I have a sincere question I've been too afraid to ask.
Are there any examples of web3 projects that solve a problem or have features that would not be possible otherwise?
Are there any examples of web3 projects that solve a problem or have features that would not be possible otherwise?
Theres a project called Golem that I was interested in some years ago that allows you to buy and sell hash power in a permissionless way. Right now there are data centers and big providers, it's basically impossible for a little guy to get in on that market. But a system that allows anyone to contribute to a pool of compute and anyone to buy compute like a commodity is an interesting thing. And there's no gatekeeper or middleman, compute providers and purchasers are matched up algorithmically.
There's something called "liquidity pools" that enable trade to occur without order books. This is a major, major fintech advancement.
Another one is triple entry bookkeeping, which is impossible without these systems.
Just the fact that the byzantine general's problem has a workaround (not entirely a solution) that's shown practical use for a decade is enough for me to call this a fantastic technological achievement.
I'm sure there are more that I can't think of. I don't use the term web3 because 99% of shit marketed under that banner are scams, and the term itself is misleading, and the line around the meaning of the term is amorphous. But this whole cryptocurrency world has brought some really interesting things.
Basically, “you can borrow” if you already have a few hundred million already, and want to gamble with it.
If you want to borrow $100m USDC, you need to post $100m of something else (e.g. BTC), which can then be liquidated if the value changes.
There is definitely a case for this (financial speculation, aka shorting one asset by borrowing and selling it), but I think the largest "legitimate" (not tied to hacking, or ransomware) case that's also not speculative (shorting or decentralized leveraging) is simply to avoid a big tax bill.
In other words if you bought a few thousand BTC 10 years ago and never sold, you don't have to pay capital gains in many jurisdictions if you just use it as collateral to borrow USDC.
Personally I'd be happy to pay taxes on a massive windfall like that (and also wouldn't want to hold BTC long-term due to the environmental effects)
But there are (unfortunately, in my opinion) a lot of anti-government, sovereign citizens, and libertarian types in the crypto space as well.
Basically, I think that everything in the crypto space is bullshit, with the possible exception of Bitcoin itself, but I'm still agnostic on that front. I hope I'm wrong - it's appealing to think that we're on the cusp of another technological revolution that will make everything better, especially if it gives me a chance to get rich! - but for fuck's sake, it's been five years since this classic article and still nothing has fundamentally changed: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
If an asset doesn't live exclusively the blockchain, the blockchain can't enforce its ownership. If the blockchain can't enforce its ownership, it doesn't have anything else to offer.
One small corner of potential I still see is running some low-volume Internet services with a blockchain as a backing store. There was a bit of a buzz a few years ago around distributed DNS, and it seems to fit the criteria to me. The asset itself (DNS records) is a tiny set of key-value pairs, so it can feasibly be stored on the blockchain itself. Clients can look up the blockchain directly, if operating a node is cheap enough, or use middleman servers.
I think it's fine technically, but adoption is going to be a problem. On the plus side, the current administration of this centralized resource (ICANN), has its fair share of opponents and critics[0] - of course it is extremely debatable whether an ancap-style decentralized market would be preferrable, nevertheless there is an existing group of unsatisfied users who have reasons to look at alternatives.
And snce adopting an alt-DNS doesn't mean you need to drop your traditional DNS records, there's no real cost to jumping in.
On the other side, clients will only see added value if your site *isn't* available on the ICANN DNS network, and that's a long shot. Worse, you need a 'killer app' of a site to make people switch to a different DNS system, but realistically a site isn't going to grow big enough without being available on the traditional DNS in the first place. You'd need a few major sites to announce that they're pissed off with ICANN (for example due to a high-profile name dispute) and that they're moving to an alternative DNS. Fat chance of that.
To put it more bluntly - if IPv6 is still having trouble with adoption, what chance does decentralized DNS have?
> There was a bit of a buzz a few years ago around distributed DNS
DNS is already distributed: records are aggressively cached across the internet. It's globally scalable and it works pretty well. There's security issues with it that we could fix (most of which we could fix without blockchain).
A blockchain-based DNS gives us what? It has the advantage of removing the "admin rights" from name registrars. This definitely sounds desirable but it comes with an obvious, massive burden/baggage: in order to retain those byzantine properties, everyone who wants to look up a DNS record has to have a multi-terabyte blockchain file locally downloaded and verified. The pro doesn't outweigh the con. And delegating to a cache brings us back to where we already are now.