Web 3 is Flawed
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The big pitch was that you could have non-copyable items which you could move between virtual worlds. The Second Life / Open Simulator ecosystem already has that problem. People looked into NFTs as a way to solve it, and concluded it would not help.
You can download content and upload it as new content, perhaps with a minor mod, creating a new object. This is called "copybotting" in Second Life and Open Simulator. As with any copyright violation, you can file DMCA takedown requests if you find a copy of your stuff.
Would NFTs stop copybotting? No. They just protect the object's ID, not its content. You can still copy the content. If you want to copy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT image and make a poster of it, the NFT system does nothing to stop you. It's not even clear that's a copyright violation in the US, since BAYC images are computer-generated.
Many NFTs don't even have an on-chain cryptographic hash of the content, only a URL for some server. Nor do most NFTs have their NFT ID watermarked into the actual content. So the NFT doesn't even give you a verifiable proof of ownership independent of the creator's server. There isn't info that would allow a server to tell if a new image upload is a copy of an existing item. An image search might help, but that doesn't need NFTs. Decentraland's solution to this problem is to charge a $500 "curation fee" to get an object onto their platform, which cuts down content to the point that they can check for duplicates.
NFTs are thus useless for their claimed purpose.
This is very similar to how DRM works (protects the ID, not the content, hence we need DMCAs if someone tries to illegally stream a movie on YouTube or whatever) and it seems to be doing a pretty good job. In spite of everyone hating it, we have the luxury of Spotify, Netflix, Apple+, etc. because of DRM. NFTs definitely have a use case in gaming and digital collectibles; they also happen to be consumer-friendly (unlike the current status quo of digital collectibles). I wish I could sell my thousands of items in WoW for real money, or my Fornite skins for real money, or my unneeded Magic Arena cards for real money, but I'm locked in their ecosystem.
The tokenomnics aspect of Web3 is mainly speculation, which imo also has a use case, but it most likely will be impacted by some much-needed regulation.
NFT does not perform an equivalent function. Be infinitely more useful if it did.
That's exactly it: you may wish it, but the reason it won't happen isn't that NFTs weren't invented yet, it's that companies making these products really don't want you to. One simple reason is that it might make someone else play less if they could all those items by just paying a little money.
The other reason why selling in-game items for real money will never be permitted (again) is all the gigantic legal crap that it brings along. If the items are worth real money, you can sue Blizzard or other players for events which unfairly make you lose an item, or affect the value of the items you hold.
This isn't true at all, because Magic (the card game) already has a vibrant secondary market with no legal problems. They nerf/buff cards all the time.
People like you are just pushing back so vehemently because it's popular to hate on crypto and NFTs right now. Rightfully so, even, as there's tons of scams out there, but that doesn't mean the idea and technology is interesting or useful.
This is not true. It is exceedingly rare for paper cards to be nerfed or buffed. The only real notable example is with the Companion mechanic from a few years ago. Wizard's solution is to ban problematic cards.
And people like you hop into threads pushing your ideas forwards _so vehemently_ without disclosing your financial interest and involvement.
There is also no way for someone to exploit a flaw in MTG and gain access to all of your cards to sell. Conversely, if someone exploited a bug to steal your WoW account and sell off your items for thousands of dollars, you would sue Blizzard for damages. Even worse, if you did something against their terms of service and they wanted to ban you, they would probably have to have some way to compensate you for all the items you would lose access to.
Further, WotC they actually do have problems because of this trading: they have had to create a list of cards they promise not to reprint, because of all the backlash from traders who perceived a re-print of Black Lotus as "flooding the market". Afterwards, they once wanted to still go ahead with a re-print of these cards with some special features, and again faced serious backlash and threats of lawsuits, so they backed down.
I doubt this. All of these services have one thing in common: it's easier to just subscribe than it is to torrent the content. It's not particularly difficult to find original-quality torrents of Netflix content, for example.
No it isn’t. That’s exactly my point. There is no real problem being solved here, because clearly, events (even illegal ones!) that required tickets for admission have worked fine for ages without NFTs.
This is the problem with most proposed blockchain applications: they have no mechanism to compel behavior in the physical world. Someone controls access to this rave; at the end of the day, the only reason that they accept blockchain tokens instead of entries in a centralized database is because they’ve decided to arbitrarily.
You could totally feasibly create a private club whose members you track yourself in a spreadsheet (allowing them to sell their membership to other people, or not, as you prefer). Someone else, or more likely yourself, could then decide to give your members access to private parties, and everything would work the same way.
The only thing NFTs give you is irrevocability of the initially stated membership rules: with my example of a private club tracked in a spreadsheet, you could choose to change the rules at any time (say, charging a fee for anyone who wants to transfer ownership). You couldn’t for NFTs. But this advantage of NFTs is somewhat illusory because, again, whoever controls access to benefits in the physical world can themselves change the rules at any time, and so you haven’t really changed the number of parties you have to trust. Whatever organization is running these raves might decide tomorrow that you need a Super Duper Bored Ape that costs extra or has different transferability characteristics, and you’re back where you started.
Of course anything can be done without a blockchain, but it has trade offs. Not understanding the trade offs will drive you towards centralized solutions.
This seems very much like the argument that, say, Blizzard would build support for NFT-based items into WoW so that people could buy NFTs outside of WoW and transfer them into the game (or buy them inside of WoW and still be able to use them elsewhere even if they quit playing WoW). Sure, it might have some value for the customers, but there's negative incentive for the actual companies to do it.
> realistically, it's just a customer list.
I'd pay decent money to never interact with a BAYC owner. So there might be a market for this list.
TBF to BAYC holders, there are benefits to being on a "promising suckers" list. In this case the price seems high for those benefits, ofc.
it's just a brand name that's being used to trick crypto people into thinking that, in a couple decades, they'll invent the future of gaming
and the bullet list is always stuff we've had for decades
A server that you can keep at home that you can plug in to make it part of this huge network of machines located all around the world that communicate with each other - this is the decentralized web.
Most people can't.
Access is difficult for private individuals for more reasons than just "technology is complicated".
I just launched a web server on my computer (python -m SimpleHTTPServer) which anyone in the world can connect to. If I wanted to I could build an unmoderated Twitter or Reddit and foster a community maybe one day being the biggest in the world.
And if my current government decided to regulate me then I could move to a country that didn't.
Web3 seems to be much more about decentralised payments. Which is not really a problem many people are demanding a highly complex solution for.
The rest of the world has to wait for other means of decentralization.
End to end about an hour. And it would be capable of supporting effectively infinite traffic.
Look at OpenSea. They take the blockchain data and augment it with their proprietary data.
Stripe being a $100B company contradicts this.
Payments and especially finance is a gigantic industry that is still mostly centralized but doesn't need to be. If we can make wealth flow as easy as data does today without any gatekeepers or middlemen that is a huge upgrade for the internet.
There are hundreds of thousands of banks, but hundreds of crypto exchanges. Imagining crypto to be less centralized than traditional finance is deeply, deeply incorrect.
It's only a matter of time before decentralized rails become the primary form of wealth transfer on the internet, because they are much more efficient and composable than current systems.
There aren't any. "Decentralized" is just an in-group smurf word with no legitimate technical meaning, and which is not in any way a meaningful goal.
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> It's only a matter of time before decentralized rails become the primary form of wealth transfer on the internet
We're 14 years in and it hasn't gotten anywhere close
You keep holding your breath, though. (You'll have to, with all the pollution being created.)
Note: "wealth transfer" is just a fancy way to say "online casino."
Being confidently ignorant doesn't make you correct, it just makes you miss out on the future.
Although the entire crypto ecosystem valuation is based on another source of fictional money (Tether).
The whole "moving objects between virtual worlds" thing is one of the most ridiculous concepts I see pushed by the crypto/NFT/web3 community.
As you've outlined there is a potential for this functionality in non-game/metaverse environments - even if NFTs fail to do it properly.
However, when this gets applied to video games at large, I really start to roll my eyes. Even if you could magically hand-wave away all the technical issues that go along with trying to implement something like this - why would developers even bother? Game economies have to be tightly controlled to combat things like RMT, botting, and unsanctioned item trading. Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible.
This is missing the forest for the trees. Of course it wouldn't be a carte blanche, but it would be trivial to let people transfer in cosmetic items (think stickers, color schemes, etc.) based on another ecosystem/game/achievement/etc.
Cosmetic digital items (e.g. non-gameplay-impacting) are like a hundred-million-dollar+ industry.
Please don't poison the well by calling it a scam.
edit: -4... Time for some of you to read the HN guidelines I guess.
It could be cheaper than buying a similar item on the new game. I don't see how that is a scam, I just use the definition that's in the dictionary. Who is being deceived and defrauded here?
Why do you assume the item you transfer needs to have an ability? I don't make that assumption, lets keep it simple and assume it's just a cosmetic display item without any abilities and that it's possible to display this item in the other game.
edit: You could for example display the rank you have in one game in another game, assuming the possibility to do this exists of course.
Since it costs thousands of dollars to store any significant amount of data on the major blockchains, any game item will just be some reference stored on the blockchain.
Unless every game developer builds an appropriate model for every possible item there's no "simple" importing of an asset. Even if a full asset was shared between games no two games are guaranteed to display even a texture the same way.
Even your example of "rank" is meaningless. Rank in one game doesn't have anything to do with rank in another game. The number of goblins you killed in a fantasy RPG has no meaning to a racing game.
As for these being scams, there's no reason any of these things require a blockchain. Games have at various points supported custom player models, skins, spray decals, and all sorts of other shit. None of it needed the added rent extraction of a blockchain.
The only reason to add a blockchain is to get players to prop up whatever shitcoin blockchain is being used. They get vague promises of asset reusability but actually just get normal scammy in-app purchases.
I'm not debating whether it's a good idea or not and I'm not interested in that debate either.
You're doing the same thing as you did before, you twist my words into something that is easier to attack. This is the third time now, please stop. Rank in other games is something people ask about or mention when playing somewhat similar genres so I can definitely see that being interesting to some people.
None of the things you mentioned has anything to do with scams? Rent extraction != scam. in-app purchases != scam. Blockchain != scam.
To give some examples: (1) they are not legally binding; (2) even when a legal contract exists between the NFT issuer and the first owner, the terms don't carry over in NFT trades, unless additional contract terms are signed outside the blockchain; (3) as such, they don't solve any problem they purport to solve, as buying the NFT itself on chain is irrelevant, only the off-chain contract matters; (4) they don't even contain the item they are about, or at least since hash of it, in the vast majority of cases; (5) they don't even solve the real problem of fungibility, as while the token itself may not be fungible, the item that it represents remains trivially copyable. I am sure there are more.
- Our game is inspired by <Genre defining game> we will pay homage to this game by including <Genre defining game NFT> in our game.
- Our game supports modding and enough people care about <NFT> that someone is willing to implement that NFT in the game via mods.
There's an order of operations here. These examples rely on the NFT already being meaningful in some community before it gets added in. Anything that a random person creates that nobody cares about would never be ported in.
I would guess that if "Web3" becomes the thing crypto people aim for, GCP, Azure, and/or AWS will implement "public ledgers" that have a very similar interface and may or may not rely on blockchain underneath. Any decentralized blockchain would be forced to compete with those centralized offerings.
The benefit is someone else can make a marketplace, analytics or other tools that work for many items across many games without you having to spend time implementing them yourself or creating and maintaining an API for this data.
Also it's bad for players, as the visual identity of the game would be destroyed by items coming from other games. Yikes.
Meanwhile, in the real world, whenever some company wants to implement NFTs they get massive backlash from their player base.
Almost all of those things are in some way user hostile, too (E.g. preorders, micro-transactions).
This is not something you want to admit to if it’s true, because you haven’t got the rights to old game you’re copying.
> - Our game supports modding and enough people care about <NFT> that someone is willing to implement that NFT in the game via mods.
Why don’t the mods just put the thing in? Mods don’t need to respect anyone’s NFT ownership.
> Why don’t the mods just put the thing in? Mods don’t need to respect anyone’s NFT ownership.
For the same reasons that people buy games instead of pirating them most likely. "Right click and save" is a fundamental part of the internet yet digital things are still are bought and sold. (edit including DRM type mechanisms if this pattern became a thing that actually mattered money wise).
Exactly. If I were a game studio given a choice between letting my users bring in objects from anywhere or forcing them to buy my objects, I would pick the latter.
It would not. Every one of those items would need to be intentionally added by the game devs. Every piece would need to be created, modeled, textured, and animated.
I suppose it would be trivial if you created a pile of uninteresting and uninspiring games with the exact same engine, assets, and art style, like so many NFT's of depressed-looking monkeys
There are plenty of games that support user-created assets. There's like zillions of skins in CS:GO that don't need to be "manually created, textured, and animated" by Valve (by design). Your argument just betrays a complete non-understanding of modern game engines and how cosmetic items work/are created.
And that's just the technical side, design and art would be horrified if you have no control on what can be added to a game.
You can't put those CS:GO skins into Skyrim. It would probably be easier, like I said, to move it to another source engine game with the same art style and the exact same models, but that's it.
If this "transfer between games" thing is such a killer feature why isn't it happening now? Shouldn't we be seeing stuff like this in Steam games where Steam could easily expose your progress between other Steam games.
Amusingly, Valve has already experimented with this (and, as far as I can tell, given up on it). There were a handful of in-game items in Team Fortress 2 which were given to players as a reward for purchasing certain games, or for completing specific achievements in those games.
This is one reason you wouldn’t be a crypto billionaire no matter how prices went up; you’d probably sell first.
Some email providers (Hey in the US) don’t accept emails from other senders without prior authorization from the user. IIRC Chinese providers won’t accept any of yours unless you have a contract with them.
No, it wasn't. Email was popular and established before spam became a big concern.
Though spam, and the necessary control mechanisms, is one reason email had become less central.
We encounter new problems, then we build solutions, that's how progress works.
So please stop moving the goalposts.
Do you even play games? It's literally happening between Blizzard games lol. Hearthstone and WoW had all kinds of cross-game cosmetics (mounts, card backs, etc.). Let alone all the goodies you get from Blizzcon in-game (which have a sizable secondary grey market on eBay).
A hearthstone card skin has no use in WoW.
You could do that since the GameBoy Color and without having to trash the economy, become a fugitive and give Matt Levine writing material for years.
Stupid. Ponzi. Crap.
They do though. The argument is two-pronged: (a) developers earn secondary fees on open markets, and (b) players get to resell stuff they don't want. It's literally a win-win.
Tim Sweeney knows.
If every games company is allowing users to resell their items, and Epic is not, they just look evil. We're not there yet but when we are you don't want to get the reputation of being the evil company that seeks profits above all else.
And competition doesn't/won't solve either problem, because third-party apps aren't why most people choose social media platforms, and reselling hats isn't why most people choose a game.
In other words, the proposed feature is something developers want, not users.
The perverse incentive of the "token" and making a boatful of money suddenly gets people concerned about developer's income.
Except in Diablo 3. Where all that killed the game.
So it may not have been the pitch, but NFT's are definitely Web 3. You're just moving the goal posts.
What they're asking for is Digital Rights Management. The promise of NFT is DRM.
Seriously.
What these hucksters call Web3 is the digital equivalent of essential oils. Blockchain apps have no real productive use beyond selling them to each other. Calling the whole thing Web3 was a fairly transparent grasp at trying to legitimize the whole charade.
If there's a productive use, it escapes me.
> Gitcoin grants quadratic funding is not just for funds allocation, it's also a great signaling tool!
Gitcoin is a platform where you get paid to work on open source software in Python, Rust, Ruby, JavaScript, Solidity, HTML, CSS, Design, and more.
But why was it hidden all the way down in the footer? Why was the rest of the page vacuous marketing copy that made my brain turn off?
And why does any of that need cryptocurrency? Grants for open source work have been around before cryptocurrency even existed.
The key word there is seems, you’ll probably find a lot of jurisdictions require you to report receiving payment through crypto.
Apparently "the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community". Mathematics sure have increased in scope since I left uni.
Hope that helps.
There are far too many web sites like that. Not just crypto-related ones. The ones with a flashy design, a blank for your email address, and far too little useful information. I refer to this as "the giant sucking sound of the onboarding funnel".
You can make this argument for any technology at this point. If people like crypto it will exist. It's the same with a lot of other things I think shouldn't exist like gold.
That was a perfectly reasonable position to hold until, like, Google Maps. Meanwhile we're 10 years and counting into the crypto hype and still zero legitimate use cases where it adds value.
I’ll have to poke around later and see if I can quit my day job while getting paid to solve real problems.
Also, does that mean that you going to finally stop using Signal for not only having mobile wallet [3] for payments, but also facilitating in using cryptocurrencies for donations? [4]
[3] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
Re: Skiff, it looks like a very cool product but I'm skeptical they can make enough money. The primary path to monetization for a product like this would be enterprise SaaS licensing but I simply don't see how you can sell to enterprises without centralizing the product. Auditability, compliance, SSO, etc. would all seem to be difficult if not impossible with the product as specced.
ens.domains is a privately owned and managed DNS provider. It's litterally the exact opposite of what web3 claims to be. Having a "constitution" is just re-wording "Terms of Service". I love how it sells hard covers versions of it's Terms of Service for fiat at Blurb.com. And no, Blurb does not accept cryptocurrency payments even, lol.
Signal.org existed well before they added crypto, and quite frankly, yes I did just about completely stop using it - and so did many others. The introduction of cryptocurrency in that app litterally chased away users rather than improve adoption.
Gawd, could go on forever here.
ENS is already super useful if you care about owning your identities without worrying about intermediaries.
I don't think this is even true.
For one, the service has a public governance process, and it is almost certainly the case that a proposal could be passed through that process which seized ownership of a "domain".
Second, any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction of has the ultimate veto power -- they can order it to take action under the threat of legal charges against their company's principals, or the seizure of their infrastructure. You may see this as a problem, but it isn't a problem which can be solved by software.
No, this is not how it works. To be able to do that, they would have to rewrite the smart contract with the specific rules to revoke ownership, "upgrade" the contract (which I am not even sure if it is something supported by ENS current protocol) and then they would have to convince everyone else (or the significant majority of users) to migrate to the new contract as well.
> any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction
What is the jurisdiction of "the internet"? There isn't one. There isn't a company behind this, there is no ZIP code, and so on. You can not stop tens of thousands of people running ethereum nodes all around the world. You might try to stop the current developers from doing further work, but the contract that is already deployed on the blockchain can not simply be removed. It is physically impossible to do it. That is the meaning of "censorship-resistant".
It’s the US, except for when it’s China or Russia.
You may feel you aren’t under their jurisdiction. It turns out it doesn’t matter what you think though, much like if an elephant is charging at you, your opinion of the situation doesn’t really have an effect.
You can’t get away by just not being interesting right now. Transactions are public and forever on most blockchains, so anyone can find you at any time in the future.
These people tried but they barely got to spend their winnings due to how hard it really is to launder money.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspira...
The question was "how the US government can stop people from making a transaction on the blockchain?" More specifically: what government who would have the capacity to stop people from using a dapp?
Can the US government stop people from getting their (completely KYC'd) crypto and exchanging on Uniswap? Can it stop them from making a Tornado Cash transfer? Can it stop them from buying a domain name on ENS?
The answer, of course, is no, they can not. Your talk about government reach is just unrelated bullshit.
Assuming you expect to still be alive in the next few years, it’s not a good idea to pretend like you don’t have to care about this. You can end up in front of a judge if you do something illegal, and they aren’t impressed with “you can’t stop me” as an argument. They can find someone who can do something and they can order them to do that.
> if they’re legal now it’s because they’re complying with laws, and if they stop complying with laws they won’t be legal.
Laws from what country?
OP's comment was trying to argue that "the country of jurisdiction has veto power". My question was "which country has jurisdiction over a distributed application running in thousands of independent computers spread around the world?"
It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped. A government could try to stop its citizens from using the service but even if they were successful (good luck with that...) the service itself would still be around.
Contrast that with, e.g, The Pirate Bay. To stop the service, Governments could and did manage to go after the individuals, or the hosting providers and even the DNS registrars. These were all the choke points that the governments tried to use, because these are points where they can have some jurisdiction. But no government can order an ENS domain to be suspended. No court can stop an IPFS hash to being a representation of a file, and while one could get an order for a specific server to be disconnected, there is no way to issue an order to delete all files of a given hash from the network. There is no one who can remove a contract that is deployed on a blockchain, so there is no way that a judge "can find someone to do something about it..."
And no, this is not a "theoretical argument". It is a very real one. The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature. If dapps were not censorship-resistant, then of course developers would just stick with what is more efficient, cheaper and well-established.
The US.
> OP's comment was trying to argue that "the country of jurisdiction has veto power". My question was "which country has jurisdiction over a distributed application running in thousands of independent computers spread around the world?"
The US. No, it doesn't matter where you live, it's the US. As Bandit Keith says, every country in this world belongs to America. (Except for a few like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.)
> It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped.
It can continue, but this is a Pyrrhic victory, ie there's no way this could work out in the real world that anyone would be happy about.
Imagine if someone puts child porn in your immutable distributed database. Is anyone getting away with it merely because it can't be deleted? No, now the service is illegal for everyone, forever.
More mild real example is crypto exchanges banning coins that were transferred out of a coin mixer in the last few transactions. Which is something they have done, and will do more of:
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0768
> There is no one who can remove a contract that is deployed on a blockchain, so there is no way that a judge "can find someone to do something about it..."
But they can! Judges are more powerful than you and more powerful than computers. The mere fact that you can't technically fulfill the order makes everything /worse/. Whoever they find is in contempt until they find some way out of doing something impossible; better to have had admin capabilities in the first place.
Tornado Cash seems to have the ability to do something though: https://www.cryptonewsz.com/lazarus-gets-banned-by-tornado-c...
> The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature.
Well, or because a16z is giving them money to do it. I don't agree that not getting prosecuted is proof it's fine; you need to get prosecuted and be found not guilty, get an SEC no-action letter, etc.
We could extend that "logic" to the Internet itself. Let's then just declare that because there are illegal things done in the Internet, all of it is illegal. Also, the only reason we are not suffering any repercussion is because Uncle Sam doesn't care about us (yet).
This is nothing but a cheap rhetorical trick. Hasn't anyone called you on your bullshit before?
The difference is that the various law enforcement agencies across the globe frequently succeed in taking sites offering child porn down and prosecute those involved. The point being made was that once it's on your immutable blockchain you can't do that.
And? it's not because something is on a blockchain that you have to host it, much less interact with it.
You certainly need to have people validating incoming blocks, and currently you need to have at least some nodes archiving all the data if you want to be able to reconstruct the whole history. But there is a lot of research going on in regards to state pruning, which would let nodes discard parts of the chain that are not interesting.
But currently all blockchain users have to download the entire thing unless they're just accessing it through a web API, which would be "centralized" and makes them not really blockchain users.
Web 2.0 gave us legitimate added productivity and functionality of being able to do stuff online for the first time. Web 3.0 does nothing but give us a trustless system that nobody asked for. Zero new functionality in any of those apps.
If you trust banks and FAANG companies, as most people do, Web 3.0 has exactly zero value.
I am not even asking you to do anything. I am just asking you to think of an alternative.
The web?
FAANG is not the web, it's just some companies putting apps on the web
Go ahead and try to live on the internet without being forced to interact with any of FAANG services. It's impossible even for me, who tries to keep as strict of a "digital hygiene" as possible and use open source and open standards as much as possible.
If you think that we can not improve on the web that we have today, either your standards are way too low or you already got so used to be manipulated by Big Tech that you can't even imagine how much better and freer life could be without it.
Good God, can we please stop with the cheap rhetoric and at least try to discuss things in a productive way?
Do I actually have to answer this?
.
> Good God, can we please stop with the cheap rhetoric and at least try to discuss things in a productive way?
I didn't engage in any rhetoric.
The question I asked you remains unanswered, and I was in fact being productive.
Sorry you got stuck. Better luck next time I guess
how exactly web3 is supposed to fix that?
> or you already got so used to be manipulated by Big Tech
assuming without knowing is the worst form of arrogance.
but even if that was true, I don't believe that the guy in the small village here in Italy that makes olive oil and sell it on Amazon to markets he could never even imagine existed is going to go decentralized and trustless just because Amazon is virtually a monopoly.
FAANG provided opportunities that have much more value for people than idealism (that doesn't even work!)
By providing a set of tools that allow (but not require) disintermediation.
> FAANG provided opportunities
Sure. It also blocked them. It also has created massive costs to people. It has also created Surveillance Capitalism. It employs thousands of people whose sole job is dedicated to keep its users addicted. It is creating a society of people who can "connect" with anyone on the other side of the world, but who get anxiety attacks if they have to talk with their own neighbor next door. It is destroying all chance of civil discourse, making groups increasingly polarized and isolated.
> that have much more value for people than idealism
To some people. Good for them. When it works, it is great. The question is: what about those people who don't get to enjoy these benefits? And can we get to provide this value without having all this collateral damage?
> (that doesn't even work!)
It works for some cases, and it works for some people. There is no technology in human history that was "born" perfectly ready for mass-usage. And there shouldn't be.
I'm not advocating here that we should all be dropping the systems and institutions that work, just to adopt something for the sake of "new tech". What I am saying is that there are whole lots of groups who are not being served by the current systems and institutions, and that we can do more than collectively shrug our shoulders and/or attack those who are attempting to create a solution.
How exactly is it gonna make people do the switch from Google search, Google maps, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, iPhones/MacBooks etc.?
> The question is: what about those people who don't get to enjoy these benefits? And can we get to provide this value without having all this collateral damage?
Make your own website, communicate via e-mail, host your own mail server, etc.
FAANG is not "the web" and "the web" is not the Internet.
> It works for some cases, and it works for some people
I don't think it actually works, or to put it in other words, it works like casinos in Las Vegas work.
But that they improve society it's highly questionable IMO.
I don't think we are talking about the same thing. The issue is not in getting people to consume the services that are "freely" available. The issue is in enabling people to participate both as consumers as well as producers in the larger economy without depending on intermediaries.
Instead of "get people out of Google Search", think "allow people to buy and sell things online without depending on Paypal" or "how can we have an alternative for the small olive oil producer in Amazon if for some reason Amazon decides to enter the market and abuses its power?"
larger than what exactly?
How web3 is gonna make it possible?
I can already send my tomato sauce produced by my family to Japan by simply putting up a website.
what could web3 make for my family?
> allow people to buy and sell things online without depending on Paypal
it's been possible for at last 20 years.
I pay using my credit card, not Paypal.
In Europe I can use SEPA transfers (usually free), SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (they cost me about 90 cents, money is transferred in seconds), the new PSD2 directive allow merchants to withdraw money directly from customers' accounts after being authorized and I believe GNU Taler is a much better option than any wallet solution web3 is proposing.
People can pay using any channel already available, they can also send me cash in an envelope if they want to, I'll gladly accept it.
And any of those systems (except cash in an envelope) are protected from fraud, insured, and refundable in full.
What about Web3?
Technically depending on Paypal is a choice.
Of course if you are talking about the possibility that your shady or illegal business will be banned from using one of those payment systems, well, that's a feature, not a bug.
You sound just like David Letterman when interviewing Bill Gates in 1995 ("why would I need a computer?", "oh, you mean I can listen the baseball game. Does radio ring a bell?") https://youtu.be/fs-YpQj88ew?t=155
> Of course if you are talking about the possibility that your shady or illegal business
This, right here, is the problem. The problem is that because you have all the privileges (SEPA, access to international transfers and open markets, etc, etc, etc) you think that only "shady" and "illegal" business will want to do these things.
Try being someone living in Argentina or Venezuela, who simply wants to work as a web designer with someone else from another continent. See how much Paypal (and by PayPal, I mean any money transmitting service) will eat in fees. See what exchange rate will be made available by the government.
So you're comparing Web3 with the computer and the internet revolution, but are not even able to tell me what's the advantage over current technologies, that are still evolving?
> The problem is that because you have all the privileges
You mean we have found a solution to a problem?
> Try being someone living in Argentina or Venezuela
My uncle is from Argentina.
He's not looking for web3, he's looking for political stability and blames US for installing a totalitarian regime that destroyed his country that killed 30 thousand people, created 30,000 desaparecidos and imprisoned 400,000 [1]
You've never spoken to someone from poorer countries, did you?
Anyway, if someone from Argentina build a website, I can send them money directly to their bank account from my European bank account.
No intermediary necessary, except good old banks.
My instinct tells me that the only thing people in web3 "space" (it's more like a cult) are interested in is avoiding taxes and keeping their money hidden.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
EDIT: anyway, web3 is still web based.
If governments can control banks, they can also control the web.
See: China or North Korea.
You won't free North Koreans with web3 nonsense.
And, fiy, I was born and raised in Brazil.
> My instinct tells me
Your instinct is wrong. I can not do anything about that.
the fact that a couple of your friends are using it, doesn't make it "Letterman interviewing Gates" material.
(btw, Letterman was being facetious, as per usual Letterman)
> And, fiy, I was born and raised in Brazil.
which is 10th economy by GDP in the World, just below Italy, my country, in front of many of what you called "privileged" European countries, such as Spain or the Netherlands...
More importantly: sending money to Brazil from Europe costs me a fixed Euro 0.5-0.6, plus maximum 1% of the sum (if sending up to Euro 115, less if sending more).
Very cheap, if you ask me.
> Your instinct is wrong. I can not do anything about that.
You could tell us why you are not able to explain what's the advantage for the average internet user, except avoiding taxes and hiding money...
Look at the numbers per capita, and look at the economic inequality indicators.
> sending money to Brazil from Europe
How much of these 100€ are going to get to the hands of the recipient, if sent by the "traditional" route? How fast can this money be made available to the recipient? What exchange rate is going to be used, the one offered to big international traders or the shitty one that banks offer to tourists? How much will be taken in fees by the banks? (not taxes, fees...).
I'll tell you: there is a good chance that middlemen are going to eat 7-12% of those 100€, just because they can and no competitor can challenge them.
And this is only for the first movement. What if the recipient in Brazil wants to have the money to buy something back in any other part of the world?
> You could tell us why you are not able to explain what's the advantage for the average internet user
Much like Bill Gates could not really explain the advantage of the internet to a privileged person in 1990's America?
Honestly?! I am tired. I might be throwing tens of different possible use-cases, and to all of them your reaction will be "I can do that already, all I need is <insert middleman service provider>". There isn't much to say, is there? If you are satisfied with the status quo and you don't see a need for decentralized technology meant for disintermediation, good for you.
Are you trolling or what?
If I send 100 euros to Brazil it will cost me 101.6 euros.
I pay the fee.
The recipient gets the 100.
If the recipient pays the fee, they get the 98.4% of it.
If I send 1,000 euros, it will cost 9.5 euros to send. The recipient get > 99%
how much does it cost to move money over web3 wallets?
because it is not free..
they can be free if you move them from a coinbase wallet to another coinbase wallet (for example)
If I have to chose, I prefer centralized banks over centralized coinbase.
> Much like Bill Gates could not really explain the advantage of the internet to a privileged person in 1990's America?
Bill Gates in the 90s wanted to sell MSN not internet.
You got your facts completely wrong.
And you can't still explain the advantages.
Except "it's hidden from governments, it cuts the middle man, I don't pay taxes over it"
like if maintaining the network was free.
Go hide your money and avoid your taxes if you like, but people don't want that.
They want safe tools, not useless, mob oriented, expensive scams.
If you really believe that people would prefer an insecure web3 wallet that has no safety and offer no guarantees, over a system like SEPA, you're delusional or a criminal.
> What if the recipient in Brazil wants to have the money to buy something back in any other part of the world?
Drug cartels do it all the time and they pay up to 40% in fees.
If that's your business, understand that it's a costly one.
If your only argument is "international, probably illegal, traffic of goods is gonna be easier" well, it's a very poor argument.
Imagine now that we are sanctioning Russia for invading Ukraine what would happen if everybody could freely make business with Russia unpunished.
Do you really think it would be a better World?
You continue to argue from a vantage point of someone who does not understand how the other side works and who only see the abstractions.
That is perfectly fine, and I am glad that you are fortunate enough to not need to learn that. But don't pretend that you understand all the costs involved, or how the sausage is made, or even that your solutions are applicable to everyone else.
I'm done here.
So far, you haven't named a single thing we couldn't already do vastly better
There was a post recently on hackernews about forcing client support of SNI being problematic according to some people.
So the effect of FAANG is far more fundamental; beyond ads and content that is.
basically the whole thing
.
> I am just asking you to think of an alternative.
uh thanks, alternatives predate them by decades
The "whole thing" is a mess of Surveillance Capitalism that serves no one but the elites, who is shaped to keep us in a constant state of anxiety and fear to try anything different and with enough energy to be able to do nothing but consume the crap they want us to consume.
Surely we can do better than that. We have to.
The important question is: "can society at large use the web without being forced to use products that exploit their data and/or locks them into rent-seeking vendors?"
With NFTs, there would be a huge boost in productivity in terms of licensing content (song for a movie).
I haven’t seen this mentioned in other threads nor is there a good current system, from my understanding.
(P.S. I know nothing about NFTs — just sharing a perspective.)
But... instead of that, it was just pure speculation, with nobody really wanting any of the art. And none of it ever came with that contract to give original artists money anyway. So even the smidge of a good idea in there never got done.
He’s in PE so he’s probably looking at this from a particular lease, which isn’t the wide adoption folks are hoping for.
There are songs that may have 10+ different owners of specific rights (author, composer, singer, recording, distribution, exclusive vs non-exclusive, regional vs national vs international).
With a smart contracts, you can abstract a ton of the lawyer-y stuff. Smart contracts are also good for indie, in terms of licensing samples.
[edit]: here’s a link with more info.
https://blog.reverbnation.com/2018/05/09/music-law-101-owns-...
Like I write a song that has 10 different owners - is the idea then that I purchase rights via purchase of an NFT? Because that will need a lawyer-y real world contract attached to it anyway, so I’m not sure what it’s replacing. And how does that NFT determine the cost of rights, which will be different if I am using it as the theme song for my movie compared to a tiny sample in a song?
I understand the complexities from that post, I just don’t understand how NFTs and smart contracts are the solution to the complexity.
The DB would allow current, and previous, copywriter holders to opt-in to the system. Ownership stake would be written into the smart contract with trenches of rights. Once you have a "movie" contract, that attributes X percent to Y people, based on rights, the contract can be easily reused for another project.
In most cases, music royalties are a fixed income business and the profits are easy to model. This was the foundation of the WB/Pershing Sq deal. Their prospectus is quite interesting.
Using the WB case for simplicity, the idea would be to take the current licenses and create trenches of rights, which would be sold/minted (not sure of right work) with all the legal/operational stuff baked in. For a real world example:
- WB owns the rights to song X
- DMX (hospitality) licenses music from WB to play on their connected devices, which service the hospitality sector, primarily (restaurants/bars)
- DMX renews their license on annual basis.
- Copy write owners would receive royalties per non-exclusive, commercial, non-reproducible trench when their song is played.
With NFTs, the initial licensing and renewal could be performed from a user interface similar to Amazon vs the current paper process.
This is applicable to chains like Starbucks too, as they license songs, burn them on CDs that have specific DRM and play on a (what I would guess) is a specialized CD player. Those CDs cannot be played outside the store, from my understanding.
TL;DR - you encode different licenses in smart contracts and once you have a framework, it’s easy to grant similar rights without the overhead. Specialized licenses can be created quicker. This would be applicable to large copywrite holders and flow down to indie, with time.
Edit: spelling and formatting.
Seems there would be lots of issues on the artist side of things with NFTs - like what if one of the 10 artists that are part of a song doesn’t want to sign up or get paid in crypto? Do you still get the NFT and handle the 1 person manually and sit half in NFT world and half outside? Or do you need 100% adoption before it is at all useful?
What if the music company wanted to vet who they licenced music to? Or particular songs can only be licenced for particular use cases by particular companies?
I’m not sure NFTs actually solve the complexities here.
The idea is to encapsulate the current contracts into smart contracts to downsize legal overhead.
Also, not sure why it HAS to be decentralized.
Look at IBMs implementation of HomeDepot’s inventory tracking. There is no decentralization (in a general sense), no tokens. They created a system that was easy to onboard vendors, vendors can process orders, and Home Depot can verify them with a lot less paper work and a trail.
Smart Contracts will not look how the space looks now and the ethos of crypto won’t survive most real-world use cases but some technologies will be adapted, if they fit well.
Real world example: - I worked for a hospitality chain and we have an order management system for our locations.
- we had many different vendors, different SKUs, and vendors went in/out based on annual contracts.
- when a vendor was switched, someone had to update the entire database and propagate it to stores.
- all vendors, stores, etc. had different databases and there were times were wrong items are sent, items never sent, or damaged/bad items. It takes an hour, on average, to check in an order.
With Smart Contracts, this process would be simplified: order management would require less data entry, loading orders on truck would have higher accuracy (removing errors when entering new item into the system), and there are general savings since order management protocol that all the big players use is proprietary and a pain to use.
They aren't a small percentage of the population and told me they had demand for decentralized technology.
to which i reply: "shaka, when the moon lambo fell"
Start here: https://www.amazon.com/Trick-Treatment-Undeniable-Alternativ...
What problem does Web3 solve? It helps us better manage nonsense. As we face fuel shortages, potential food shortages, a recession and stagflation I wouldn't want to be in the business of solving make-believe problems. If you're not doing work for a business that's providing tangible value to their customers then you're likely to be out of a job soon. All it takes is another rate hike of 25 basis points and we're in a whole new ballgame - and unlike 2008, which was fueled by financial nonsense that had been going on the preceding 10 years, we're going to have bona fide supply shortages to contend with as well.
Can I roll a private/public key pair and use it to authenticate everywhere as the user BabyFarkMcgeeZax? Can I authorize Spotify to BabyFarkMcgeeZax/playlist?
In theory, I can use an OAuth provider for this kind of stuff, but then who owns what? Why can't I host my own content wherever I want and allow different permissions to it? Why can't I delegate certain things to some provider and revoke it when I want? How does anyone get paid for being such a service provider, especially with the idea that the data is host proof in some cases and thus can't be monetized?
Blockchains / tokens are trying to answer this question. Most are data that doesn't fit on a blockchain or are issuing tokens with arbitrary monetary policies and following them up with bad fiscal policy.
Thus far most of Web3 just requires some algebra to see a database that doesn't solve these problems.
Is there "regular" immutable events database like this that I don't have to host myself, has a super easy-to-use API, and costs less than $5/mo, but keeps my data around after I stop paying for it?
Twitter is a no-go since their API changes fairly frequently and I still feel burned from their API rug pull a decade ago.
Yes I know, the API endpoint is silly and mutable and it actually links to my Airtable API lol, but this helps me track "when/where" that I don't want to track on a regular DB.
To date the entire thing's cost less than $10, and I have maybe 30-40 posts. Definitely not production yet though
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-innovators-dilemma-...
Many people want a government authorized dollar backed by the government and are ok with the controls on it.
You're free to choose the digital dollar you want. That's what this is about - freedom of choice in holding and spending your wealth in any currency or form you like.
When you get beyond the immediate family, relying on altruism as the organizing principle starts to break down.
Societies that provide incentives for delivering value to other citizens - going to work, doing a job, becoming wealthy if you drastically improve society - will win long term over those that provide disincentives to hard work and providing value.
Web3 and crypto provide artificial scarcity to digital goods. This is an experiment in economics. I believe providing economic incentives, when properly aligned with the tasks desired, can result in a more efficient and successful internet. Relying solely on volunteers in any group has very rarely worked - even the largest non-profits have highly paid directors and legions of paid employees. This is not some revolutionary idea, other than the fact that digital goods can have artificial scarcity.
what is scarce about tokens? the hash? why are they desired, for speculative investing?
Owning a Punk is a status symbol in crypto. I know many wealthy crypto people who have them. It’s like an expensive watch or classic car - I want it because of what it signals to the community I’m part of.
But at $50k… a bit too expensive for me at this moment. However I know people who have paid hundreds of thousands for them.
Curious, what does it signal?
The surest way to get rich in the world without using a gun or getting into a position of political power and stealing, is to create something people want to use voluntarily.
If I create a new widget and convince 10 million people to give me $10, I have $100 million of revenue. Let’s say my expenses are in total 75%. I’ve now made $25 million. This is certainly a princely sum of money, but I made 10 million people’s lives better! Or else they wouldn’t have voluntarily given me money.
Certain people would say, “You have $25 million when 99% of so little! This is unfair! You should give (some large percentage) of it back to society for the politicians to decide how to disperse.
And this is where I fundamentally disagree. The person who convinces enough people to give them that much money is rare. They have a unique ability to spot market needs, assemble people to work cooperatively, and work towards a goal of delivering widgets that meet the desires of society. I want to let them keep as much of their money as possible because they are highly likely to reinvest it properly, vs. the politicians which have a 99% chance of failure / theft.
We've learned this lesson over and over again. If you apply an incentives layer to anything, people will attempt to game it. Watch what happens at any company that starts rewarding developers for number-of-issues-closed or lines-of-codes-written.
The only responsible way to work with incentives is to constantly monitor and re-balance them. I use Duolingo a lot and I find it really interesting watching how they tweak the various gamification models over time as people's behaviour alters. They need to balance their models such that people who game them will also learn the language most effectively.
The token model - represented by things like DAOs - generally requires this incentive design to be perfect up front. It assumes that people can design a perfect incentive system from day one - which obviously they cannot.
This goes right back to the beginning of smart contracts: Vitalik was famously inspired to create Ethereum after his World of Warcraft character got nerfed. But nerfing is essential to how game design works! If you don't constantly rebalance things your game ends up being broken.
Imposing artificial scarcity on the internet is like imposing the caste system on a modern society. It's a way to differentiate people by status in a world that has no need for that distinction any more. Literally putting a rotten economic system on a domain that could be free of it and practically limitless, like people driving cars with the break pulled so others can feel faster.
What we really need to do is get the ideology out of people's heads that burning energy so you can get a hexagonal twitter avatar to set yourself apart from all the round avatar people is a way to organize society.
On the concept of creating artificial scarcity, this is a philosophical debate and we will not agree.
This.
Money has finally entered software for good.
Take something as simple as identity. In the Web3 world that's basically a wallet. lose your access to an account on a website currently and you can reset it. Lose your Web3 ID key? Well, you need a "smart" contract for recovery. I've seen variations on this such as nominating some other wallets who can give a consensus for what is essentially a takeover to recover your account.
These are really just more attack vectors created on the altar of automation and blockchain.
Look at the amount of threads on HN of people pleading about how google banned them and they can't get through to a human to get their data back. Is that the future you want everywhere? You think having to talk to your parents + friends to recover your data is worse than that?
Blockchain just one potential category of technologies or set of implementations. Web 2.0 was not defined by its technologies or implementations, it was defined by its value proposition. So, forget blockchain... at a higher level, Web3 is going to be about ownership.
Billions of people gave Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. value by creating the content that made those products useful. Web3 still has a lot to workout, and as much as blockchain is trying to co-opt web3, it may not be a part of it in the end -- but the people who create the content will get paid this time around. That is what will define Web3.
A decentralized system where users don’t have to view ads etc. will necessarily be more expensive for everyone - because you have to fund infrastructure, because you have to penalize spammers, and just because if posters are getting paid it has to come from somewhere.
And have!
Not all things crypto are about speculation and number go up. Many projects have added tokens for utility. THOSE projects are eventually going to be far better than their Web2 counterparts. By the people, not just for the people
IPFS team released Filecoin to let you store files in more than one “cloud” company like AWS or GCP or Azure.
MaidSAFE goes way further. They are building the ultimate in decentralized, uncensorable networks.
Jack Dorsey’s Web5 is using really good technologies like Microsoft’s ION (sidetree protovol) for identity, etc.
Okay and now for the part that will get me downvotes… I started two companies in 2010 and 2017 respectively, to build open source software and give it away on GitHub. I built them for Web2 ans Web3 to decentralize social networks, payment systems, voting, governance and more. Because communities need to run their own open source software, rather than relying on states and corporations. Otherwise our communications and transactions will be taking place on privately owned and centrally planned platforms.
If you want to know the details… click here:
https://intercoin.org/applications
PS: before downvoting me, actually look at this. It is not shilling any tokens. It is actually BUILT open source solutions, on github, that you can take and use today. If you don’t like something, at least comment and use your words before downvoting.
Web2 is VCs funding closed silos and all our interactions and public forums on privately owned platforms. How is that better? In only one way: it scales!
Which again looks like the problem being solved is just financializing something you could already do just fine without the "coin" to begin with.
For example: crowdfunding platforms. I can write a smart contract that reasonably and securely associates unique IDs to Ethereum wallets, keeps track of wallets that donate to a specific ID and refunds donators or rewards the wallets associated with the IDs according to explicitly set rules (ie. minimum currency threshold). I can then create a website for it, deploy it as "givemeyourmoney.xyz" and still be considered (and verified) trustworthy and safe just because everyone can read the contract's behavior.
Without a smart contract, everyone would understandably think the site is a scam and wouldn't use it - even if it was totally legitimate. That's obviously an extreme example, but that basic attribute has a lot of other implications.
The problems with smart contracts begin once you have to codify a rule that isn't so easy to translate into code (ie. it turns out that a crowdfunded project was a scam). Now people are creating DAOs to deal with situations like that, with at best mixed results.
But what if you need to verify that a condition has been met that isn't based on the blockchain, like checking if someone actually did deliver the pizza that someone else ordered? Then you're completely screwed.
You could say that these problems are eventually solve-able if the right hardware/software infrastructure was created to address them, but if so then it's at least a decade away from being verifiable and therefore useful.
Anyways, regardless of what could be possible it looks like web3 people are more interested in scamming each other because non-technical users can't read smart contracts and few people do any proper auditing.
How many people—even very technically skilled ones—read smart contracts in their entirety? Launching a crowdfunding platform backed by a smart contract should give it zero credibility by itself. Unfortunately, we popularized the idea that a smart contract equals zero trust equals you can actually trust it. None of which is true.
We moved even further away from that with upgradable contracts. Where is zero trust there? Yesterday’s Solend disgrace is a very clear proof of that.
Considering the behavior of the current community I totally understand your skepticism toward the technology itself. It hasn't really proven itself useful or safe for anything but a few use cases, and the only thing it really has going for it is the theory and the core development. Fixes and new features are slowly being added to the tech to make trustless services possible.
The criticism that web3 - even if it did work properly - turns literally everything into a token-based speculative market is accurate. I think it's an emergent property of the technology that isn't good for anyone, and it's bad enough that it might be worth ditching completely.
Jpeg NFTs are dumb, cos the record is public. But a singular record that can out of band handle authorizations? Neat.
How is this different from setting up a website and requiring a password to access it?
Rather than maintain and protect a local set of usernames and hashes, you let anyone in who can present signature and address. Then server side you check that address has some NFT. Done. No hashes or usernames or anything.
OAuth or one of many services e.g. Auth0, AWS Cognito, Okta can provide a managed service for you.
This isn't a problem Web3 is uniquely solving.
Ya know, about 14 years ago something happened where we could maintain these eternal data structures with rules around state mutation. Humanity is only learning the power of such structures a decade later. There are very much unique problems being solved here and you are missing the dark forest for the legacy trees.
User installs a browser extension (wallet) that is created by a third party that they have to trust unconditionally?
Is that what the promised land of zero trust is about? Trusting a 3rd party with all your finances?
It's about user empowerment and not letting other entities have any control over any aspect of it.
Firstly, we have that on the web today with OAuth. It is centralised in the hands of a few companies but that's because people trust those companies. There simply is no consumer demand to allow other options but it's easy enough to do.
Secondly, the problem with the NFT approach you described is that it coerces people to use a single wallet for everything. Which goes against the best practice for crypto at the moment which is to have multiple wallets due to the many, many NFT scams that can steal your wallet. So in effect your approach trades off centralisation in one area for another. With the end user not really being in a fundamentally better position.
You trust them. I don't. Now what? Are you saying I'm forced to trust them, because you do?
For every story of crypto projects going awry we can find a story of Google shutting down someone's account without any recourse, Apple abusing their App Store position to ban reasonable content (commentary on sweat shops or even mildly adult content), or Facebook accidentally toppling an entire democracy.
The reality is that these centralized systems aren't some panacea and you are frankly naive to be so happy about using them for the rest of your life.
OpenSea takes the blockchain data, filters it and augments it with their proprietary data. Which means that as a user I may buy an NFT that OpenSea is filtering and which therefore is useless on other sites.
There is nothing inherently special about blockchain that prevents centralisation or allows you to have a trustless ecosystem. At some point I will trust Metamask with my wallet, Binance for my trades etc.
Metamask is the same, if you can't use it you can easily take your coins to another wallet and use them there, you just import your seed phrase.
Money is inherently a liability of the issuer. No one is liable to accept bitcoin (for example) as payment, therefore it is not money.
However, if you can build a currency that represents real world assets, liabilities, and/or collateral, then it potentially becomes money, and can solve real problems such as liquidity in markets.
IMO It's likely there will be an iteration of protocols and storage mechanisms that will be more useful in the future
I also think "Web3" is probably the dumbest imaginable branding
"What is the value of cryptocurrency/blockchain/web3? Why should anyone care?
Here is my opinion (as a developer who studied and built blockchains):
It allows digital information (value) to be open/free (as in not under the control or in the power of another) and virtually permanent.
That's basically it.
If you want digital money, we already got that (Cash app, Venmo, online/mobile banking, etc.).
You want digital collectibles, that's been around forever in games, etc.
But I think we all know most people see value purely in the speculation. Be careful not to confuse all the "innovation" and hype as real substance, because most of the time someone is trying to PUMP and DUMP, which can make a lot of money. Just look at any of the thousands of blockchains/coins that are no longer used or traded, but were supposed to change the world."
You may be ok with companies messing with your life because they can, many of us are not. Especially non US citizens where we face a lot more financial discrimination.
1. The most beautiful and innovative things being done in the Web3 space are much more beautiful and innovative than anything you will do in your life.
2. The most dastardly things being done in the Web3 space are much more dastardly than anything you will do in your life.
Now for the two broad camps of people I see here:
a. People who think 2. is not relevant to pursuing 1.
b. People who think 2. can never justify pursuing 1. – or even finding out about it.
Look at the kids: the day is better spent curious.
If you mean that both of these are achievable on an individual level, then I fail to see how coding an idea has any more potential to achieve these extremes than using a paintbrush.
Look at the kids: they get far more excited by video games than DeFi.
Wikipedia and Google pre-date Web 2.0. Facebook is arguable.
in the least it’d be inaccurate to say that web3 has not provided something of a paradigm-shifting mechanism for artists to get paid
web3 is also kinda new & if not web3 then what evolve / direction / next level for the www ?
Real-world use cases could replace parts of PayPal, Patreon, Bandcamp or Kickstarter with a crypto-native solution to decentralize some parts of payments, user accounts, and ownership. Where is the killer Web3 app? It's only been a ~year or so since Web3 has entered mainstream consciousness, and the few-years-old tech is still far from a usable state. Crypto has a long way yet to go: Proof of Stake, rollups, zk privacy preservation, light clients, and a host of other solutions need to be first solved for it to be widely usable. In the meantime, most current Web3 apps are best to view as high-risk "beta" experiments.
> The Web was about making information accessible to all, Web 3 is trying to provide value to a few, where everything is done for the benefit of the few rather than benefit of all.
This is a gross misunderstanding of web3. Take a look at NFT art world, almost all the media and information is freely accessible, to the point that it is regularly ridiculed with "Right Click Save" by the out-crowd. This is distinctly different than Patreon and Bandcamp models, where artists might put digital media behind a paywall, making the information only accessible to a limited few. See more here[1]
[1] https://mirror.xyz/herndondryhurst.eth/S-W2ZXRbrcy8bVGrKwMXS...
Literally everyday there's an article that is posted that completely misunderstands cryptocurrencies and the related ecosystem. The most common critique I see on HN of this is that NFTs are garbage and rug pulls suck.
Thats like saying the modern web sucks because a couple of shitty websites are live and you got your CC stolen by phishing e-mails. It just makes no sense as an argument.
Crypto has a long, long, very long way to go but if folks truly do not believe that transferring something that we believe to have some value (i.e bitcoin, or USD, or whatever) without the need for a middleman, while also keeping your funds truly safe from external control (i.e banks, governments, and the like) then cryptocurrency is simply not for you, full stop thank you for considering it.
In the first world, the full value of such decentralization and trustlessness will never be understood until they get burned like Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Cyprus, and other countries with massive hyperinflation and complete loss of wealth (temporary or not). The daily fluctuations of BTC are literally nothing next to the hyperinflation of the Turkish Lira, the Lebanese pound, the Zimbabwean dollar, and so on.
As a side note, its getting kinda tiring to see these boring, lame takes on crypto which seem as half assed as they are uninsightful posted on HN. Lets get some moderation done on this front IMO.
None of that applies to Bitcoin or any other digital currency. There is always a middle man (and fees), disintermediation is a myth (and don't get me started on decentralization).
the internet never made any promises about being an equalizer?
Both outcomes are simply not going to happen and those supporting either of those outcomes will be disappointed.
Co-existence with the current system is the most highly likely outcome with some cryptocurrency projects staying around and meme-coins, tokens will disappear even after regulations coming in.
But I do use a whole raft of various companies products and services.
Almost like the web as it is today is decentralised.
> tear up the greenery we could have played on
Can hardly believe HN is earnestly arguing that walled gardens controlled by Google / Facebook / et al are a preferable future for the internet. There's some serious cognitive dissonance on this site when it comes to blockchain tech.
b) I don't use Facebook and Google only for search engine. So those aren't walled gardens for many people.
No one, including OP, is arguing that web3/blockchain/whatever is "solved." It's obviously very new tech with tons of flaws. Why can't we have a frank conversation about the flaws and work on solutions? Instead on HN we get brainless vitriol against ANYTHING blockchain related and arguments that decentralization is unnecessary (just use a database, duh! Just trust Google, duh!). The whole thing is frustratingly dishonest.
> b) I don't use Facebook and Google only for search engine. So those aren't walled gardens for many people.
Facebook, Google, and/or Apple control your life. You can't even operate a phone without one of them.
I’m honestly trying not to throw the baby out with the bath water here but struggling to find out if the baby was ever even in the bath amidst all this dirty water. The problem statements people say crypto will solve and then the implementation always seem like total non-sequiturs to me. I could just be dumb and missing the next big thing from the internet, I accept that. But it’s not for a lack of trying or good faith that smart people could see something there, I assure you.
> Facebook, Google, and/or Apple control your life. You can't even operate a phone without one of them.
How is a blockchain going to approach solving this problem? Why are we conflating these issues? This is the kind of thing that makes me scratch my head like I mentioned above.
Why not elaborate on what the walls, fences and guard towers are for us non-paranoid people?