Federation is the other problem. It's decentralized without real end user benefits other that a bit of censorship resistance, within the limits of the hosting company. It doesn't add reliability or offline communications on the LAN.
But we're talking web3 here, not money, so whether it's good or bad at handling money is irrelevant?
We'll probably have to agree to disagree there. I could send you $5 in Bitcoin right now no matter what country you're in, what bank you use, and without knowing who you are. It would cost like a $1 which is high for a $5 transaction, but that price wouldn't go up for a more significant amount of money.
> But we're talking web3 here, not money, so whether it's good or bad at handling money is irrelevant?
I think you have a misunderstanding of what exactly web3 is. All the apps with any traffic (loans, gambling, NFTs, insurance, derivatives) are using the money transfer capabilities of blockchain. It's the whole point.
That transaction fee is itself highly variable & dependent on load, though. The more people that actually try to use bitcoin to transfer money, the more expensive it gets. It actively resists using it to transfer money.
That, combined with the long transaction times, make it completely useless as a general purpose currency. You can use it as a variant on a wire transfer, where you only use it for rare, large transactions. And even then only one where you're ok waiting load spikes out (which can last for months as was the case in the first half of 2021). But then you're still spending extra time & money on each side of that transaction moving back out of bitcoin and into something usable for "normal" transactions.
> I think you have a misunderstanding of what exactly web3 is. All the apps with any traffic (loans, gambling, NFTs, insurance, derivatives) are using the money transfer capabilities of blockchain. It's the whole point.
But that's not what web3 proponents claim it is. Yes right now all the "web3 dApps" are money-related (or less charitably but more accurately, pyramid schemes), I don't disagree with you on that at all. But the claims are that it can be a decentralized replacement for web2. And web2 does a whole lot more than just shuffle money around.
That's why it's billing itself as "web3" and not, idk, "visa2".
I'm not sure what specific claims you're arguing against, but most people in the space aren't making them. It's a straw man. It sounds like you mainly take issue with the name web3, which I don't disagree with.
Blockchain provides incentives, those incentives can be transformed into cash for the end user. Web2 basically focused on 2 aspects. Transforming the browser into a OS that can run on any computer, using advertising for the generation of money for stakeholders. In regards to advertisement the reason why this was use d was because it worked in the past. Printing press --> newspaper --> advertisements, Radio --> audio advertisements, Movies --> pre-movie advertisements, tv --> commercials. This mechanism has worked before and worked for web2.0. The problem now is that so many companies are involved in data collection on individuals that it has become quiet scary, this was not possible with previous mediums (not to the same degree). Game companies have tried to transition to micro-transactions, psudo-gambling, upgrades as a payment form. Web3 offers a different incentive model that if successful can replace these arguably more scary methods.
Web3 kind of IS just blockchain at this point. Some are even calling for a Web4, as a non blockchain more performant version of web3 not focused on financial features.
I suspect if any P2P tech gets big without a token, people won't actually call it web3.
If it’s credit cards..we’ll now you’ve created a massive centralized link in your “p2p” system.
I am perfectly fine using centralised finance to buy things that are mostly already inherently centralized, which is pretty much all common purchases for most people, since buying anything that can be made cheaply by an individual is rare for most.
A huge number of things can be done purely P2P with no payments, with almost no infrastructure. That should be the core feature of Web4.
Even more things can be done semi-decentralized as in BitTorrent+a seedbox, and that works just fine.
Some of those things can even be donation supported in a profitable way and don't need payment from most users in any way that actually connects to the service. They can just put a PayPal and bitcoin link and people can donate however they want.
In Wikipedia can do it, Facebook and maybe even Youtube can, with appropriate P2P load balancing.
This is almost essential because the competing centralized services are totally free(via you-are-the-product models).
An email service or something that costs money and requires linking your bank to some coin payment service is going to have a hard time competing with gmail for the general public.
If something needs payment, it probably shouldn't be a core layer of the whole system. The first priority should be make things too cheap to meter where you can, and then figure out how to decentralize the remaining stuff, assuming there is demand.
Blockchain inherently can't do offline first LAN apps properly, you can't have consensus without communication. If I can't talk to someone on a mesh network without internet, a large amount of the advantage of P2P is gone.
I agree that not everything requires payment, but the things that do cannot truly be p2p without p2p payments.
Let me pose the question in a different way: why do you see p2p filesharing, hosting, communication etc as valuable but p2p payments as non-valuable?
Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud.
Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases.
Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled.
For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue.
P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.
What incentive? Users forced to mine to view content? Or just as a paywall? Because the former isn't an incentive (it's just ads taken to an even more extreme level), and the latter is already doable on 'web2' and vastly cheaper at that.
> Blockchain provides incentives
No, it absolutely does not. Blockchain is just a public ledger. It doesn't provide incentives of any kind, just an append-only list. Proof of Work provides "incentives" to burn power pointlessly, which is a pretty awful incentive. Proof of Stake provides incentives to hoard "money", which is... well actually a pretty big regression from the current state of the world, even. And that's about it.
And in both of those cases the money (and thus "incentives") still have to come from somewhere. Blockchain technology itself isn't generating any value, nor do things like IPFS. They need externalized funding to function. Filecoin then tries to make IPFS make sense for people to participate in, but that's then just a mediocre twist on AWS S3 or Backblaze or any other cloud storage provider. "Mediocre" because it completely lacks things like customer support & uptime guarantees. Kinda important things if you're trying to build a business on top of it.
Decentralized insurance seems like a horrible idea. Who makes the decisions? And who do you sue if they turn out to be a scam? How can you sue anyone without a centralized legal system?
At best, DeFi seems like a last resort, being marketed as a replacement for the whole bank system, while still not providing core services the current system does, and calling the lack of those services a feature rather than a bug.
It may have uses to certain niche groups, but the name web3 implies it's some kind of revolution on the scale of web2.
But most people have exactly no use for cryptocurrency. I don't want my money outside the traditional reversible financial system.
DeFi loans seem to mostly be based on large amounts of collateral. Greatly defeating the purpose of taking out a loan, which, unless you are rich and doing wierd finance stuff, is because you need money that you don't have.
I know very few people with any reason to touch Web3, unless it provides something of interest for anyone but rich people with a grudge against the government.
It would be fine as a niche thing, but unfortunately it has completely taken over the tech scene to an insane degree.
Open source software already is literally free. Almost all the good stuff is developed by corporations at a pretty high price, but it's still not much considering billions of users.
Hosting apparently costs so little to provide that just a few ad clicks and some data collection, or a donation model like Wikipedia, can be way more than enough.
Some of it appears to even be given away just as a promotion.
It's not literally free, but it's getting close to irrelevant costs per megabyte of data.
What exactly, do you think web3 is?
I think that the lack of a consistent definition and understanding of what web3 is supposed to solve is why every thread about it turns into a bit of a mess.
e.g IPFS is generally considered part of web3, and is not about money at all.
NFT.storage is well, to put it nicely, a scam platform to drive traffic to Filecoin.
As far as I know it also still spews your entire wantlist to all peers, which could be hundreds, in hopes that maybe one of them happens to have a popular block you want.
It's also immutable first. So you can't change anything without changing the parent, and so on all the way up the tree, which is fine for some kinds of content but not others.
tell that to the russians right now, or to all the other 3. world countrys whose only hope for usable currency is bitcoin
It's great if Facebook is censoring you, but it doesn't seem strong enough to protect you all that strongly against someone bigger who can just shut down a platform if they don't like the content it allows.
Bitcoin does have a use in some places with no other alternatives, but I'm sure glad I'm not forced into that position with their unpredictable fees that often go way above credit card fees.
Sure its a little different than most payment providers where the person initiating the payment pays the fees, but the fees are well under credit card rates.
In the middle you have the space where you can do BTC to BTC transactions with somewhat smaller fees, sure.
As an example, Coinbase charges reasonable withdrawal fees that correspond to the actual TX fee, around $0.05 when I last used it a few weeks ago. Others charge absurdly high fees, biggest examples of that being Binance and Bitstamp that charged ~$20 for a Bitcoin withdrawal around the same time Coinbase was charging $0.05.
Point being, different exchanges charge different fees, and LocalBitcoins is always an option if you want to avoid exchanges altogether.
Credit cards are 2 to 4 percent.
Most people pay their only large payments(Rent and bills) with cheaper direct transfer schemes from zero to a few USD.
For a 16 dollar fee to be better than 3%, you would have to spend 480USD in one transaction, on the kind of thing that you'd normally have a fee at all for. Something I have only done an extremely small handful of times in my entire life.
A few of my more well off friends might have computer parts or jewelry worth that much. My laptop is the only single thing I own close to that price, and even then, it's not much over it.
For a trip to the grocery store for a single person, bitcoin would probably be a 8% to 20% fee.
Flat fees are a regressive sales tax.
1. Russia's problem is that other countries are choosing not to do business with them. The mechanism doesn't change that (China and India will do business, at a hefty discount, but that's true for gold, too) and Bitcoin adds some risks because the blockchain model is perfect for enabling censorship because it not only allows people to avoid transactions with sanctioned entities up front but adds retroactive risk: if you accept Bitcoin from someone on that list your transactions and everyone downstream can also be blocked, driving down the value of those coins and reducing your potential buyers.
2. If your concern is censorship by the government where you live, think very carefully about whether you'd want to be someone in Russia using an application which requires a great deal of very easily detected network activity and maintains a full public transaction history for the convenience of the cops who just illegally searched your phone. Each time someone you've interacted with is compromised, they now have a hard record to go after everyone else in their history so you're not just at risk at the time of the transaction (as with cash) but for years afterwards, hoping that nobody you know has been compromised and wondering whether the police are monitoring you to see whether you lead them to anyone more interesting.