Web3 is just a fresh serving of the same old crypto nonsense
ft.com
ft.com
How did the point of "open-source" get hijacked so quickly by the tech bros who have also helped the surveillance capitalists agenda and exploit more of these free-software developers to the point where they end up working for the likes of surveillance capitalist big tech companies using open-source projects (and privately modifying it) for free to accelerate and speed up pushing their closed-source spyware?
I think maybe both of these concepts that many technologists have envisioned have become quite frankly hopelessly utopian and instead has helped pave another road to a dystopian hell.
Web3 is just a few people pushing for something that nobody wants, nor even understands, maybe even themselves.
Versioning the concept of Web is dead now, let's just say Web and move on.
We don't need blockchains. The Web as a concept is already decentralized, let's work toward actual decentralization but you don't need new concepts nor upping a version number for this. You need lobbying, teaching, raising awareness, legislation, building solutions...: human stuff and a bit of technical work.
I’m sure the origin of “web3” as something related to crypto scams was entirely SEO. You could pitch your new scam-coin as “the new web tech” everyone is talking about and then link to a tach about Web 3.0 by Tim Berneses-Lee as if they had any anything at all to do with each other. Unfortunately the semantic web never truly matured to the point of widespread adoption, but crypto scams did.
At least it's good they didn't manage to follow the "Web X.0" scheme properly.
Talk to your family members now to help them to avoid losing money.
What happened recently is Capital cycle bubble broke. Building cycle is well and truly on.
Basically, I'm super skeptical, and anyone who claims there will be use-cases often don't point to any projects. And the use-cases they offer seem to be easily dismantled (perhaps by a lack of vision and imagination and understanding on part of the critics).
But I do think that perhaps in 10-15 years, IF blockchain tech lasts, that it will become implemented to the point where people will be using it whether or not they know it.
But I also think that it can't gain mass adoption without a TON of infrastructure, because as is it just looks like it is piggybacking off of already existing tech (which is understandable).
All that being said... what infrastructure do you think needs to be set in place for mass adoption to gain traction, so that the tech is at all relevant to anyone and everyone?
I'll be frank: I don't necessarily see how owning digital artifacts is what younger folks are seeking, but I'm not entirely closed off to this being the cause of the potential sea change. Just because I don't see it/ get it right now doesn't mean it isn't massively appealing to people if given the right tools and platforms.
Perhaps I'm only seeing things cynically, but that level of granular ownership seems like it could become kinda tiresome, restrictive, and limiting (in the sense of who would be able to see and engage with what you decide to share and put out there). But I fully admit I'm at a loss for imagination right now, and many things I thought seemed silly, even with Web 2.0 stuff, I'm now using quite frequently.
actually i dont think you will find many crypto fans on hn. at least not in the comments
In my mind it has one good use, darknet markets, but that doesn't justify this whole nonsensical ecosystem somehow worth billions of dollars around it which does basically nothing, apart from being a huge casino. Cryptocurrencies have worked fine before all the finance bros and gurus came in and hijacked the whole space.
A good summary.
at a market cap of over 800B ?
Yes, it is.
> Isn't it crashing and burning together with the value of blockchain crypto coins it's nebulously tied to?
No, it's not.
Across all markets, the primary markets are doing okay. (just okay though, in the sense that new ventures are getting funded, new bond issuances are getting subscribed, new NFT series are getting launched just fine, new cryptos are bought up, venture and hedge funds getting large amounts from limited partners). The secondary markets are puking everywhere, and thats what people see with the charts and headlines. But that doesn't matter for the entrepreneur, they already got people's money, in the web3/crypto-space some of the builders actually use that money to develop something and subsidize their time to push for protocol improvements that do make crypto-everything incrementally more usuable, just in time for the next bubble with a larger population.
It seems the crypto bros are pretending web3 is still a thing and an exciting one at that, but I suppose they have to since that’s where they hope to exploit others. From where I’m standing, it’s pretty dead in the water though, the only hype seems to be from people already heavily invested trying to stop their things from losing more “value”, but then I haven’t been paying so much attention lately so who knows. Definitely most non-crypto people seem to have lost interest.
I know some crypto bros so I tried hard to see the value of web3 and NFT’s, I even learned to write smart contracts a few months back, but the more I learned about it all, the less I liked it and the more bullshit it seemed to me, especially crypto games and (vomit) play2earn (really just pyramid schemes).
For pay2earn games: the blockchain aspect is too thin to add any actual value — you still need to do a lot off chain to do anything substantial, which defeats the purpose and claims of being blockchain based — and the “earning” aspect tends to 1) rely on a constant influx of new money (ie its a pyramid scheme); 2) requires pointless busy work (which doesn’t add any value to the people paying) to rate limit payouts; and 3) in order to support both of those tends to be designed around the most exploitative monetisation tactics usually gambling-based. The games themselves tend to be the trashiest gameplay-less unfun soulless garbage you’ve ever seen, nowhere near the calibre of even mobile games, nevermind mainstream console or PC games.
Web3 seems to just be a buzzword for connecting your wallet with a smart contract to interact with the contract from javascript and outside of games, has quite limited application: most people use it to mint NFT’s, occasionally it’s used for a DeFi marketplace or exchange. Often the smart contracts aren’t developed in the open so the “decentralized” part of DeFi is essentially meaningless since you still need to trust the authors. Using web3 to interact with smart contracts also has the issue that every single operation has a cost, and every computation needs to be triggered by something willing to pay that cost, so it’s very difficult to actually build meaningful logic on smart contracts. Eg if you have a game, for anything to happen on-chain, you must trigger a transaction and pay the fee, there’s no “background processing” unless you have something triggering those transactions. That makes it very hard (and expensive, depending on which blockchain you’re on) to implement anything outside of transactional ledger-based things (ie leaderboards, account abalances, etc you can build, but actual business or game logic is probably out of scope).
NFT’s… I explored them and their potential a lot as part of my look into smart contracts, even created my own based on custom smart contract code and my opinion is even lower now than it was before. As long as they rely on any off-chain data, they’re pointless. They don’t convey any ownership over anything but the small number of bits stored on the blockchain. Owning some data that claims you own an image (for which you often don’t own the copyright) or claiming you own something you can’t own, like a tweet or a chunk of Mars, is absolutely useless and pointless. Additionally, ethereum smart contracts are too limited to really do anything interesting with outside of creating coins and receipts. Other newer blockchains have a little more potential but still seem too limited, or they give up the promise of decentralisation, which defeats the purpose. Additionally, in the real world, we need more than just a receipt of ownership: it turns out we do actually need to be able to reverse transactions and such, which has been proven by the number of times that blockchains have been reverted to undo fraud. So NFT’s don’t really do a good job at solving the thing they claim to solve.
And finally, for every half reasonable project, there’s a hundred scams and rug pulls. The amount of money stolen on blockchain is insane and the scams and thefts just keep coming and coming.
PS: owning a receipt that says you own a badly drawn picture of a monkey is fucking stupid.
So, in my opinion, crypto is not dead and isn’t going anywhere any time soon. However: web3, NFT’s and pay2earn haven’t added much of real value, have stagnated, are mostly useless garbage and overwhelmingly are scams and fraud.