Not in terms of money, but in terms of freedom of speech without censorship and a controlling authority.
With no authority that decides whether I can send money to/receive from someone.
Especially living in a corrupt authoratarian system, even only those two outweight all the bad sides (tx fees, scalability, PoW environmental effects) for me. It does more good than it harms in the big picture.
More accurately, it could if it actually worked but since it doesn't all you're doing is paying more for lower quality of service. A key concept to understand is that when blockchain sales people say “no authority” they mean “except the miners, software developers, exchange and oracle operators, and the governments which have jurisdiction over them”. Just as real-world censorship is far more often based on after the fact consequences rather than preventing someone from speaking first, consequences can be applied retroactively to anyone who participates in illegal transactions and blockchains very helpfully publish a full list of transactions so the authorities don't miss anyone.
We're seeing this right now: technically, someone in Russia can make a Bitcoin transfer since the Russian government hasn't chosen to block the protocol at the network layer but when they do so they are finding that many companies won't participate in those transfers and since the history is public that can extend to any downstream transactions based on the transferred funds.
Critics like to say "it doesn't work", then the next day complain about how it enables a ransomware plague. You can't have it both ways. The fact is it clearly works.
This isn't to say it's magic; it doesn't protect you from bullets any more than it makes you coffee. It is not a magical unicorn; just finding a reason why there might still be censorship somewhere is not a valid argument.
Free speech laws work even if Facebook deletes your post, or you a fired, or sometimes someone doesn't appeal their conviction. Your argument about "miners, developers or exchange operators" existing is not any more valid than this one is.
> Free speech laws work even if Facebook deletes your post, or you a fired, or sometimes someone doesn't appeal their conviction. Your argument about "miners, developers or exchange operators" existing is not any more valid than this one is.
Free speech laws generally don't apply to private companies like Facebook, who are generally given a high level discretion for how they choose to run their communities. The same is true of a blockchain network: the implementers and operators set the policies and since these systems are based on money that generally means that you're getting the rules which the major players either want or are required to implement by the governments with jurisdiction over them. That last part is key to understand: maybe a protocol allows you to make a transaction somewhere but the cost/risk shifts considerably if the recipient knows that they won't be able to use it in most places and every potential buyer can easily tell that it's on a list of tainted tokens.
I see no evidence of this. Authorities have been going after crypto-currencies users very effectively ever since the early days of Bitcoin; from the first darknet market takedowns, to arresting people on LocalBitcoins because they didn't register as money transmitters.
It sounds like we agree on the limitations of a ledger, but saying it "doesn't work" simply because the physical world exists and governments can arrest you, attempt to track you, make rules for exchanges and merchants etc is nonsense. Of course they can.
They can equally block encrypted chat apps, VPNs, prevent device makers from allowing them onto the hardware, force backdoors, effectively threaten people who use them, or spy on your communications locally.
None of these things mean that encryption doesn't work, or that it isn't useful.
If you live in a relatively open democracy, the knowledge that your encrypted chat app could be attacked by the police isn't a huge deal because there's a legal process protecting you but that trade off changes considerably if you are at risk from a hostile government. Systems which require you to leave a public paper-trail for the authorities, for example, are too risky to consider and something more privacy oriented is still a significant gamble — especially since in such an environment it's likely that you'd be at risk simply having it installed on your devices unless you were certain that it made no identifiable network activity. If I lived in China now, for example, I would not want to risk having something like a VPN client or Signal installed on my phone if the police stopped me or started linking DNS lookups to ISP customers.
Sure, gas fees aren't that low to cover with "a little mining" but I'm sure there will be a middle ground between with more gas available for anonymous posting and optimizing gas use for these actions, with some volunteers over the world incentivizing free speech contract interaction with lower gas fees just like people volunteering to participate in Tor network.
While we're not there yet, I see it very hard to trace any transactions that way.
That last part seems like the key challenge to me: what you described isn't cheap and it only works to the extent that you can do business with people who aren't following KYC. That makes it more likely that the entire service will be tainted because the non-trivial cost means that people aren't going to use it if they don't need to.
The other problem is that durable records are inherently risky. Your use of such a system isn't just a question of whether someone can see the transactions immediately but whether it'll retroactively become de-anonymized — the public blockchains are right out there but if you're trying to use a private L2 system you now have another party you're placing a lot of trust in — not unlike the questions about how you'd be able to trust a VPN provider or Tor nodes not logging your traffic.
If participating in anything on this new internet requires money, the Bezoses and Musks will be able to do whatever they want while the normies will beg for scraps in this vision of the web.
Instead of fixing a corrupt authoritarian system, we'll just end up implementing digital neofeudalism.
This is already starting to happen with NFT games, where westerners keep Filipinos as indentured servants. [0] It'll only get worse from here if we don't stop it.
[0] https://reason.com/2022/02/01/the-biggest-nft-video-games-ec...
That’s actually a good point and Bitcoin/crypto solves this. Why doesn’t it stop there though, what does web3 solve?
You can imagine outlawing processing some crypto transactions in some area. Miners have no choice but to comply, leading to at least a fork and massive confusion, at most to actual enforcement of the rule.
Blockchains may be censorship-resistant, but humans are not rubber hose resistant.
It is not a geo-location issue. The enforcement measures in question either manage to control 50% of the hashrate or they don't. If they don't, the protocol will ignore their censorship. Yes, they could continue mining a minority fork chain, but you would need to convince Bitcoin-users and services to use the fork instead of the uncensored version. You could imagine this being done by force: ISPs block the download of the software, exchanges no longer trade it etc.
The point is merely: <50%, the power is not with the miners at all; it is the users that need to be controlled.
Not so far off 50+eps
For now. Governments are catching on, and since the transactions are public, they can (and are putting the building blocks in place now) easily apply the same regulations to international bitcoin transactions as they do traditional money transfers.
Basically, folks today are taking advantage of a blind spot in government oversight. They're aware of it and are removing that blind spot.
I heard an analogy at one point - governments are elephants. It's usually pretty easy to avoid being stomped on when you're small. But if you do get stomped on, you'll be utterly destroyed. Many governments have no problems with making examples of people.
NFTs are already centralized and primarily used as scams. If your non-scam NFT is blocked by OpenSea, it might as well not exist for the purposes of selling and re-selling.
Where NFTs are not used for scams, they're being implemented in a proprietary blockchain and used as a method of extracting more money from customers with no new benefits (it's not like customers can re-sell their NFTs; see: proprietary blockchain).
The only thing I potentially see as valuable from web3 is cryptographic customer identification - but this is something we've had for years (client certs), but which never took off. I don't see how "web3" will change that.
None of them are scams. I know many people who work on other NFT projects which aren't scam as well.
They are all on public blockchains, perfectly functional with relatively healthy communities.
I think you are cherry picking the scam projects by using the word "primarily". We hate scam projects just as much as you do, they damage the reputation and trust of whole ecosystem.
People can collect and trade items of virtually any kind that virtually represent anything digitally. They can also be programmed to perform tasks to do anything on the chain.
Basically it's creating a whole new platform that isn't controlled by anyone and everyone can contribute to it as a user or a contributor (NFT creator, contract designer etc) to suit different use cases.
Just because some actors use it to scam obviously doesn't mean that the whole ecosystem is bad.
There's no technical reason fiat money doesn't have this property. But societies everywhere, democratic or authoritarian, have decided that's a bad idea and have money laundering laws.
And why wouldn't they?
Digital assets shouldn't be controlled by authority as long as you aren't converting it to fiat. Then, (while I still don't support it, I get it) I understand if IRS takes a portion when you convert it to USD. But that should be all about it.
Crypto "world" should have a separate line with fiat world and fiat-controlling authorities shouldn't have any power there as long as someone doesn't convert their crypto to fiat.