Web3.0 Must Be Destroyed
webtwoboomer.com
webtwoboomer.com
Web3 is the unusual case where it has significant effects offline that affects people other than nerds, namely in the form of energy consumption and global warning.
It's using energy fast enough that it's holding us back from green energy deployments. There are studies picking this apart that you can Google if you're interested. The gist of it is that every unit of green energy added to the grid is gobbled up by miners forcing legitimate users of energy to rely on coal. PoW coins have expanded our use of coal over the last 10 years rather than reduced it.
Update:
"But proof of stake..." is green-washing. Claiming that something will be green in the future does not make it green today. Nor does it wash away the fact that this claim has been made for the last 6 years and has been delay yet again. It's release will likely continue to be "some time in the near future," indefinitely.
Except these grifters, scam artists, and rug pullers are fleecing more than just a few nerds and it isn't limited to just the online world.
edit: I don't watch TV and use adblocker (both of which I recommend).
Jimmy Fallon became a meme for his awkward endorsement of his Bored Ape: https://twitter.com/FallonTonight/status/1485843736345161737
Meanwhile they get the marketing value. They spend over $100MM annually on advertising (by way of a quick googling, I have no special insight) so it seems reasonable that they like being talked about, especially by people who might otherwise be avoiding them.
They're gremlins. At a Waffle House. At 2:30 am. It may not make any sense, but the situation doesn't look good.
https://www.cbr.com/why-gremlins-after-midnight-eating-rule-...
I mean, absolutely. But let's not pretend that the whole blockchain bubble is a "nerd" (in the tech sense) thing. It hasn't been since like 2014. It also isn't an "interest of some", the cryptocurrency people very much want to force this dystopia and snakeoil technology onto everyone. All so a few people can make a lot of money.
I'm very sorry to report that these regulations are going to come and wipe the meme coins but leaving the compliant cryptocurrencies and web3 projects to survive.
So, when I see articles like this calling for it all to be totally destroyed even since it 13 years of its existence, I can only say that the author, crypto-skeptics and the crypto maximalists are going to be disappointed for the next 13 years.
If you goal is to prevent your average joe, grandma & pafrom getting rugged from script kiddie, then it must be destroyed.
Or you create financial tsunami dwarf today's collapse and probably create WW3.
I find this part amusing. It makes me wonder if it is even possible to actually plagiarize an NFT. Like, sure if you copy a picture shown in an NFT, reupload it and wrap it in a new NFT, that's plaigarism, but the way around that is even simpler! Just deploy the new NFT and reference the location of the existing picture! If people are willing to purchase your NFT anyway, who cares?
Its like buying a picture frame, holding it up over your face and looking through it to a picture hung 5 feet away. If people are willing to pay for that, then sell picture frames. NFT are the picture frames.
The difference is that I find it merely amusing, while this person finds it like their missionary duty to stop the practice. But why? Who cares? The contract address of the digital picture frame is different and can't be plaigarized, its up to the consumer to discern. If consumers don't want to..... then sell digital picture frames!
There are overlapping similarities to a selling a TV as well, or cable box, you can set the channel to one thing elsewhere, or you can change the channel. NFTs are the TV or cable box here.
I think the most similarities would be like those digital photo frames you can buy at stores, the ones w/ tiny android computers in them that show a digital photo that you set. That's the NFT, except the NFT is completely digital, so its more akin to a digital digital photo frame.
Maybe Matt Levine could write it that way and more people would get it that way. But maybe you're already perceiving the world correctly, congratulations, you perceive the world correctly. The market is saying sell those, so sell those.
That makes zero sense.
If you're posting a new NFT that just references the existing URL, you aren't copying anything.
Unfortunately I can't watch the video right now. Care to summarize the reasoning, here? Because it escapes me.
Edit: also I updated the video link so it points to that specific part of the video.
right but specifically what?
which one and how would that play out
if there is no logo or phrase in the picture, then it couldn't be a trademark infringement. and even if there was I would have to look at it case by case, with many cases I don't think it would be applicable. the consumer has to discern with the features that the blockchain provides. if there is a valid consumer protection issue thats with the marketplaces and wallets UI. the lister doesn't have to misrepresent anything if the consumer is buying by looking at pictures alone. and the lister could likely make a compliant and accurate name. "NFT showing Bored Apes"
The thing is, the law isn't just a regex you apply to what the seller said and it tells you if the seller broke the law. That ain't how it works. At the end of the day it's going to come down to whether the seller mislead the buyer.
Isn't that ultimately how anything works? I can print out a cheap copy of the Mona Lisa, say "I'm selling the Mona Lisa," and someone can purchase it if they choose to. Of course, I may have broken some laws in the particular government jurisdiction this transaction occurs in, like trademark, copyright, fraud, etc., but that's just as true with NFTs.
This just doesn't seem like a valid criticism of NFTs. There are plenty of valid and strong criticisms of NFTs available, so there's no need to invent invalid and weak ones!
Well no the difference here is that my example has nothing copied either. Your example has something copied. They are not analogous as they lack that similarity.
The person selling this NFT that contains no copy does not have to misrepresent anything. Hence no fraud. The contract address is obviously different.
Theft requires something to be moved. Copyright infringement requires something to be copied. Fraud requires misrepresentation.
None of that is necessary here.
I don't consider what I wrote to be a criticism of NFTs, I find it amusing.
Okay, then just tweak my analogy slightly and sell a piece of paper printed with the URL to a photograph of the Mona Lisa, or to an image of a piece of digital artwork, or to a digital audio file, etc.
> The person selling this NFT that contains no copy does not have to misrepresent anything. Hence no fraud. The contract address is obviously different.
If you're defining it as not fraudulent and not copying anything, then what's absurd about the situation at all? It might be amusing that someone might buy something that you personally don't value at all, but that's hardly unique to NFTs.
We're agreeing then.
that's my point
I'll expand on another commenter's analogy. Imagine if it was possible to easily duplicate, atom-for-atom, the Mona Lisa. How much would a copy go for? Maybe $50 with a nice frame? Nothing close to the mega millions for the real thing.
This means that the value of the painting is not the painting itself. It's valuable because of who created it and the history surrounding it.
It's possible that bad actors will try and sell a forgery, with paintings as well as for NFTs. That doesn't mean all paintings are worthless. It just means that buyers have to be careful.
There are plenty of valid criticisms of NFTs (and to be honest I'll probably never buy one) but this is not one of them.
I understand and use and create and sell NFTs, I can understand where your assumption came from given what responses one might expect to see on this forum.
I think this is an interesting nuance of this technology that is not well understood by NFT traders or NFT critics. Many malicious actors are also doing more than they have to do to sell "forged" NFTs. Developers can perceive whats going on though.
thats hilarious.
It's incredibly simple. The NFT points to a URL controlled by the author. The author configured the web server so that it would respond with different images "based on the IP or User Agent of the requester." There's nothing web3 or blockchain going on here, it's just a normal image URL where the web server responds differently for different requests. Kinda like image hosting services that would return a placeholder image if you tried to hotlink directly to the image URL.
https://api.niftygateway.com/beeple/100010001/
More info: https://cryptobriefing.com/rare-beeple-donald-trump-nft-sell...
LOL – if you think this is true, you don't know anything about greed or emotions. (To be a bit less obscurant, I'm saying they are both either boundless or unquantifiable. There's nothing special about 100K btc, nothing more special than 69K USD BTC.)
If you don't think this critical sell-off volume exists, then you are the one who misunderstands greed and emotion.
Sell low, buy high – that's the name of the game isn't it?
Great article, by the way. I have just skimmed most of it, I am knee-jerking, but my strongest impression after reading through most of it for the first time is "I'm with Keanu here" with the caveat that I do believe there are a handful of good Web3 projects out there, I'm not going to name one because I don't want to detract from your article, which is actually very good IMHO. (Edit: I guess I mean, I'm with queersamus, whose quote appears under the picture of Keanu...)
Same with Authentication... The idea of web3 is decentralisation... Once the app is operational, there are no more server fees. It's always online - heard of arwave?
Web3 is not crypto man...
Web3 is a design blueprint that is based on decentralised databases, decentralised Auth and decentralised payments and decentralised storage.
It is way harder to implement web3 solutions today than web2. Travel back in 2002 at the early days of web2, and look at how miserable it was to create a webapp.
There are actually no valid point, the guy doesn't even go technical, while talking about a technical subject- and the read is not short.
The concept of web3 is that no more dependencies on AWS, Azure and cloud premises- which are all controlled by govt.
Tor is Free??? What? Please share your server provider... As far as I know, you still have to host your TOR website on a physical server, and pay for it. Ahah. Maybe you talk about access? Well ipfs is free, arwave is free and Ethereum is free then.
This article is a piece of opinionated incompetent crap written in good English.
So as long was we have Meta [0], Stripe [1], Signal [2] and others [3], [4] are still using them, it is NOT going to be 100% guaranteed to be destroyed and totally going away then?
The die hard anti-crypto extreme who think it will be totally completely and totally destroyed are just as wrong as the religious crypto maximalists who think all projects are going to succeed to the moon.
Don't be either of them.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/09/instagram-testing-nfts-sel...
[1] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto
[2] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
[3] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ukraine-electronic-...
[4] https://ir.moneygram.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...
So why has cryptocurrencies lasted longer than that?, or even better is that why companies like Stripe re-entered again after dropping Bitcoin and using another cryptocurrency? Which that is the whole point of why I quoted this:
> Newer revisions of the tech, such as Algorand, may have promise and deal with some of the issues I mentioned.
Same reason all the above companies got into Beanie Babies: To make money.
Stripe is happily selling pickaxes to gold miners, as they say. They are more than happy to collect their "useless" fiat USD, and play along. I think it's ethically dubious, but... that's another story. It's certainly profitable.
Right. I'm still asking where is the 'use case' in beanie babies vs cryptocurrencies, or stable-coins like what Stripe is using it for?
> Stripe is happily selling pickaxes to gold miners, as they say. They are more than happy to collect their "useless" fiat USD, and play along. I think it's ethically dubious, but... that's another story. It's certainly profitable.
And that somehow is a problem? Is that why it will be 'totally destroyed' and banned then?
Surely both you and the author are going to be disappointed and have to complain a bit more if you're looking into 'destroying' it all.
The "stable" coins used to route around US laws are starting to lose their peg. When Tether goes, it'll all drop at least 90%, if not 99.95%, as all the margins on the offshore exchanges get called.
There's no middle ground with stablecoins, they're either worth $1 or zero.
This reflects a market consensus that there's about an 80% chance that it won't regain the peg, if you think about it.
The political foundations that have permeated its design are intolerable alone. Austrian School, "sound money," economics put the liberty of the individual above that of society. The entire community walks and talks like a fascist movement: they celebrate masculinity and "strong leaders," authoritarianism and oligarchy, they see themselves as superior and righteous, and above the law. It's the preferred way to fund blockades, white nationalist movements, etc.
Let alone that the technology is hot garbage and shouldn't even be out of the prototype stage. Hasn't your mother taught you not to eval a strangers code on your computer? Well that's what a smart contract does and it handles financial assets too. If you can read and understand proofs the attempts to formalize these machines have produced reams and reams of theorems and work in order to try and make this safe(r)... yet hackers continue to siphon off trillions of dollars in attack after attack. If the proof is so complex that you can't understand it then it's a sign your sniffing down the wrong path.
But that doesn't even matter. Most of web3 tech is only good enough to pull off the grift. I suspect that's why most scammers have moved on to target holders of cryptoassets rather than old folks and banks: it's easier, less risky, and way more profitable. So go ahead, spend 20k and invest in an NFT and flex on all your socials. If you have already I guarantee you're on someone's list.
If you're interested in following along with how much money has been lost, stolen, scammed, and simply disappeared: https://web3isgoinggreat.com
I’m having trouble buying into the sentiment. It seems like just a big long negative rant about Bitcoin, NFTs, & crypto/ blockchain in general. Kind of just rehashing all the typical straw man criticisms of ‘crypto bros’ or early adopters.
While these things are an aspect of Web 3.0, they are not the end all be all. There was no mention of other decentralized technologies. Things like Mastodon or Matrix. There is a huge selection of self-hostable, decentralized software projects available to us now. Nextcloud might be another good example.
The point is we want to move away from highly centralized closed source services, that track our every move for profit, and we have no recourse over if something goes bad. We want to embrace open source, freely available software that we are in full control of. Web 3.0 is more than just crypto currency.
I think the title of this would make more sense if it said, “Cryptocurrency & Blockchain Must Be Destroyed”.
Talks a lot about RSS, simple/minimalist websites, decentralization, fediverse, linux etc.
Users should own their own data, period.
I hate cancel culture even more than web3.
> I believe there is a moral imperative to destroy web3 and to protect those that have been infected
The very first sentence of this piece is dishonest: blanketly condemning "all" related tech as environmentally devastating. Later on in the piece it's admitted that innovations like Proof of Stake solve the problem of needless energy consumption.
>To actually use this stuff is quite difficult, even the most simple thing, like buying something.
Yeah, scanning a QR code with your phone - as one needs to do to buy something online with a mobile wallet - is super hard. ;)
This article seems to be a cavalcade of shallow and dishonest criticism.
I'm awfully tired of these completely misinformed blog posts that seem to reflect HN's collective delusion about bitcoin. I don't know about US, but the whole drug trade, from the largest transactions to street level, have transitioned to crypto in Eastern Europe and at least few Middle Eastern countries. More and more of my friends who have never been interested in crypto as a ponzi scheme are using USDT to send and receive money across borders as their banks are hit with sanctions.
If you don't see something, it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.