Jack Dorsey and Marc Andreessen's crypto feud puts Web3 at risk
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The rest of the crypto space is little more than an outright grift of insiders who premined a bunch of coins that they then pump and dump on the oblivious masses.
edit to address your ninja edit; of course bitcoin emergently benefits the early adopters who got lucky or took a big risk on it. That's literally how all property works, e.g. if you got lucky enough to buy real estate in New York city 200 years ago and held it.
E.g.:
1. "We're building a blockchain-based Linux phone."
2. Showered in metric shitton of money
3. Use money to make kick-ass Linux phone
4. Release kick-ass Linux phone with a power-hungry, unusable blockchain-based messenger on it
5. "We've received reports that Yakchain may drain the battery, sometimes when sending a single message. Looking into a proof-of-stake alternative for our messenger, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please enjoy your kick-ass Linux phone!"
6. Give up on messenger.
7. Focus on refining kick-ass Linux phone
The web is already open and decentralized by its very design, and that openness and decentralization is a major reason for its incredible success.
Web3 people want that stuff not to work. They want you to be unable to right-click save. You can already openly save, modify, and share images. Web3 people want to lock it down and charge you for memes.
It is the biggest, greediest grift in recent memory. If you are working on this, don't be fooled by all the empty words about "decentralization"; you are working on DRM for giant hedge funds who are trying to take over and own the entire web. Its current openness is their enemy.
People tend to work harder to create interesting things if they get to have a chance to generate wealth from that work.
But the nature of web3 now really doesn't fulfill that vision.
If it were decentralized then why would I need to go their servers to access my content or the content of my friends. Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive? That’s decentralized. Social media is not.
The web gave this up long ago for advertising revenue.
Facebook is not "the web". You can opt out of that walled garden and go elsewhere on the web if you want.
>If it were decentralized then why would I need to go their servers to access my content or the content of my friends. Why don’t I just connect directly to my friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off my friends hard drive? That’s decentralized. Social media is not.
Because you and your friends choose to host your content on their servers. If it's that important to share something with your friends, spin up your own website for your friend group. Don't wanna do that? Then get a NAS and show them how to log into it to see your photos. There are countless ways for you to share stuff with your friends that doesn't involve using Facebook, social media or walled gardens.
Hell, by virtue of the web being the web, you can "connect directly to [your] friend, not through some third party content server, and pull the desired content directly off of [your] friends hard drive". SSH, baby!
The web remains decentralized, but everyone chooses to remain in walled gardens.
So despite how you wish to define the technology there exists maximum centralization.
SSH is not the web. The web is HTTP.
That, my friend, is called a "web page", and thanks to the open design of the web, literally nothing stops you from setting one up.
You understand this is what Web 1.0 was right?
That's the decentralization of the web. And that decentralization still led to walled gardens, just like it will with Web3 because it's always in a corporations best interest to do so.
> It is the biggest, greediest grift in recent memory.
Strong agree, all around. But I also have strong laments about trying to better distribute, decentralize the technical potential we've already built. There's a couple rare projects like https://yunohost.org doing the honest competent work of making this power accessible, of sharing it. But there's a super toxic mentality that computing isn't worth doing, a belief that real computing is not for users, that users are only interested in highly synthesized Service-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS) horseshit.
I want to say that there's precious few real examples to empower & enable users, to really decentralize the power-base, to make accessible. If I look a little further, I can see endless fields of techies trying hard to make their projects usable, understandable. But so many projects exist in their own particular tech niches. Even if we are talking general software systems, there's still endless fractal mazes of Ansible or Chef or Terraform or Salt or Kubernetes, different worlds & paradigms to compute under, with various points of overlap & disjointedness. I cited Yunohost because it's one of the broader efforts to provide generalized mass configuration of systems, to make a lot of things accessible, in a friendly fashion from a central control panel. But it's still just a super cheap hack, a bunch of preconfigured scripts for a bunch of pieces of software, far from real systems mastery. Overcoming this our expectation that users fear & don't want real computing, that they must have baby-food, is not a real sustainable paradigm, in my personal view, and it cripples our ability to make real advances, real innovation: we need real operational paradigms to begin to have a power base upon which decentralization & distributedness can begin. For too long we've considered p2p & distributed to be app level concerns, things for the app. In my view, the cloud needs to come home, we need real bases of computing to start from, & a willingness to have systems that both have easy-to-get-started paths, but which also go deep & invite in real operational working & reworking. Computing is still closed. We need to re-embrace & make computing work. Web3 is not alone in not fighting the good fights.
In practice this basically just incentivizes users to treat web3 projects as if they were a MLM schemse and sell them as hard as possible to anyone who will listen.
Plenty of people like this setup for obvious reasons, but it's virtually indistinguishable from a pyramid scheme wrapped in a layer of technical jargon.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-19/washin...
That sounds like something that just gets wrapped up in some meta game and whatever it is …is just a meta game.
[*] Not claiming all interpretations of "web3" fail that condition, but if they do.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-19/washin...
> “This is, essentially, a pyramid scheme,” said Dror Poleg in an infamous post about Web3... “A Ponzi. But it makes sense. It will be the dominant marketing method of the next decade and beyond.” I don’t like it! But I am not confident that he’s wrong.
Imagine someone picks up a heated Hackernews conversation and goes "well these two guys put functional programming at risk". It says a lot about what people truly think web3 actually is.
The UNIX wars of the early 1990s, pitting AT&T against BSD (1-800-ITS-UNIX), the QDOS / MSDOS episode, and the Traitorous Eight all come to mind.
As Frank Herbert wrote, "a beginning is a very delicate time".
Computing is largely faith/belief by tribes.
The eco-protests against cryptoshit has been high & loud & I think effective: it's obviously a colossally inefficient system, the most unimaginable conflagration of computing resources imaginable. But Jack has honed in on a more purist argumentation, one that is less rooted in the hard fact of cryptoshit scorching the planet, & far more insightful about the hypocracy & ineffectuality of the beast. There are few benevolent factors about in crypto-coin shit, it's a world dominated by self-interest first & mistrust second. They are systems ruled by concensus-of-the-powerful, & most folks need deeply deeply deeply intermediated experiences to have the most remote hope of getting anywhere at all.
In short, Jack's one of the first critics to highlight just how perverse the profit motive has been here. Cryptocoinshit is free to become good, to show a light side, to enable real genuine capabilities, any day any time. But it's a highly highly costly environment to innovate in. There's a lot of pick axes folks need, is what Jack has highlighted. And the costs of working the medium, of sticking your pick in, are absurdly high, fantastically expensive.
I don't see this as a specific threat of person versus person, but a battle for the soul of a young, interesting technology, one that has had less & less enobling, user-empowering potentials, and more and more been a dis-empowering, deeply intermediated, finnicky & costly boondogle. The particular personages here are proxy combatants, whose contest has provided a bit better televisable experience of what the real battle-lines & conflicts are.
Anyway...
And not one has produced anything of use to real people. That's a lot of billions for basically no return.
So, "not one has produced anything of use to real people" should be amended to "not one has produced anything I personally consider useful".
How can you be so sure that you are correct, and that the people willing to invest $12.75B are incorrect?
Correct about what? I'm sure many people, memecoin flippers and VCs included, will make a lot of money for themselves, just like a lot of people made money on ICOs (remember that one?) Since a VC's job is to make money, many of them will be "correct". But if the only actual useful thing that came out of this decade-long hype fest is a lower-fee version of Transferwise... then it's just not very convincing.
However, when the OP says something like there isn't a single use it doesn't take a basket of use-cases to refute them, it just takes one example.
Do you really think that $12.75B is going into pointless NFTs?
1. Gold bars are just collections of atoms and always stay exactly how they are, the material never changes, so the intrinsic value of a gold bar never changes. 2. It seems that the only way to make money while trading gold is to take it from other people. The only way to win a return is if a bunch of people suddenly want gold and offer to pay you for yours.
Gold, and other commodities, seem to fit your definition.
This is not true for cryptocurrencies, the term shitcoin did not come out of nowhere. While there may be artificial scarcity within a single cryptocurrency there is no scarcity of cryptocurrencies. Everyone and (literally - Dogecoin) his dog can launch a new shitcoin and try to dupe investors into driving up its value, if only for a short while. By the time the hype is past those who launched the shitcoin will have cashed out already, making off with a large fraction of whatever they managed to dupe people into investing in the scheme.
[1] unless someone takes up asteroid mining, that is...
This can give the impression that all of crypto is a scam, that impression is wildly incorrect. I believe this is the trap that lern_to_spel and many others on HN are falling prey to.
In any case, here's another counterexample. People need ETH for its properties. Ethereum is necessary for payment for the execution of Ethereum smart contracts, which provide a service with no predecessor. You might disagree with me about the utility of the service that they provide, but there really is no pre-crypto smart contract alternative.
The smart contract itself has zero value because non-crypto alternatives are cheaper and actually enforceable.
Some day you might find someone you kind of trust who tells you that no, there really is something to this crypto thing. I hope this comment helps push you over the threshold of giving it a shot and looking into smart contracts.
There is a lot of noise but once you get through the noise there really is a lot of cool and actually useful stuff happening with smart contracts, you'll be pleasantly surprised.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fuh2/
I suspect that something like that for Web3 is coming soon based upon the amount of overall hate I'm seeing.
FUW3.com goes to an asian porn site, but fuweb3.com is available.
So... web3 will completely take over? I don't know where you guys live, but I see trucks all over the place that have hoods even higher than those old Hummers.
I rarely, if ever, see them anymore. Hopefully we can say them same about Web3 garbage 20 years from now.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That's what everyone in the space likes about the space. The permission to fail in a fantastically quick project lifecycle and rapidly iterate in any direction!
The entire premise of this article are people pretending to represent the space.
A lot of the space is very wary of projects with VC backing, they are wary of people that derive confidence from projects based on the logos and presence of VCs. The VCs are the only ones that need large groups of suckers for their liquidity ponzi scheme, everyone else just needs small groups :) and derive confidence in a stronger prisoner's dilemma from the lack of larger whale.
Cheers