Web3 is just web2 with a different focus. it's not decentralised, it runs on web2 stacks, it does none of the thing it purports.
Just like the lack of any real revolution in this supposed 4th iteration
The cypherpunk thing is happening now, not in the 90s like you might have hoped. It's startling to me how poorly received it is on HN from people who would ostensibly be a part of it otherwise.
“Late Show with David Letterman” clip courtesy of David Letterman
“What the hell is [the internet] exactly?” Letterman asks Gates.
“A place where people can publish information. They can have their own homepage, companies are there, the latest information,” Gates says.
“It’s wild what’s going on.”
Letterman wasn’t sold.
“I heard you could watch a live baseball game on the internet and I was like, does radio ring a bell?” Letterman says.*
Gates said unlike with radio, the internet would allow users to watch a baseball game whenever they wanted instead of live.
″[Do] tape recorders ring a bell?” Letterman asks.
There are a lot of people promoting Web3 who can't explain why it is any good in such a way that anyone can see the potential. That's on them, not the skeptics. If there is actually some real value to the concept, then someone out there should be able to explain it. And if that's impossible but the benefits are real, then who cares? It'll eventually make its value clear just like the internet eventually did and why care about that now? Oh right... because the scam doesn't work without the FOMO part.
> Programmable money is really interesting.
Why would I want to "program" money? What does that actually do for me?
> Random things I’d like to do, such as buying a gamertag for my Xbox account that’s already taken from a stranger, suddenly have viable solutions.
Yeah, see, I can't see much reason to want to do this other than to use it as part of a scam. I don't have a gamertag, but nearest I can figure it's just an online identity. Why would you want to buy someone else's identity? I suppose they might have some kind of vanity username that's being squatted? So what are we promoting here? Just a useful tool for black markets? Sure, that has some utility, but it is hardly what I would call exciting new world changing technology.
> Atomic transactions allow pretty interesting things too - imagine payments like SQL transactions where your own custom logic has to be met for the transaction to occur.
I'm imagining that, and I can't see what it does that I can't already do today in the real world without having to know any over-complicated technology.
> The issue is it’s still a really new, complicated, and fast evolving domain.
The complexity is part of the reason I don't have any trust in it. When people are trying to sell me something by saying "it's complicated, but trust me it's great!" I am immediately suspicious. They call it 'confidence' artistry for a reason.
And christ, whenever people talk about this stuff it is always about money. Does it have any uses not related to financial trickfuckery? Theoretically this is supposed to enable decentralized youtube and the like, but nobody talks about that. This makes the whole space very untrustworthy.
I feel like there has to be a name for the fallacy here. If you looked at the cryptocurrency space, especially the blockchain builders, you'd likely find a lot of people who you'd be willing to accept are smarter than you working on it. Silvio Micali and Vitalik Buterin are 2 big names that come to mind (I don't hold/use algorand FWIW, but Silvio seems like one of the brightest minds in the field solely based on accomplishments).
Besides, if the technology is actually valuable in some way I cannot yet perceive but that will become obvious over time, then I can just wait until it becomes ubiquitous and reap the benefits without risking anything.
The tokenization of everything is a mixed bag. On one hand it leads to perverse incentives that result in an incredibly low signal-to-noise ration. On the other hand it enables types of consensus that don't exist when there's not a penalty for misbehaviour (specifically for proof-of-stake and staking, the token makes it possible to reward network participants, while making the cost of attacking the network higher than the market cap of the network).
If you are outside of the financial industry, you probably don't. Maybe you can do some amateur high-frequency trading on the side. It's not "programmable money" in the sense of "please send $30 to the gas company every month".
As I see it, the main application is financial derivative products i.e. investment products. You can make any kind of "ownable thing" based upon other ownable things on the blockchain. Remember the mortgage-backed securities that caused the 2008 crash? Now anyone can create their own variety with some coding effort and a $100 fee. And if you pay another $100 fee, they will automatically become tradeable on major exchanges.
It's peak capitalism, basically. From a purely technological point of view, I think this is pretty damn cool. From an economic point of view, it's going to be our downfall.
And from the looks of it, everything crypto is centralizing extremely fast, see Binance/Coinbase for exchanges, Opensea for NFTs. So at the end of the day you're still at the whims of large entities.