Web3 is the big idea customers didn’t ask for?
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Try to imagine how you would build a blockchain based business 10 years from now. I've done it several times. Everytime I have, I've found a bunch of gaps, missing necesary capabilities. It's just not possible today to build a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product today. You can solve some of the problems in a hybrid way, and crypto received a lot of flak for that recently (which I suppose is fair), but it's just a painful necessity until the gaps are filled.
So a lot of the good stuff that was/is being built this cycle, the stuff that's going to survive the bear market is critical infrastructure meant to support the future new startups in the blockchain space... the customer of crypto today, is crypto. Combined these capabilities will enable a very powerful platform which will eventually serve businesses and individuals. Today, it's not ready for your needs.
It's not like Blockchain is the only tech people have been talking about for the last 10 years that hasn't been fully actualized yet. Doesn't mean it's not well on its way.
Saying very smart people work on it doesn't do much to really convince me. Bitcoin's block size isn't a technical debate that requires Very Smart People to solve. It's a social one, about externalities, core beliefs, power structures, and motivations. And those are ones that Very Smart People tend not to make progress on, because they're unable to step outside of their lens of technicalities.
How many of those technologies had no impact for that long but then went on to be significantly useful? The only examples which come to mind are things like mRNA vaccines which had far more development & approval hurdles, which is a pretty different situation from systems which are globally available but generally just haven't found a niche where they're a good fit and affordable.
Gen 1: Bitcoin - general ideas established, mostly a proof of concept
Gen 2: ETH - Building on bitcoin's ideas it establishes the idea of the VM + chain, which transforms bitcoin into essentially a new digital economy.
Gen 3: AVAX/SOL/DOT - ETH with scaling and fixes environmental concerns
AVAX, the chain I develop on, and the one that has the best technology to enable the capabilities required is less than a year old. Solona and Polka Dot are 2 years old.
The stuff i'm talking about is what I would call Gen 5. I think it's pretty unfair to say it's always been "10 years in the future".... a lot of progress has been made, it just might not be apparent if you're not active in the space.
My general metric is when people use something for a purpose other than working on that technology. For example, the web very quickly passed that point very quickly because you had people sharing scientific information, building personal sites, using it for businesses which weren't selling web technologies, etc. where the underlying technology was the vehicle but not the purpose.
There haven't been many examples of that in the blockchain space so far — a few places accepting it in addition to credit card transactions, etc. — but almost all of it has been focused on generating business for various blockchains rather than being better than or even competitive with existing options (e.g. how many NFTs were marketed and priced based on their artistic merits versus “you're going to make a fortune if you buy now!”?). Do you have an good examples of things like that which are actually used by non-cryptocurrency people[1] and have some advantage from using this stack unrelated to selling tokens?
1. The equivalent of, say, the people I helped get online in the mid-90s because they wanted to join hobby forums like photo.net, email relatives, get stock quotes, etc. but weren't really interested in the technology in its own right.
1) they're funding previously biotech companies (e.g. traditional venture not interested because insurance companies won't reimburse hair loss treatments)
2) incentivizing scientists (and other workers) from anywhere in the world to work part time towards these scientific goals
This is only possible due to the token incentive schemes and DAO governance structure. Crypto was never envisaged as a way to improve science, but it's being adopted anyway.
It's worth noting that while it fixes the environmental aspect, it seems to reduce claims made regarding decentralization, wouldn't you agree? If so, one of the core tenants of crypto (arguably /the/ most significant) gets effectively traded off in favor of fixing environmental concerns. I'd imagine that would make non-BC/ETH crypto an unappealing for some as BC/ETH is currently for the environmentally concerned.
I've not heard a convincing argument regarding the ability of PoS, or any of its variations, to prevent centralization in any significant way. Do you have any references you'd recommend?
I think you'll find you've just invented a better version of that system.
cost: check, definitely.
decentralisation: nope, that's the point.
If you have to go to bitcoin.com to get your drug money, you can just shut that site down.
The Pirate Bay still works even though it's blocked in lots of countries, because running a mirror on a new domain is incentivised by littering the site with scammy ads, and the trackers and magnet links are an organic, decentralised matter.
Yes, you'd then need some middlemen... but are the cost of those middlemen really higher than a skil-road rugpull? Or a crypto crash? Or all the pyramid-scheme lot coming in to pump your dark money system, and screwing you over?
They don't have to, but they can if they want to.
I think there's a few different things to think about here. Does EVERYTHING need to be on-chain? No, clearly not. but for the stuff that does it's been found that you can scale by having multiple chains. I mostly use AVAX, it's like ETH but uses a DAG for consensus, which means finality is WAY faster (seconds). It also has a concept called subnets, so scale is accomplished by having multiple blockchains which can interoperate with each other. Not all validators validate all subnets, but all subnets have multiple validators. Your need for level of security is going to depend on your application. Defi has a high need for security, gaming has a low need. The idea of 1 chain for everything is kind of obsolete.
"It's just not possible today to build a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product today."
The things that customer's didn't ask for is a vaporous abstraction such as "a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product"
I, as a supplier, want to prevent coupon fraud - a ~300M year problem. Today they mitigate this with trust relationships between retailers and distributers, which consequentially means that coupons are less widely distributed and more marginal in what discounts they offer than they could be.
When coupons are redeemed, a cashier stuffs them in a bag, they get counted and redeemed and the supplier cuts a check. A shady retailer can simply say they have double the coupons they actually received, and they will get the same check. There's nothing unique about the coupon to prevent this.
Ignoring web3, how could you solve this? You could set up some simple database and rest api and have the coupons have some unique identity. You'd need to make this cryptographically secure so you couldn't simply forge identities, you'd need to be able to issue these easily and in bulk, have them expire at a certain time, onboard retailers to easily redeem these coupons and then facilitate payments to the retailer.
And, well, that's essentially what Hedera does[1], as a cryptographic DLT. Its value is that the cryptographic proof of whether something is unique and how it can be redeemed is done via NFT, and this protects against a number of attacks at the "consensus level". It offers you a secure way to do this and not run any computer, for minimal and predictable fees. Every transaction is fixed to USD and costs 0.0001 USD and completes in 5 seconds.
https://hedera.com/users/coupon-bureau
If you don't believe me that the customer is asking for this maybe you can listen to them yourself:
Granted, Hedera is digital, but from the description in the link you posted it's neither autonomous nor decentralized. "Target and General Mills" may have access to it, but I certainly can't post a "50% off my hand knitted sweater"-Coupon to it. I may also need some convincing that Hedera users are able to verify the cryptographic integrity of a coupon without running "any computer".
"Ignoring web3, how could you solve this?"
Roughly in the way you describe, with a database. You even go on to say "that's essentially what Hedera does", I fail to see the added benefit of slapping a blockchain/web3/NFT/whatever on top, but maybe I'm just ignorant.
> I fail to see the added benefit of slapping a blockchain/web3/NFT/whatever on top, but maybe I'm just ignorant.
Mainly being able to run this as a service and having assurance that the data you put onto it is correct, like a digital notary. And to provide assurances like no double spend and transaction ordering. A way to verify that something happened and not rely on an intermediary to decide that or to have custody of that data.
So for example Amazon could easily implement this, and do it at scale. Would you trust Amazon? To both keep custody of your data, ensure that it will always be available, that it would not be meddled with? Would an enterprise like Wal-Mart trust that?
That's essentially TCB's problem. Wal-Mart doesn't necessarily trust the TCB, either, even though it is industry non-profit. So TCB uses Hedera as its data layer - it does not own the data.
And how can Wal-Mart trust Hedera, ultimately? The governing council
Yes, far more so because Amazon will give you a legally binding contract with things like SLAs.
The problem with decentralized systems is that serious apps cost more to run but people generally don’t want to pay for things which don’t benefit them. You can ameliorate the performance and reliability problems of a blockchain by throwing capacity at it but there’s always the question of why you wouldn’t spend less to run your own private system to avoid the possibility of having problems caused by people you don’t even know about.
Maybe trust is the wrong word. Like - yes they might say they intend to provide this level of service, but the only way they can actually guarantee that level of non-repudiation of data is with cryptographic proofs and decentralized consensus and now you've basically got a cryptographic ledger.
PoW Blockchain isn't the only technology to accomplish this, either. There's a whole host of blockchain and post-blockchain technologies seeking to corner that market - a more efficient blockchain. Hedera for example uses the hashgraph algorithm.
And a cash alternative has a bunch of problems of its own - most notably, money laundering and its utility in conducting fraud and getting payouts for extortion rackets like ransom ware.
These are issues that centralized coupons have. Trustless ones would have it even worse.
Are you sure the retail industry, or consumers, are crying out for a trustless coupon solution?
As far as doubt whether customers are asking for this - I mean, again you can listen above but yes a number of large retailers and vendors like Wal-mart and P&G are going live with this use-case this year.
And who are we to decide what is economically viable and what isn't? Let the market decide.
You could replace Hedera with a private blockchain or another ledger - likely not a public one due to unpredictable transaction fees or high time to consensus - the value is the same.
I think nearly anything digital can be turned into a crypto business that can operate more effeciently than a corporation. Anything that touches the real world however will require a corporation with people. The solutions I've seen for interfacing with the real world just suck, and I suspect that is a fundumental problem. So in my opinion, the strength is digital. Fortunately for crypto, most things real world have the ability to be turned digital (think CAD -> 3D printer).
Why would a crypto business out compete a corporation? To me the answer comes down to how your business is structured. Corporations are structured around managing people. Crypto businesses (I think when some workflow pieces are added) can be structured around interfacing with AI. An entire world of AI can freely contribute value to a crypto business where as a corporation will have to prioritize, plan, and execute. We can kind of see that today, the biggest whales in crypto have bots doing the heavy lifting. People struggle to interface with crypto, but bots interface natively. This probably sounds hand wavy. At some point when I find time I'll try to write into more detail on how I personally believe this can work.
I'm certain Crypto + AI = an accerlerated future. I'm motivated to work in this space, because if done wrong, this is a disaster for society. If done fairly, we can build something amazing.
Because right now the web3 ecosystem seems to cut directly against the ethos of "build stuff that solves a problem for your users". It seems like it's becoming increasingly insular for who its solving problems for - namely other people building things in the web3 space.
Like imagine its the 1980s and the industry decided it was stupid to build a home computer because we didn't have X Y or Z built yet so these machines are for computer enthusiasts, scientists, and researchers ONLY.
Consumer apps:
- STEPN
- Superlocal
The future of brands (NFTs):
- Doodles
- BAYC
Science funding:
- VitaDAO
- Molecule
- HairDAO
Using NFTs to enforce digital scarcity and 'ownership' of content can be cool.
but the idea of a exclusive social club where you can only get into by buying a million dollar avatar is a little ridiculous. IF they actually had good content in the group that would make sense but it seems to be mostly an MMO
the pictures dont even have any taste and the whole thing feels overly commercial and reeks of group-think.
This is why Stripe, Moneygram, Checkout.com, etc are choosing the blockchain technologies that are useful to them, which tells us that some of them are going to survive past this bear market and make it past regulations. Not all of these crypto projects will survive either but a certain few will.
Again, like the free-software activists who have been disappointed with their mission in removing all non-free software which the web2 tech bros have hijacked the 'open-source' term as cover to suggest their so-called 'transparency' in closed-source surveillance capitalist companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc, we are now seeing them going to be very disappointed with the hope of absolute obliteration and complete removal of everything web3 and blockchain related.
I'm afraid that this 'destroying' or 'removal' of it all is not going to happen, just like it isn't going to take over the current system. Like closed-source software, crypto is here to stay and both web2 and web3 people are going to be very disappointed.
What problems does a "blockchain based business" solve? That's what I don't understand.
Most businesses out there derive value by interacting with off-chain, real-world state.
If you wanted to use a blockchain in this case you'd need some trusted party to sync the blockchain state with the state of the real world, which then nullifies most/all of the advantages of using a blockchain over just letting this trusted party run an old school database.
I don't say that you should not experiment with the market, but I'm questioning if that's even the point. Projects like these are being pumped out in this space hoping to luck into some temporary craze, but I see a lack of care, not polish, but a lack of interest in making something useful for actual people. I really question the usefulness of crypto in these projects. It's putting the cart in front of the horse, most of these projects would be actually better without it.
The idea that this is unique to Web3, crypto, or even decentralized systems is incorrect. MMOs do this all of the time with a SQL server.
You just described a subscription service, which as a concept has existed longer than web3 has. All of these things that you have described has been possible for over 2 decades. Web3 adds in the idea that your crypto subscription could tank and you have nothing left to pay for legals costs.
Given you (or your company) is the only party that's actually exposed to risk in that case, why would it benefit you, or your customers, to use Blockchain/crypto/web3 stuff?
At the end of the day the same result could be achieved with a database in your AWS account and some registered users who get a small fee for reviewing claims.
Actual title:
"You Can Give People What They Want. Or You Can Give Them Web3"
It is a made up term from people who want your money and nothing more. Shaded with some good old cargo cult fan boys who will tell how it will save the world.
Do you have any links please?
— AFAICT Web 2.0 was initially about dynamic web pages (client-side dynamism mostly, i.e. the Javascript revolution) at a technical level. Then a short while later, on a social level, it was about more user-generated content. Combined with the improvements brought about by improved UI from the previous. Web 2.0 also somewhat encompasses e-commerce too, to a large degree (the dot-com boom was mostly all about e-commerce, and Web 2.0 came about in the midst of that, of course).
I don't recall there being articles saying that customers/users didn't want these things. What I recall was kinda the opposite: folk did want improved UI (without round-tripping to the server every click), folk did want to be able to more easily share content they'd created, with their network of friends and the rest of the world. Folk did want to be able to buy things without going to a physical store. — But perhaps I just have poor recall?
This is why I'd find it particularly interesting to read some articles that say Web 2.0 was solving problems that customers hadn't asked to be solved.
Personally, I don't think Web 2.0 was destructive and pointless, as you claim. Could you expand on what you think was destructive and pointless about it?
Perhaps we just have differing ideas as to what Web 2.0 is/was exactly.
People are susceptible to a specific sort of social-proof, social-recursion type of fraud. Enough people do something early, on paper it grows rapidly, and the scam artist sells that rapid growth as value. You get in late, they cash out by you getting in, and hence defraud you.
The 10s is going to be seen as the decade where Amway was replaced by crypto, and gullible housewives replaced with gullible tech bros.
The value of a product or service is in its use, the value its consumers place on it. "Crypto" is just another "amway soap dispenser": a piece of cheese in a mouse trap. They say "everyone wants to buy our soap!" (coins, etc.) ... but no one does. Your job, with soap/coins in your hand, is to go out and "pump the value"... and likewise, all the way down the pyramid. No one wants the soap, the coins, the crypto. The marginal value to a consumer is zero. The only value it has now is the future expected amount people can be defrauded.
It's fraud, and the people buying in early are exiting at ATHs paid for by people who are being scammed. This needs to be called out for what it is and regulated into oblivion. People are loosing everything because reputable grifters (celebs, etc.) are selling a scam.
They have two choices, sit back, own nothing and watch their savings evaporate with inflation. Or just try every thing they can and pray one of them works.
If we don’t want to have people getting sucked into crypto, then maybe start by making our actual currency more trustworthy, rather than work your ass off, pay the money of half the hours worked away in tax, then sit and watch the measly pile you hoarded get evaporated away with inflation as houses skyrocket.
Compared to that, a ”scam” like Bitcoin starts to look like a way out to many.
It's the same messaging for pyramid schemes: become your own boss. The 9-5 has failed you. etc.
I think crypto has been interpreted as a ponzi.. but that misses the whole social phenomenon. It's actually a pyramid: it's a cult out to defraud.
Your job as a coin holder is to recruit others into the system, that's how you exit. You only make money if you can get others into the system. You dont make money from the coins ever actually being used.
Your messaging here is the "cheese in the mousetrap". It's a scam. It's a scam. Really, your eyes aren't deceiving you. No one uses crypto. No one wants crypto. No one wants your "vitamin supplements" and "essential oils" sold door-to-door.
There is no product. It's a warehouse of useless crap no one wants. I think we need to be really really really clear here: it's a scam.
The last 95% of people buying in will be left with be left with a loss.
We need to stop positioning fradulent schemes in the same breath as critiques of the job market. They're making it worse: they're defrauding those people most vulerable.
Everyone in crypto wants you to be talking about the economy, just as everyone in pyramids wants you to be talking about vitamin supplements. Both are irrelevant. The proposition is a scam, you're being defrauded and invited to defraud others. Ignore vitamin science, ignore economics, ignore the job market: this is a scheme to transfer money from dupes to grifters
A gov-backed fiat has a whole government and international finance system (including army, police, taxation system conducted in the currency...) behind it.
Gold, at least, is gold. It has some marginal use value in producing goods.
The scam here relies on this profound economic illiteracy, in much the way that pyramid schemes do: here, sell this goods door-to-door and beat amazon!
The cypto system is a pure fiat currency, many of which exist, which are "made out of nothing", and no one uses -- that has no army, that has no shops, stores, no taxation system..
It's a false cancer cure sold by pyramid marketing. Inasmuch as vit-c doesnt cure the cold, "digital mining" is a false economy that will collapse. All the value people think they hold is smoke and mirrors. When the scam ends, everything will be obliterated.
The use of "energy" to make something has nothign to do with its value, right?
We can use many kWhs of power to boil a grape, but so what?
Value is in supply and demand. There is no demand for bitcoin as a coin; no one uses it. If anyone ever actually tried, the whole system would collapse.
The energy requirement and limited supply means that no one can counterfeit the money, i.e. create it without cost. Production cost should be close to the current price of the coin. This ensures that the distribution of new coins is fair, and that savers are protected from endless money supply inflation.
Primary use and demand for money is for savings, which gives money its value. Medium of exchange is secondary.[0] Also, many people use bitcoin as a currency too, with Lightning Network.[1]
[0] https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...
BTC is, like those, going to zero. Crypto is pseudo-economics just as vitmain supplements is pseudo-science.
Almost no one uses bitcoin for anything, it has no economic backing. It's value is pure fiat, pure speculation.
The number of actual economic transactions conducted in BTC, i'd say, would place the coin at <100USD. Ie., I'd guess the actual BTC economy is 21m*100USD = 2.1bn at most largely due to the black market.
Contrast that with the USD economy which is, what, 100trn worth of transactions?
I suspect the black market will keep BTC alone in the 100-1000 USD range. Everything else is going to zero.
The value of money isnt speculation, its value is given by the economic transactions in which its conducted. With a gov. collecting taxes in a currency, it has a massive guarenteed value as a gov then requires massive amounts of economic activity to use its currency. The USD, in addition, is the currency of oil trades and the reserve currency of the world.
THAT is why it has its value. The number of actual economic transactions in BTC is trivial. No taxes are collected in BTC.
So where's its value from? It's just ponzi value, a pyramid scheme.. its a made-up paper value that a few early stakes can realise gains on, when the whole thing collapses 95% of people will lose.
That's what all scams look like.
This is an excluded middle fallacy. There are a lot more reasonable options than those two.
I would predict a huge spike in crypto market value when the ability for one model (or AI entity) to make calls to other entities or models becomes a standard thing.
I’d really like to see OpenAI and Microsoft add this ability with the Lightning Network.
The value of a coin, and the whole crypto system, is easily manipulated by the few-% who own most of those coins -- and likewise, by the two-or-three mining companies who mine the vast vast majority of them
"trust" in the crypto sense is a bizarre mathematical term, which has no relationship to trust in the fiat sense.. in that sense, crypto is a more extreme version of fiat -- there is nothing backing it, no gov, etc. other than the faith of its users
Surprised they haven't merged yet. Why aren't suburban housewives throwing crypto parties to sell new coins and the devices/apps to manage them?
The joke is that there is an incentive for Web3 projects to be competitive. Most video games with microtransactions strive to have a wider appeal, otherwise they have less people to sell to. And yet such effort is not exerted for Web3 projects. The people are just supposed to see how potentially revolutionary they are and come flocking. Because it worked for Bitcoin and Ethereum the developers think that this is how the market works. You build something new, if relatively useless and the people throw their entire savings at you, because they don't want to be left out.