Web3 doesn’t care about privacy
coinsights.substack.com
coinsights.substack.com
This article seems to think that having a super cookie like this will make advertising less bad. I think it will be the opposite - instead of only Google/Facebook doing it, you're now going to have every single shady operation under the sun now able to use/mine/combine your data however they please with zero controls (and unlike HTTP cookies they'll need exactly zero investment & zero infrastructure to do so, so there is no barrier to entry to start using this data)
Web3 is the advertising world's ultimate dream situation.
It allows significantly more invasive tracking by tying online and offline, cannot ever be deleted or changed, and the same cookie ID is shared across all aspects of your life (unless you use multiple wallets with one-per-site, but my understanding is that an anathema to web3 concepts about data ownership)
So if you just have throw-away wallets, how do you use that with your content? You cannot "own" your content if you keep having to abandon wallets to get a fresh advertising ID. And if you keep several different compartmentalized wallets around, as soon as you move something from one to the other or use a different wallet with the same login, you have permanently and irredeemably linked those identities.
Instead, all this could have been avoided if they took the Keybase approach: keys never leave the device. Just have a keychain of devices which you authorize or repudiate, and use THAT to retrieve your actual accounts from the network and sign things.
This would work best with BLS signatures without a trusted dealer. I am not sure it can work with ECDSA or Shnorr signatures if you want to collapse all multisigs down to one signature.
People think they need fancy airgapped computers and hardware wallets when all they need is to copy their 12 word phrase three times on paper, cut into 9 pieces and bury in 9 different places.
Better yet —- wallets normally shouldn’t allow people to export keys.
This is what modern smart contract wallets like Argent do. There is no 24 word phrase or long private key to write down, remember or lose. Instead you set up guardians which is a group of people, organizations, and devices you create that allow you to recover your account if you drop your phone in the ocean so there's no practical way you can lose your money or identity. An example guardian setup might be your mom, best friend, lawyer, your hardware wallet and a distributed paper wallet. To recover your wallet you would need 3 out of the 5 to agree. The number of guardians and other details can be as secure and exotic as you desire.
The account is also protected by configurable safeguards that mimic your existing bank account. Sending over $500/day? Guardians must approve. Your tokens or NFTs are being sent to a non-white listed address? Guardians must approve.
The crypto ecosystem is still in the early phases of being built but these problems and ideas have already been discussed and debated for years and the foundational infrastructure that people will end up using in the real world is being built and deployed today after years of hard work. Using crypto today is a lot like using the internet in the early nineties: it was hard, easy to break, and you generally had to be good at cutting your teeth on new and quickly evolving tech. Nowadays you mostly just forget you're using it.
And you call this an improvement over the current state of affairs?
You can choose to only use yourself as a guardian, a group of family members/friends, a set of financial institutions, or a mix of all of those.
You can set it up so that it’s very hard for individuals or governments to take control of your assets.
The problem is that this model is basically impossible with the current level of fees on ethereum. It isn't clear to me what the solution to that is supposed to be.
Look at Sidetree protocol for instance
Yes, in most cultures these individuals are called “family” or “friends”. It’s a rare concept in the crypto world though, yes.
Who would you trust more to come to your aid when there is a situation?
How about in a rural area or one where police are overworked?
How about if each neighborhood could hire its own police agencies and police agencies would compete on how well they keep people safe and maintain order without excess brutality? If they got to know the people they are policing, and worked with the clergy and others to help them holistically?
That is how libertarians think.
If you're critiquing the idea that family/friends won't be able to respond when you need them the most, not everyone has family/friends. So there will naturally be companies that act as account recovery services as well.
Are you the kind of person who LOVES signing in with Facebook, and trusts them to safeguard your keys and identity in their nice centralized database — if anything goes wronng you’ll have the legal system, another nice top-down system of laws and enforcement, to correct everything, right?
Most individuals cannot bear the weight of corporate lawfare. Congrats on winning a nice case and getting a good pay out. but that is survivorship bias.
You’re right, it’s much deeper and more significant than laws (which are broken literally every day).
> A modern economy needs private contracts that are fully enforceable by courts of justice, it cannot rely on informal agreements like this
That may be what an economy needs, but what a society, culture, or civilization needs is the deep bonds of human relationships. Those things are built on families.
> I don't think anyone wants to become custodians of someone else's on-line accounts, even if they are your friends.
Have you ever helped your friends or family? Have you ever been helped by them?
I find this a necessary question to ask because the only people that critique this idea are those that do not have any real friends or family. And to be fair, I already addressed that in my original comment (there will be services / companies to help people in that situation).
Emergency services are generally funded to be able to respond to an emergency, are available 24/7, and know that if you call them, they're the ones that need to come. I trust them nearly absolutely to come if I call them, though I do know that if they are funded poorly, they may come too slowly to help me, which is why I want them to be funded properly, and in a way that operates at a loss (I don't believe these services need to turn a profit).
If I'm in a rural area, I know that response times are going to be very slow, but they will also be slow if it's friends or family, because it's a rural area, and everyone lives far away from each other. If it's the middle of the night, my assumption is that my friends and family won't be reachable at all, but maybe the police will be.
Neighborhoods funding their own services mean that rich people get great service and poor people are on their own.
I understand that this is how libertarians think, and this is why I think that libertarians live in a fantasy world where they believe things will work out exactly the way they've planned them in their mind.
Asymmetric split key generation is a well understood cryptographic technique, sure, don't trust a service that just spits one out but if you give them a public key to use in generation then you can verify the result only works with the paired private key you control.
Nitty gritty of the elliptical curve cryptography involved:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=81865.msg901491#msg9...
You can create N “accounts” which are not tied to devices. In fact, that would also be good for a quotum to “outvote” whoever found M devices, to repudiate them. (Otherwise it would have been a stalemate.)
Using “virtual accounts” you can bootstrap from one private key + U of V keys from a set that you gave to friends + family, to reconstitute your account should something go wrong and you lose ALL your devices.
So, just to be clear: either a private key is stored in a device, or it would have to be paired with U of V other keys that you gave out, in order to activate a new device one time with that key.
But the real provisioning and repudiation of keys would be in a smart contract on the blockchain. That is — pardon the pun — the key to the whole thing :)
How is a site I'm interacting with supposed to know it can use my previously-configured settings if I'm showing up with a new public key every time I authenticate?
People always say the likes of Google and FB treat us as a product, so perhaps we can at least get some kind of magic bean tokens as a reward :D
~1998 Beenz.com launched
Purchases sure on most chains (though not on e.g. Secret) but the chain isn't recording your logins via your address in most cases. You are just showing to the site that you have the key without making any transactions. So no, advertisers won't have much extra data on your site visiting habits that they don't have now.
In the same way tracking your location for sure can determine who you are.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca...
Based on just a few transactions they can figure out that you're a middle aged guy, living in Nowhereville, Iowa, that's into samba, anime and drives a Toyota Corolla, etc. and then from that it's not hard to actually figure out who that person is.
Right now I use my country's currency, do you want me to go to a mix of currencies like I'm playing some sort of Android free to play game?
That's just adding complexity to my life for no obvious reason.
I dislike OldFi and want to contribute to a new, healthier system to serve people in general. But, short term, risk of DeFi is obviously higher due to its imaturity.
OldFi has been maturing for 100's of years. Perhaps we could argue 1000's. It'll take at least 20-50 more years to reach a similar maturity in DeFi.
By maturity I mean: people understand the risks and know what to expect.
If you are just doing login by registering your public key with a service.... then you are just doing signature-based-authentication that you could have done two decades ago.
1. Users understand passwords. While password stuffing is a concern, almost nobody actually makes product decisions based on rational security analysis.
2. Only a small number of users are concerned about centralized login via OpenID Connect. The privacy and account access weaknesses of logging in with Google or Facebook aren't concerns for the huge majority of users.
3. Creating and maintaining a key pair is less ergonomic than creating and maintaining a password.
#3 is now different for people who are regularly using blockchain systems so it doesn't surprise me that uptake is larger than now than in the past. More people have a Coinbase account than use PGP. But I am not convinced that people actually care enough to swap if they aren't already ideologically aligned with blockchain technology.
For #1: New people come to technology all the time. They don't understand passwords yet, so if something is better than passwords it can make inroads.
For #3: It's not clear to me why this is the case, besides just that it has always been the case. It's really un-ergonomic to create and maintain passwords. It just seems the alternatives have been even more so.
(Interestingly, I don't think Coinbase actually gives you a keypair you can use to login to stuff...)
When a web service is requested to "delete your data", all they need to delete is your name, email, phone etc. and still keep your activity data.
And it's definitely possible to derive PII from activity data.
When a company deletes you as a user under GDPR, it does not delete your purchase history for example, because it needs to link the transaction that happened, what was sold, for how much, from which merchant etc. Just because you ask to delete your data does not mean everything associated with you is deleted. The merchant for example will still need to see that the item was sold to someone for a given price etc. That data was not just "yours".
But that isn't a reason to keep all kinds of data related to a user account.
Monetary transactions, claim data for insurances, but not support requests for instance.
Are we using different definitions of the term "purchase history"? To me, that means a list of purchases by a single person. You can derive PII from that, so that's a no-no under GDPR. If you just have transaction records but can't group them by customer, then that's (probably) fine.
Also note that sometimes you're legally required to keep PII for a certain amount of time, e.g., invoices with PII for tax reasons. GDPR says that's fine but you have to keep them for no longer than needed.
I'm not talking about legal reasons. You can keep the data regardless for any purposes as long as you remove the "personally identifiable information".
For example, you will be required to remove their exact address but you can replace that with the general area (eg. post code) as a part of your anonymization.
[0] https://dataprivacymanager.net/pseudonymization-according-to...
The reason you pseudonymize in the first place is that you can delete the PII part, after which the data becomes anonymized, which you can keep.
Blockchain is such a terrible idea because even if today you're thinking "Well, I guess storing X is fine, it can't identify a user", tomorrow you might learn that it can. And there will be nothing you could do about it. And we haven't even started talking about bugs, which all software has (including DAOs and smart contracts...), that might cause you to store stuff on the chain, publicly and irreversibly. The future is going to be fun!
So no, deleting you name but keeping your activity data is not sufficient.
The EU has no jurisdiction whatsoever over a service outside its borders. It can ban various apps and then penalize its citizens for using them (or just block them) but it can't dictate to companies in other countries what they can put on the internet.
In the extreme case, consider that Tencent and other Chinese companies with social media platforms are required by law to collect user information that violates the GDPR. Do you think they'll follow the laws of their own country where the business is based or EU regulations?
Consider that our basic premise of advertising is that we must compete for attention to influence consumers. This premise requires a "captive audience", and must insert the ad into some span of time and space where it is viewed.
Because these businesses will also operate on Web3, their data is also ripe for the picking. Not all of it, but enough that users will have products available that evaluate the business and make suggestions about the course of action to take, or even select a purchase given a rough specification. If insufficient data is available, independent reviewers will endeavor to create it. And businesses that resist will become dinosaurs. The influencing function of advertising will then begin to collapse as more people delegate decisions to an AI, adding a privacy barrier. Increasingly, businesses will build to the specs generated by analysis of this request data. There will be no market for selling the data, except that of voluntary user disclosure.
With regard to data ownership, I wouldn’t say the requirement of that is linking everything you have to one wallet. Many people typically have a private wallet and a public one. One that’s used to publicly attest ownership of things for bragging rights and may be sued to link some sort of personal identity, and one that could be used solely for defi applications or tied to another social identity completely.
Another cool thing about using wallets on the web is that it’s always been a design requirement to always obtain user consent when sharing address info and of course when making transactions as well. At the very least when you’re sharing your information it has to be intentionally done unlike with cookies that I can set on any visiting user’s browser (GDPR regulation doesn’t technically stop me from doing it non-transparently, it just has legal consequences if I do)
I’m not looking forward to a world where everything about everyone is carved into the blockchain forever.
Dumpster fire of dumb.
I'm interested in large 3D virtual worlds with user created content. I've read at least twenty metaverse "white papers" and "roadmaps" which go on and on about their "tokenomics" but have little or no info about how they actually intend to build a 3D world. The contribution of the crypto crowd to actually making it happen is near zero. I'm disappointed. I've seen "fake it til you make it" before, but a lot of those guys aren't even trying.
Bitcoin ponzi: “store of value” is utility!
Filecoin: storing files is actual utility
ERC20 memecoin ponzis: “shibaMUSKinu community .. utility is coming… we will um, fork an open source wallet or dex”
NFT ponzis: “join the bored ape punk community, utility is working out in our gym on a private island, only 1% ever bother to show up”
Metaverse: “virtual worlds and real estate is utility! Accessorize your avatars. First people who come get to be the kings, next people can be the landowner class, later people will work their way up from serf. You’ll be able to fight and win virtual land, play to earn…”
The thing is, many of these things can legitimately be considered something of a utility for someone.
And frankly, this is STILL better than Web2 corporations owning the metaverse. It’s bad enough they employ psychologists to figure out how to make you more addicted to your phones and spending your time outraged, contributing content in political arguments while ignoring your kids. Imagine now you will be spending hours in virtual reality. What’s next, computer chips in your brain via neuralink?
If it was open source software, at least I can sort of control the economics of it. Otherwise… by 2040… you are a slave, Neo! Think about it.
Centralization is worse in NFT land. The NFT industry is Axie Infinity, OpenSea, and the little guys. Back end mostly goes through Metamask. Few people interact with the blockchain directly.
Metamask can and does blacklist coins and wallets. OpenSea can and does blacklist NFTs. While in theory you can go around them, they can seriously reduce the value of assets at whim.
To get an NFT onto Decentraland, there's a US$500 "curation fee".
That means that they will easily crush their competition and cement themselves as the home of NFTs. And then of course their "filtered view" of NFTs will become the source of truth and not the blockchain itself. And they have shown they are happy to do this filtering when asked [2].
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/opensea/company_fina...
[2] https://cointelegraph.com/news/opensea-freezes-2-2m-of-stole...
This comment only adds a poorly informed opinion to this discussion, while not being very relevant.
> which is false by definition
I mean, why?
> the apparent centralization of web3 being supposed to be p2p, there are several different web3 providers (eth, poly, ipfs) with different incentives.
> a pessimistic example of what's possible with web3 tech.
I want to engage on these points in good faith. I'm asking you to expand these because I'm curious.
I think crypto economics are a blight in practice, while the theory might be sound.
You've presented a head and no body work, and I am genuinely curious to hear the expansion.
My take on crypto at this point is very simple: At least we have the transparency. There are so many scams going on in the financial industry. But it's hard to undercover, because all is opaque.
It is the same with energy costs. Has anyone dared to calculate the CO2 release of traditional core banking systems or even running a large network of physical branches. No, because it's difficult and opaque. With the public blockchain these things actually can be calculated, which is a good thing I believe.
Same with art. Is the broad public aware of the crazy price tags paid in the art scene over the last two decades? NFTs make this public.
If more people would embrace the transparency created instead of complaining about the space all the time, we would create a better world.
I never met anyone who got scammed by a real bank.
> Has anyone dared to calculate the CO2 release of traditional core banking systems or even running a large network of physical branches
Yes and it's pretty negligible compared to PoW, obviously.
> If more people would embrace the transparency created instead of complaining about the space all the time, we would create a better world.
Transparency is not a magic cure-all. Plus, privacy is crucial to protect vulnerable people.
Congrats on the first world privilege.
Basically it's great for poorer countries, first world criminals and potentially for a dystopian future.
I find that curious. Usually people get lost on the tech side.
Decentralized systems don't provide cryptographically-assured accountability, they require cryptographically-assured accountability in order to function correctly. If you give up the decentralization requirement, and instead federate authority across well-regulated entities, then you don't need the crypto, not as a base requirement anyway. And you still need the regulation, because all this fancy cryptographical assurance does is prevent man-in-the-middle attacks that arise from the decentralization requirement, and you still need to regulate the input and output--which is where all fraud occurs anyway.
You can't solve a social problem with a computer/tech solution. It just doesn't work.
You could say that Turkey was a well functioning democracy. But look now with Erdogan, and Turkeys inflation is at 49%.
Having access to some stablecoin like UST could saved a lot of people troubles. Without really having the burden to go buy dollars or euro's in some form or another.
The borders are gerrymandered, fair voting is hamstrung by FPTP, funding is withheld from constituencies where the MP doesn't tow the party line, and both public money and foreign bribes go into the pockets of the elite few. Clearly a well functioning democracy, a pillar of the West, where government officials may place themselves above the law. Lying in Parliament? Free pass. Calling out lying in Parliament? Ejected from the discourse.
But at least Sir Boris led an inquiry into Sir Boris and found Sir Boris free of guilt.
I really don't think it's so crazy to think that the adequate application of crypto can lead to well-functioning democracies for precisely this reason; we can have real accountability.
But you don't say how.
Turkey was a well functioning democracy, until it wasn't, that was my point.
Did I say cryptocurrency fixes governments? No, I said you can store value in stablecoins when you have malfunctioning governments.
If I lived in Turkey, my wealth was largely stored in UST and NOT Lira.
Not goldbars, not USD or EUR cash, not in banks or any service they provide (except day to day needs of course).
So if you lived in Turkey and had about $200K, where would you store it?
So do you consider a country like Turkey first world or not? Did you think 10 years ago it was first world?
I have (indirectly) in this bank run. It was the fourth largest bank in an EU country.
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_of_Bulgaria%27s_Corp...
We solved them with... more regulation :-)
I think every major bank has got some folks doing that. It's a prerequisite of green washing.
Most companies monitor their power bills in order to ensure they are not needlessly wasting money by leaving lights or air-conditioning on etc.
Once you know your power consumption it's a pretty simple calculation to get CO2 usage.
But I work for a bank and our money laundering systems and processes automatically kick in for suspicious transactions and those over a certain amount. We will freeze transactions until we conduct due diligence aiming to identity the true parties e.g by unsheathing shell companies as well as the nature and intent of the transaction.
And this is through a range of methods including requesting supplemental documentation and involving law enforcement.
Can you clarify for any of the million dollar Bored Ape Yacht Club purchases who the true parties are given that supposedly this information can be derived from the blockchain ?
In most cases the money can’t be recovered because it gets quickly wired to countries like Nigeria or HK. It’s a whole industry. Completely opaque because no company likes to talk about the losses. These things are handled quietly.
On a different level: I believe many structured products purchased by private consumers are at least a rip-off and could be categorized as scam. Take for example life insurances sold by brokers with lifetime contracts yielding almost no interest whatsoever. There is a constant battle between regulators, lawyers and companies.
Whoever's going to push web3 will still want that opacity, it's a feature, not a bug. They'll want it to make money and to protect and hide their money.
Plus you can't have it both ways, either cryptocurrencies are somehow, magically, privacy protecting and anonymous, or you have transparency. It's impossible to have both.
Which has unquestionably benefited consumers.
If you look at the financial system 50 years ago and compare it to today consumers have far more rights and protections. And the system continues to learn and improve e.g. requiring banks to hold more reserve capital and increasing the amount of deposit insurance.
Problem for Web3 is that governments, regulators and the legal system do not play a central role like in Web2. And so all of the safety nets built up over these years will evaporate and consumers will suffer.
Realistically, the buyers of bored apes are not really of interest to anyone and the NFTs probably won't be worth anything in the future.
When crypto is used to purchase things that actually matter then it will most likely be a trivial matter to identify whether the coins are "tainted".
How do you square this idea with the fact that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is widely recognized as being disproportionately riddled with scams?
What scams?
But just a very public example: Look-up the company Wirecard or google cum-ex fraud. Fraud on a huge level. All going on behind the curtains. We sometimes get a sneak peak when something on the level of Wirecard blows up. Just extrapolate that for a second to the entire economy.
If that is true why do so many of the principles behind various web3 things keep their identities hidden? That is the opposite of transparency
With web3 you just need to login into twitter and follow-up the transactions. That's a huge advantage from my perspective.
I just realized I haven't had coffee so off to have that so I can write in a way that doesn't make me sound like a jerk.
For example you might say Bitcoin doesn’t provide privacy you can see every transaction, but if you want complete encryption then there’s monero, secret, mina and others…
To say “web3 doesn’t care about your privacy” is like saying vacation destinations are cold. Some are for sure, but others aren’t.
Example: https://oasisprotocol.org/
Also, the fact that it's possible to interact with dapps without going through centralized servers it means that it's much harder to get metadata (ex. IP) about who performed a specific action.
This would require more than just a mobile device, however. Perhaps a rooted Android device could self-host an Ethereum node, although your battery life may take a hit.
I think there are other chains and wallets that are designed around mobile use cases, which make it easier than on Ethereum to sync the whole chain, or use technical means to mediate the need to do so.
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/ru...
https://docs.flashbots.net/flashbots-protect/rpc/quick-start...
Generally what happens is that: - Everyone is able to prove a transaction's correctness; - There's no way for a third party to track the contents of a transaction adversarialy; - there are ways for first and second parties to prove them if they so wish.
Cryptography ensures that transaction amounts, sender, receiver are encrypted. There is no way to decrypt the data. You can verify the encrypted data without decrypting it. Everything works similar to Bitcoin but now you and others have no way of figuring out anything valuable by looking at the blockchain, because everything on the blockchain is just encrypted bytes.
Even the node that is the first one to receive all bytes has no idea who is sending, receiving and the amount. Everything is always encrypted.
When I create a transaction that includes my wallet address and the address that receiver gave me, once the transaction is made, the receiver cannot see the original address of my wallet, the 3rd party cannot see the amounts or addresses in the transaction and the receiver can move the money to a different address and I would have no way of figuring out that happened. Similarly, receiver can send me back the amount and I would have no idea from which wallet address it came.
We may joke all we want about it, but there are still laws in place and we need to respect them.
Systems like zcash and monero are similar: if you don't trust the cryptography then they're not useful, but it seems like a strange objection to say somebody could do unsavory things if they could break the cryptography, that's what it's for!
If the cafe, thief or anyone steals my money for whatever reason other than me physically giving someone my card/PIN then the bank or credit card company is legally responsible. And they will refund you the money.
Look forward to Web3 without a similar safety net in place.
The worry wouldn't be about someone breaking TLS, but someone MitM your connection with your card processor in a way you don't notice. One is much more likely than the other.
It does make creating a new identity expensive and difficult. If you create a wallet with coins from another wallet, that's traceable. If you create a wallet with "grey" coins that have been through a mixer, that marks your wallet as suspicious. If you create a wallet with "white" coins, with fully traceable provenance, that's expensive.
"YEAH!!!"
"We need to build our OWN Internet!"
"YEAH!!!"
"Where EVERYTHING you do is on the Blockchain, public and immutable forever!"
"YEAH!!! Wait, what?"
"We barely know what it is, and of course no actual rational argument has been made for why it is needed, but... everyone's talking about it! We can't be left behind!"
So you claim that the developers of for example SushiSwap barely know what it is?
Why do you think web3 services can't be interfaced with a good UX?
IBM's hype campaign from the early-to-mid 2010's, on Watson, Internet of Things, Machine Learning, Cloud, and whatever other buzzwords were thrown into that PR carpet bombing campaign that was everywhere.
I still don't know what any of those technologies do, and whether or not they're implemented in anything I'm using.
But it sure sounded important and potentially revolutionary at the time!
Nevermind that IBM calls everything it does cognitive, even basic bitch BI tools like Cognos.
The same thing happened with NFT.Am I officially too old to follow up on tech?
Right now I’m questioning if Web3 is even a thing.
There's just too much going on.
- issues with privacy
- inability to hide data, piracy
- manipulated prices (due to "anonymity")
- bugs in smart contracts, problematic code redeploy
- questionable economy models of NFT games
The message of the article is certainly not that “Web3 Doesn’t Care About Your Privacy”. The title of the submission should be changed.
There is something going on in the cryptocurrency communities that doesn't reward features that increase privacy and decentralization. Privacy and decentralization should be the core incentives to use cryptocurrencies.
When designing the web 3.0, wouldn't you say one of the most important things would be avoiding the privacy pitfalls of 2.0?
A wallet is not your user account. A wallet holds many private keys. Each private key can be used as a user account. You can have an unlimited number of private keys.
That means that you're only tracked as much as you want.
Also, there are private chains you can use today. And they're only going to get better. We're talking about cryptography here. It will be private if you want it to be.
Or invent a new technology.
Personally, I hope blockchain is overblown. Given the amount of money in it, I know it’s not. It is here to stay in one form or another. But is it really already accepted wisdom that it will underpin the whole web?
It is specifically referring to applications built on Ethereum and doesn't actually have any technical connection to the web as we know it today.
Only that it wants to replace it.
> But is it really already accepted wisdom that it will underpin the whole web?
No. It will have as much influence on the world as Bitcoin has had i.e. it will be popular amongst tech bros, criminals, gamblers, VCs etc.
But won't really cut through to the mainstream.
We didn't, but blockchain proponents hijacked the term "Web3" like Facebook hijacked the term "metaverse".
Over a long time perspective, this is probably inevitable.
But what is the probability that current crypto currencies will play any part? Not high, I think.
No one cares about privacy anyway.
That's the idea, not trying to argue that's the case. Just giving a possible answer to your question. In reality we're all in a completely free, survival of the fittest-type situation. We're all gonna die someday and all that. It's just that society provides some nice illusions wherein we can debate about whether we're socialist or capitalist.
This isn't a move towards socialism. It is a move towards additional hypercapitalism accelerated by almost entirely unchecked automation controlled by technologists who have access to absolutely insane amounts of investment because they got lucky as early adopters of the coin du jour.
It's the exact same VCs that bankrolled Facebook, Google etc.
While it is certainly appealing that institutions no longer have the power to hold our data hostage, it is still important to ask: what does the public and transparent nature of web3 mean for our privacy?
So I think it does have quite a bit of privacy.
So based on this knowledge, web3 is less private than what we have now