Web 3.0 – The Great Con
davegebler.com
davegebler.com
I watched the discussion unfold a bit and it was instructive. Obviously there were a lot of upvotes on the story because I think the thesis is basically commonsense for most people that pay attention. Except for the actual active scammers (or chumps that have somehow been had) who are quickly voting down any comments supportive of the fact that crypto is a scam. It's the contrast between the upvotes of the story and the downvoted common sense comments that is interesting. It happens with political stories sometimes too
Maybe most people were voting on this because they think it's right or wrong, not because it says anything new or interesting (I don't see that it does).
There's probably some truth in this, in respect of the voting. I certainly never expected it to have a brief stint top of the front page when I submitted it.
As the author I'd like to hope it was an interesting read, but I'll absolutely agree if you're much familiar with the crypto space, it's not new information or a new set of arguments. That doesn't matter to me because for me, for the position I take on this industry, I think what's important is for more people to speak out against crypto, to challenge the hype around blockchain and not be afraid to say it's simply not delivering.
From my perspective it's just changing one set of monetary system problems for another set of technical and resource use problems, which IMO is not a step forward.
Specifically, there is energy and capital available, whereas previously it would have been impossible to work on this seriously absent a collapse or crisis in the current system.
As for whether the technological changes imply net neutral outcomes, that seems hard to qualify.
It’s the best way I’ve found to send money to strangers on the internet. I’ve opened unofficial bounties and paid open source developers to implement them, as one example.
It really “just works” in a way where other crypto currency doesn’t.
I still support many other projects in this space, but Monero was the only one I felt comfortable actually using.
But you're totally right, only monero have a 'legitimate' usecase (bypass the taxation laws).
So they are theoretically a good idea with no practical application in the real world.
In particular there are a lot of variables around reselling restrictions, profit sharing, meaningful ownership, copyright, etc.
It has no other real legal or legitimate use case, it otherwise works the same as other cryptos. You could just pay those developers in cash. Most developers I've known that aren't hardcore crypto zealots prefer to get paid in cash.
The only reason DID exists is to push crypto. Nobody wants their identity to be put on a public ledger. That's has identity theft built-in as a "feature"!
DID is absolutely, first-and-foremost, about individual personal identity. One of the use-cases listed is that it could be used as a replacement for ID cards such as drivers licenses, passports, etc...
"A DID refers to any subject (e.g., a person, organization, thing, data model, abstract entity, etc.) as determined by the controller of the DID."
So, is for anything (where persons are in the set of anything)
> 2. Trust System. In order to be able to resolve DID documents, DIDs are typically recorded on an underlying network of some kind that represents a trust system. Microsoft currently supports two trust systems, which are:
> - ION (Identity Overlay Network) ION is a Layer 2 open, permissionless network based on the purely deterministic Sidetree protocol, which requires no special tokens, trusted validators, or other consensus mechanisms; the linear progression of Bitcoin's time chain is all that's required for its operation. We have open sourced an npm package to make working with the ION network easy to integrate into your apps and services. Libraries include creating a new DID, generating keys and anchoring your DID on the Bitcoin blockchain.
> - DID:Web is a permission based model that allows trust using a web domain’s existing reputation.
Introduction to Microsoft Entra Verified ID - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/ver...
"Trustless", "decentralized", "ledger", etc... all make a regular appearance.
> Introduction to Microsoft Entra Verified ID
In a similar discussion I tried to politely make the point that despite over two decades of "identity" experience under my belt, I have literally no clue what any of this technical gibberish is trying to solve (other than making crypto a mainstream thing).
I've read the entire Entra document. I've read most of the backing standards papers, like ION.
It's wall-to-wall gibberish.
I won't go through the criticism in detail, but let's just look at the the practical example shown in this section: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/ver...
What. The. Eff?
Why would anyone solve this problem with blockchain!? Or "distributed" anything?
This is a Solved Problem with vastly simpler and more direct (not distributed) solutions.
For example, similar discounts are offered to students and education staff by various shops. They simply ask students to sign up with an email that has an ".edu" or similar suffix.
For this specific example, the shop could simply use any identifier that is PKI-signed by the employer! A simple 2D barcode would do, shown via a simple phone app. Literally just a public key and a barcode. No ledgers, IPFS, wallets, distributed this, trustless that.
A printout on dead trees would suffice.
This all feels like boiling the ocean to make a crypto pot of tea.
Occasionally there's an insight, like distributed computing, decentralized and trustless - and it gives me hope that something real is happening, that there's practical value. But then I see the ecosystem and market full of pseudo-technical BS and outright fraud. It reminds me of modern financial instruments with intellectual-sounding concepts, derivatives, securities, repackaged loans, and so on, enabling a wide range of tricks and scams upon the public.
As far as scams go, it makes sense that most of it is made up of words, like politics and religion. And maybe some parts of the story can be based on reality, to make it sound more believable.
Microsoft Entra seems to be marketed to enterprise customers, big money. But that's the completely wrong audience to try and sell "decentralized". Enterprise-scale companies need centralization of identities.
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I gotta admit though, even after the disillusionment and breaking the spell, I'm still a little bit curious and hopeful that the crypto/blockchain hype has at least a few nuggets of real, practical value. It's a great con indeed, and one of the biggest mass "nerd sniping" I've witnessed.
There are many great cons, the current monetary system could easily be considered one of them. Fractional reserve banking is a fraudulent concept at its core. Yet, we keep it because it kind of works to create the right incentives (we accept some level of corruption for this reason). It isn’t (at all) clear to me that we have landed on an optimal system.
And FYI there is nothing wrong with fractional reserve banking when it's done in the right way with some mechanism (like regulation) to stop the banks from lending out too much and becoming insolvent or causing runaway inflation. It is not a big scam for the banks to take your money. Central banks all over the world are using it successfully to finance their economies. It actually works and occurs naturally in any banking system, including those in crypto. Except in crypto there is no central bank to cover for bank failures, the only option crypto lenders have in the case of a bank run is to just halt withdrawals or go bankrupt like old times. Which has happened extremely often in crypto to every prominent crypto company I can think of, like the one that just caused the crash earlier this year.
In my experience, people loudly saying on social media that fractional reserve banking doesn't work are trying to sell you a narrative of conspiracy theories, likely to promote their alternative "investments" that often seem to include, surprise surprise, selling you crypto.
It isn't at all clear to me however that the current system is optimal as it favours participants closer to the money printing source yet these participants are not providing any goods or services - just measures of value. The size of the financial services sector of an economy is likely a reasonable proxy for how suboptimal the system is.
This is again a conspiracy theory typically promoted by adherents of the long discredited pseudoscience known as Austrian Economics. Don't fall for this. The fact that it's working at the set interest rates is proof that the system is not a fraud, because the bank should absolutely be able to make more good loans when it knows it can. It's only a fraud if it there are no regulations or safety nets and the banks become insolvent and everybody loses their money. Which right now is mostly a problem that crypto has. Central banks have become increasingly good at preventing it from happening with their own currencies.
>it favours participants closer to the money printing source yet these participants are not providing any goods or services - just measures of value
Well this isn't true. Providing liquidity and assuming risks are actual valuable financial services that the current system gives. The demand for these services won't go away if you change how the banks work. And the alternative is even worse anyway, where banks wouldn't be able to make money from loans at all, and they would just charge everyone mandatory increasing deposit/withdrawal fees. Hey this is starting to sound a lot like crypto.
The "rich get richer by doing nothing" effect is just a common feature of capitalism. In that aspect crypto is again, even worse. It provides no goods or services either, the entire thing is a waste, built on a technological fraud and propped up by "whales" who don't want to lose their investment.
>> Providing liquidity and assuming risks are actual valuable
Liquidity is another name for creating measures of value. A bank is a group of people that have magic wands to create these measures. The magic wand becomes less magical with defaulted loans - this is the risk that you mention.
Banks used to also provide a safe way to store things (vaults and so on). Now, a bank is a centralized database + magic wand.
In any case, it seems you are convinced that the current system is optimal and cannot be improved. I'm less convinced but that's fine. I encourage you to free your mind a bit. The first step is to use language that triggers no emotional responses. For example, "organization" is a set of people - nothing more. Money (massive emotional trigger) is a measure of value. If you know how to code, I encourage you to implement Bitcoin from the whitepaper (or just read it - it is very simple). This helped me infinitely more than listening to various Bitcoin maximalists/minimalists on YouTube. This understanding hasn't motivated me to own any crypto of any kind thus far however.
Bitcoin on the other hand, as it was presented by Satoshi Nakamoto whitepaper, is the disruptive technology. Took existing technologies and combine them in a way making something unique. It is not a currency, it is a platform of trust. For the first time in human history there is a tool that enables online exchange of value, which is peer-to-peer, permissionless, censorship resistant, borderless, neutral and open.
The rest of the applications that are built on this idea may be "useless" as the author believes, maybe not. I don't know that and I don't think anyone can be sure.
When the current financial system is a fraud and rigged the only bad thing that web 3.0 and cryptocurrencies could do is not making it better.
MIT course MAS.S62 Cryptocurrency Engineering and Design is free in youtube and helped me understand more about money, the tech and what problems is solving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJquEYhiq_U&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...
All of this is false. Every word of it. If that's what you heard from an MIT course then what that professor is doing is shameful. Here, let's go through it.
- Bitcoin isn't peer-to-peer or permissionless and it never has been. The network is de-facto run by mining pools who have exclusive permission to determines who gets to write to the blockchain. In order for two users to send payments to each other they must go through the miners and must pay them fees to gain permission. Peer-to-peer would be if the two users directly sent messages to each other to exchange funds, but that isn't how Bitcoin works. The core design of it intentionally has middlemen and gatekeeping built in.
- Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant or borderless. Have some articles:
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/eu-issues-bitcoin-crypto-ban...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/08/politics/fbi-north-korea-hack...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-seizes-1-billion-bi...
- Bitcoin isn't neutral. The political leanings of bitcoin have been known for a very long time. Satoshi intentionally put political statements in the whitepaper and the genesis block. The early adoption by wikileaks and silk road wasn't a coincidence, they had a very specific goal they had in mind.
- Bitcoin isn't open. The code itself is available on github but only a small number of people have commit access. A random person can't just go in and start modifying the bitcoin code at will. The best you can do is try to fork the network and launch your own token, which has happened a lot of times but none succeeded at causing the system to actually become open.
>The rest of the applications that are built on this idea may be "useless" as the author believes, maybe not. I don't know that and I don't think anyone can be sure.
I can say for sure that it's useless because every single positive claim I've ever seen about it has been completely false.
"Blockchain is the greatest technological fraud" - It's just a hashed data structure. Maybe people use it for fraud but that's like saying accounts are a fraud because someone had bad ones once.
"[Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies] are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity and a Ponzi scheme in effect if not name for everyone else." - they are used a fair bit in speculation which is not actually illegal. With bitcoin there is no ponzi schemer, the thing doesn't collapse ponzi like - it just goes up and down.
Not to say they don't have flaws but there is interesting stuff too.
There doesn't need to be a single person collecting the dollars for it to be a ponzi-esque scheme. The reason people call it a ponzi is because there is no actual profit anywhere in the system nor is there any reasonable mechanism for any typical investors to get stable profits. It's all speculation. The only way you can make a profit from "investing" in crypto is by selling to someone else at a higher price. Yes, ponzi schemes can continue indefinitely if people keep dumping money into it and nobody shuts them down.
Such as? Credit cards provide huge UX improvements most notably convenience and security. I don't have to carry around lots of cash, and if I have an issue with a transaction, the payment processor can arbitrate the dispute.
The very nature of credit makes dispute resolution much easier.
Everyone's greedy or shortsighted if you hit the right cognitive levers, which is why cons work on everyone, especially on people who think cons don't work on them.
I mean, I get what you mean.. but we have a -40% differential here to prove you utterly wrong at the moment.
I think a bigger advantage of this system is that the money isn't your responsibility. Many people lack the fiscal responsibility to manage stocks and bonds or will do the smart thing and save up for later when they receive their pay cheque. By shifting responsibility to the individual the most vulnerable of society are most at risk of financial mismanagement and poverty during retirement or even not being able to retire at all.
Instead of say, social security being significantly higher by people paying more into taxes.. we have convinced people to put money into a 401k.. which is first entirely dependent on "the market", something which is well out of peoples control. The design is that people are 'forced' to contribute this way, which will drive market prices up so the people who actually have substantial money make way more on the market going up than the little guy.
Then on the flip side, when the market does tank it hurts the little guy way more because it's basically ALL of their assets at risk on something they can't control. While the rich are able to have money in a much more diversified set (real estate, business etc).
People also get f'd if they happen to want to retire close to a big market crash and all that. Again, things completely out of their control.
Before anyone starts arguing "I would rather have control on my 401k than the government!!", if the US government couldn't pay social security you would be way more fucked in the market in that situation. We have a stable government- that stable government should be providing security for people in old age.
"Retirement" being linked to the market is so beyond dumb. It's one giant scam to pump up the market and shift risk to individuals.
My future social security is based on the promise that future taxpayers will fund it.
I’ll take my real value (401k) over the promise of value in the future (social security).
For the median household, most wealth is tied up in real estate (their home).
Pensions have major issues. The government has not made a very good case for “we should manage more retirement funds” with the state of the SSI trust. 401ks are a next move to address downfalls and failures with how other options have played out. But yeah anyone can do dumb shit with money to their detriment; that’s very difficult to overcome.
But if you do allow that personal retirement savings should be encouraged and subsidized, the existing 401k program is turning out to be nearly optimal.
In that sense, web/3 might be a called a great con.
Cryptocurrencies are not "useless except for criminals"... Blockchain is also not useless. It's just much less useful than the hype makes it out to be.
Making absolute statements like this isn't helpful, it makes it easy to demolish the argument for the actual scammers.
You say this, and yet fail to mention a legitimate use case, which is exactly what a big part of the article is about.
Do you also require an example of why anonymous payments are useful to non-criminals?
What other mean of online anonymous payments exist? I'm not very up to date on this front.
Edit: Going through MobileCoin info it’s not super clear to me how you deposit/withdraw currency but keep in mind that this is historically a plenty sufficient amount of information to put your entire transaction’s privacy at risk (from certain adversaries anyway). I.e. if you are suspected of a crime but the only info available to prosecutors is you deposited $N and then your alleged conspirator withdrew $N out the other end, the fact the transaction itself was private is not going to save you.
These UX problems can be solved. An example is Aztec protocol[1] which makes it easy to send and receive anonymous payments without running a private blockchain node.
That isn't a legitimate use case. Cash is still largely superior at anonymous transactions, and it always will be because every crypto transaction inherently leaves a rather large paper trail. This can be obfuscated with cryptography techniques but can't be totally eliminated, traditional network tracking still goes a long way.
>Do you also require an example of why anonymous payments are useful to non-criminals?
No because they largely aren't. Any activist use case you think you have is disproportionately benefiting criminals. The larger the sum of money they're trying to launder, the more they gain from this. The problem with your line of thinking is that "anonymous payments" isn't actually a feature, it's the default state of things. Big corporations and shady governments would absolutely love to not tell anybody anything about what they're spending money on unless they can put a marketing spin on it. The transparency, accounting and reporting requirements are things that society built because we acknowledge that those who have large amounts of money have more power and therefore deserve more scrutiny.
The other part is the article already comes in at something like 3800 words. I could write five, ten times that on the subject and still not be done. I have to pick and choose what I cover and in what detail.
The primary use case of cryptocurrencies (and in particular Bitcoin) today, when used directly as currency, as a means of purchase, is criminal activity. The article glossed over that there are other niche use cases where coins are used as currencies but they are very much a niche, particularly when weighed against the biggest use of crypto today which is simply as a form of something analogous to stock trading only without the regulation.
But this is almost a secondary point; the article is about "Web 3" hype, these points are relevant insofar as the thing which is really being challenged is this idea that crypto and blockchain will be the foundation of a major new era in the web.
I'll certainly take it as constructive feedback on my writing if that isn't clear enough. Thanks.
The only exception you mentioned is ENS, but there isn't anything special about that. It's just a DNS system but centralized into a smart contract instead, and because it's on ethereum you have to pay gas fees in addition to the registrar fess. No actual benefit to using it versus real DNS.
“Centralized into a [decentralized] protocol” is an oxymoron. The benefit of ENS over DNS is that there is no centralized actor that can control, censor and manipulate the namespace.
No, I understand it perfectly. The only purpose of stablecoins is to provide liquidity in the crypto markets for these defi apps where all the trading action happens. They don't have any other purpose and there isn't any other reason to hold them. If it wasn't for the crypto markets you would just be using USD and trading against that directly. Seriously, if you go to the DAI website and you click the big "Use DAI" button it literally just takes you to another crypto investing app.
In the future please avoid falling for this trap that web3 tech pushers set. They claim there is "innovation" in the space but almost all of it is just clones of existing financial services with crypto instead of real money. The fact that there's even something call "stablecoins" should demonstrate to you how bogus this all is. The rest of cryptos are so volatile the only way they can make anything resembling a market out of it is by pegging other cryptos to the USD and doing all their trading against that. It's just adding more middlemen to reach the ultimate goal which, as always, is to eventually cash out into USD. Because everybody knows cryptos by themselves are useless for anything besides speculative gambling.
>“Centralized into a [decentralized] protocol” is an oxymoron. The benefit of ENS over DNS is that there is no centralized actor that can control, censor and manipulate the namespace.
Nope, you're wrong about this in the context of most things implemented in smart contracts. You should be extremely wary of anyone making these claims. Since the "smart contract" is actually just a piece of code, typically the smart contract will have an update mechanism that only a centralized actor can use to upload patches and updates to the code. IIRC this is still how ENS works last time I checked. Like almost everything in crypto, it's a centralized service that the authors lie about and masquerade it as decentralized.
Sometimes they'll do an even worse thing by having "governance tokens" that grant you powers to update the smart contract, and someone with a lot of money can just come in and buy all the tokens and take it over. So these "smart contracts" are not really decentralized in any sense. If anyone says "we are making this thing that can't be controlled, censored or manipulated" then that's a massive red flag.
There's also the question of why anyone actually wants that. What other industry would this be ok in? If someone had a company that made self-driving cars advertised as being "uncontrollable and uncensorable by driving laws", nobody would want that. We'd recognize that company is actually just selling unstoppable killing machines. So why do people for some bizarre reason think this is a good thing in financial markets where the super-rich already have extreme power consolidation? It makes absolutely no sense at all.
> They don't have any other purpose and there isn't any other reason to hold them.
A claim that is easily refuted. Send 1000 DAI to an individual and they can now hold a USD pegged asset non custodially, without a USD bank account, and transfer any amount to other individuals.
Smart contracts can be made immutable and locked. The ENS root multisig owners have locked .eth TLD and have minimal ability to affect any existing .eth ENS name. Since the contracts are open source, if the ENS team went rogue and against the community’s wishes, the protocol could be forked. You can read about it here: https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions
Nope, this is wrong. Any stablecoin is necessarily centralized in order to maintain the peg, in the case of DAI it has a "custodian" in the form of MakerDAO. Look it up, this is how they all work. When they say the words "non-custodial" it's a blatant lie. Everything in crypto has a custodian, some projects are just aggressive about trying to conceal them.
>Without a USD bank account, and transfer any amount to other individuals.
But this isn't a reason to hold them nor is it an innovation. You could also just do that with moneygram or a similar service, no blockchains required. The only thing you can meaningfully do with this that you can't do with another cash-only service or a bank is to trade other cryptos with it, but that also isn't even for any technical reason. If the banks decided to start exchanging cryptos directly, they could. And that would totally remove the reason for any stablecoins to exist.
This is coming back to the same problem with any of these questions like "but what about the web3 tech?" There isn't any new tech here. You just described an existing thing you can do (send money) but with some buzzwords attached. If you dig into it there's never any actual explanation as to why the "web3 tech" makes it better, because it doesn't. So please just don't ask those types of questions, find some better ones.
>Smart contracts can be made immutable and locked.
Well that isn't how ENS works. And that's a universally bad idea anyway because that means it can never get any upgrades or bug fixes ever again. It's like saying your data center is "decentralized" and therefore better because you encased it in a block of concrete so one can get in to upgrade the servers ever again. Well no, it's not, it's still centralized, you just made it worse for no reason.
>if the ENS team went rogue and against the community’s wishes, the protocol could be forked
This is exactly how DNS works as well. There is no practical difference, and yet no one forks the DNS root because doing so would be extremely expensive and pointless. Because it's not just about forking the protocol, you also need to fork the whole network and overcome network effects, and that's the actual hard part. ENS offers absolutely nothing to fix this compared to DNS. It's the same thing. I should also point you to this sentence in the FAQ:
>The root node is presently owned by a multisig contract, with keys held by trustworthy individuals in the Ethereum community
Which is a random, centralized group of people hand picked by the ENS founder, acting similarly to a corporate board of directors. There's absolutely nothing "decentralized" about it in any way. I'm completely serious when I say this whole thing is a blatant scam built on lies. If you find yourself trying to look for positives in this system, you're doing something wrong. It's literally all bad.
> But this isn't a reason to hold them.
The person now has DAI, an asset that has value, and that they can send to another person. They received the DAI in 30 seconds, without needing a bank, and can send it to another person in 30 seconds, also without them needing a bank. The closest comparison is cash, but you cannot securely send cash around the world in 30 seconds without a bank.
There are many contracts and protocols that are designed to be immutable-only with forking as the only mode of governance, I would advise doing a little more research into the development practices.
> This is exactly how DNS works as well. There is no practical difference
Except that domain name registrars are centralized entities with complete custody over their owned domains, unlike .eth names which are not owned by any central party, and cannot even be revoked or controlled by the root node multisig owners.
A lot of your writing seems like a sort of zealotry against crypto, which is understandable as we are on HN, but it does not mean it is accurate.
Nope, they actually can do all of this by just updating the smart contracts. And even if this were true, it would be an anti-feature. I don't want to use a system where the illegitimate transactions of thieves and hackers can't be blocked. Just look at how many smart contracts get hacked to see what a bad idea it is to say "we never block any bad actors". It just makes no sense at all to try to spin that as a selling point. It's not in any way a good thing.
>The person now has DAI, an asset that has value, and that they can send to another person. They received the DAI in 30 seconds, without needing a bank, and can send it to another person in 30 seconds, also without them needing a bank. The closest comparison is cash, but you cannot securely send cash around the world in 30 seconds without a bank.
Yes you can, I already addressed this. Moneygram and similar services literally does this, without cryptos or blockchains. All you need to do in order to accomplish this is to have someone else who has some funds (or a bank account) that is offering to make the transfer for you and gives you a code (or lets you use your own personal code, like a private key) to redeem the funds on the other end. No blockchains are required at all to do this, adding blockchains to this only makes it worse because it unnecessarily adds more extra steps.
>There are many contracts and protocols that are designed to be immutable-only with forking as the only mode of governance, I would advise doing a little more research into the development practices.
I've done plenty of research and I'd say that's a universally bad idea, and whoever is saying that has no idea what they're talking about and should be discredited. Forking is an extreme method of last resort that has a lot of friction, it isn't something you want to encourage people to do just because of some small easily-fixable bug. Especially when people stand to lose a lot of money because of those bugs. This is just another instance where this stuff is like the wild west with no regard for normal development practices used in financial software.
>Except that domain name registrars are centralized entities with complete custody over their owned domains, unlike .eth names which are not owned by any central party, and cannot even be revoked or controlled by the root node multisig owners.
Ok but you just said some other party could fork and replace the protocol as governance, which one is it? If there turns out to be some nasty bug in that contract the developers will just say "whoops, everyone use this new contract instead" and then everyone will be frustrated but will still switch over to it because they have no other choice. Or for the nuclear option, if the ethereum developers really wanted to, they could just change the ethereum code itself to mess with that smart contract, just like they already did in 2016 and they could easily do again if they decided to. "Non-custodial" in crypto is a complete lie. I'll say it again, there is always custody. This is still inherently a network service that has to run on physical computers and has to get updated by humans who need to perform customer service and all that jazz. In crypto it's just intentionally obfuscated who actually controls what.
Even assuming for a moment that all this works like you say it does, it still would be a bad thing that isn't innovative at all, it's just lazy! I would absolutely not use a domain name service that refuses to block terrorists and criminals and refuses to come up with any way to effectively block them. I don't want to be on the same network as them at all, everything you're saying is an anti-feature.
>A lot of your writing seems like a sort of zealotry against crypto
It's not. What I actually do have zealotry against is liars and thieves. Crypto just happens to be overloaded with those types. The entirety of it is a fraud based on faulty technology that can't actually do any of what is promised in any meaningful way that is different from existing systems. The core of your comment seems to be saying "if you don't like it then just fork" but this is the whole problem cryptos were pitched to solve in the first place! They wanted to "fork" the banking system because they were angry about bank baliouts but now they've gone and done the exact same stuff over and over again!
> if the ethereum developers really wanted to, they could just change the ethereum code itself to mess with that smart contract
Forking is a user activated decision. If an honest majority users of the chain wanted to point to a new ENS contract to resolve names to addresses, they could come to that consensus regardless of the will of core devs or root multisig owners.
If an honest majority of users would like GoDaddy to stop censoring X.com domain, or PayPal to stop blocking funds, they cannot fork the centralized private protocol. If a dishonest MakerDAO actor manages to push an unwanted change in DAI contracts to block a user’s funds, the honest majority could easily reject the change by following the old protocol.
Is this not what you were asking for though? I'm addressing all the concerns about these random web3 and defi projects, yes they're tangents but so is the whole conversation as it relates to the original article. None of that fundamentally changes the game, crypto is still a big fraud.
>Forking is a user activated decision. If an honest majority users of the chain wanted to point to a new ENS contract to resolve names to addresses, they could come to that consensus regardless of the will of core devs or root multisig owners.
Ok, with DNS you could also just do this by spinning up some new DNS root servers and trying to get everyone to use that. People have already tried to do this multiple times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
Again you're not saying anything new here. None of this changes just because someone decided to write the name resolution code in ethereum solidity instead of C++.
>If an honest majority of users would like GoDaddy to stop censoring X.com domain, or PayPal to stop blocking funds, they cannot fork the centralized private protocol.
I'm sorry what? This whole sentence makes no sense. DNS is an open protocol, and Paypal isn't a protocol. No you can't convince Paypal to do business with someone they don't want to do business with (unless you force them legally) but the same is also true of the big crypto companies like Binance. If they decide some customer is bad for business they can just block their wallet and force them to go somewhere else. It's the same exact thing. Also I should remind you, Paypal is now literally a crypto company that offers crypto services.
>If a dishonest actor manages to push an unwanted change in DAI contracts to block a user’s funds, the honest majority could easily reject the change by following the old protocol.
How would they do this when their tokens are already gone because the original smart contract was looted? This isn't a theoretical, this stuff happens constantly all the time, another big one just happened last week: https://www.investopedia.com/mango-markets-got-hacked-675007...
Like, I get people's reluctance to seem biased, but how long are we going to let this charade continue? How long before we can say enough is enough? "Enterprise blockchain" is a marketing buzzword. Nobody actually wants them except to tick a box on a checklist. They never gained any real traction, because they're useless. They have to be managed by a centralized admin anyway, so what's the point? There just isn't one. Part of this is intentional confusion on the part of promoters, people labeling anything that uses paxos or merkle trees as "blockchain" for marketing reasons, but I hope people also start pushing back against that for what they are: obvious attempts to cash in on the crypto hype by using the word blockchain.
Cryptocurrency were supposed to mimic decentralized cash but there are still some problem that needs fixing.
> Imagine, for example, a world where you're out at a restaurant, or something, and you accidentally drop your keys. Someone else picks them up off the floor, only instead of handing them back to you, they now legally own your house and car. You call the police, but they say they have no power to insist this person gives you back your property. It's their property now, because possession is ownership, access is authorization.
Cryptocurrency should mimic cash, they don't have any intrinsic value just like cash. So correct example would be if you drop cash in restaurant not keys of your car. Just like cash whoever picks it up is there new owner & police can't do anything about it except for locking him in jail.
> In October 2017, JP Morgan's CEO Jamie Dimon called the idea a fraud and said he would fire any employee trading Bitcoin for being "stupid".
Ofcourse he will say that, JP Morgan creates money out of thin air by using fractional reserve, just like cryptocurrency. So basically bitcoin is taking away there business.
Author also misses important use like voting where we want record to be public, accountable & certifiable.
And about the criminal part. For criminals, CASH IS STILL THE KING.
I hear people saying this, the problem with this thinking is that there is no actual reason for a digital payment system to be like that. It's actually one of the main drawbacks of cash and one of the major reasons not to use it. Intentionally designing a system this way doesn't improve it, it causes it to have the disadvantages of physical money (easily and irreversibly stolen) as well as the disadvantages of electronic money (easily hacked by anyone on the planet). I argue this combination makes it uniquely suitable for cyber crime, and nothing else. Nobody actually wants this combination of properties in a legitimate payment system.
And I should also state that these properties are policy choices and not really related to anything technical about Bitcoin or blockchains. Banks can also just refuse to give your money back if you get hacked, but doing so would obviously be very bad and make their customers angry. It makes no sense to condone this behavior in crypto.
>Ofcourse he will say that, JP Morgan creates money out of thin air by using fractional reserve, just like cryptocurrency. So basically bitcoin is taking away there business.
This doesn't make sense, you're going into conspiracy theories here. Yeah he said that but he also said numerous times he would take customers' money if they wanted to trade crypto, and that's exactly what he does.
>Author also misses important use like voting where we want record to be public, accountable & certifiable.
What you need there is laws, not blockchains. Electronic voting doesn't help with that and just gets in the way. Every blockchain voting system I've seen has been a total failure that's less secure and less accountable than simple paper ballots. On a more fundamental level, you can't have a voting system for ordinary people that requires them to understand how complicated microchips and algorithms and radio signals and network topologies work in order to trust the system. It's just not going to fly.
>And about the criminal part. For criminals, CASH IS STILL THE KING.
For small transactions, yes. Chalk up another failure for crypto. For large criminal transactions like ransomware and sanctions evasion, it's still crypto all the way. But this also is not for any technical reason, it's because of various policy choices to avoid applying any kind of increased scrutiny to large transactions, and also because of crypto enthusiasts having some kind of weird fixation with helping thugs and autocrats: https://news.yahoo.com/virgil-griffith-us-expert-jailed-0759...
Its allowed me to pay when paypal/credit cards/my bank have decided they're going to not allow payment to a service.
It's allowed me to get paid cash in hand without having to involve entities who its none of their business why that money has been paid to me.
It's allowed me to bypass currency exchange issues and fleecing.
2. That part is true, largely. You do have to pay a (very large!) fee for the transaction, but it's not to anyone in particular and they don't know any more than the rest of us do about what you're paying for (which, again, is not completely anonymous!).
3. This part is laughably wrong. Even now, post-crash, transaction fees are measured in multiple dollars per. During the boom, it was routine to see entities paying more than $100 to get a transaction to post.
Not necessarily. For example, PayPal has recently introduced "acceptable use policy" where they can freeze your account without you violating the law. Banks also have done the same for being "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" etc. All of those things are perfectly legal in the US. So your assertion that only illegal activities require use of crypto is false.
And that's before we get to the fact that just because something is "illegal" doesn't mean it's good to have this banned. Pretty sure the ongoing Iranian protests are illegal.
No, but it means that the question has nothing to do with money. Using BTC to launder or evade tracking for a transaction that is illegal is simply committing another crime. If you want to be free of prosecution, talk to your government, don't just cheat and figure it's OK because it's crypto. That's how you end up in jail.
As for your suggestion to "talk to your government", yeah I'm sure that will go down well with the Iranian regime trying to crack down on anti-hijab protestors.
What you're doing is extrapolating from "some people sometimes have trouble with a bank" (true) to "the only way to evade oppressive banking censorship is crypto" (bananas).
Or rather, the second frame is true, for a certain subset of transactions that happen to be illegal.
3. The exchange rates are rarely market rates with most platforms. I think Mastercard/VISA is as good as it gets when exchanging. With crypto the downside is wait times, if you don't want to pay a high fee you don't have to.
Whether web3 becomes a mainstream "thing" is anyone's guess, but if it makes any headway, it won't be large enterprises leading the charge. Exactly like the author states; "Do airlines have any problem selling [tickets] to you? Of course not; this process is already efficient and optimal." Where it potentially could be used is by smaller entities that don't have well established processes, and don't necessarily have the means to build out some of the required systems.
If I want to build any kind of digital asset (an item in a game*, access to a forum, etc) and I want to allow it to be traded, I have to build that trading platform. If I want it to be traded outside of my platform, then I have to deal with endless integrations. If I'm a multi-billion dollar enterprise that's fine, I can do that. If I'm a small company, that may not be feasible. If I use a blockchain to store that asset (or at least to track who owns it) then I only need to integrate to that blockchain, that is, check that a user owns the asset before I allow them to use it in my system. I'm not saying this is simple, or even currently desirable for most people or companies, but what I am saying is that it is something that is feasible and potentially of value to an end user.
Where this will struggle in the short-term is in the end-user experience. Wallets are awful, most people don't want self-custody, and honestly, the space is filled with slimy individuals that don't exactly inspire trust. I could write for hours about all the things that I view as wrong with with web3 (some of them are technical, the majority are about the people), but to outright dismiss it as a scam/only for criminals/the worst thing on Earth is blindly emotive and is (almost) as bad as the fanatics that are just as emotional about promoting it.
* I'm only referring to tracking ownership, not interoperability across different games. That can go in the "unrealistic things web3 people say" basket.
I mean but you came up with one maybe kinda plausible use case just to better than I could dismiss why it would be a piece of shit anyway - and that most importantly it doesn’t solve the hard problems. It’s not emotive - I just want an existence proof of something useful that isn’t purchases or transactions I want off the grid.
I don’t think money laundering or concealing transactions is necessarily criminal - but the only real use of crypto assets for transactions is to do stuff someone powerful doesn’t think you should be doing.
Whether web3 becomes a thing is not anybody's guess. Anybody who thinks about it clearly can easily conclude that it will never be a thing except among scammers and their marks.
Oh absolutely, a centralized digital assets trading platform for general digital goods would be better in almost every (at least technical) way compared to a blockchain/decentralized platform. The challenge isn't technical, it's getting parties to trust you and your platform, and to use it. That's maybe the one (if not the only) upshot to using a blockchain; I don't necessarily have to trust the platform.
That said, Visa and Mastercard basically have a duopoly on digital payments, so it's not unrealistic to think someone could do the same but with trading/tracking ownership of digital assets.
Why use a decentralized platform? Because users are able to escape the walled garden, and have more power over the protocols that distribute and generate sales on their content.
[1] https://edm.com/gear-tech/steve-aoki-made-more-money-from-nf...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-...
[3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/spotify-reportedly-tests-nft-...
The post is riddled with fallacies. For example:
> Imagine, for example, a world where you're out at a restaurant, or something, and you accidentally drop your keys. Someone else picks them up off the floor, only instead of handing them back to you, they now legally own your house and car.
This framing is ridiculous and reveals either that the author has no idea what they are criticizing, or is being deliberately obtuse. Nobody in Web3 is suggesting you hold all of your assets in a single private key that you physically carry to a restaurant.
The root of this blog post is this:
> it's the sheer absence of any explanation or detail as to what problem [web3] advocates believe they are solving
And this is the primary complaint. Web3 is too vague a term, and encompasses too many unrealistic hype ideas like houses-on-the-blockchain, and the author has not bothered to look further than these claims.
Why not take aim at actual Web3 products that are live today: Uniswap, Aave, ENS. These all fit under the umbrella of Web3 and are able to secure billions of dollars worth of assets while meeting the promised goals: a set of trustless, permissionless, and decentralized tools for transferring and owning value on the internet.
I'm sorry, I know this isn't reddit, but: fucking lol.
What do you even mean? What does "owning value on the internet" mean? This is exactly the kind of handwaving the article is about.
One example is PayPal. When you deposit fiat into a PayPal account, you get back an asset: a digital and virtual currency that PayPal holds custody over for you.
Another example is a digital gift card, like a $50 voucher for Amazon. The key associated with this card holds value, and in some cases you can even gift and transfer this online.
Another example is a domain name. If you own a valuable domain name like Meta.com, the asset isn’t “money” but it also isn’t worthless or valueless.
Now take a DAI stablecoin, Aave position, or ENS domain. Very much the same as above assets, except that they align more closely with the three aforementioned properties: trustless, permissionless, and decentralized.
In all of these cases we use the term “ownership” but the ownership of dollars in a PayPal account and ownership of DAI tokens in a wallet have very different properties.
But wouldn't you agree that the article is mainly about why "Web 3.0" has failed over and over again to provide exactly these properties, or to provide a valuable solution to a problem that hasn't been or could be solved in a better way already?
Literally everything related to "Web 3.0" has been a snowbally scam, and yet, as another commenter in this thread put it aptly, "the "pull back" in hype has allowed a new breed of charlatans to pretend there is ever more legitimacy to this whole scam".
It is, for me at least, impossible to take DAI stablecoins, AAVE positions or any other new kid on the block seriously.
If you or the author feels that Uniswap, DAI, ENS, and AAVE are scams, try to provide some rationale for this claim. Otherwise these sweeping statements are just as hollow as saying that SMPT is a Great Con based on the notion that 85% of today's circulating email is illegitimate.
I'm not suggesting that, either. It's a metaphor. In the metaphor, we're not talking about crypto wallet keys, we're talking about actual, physical keys which open doors. But many people do of course keep all their crypto keys in a single, vulnerable location, or hand the contents of their wallets over to another wallet for some other purpose such as lending - typically this is on centralized exchanges or defi markets and platforms, for example Celsius - which I haven't checked in a while but can only assume is still in business, doing well and allowing customers to access their funds.
This framing is disingenuous. Crypto proponents do not suggest holding all assets in a single key and leaving it in a vulnerable location. It would be like suggesting that investing in fine art is futile because investors might accidentally drop their Picasso painting on the way to the restaurant.
Many outspoken proponents advise against “CeFi” including centralized lending services like Celsius. Meanwhile with Aave, which is analogous to Celsius and is actually DeFi, the protocol is still doing fine and the users still have access to their funds. This goes against the general tone of your statements, and is an example of Web3 product that is actually continuing to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Companies make weird decisions all the time, like MS killing Skype's p2p system which destroyed the whole app. Quoting mobile as the reason when there was no reason the PC/Mac clients couldn't continue on.
Even laptops probably contributed. A lot of people are going to be using laptops on the go and connected to mobile hotspots. You'd be pissed off if a game client used all of your battery and data cap in the background. Even the p2p of Skype was a pain, you had to carefully coordinate the transfer of large files. You both had to stay online and manually restart them. While now the central server holds it and it’s way more convenient.
Edit: I just remembered that windows lets you opt in to p2p updates but that's the only thing I can think of.
CGNAT could be another explanation.
I still don't see why you wouldn't try and have p2p as a back channel that's attempted. If it can increase deployment speeds and improve user experience then its a huge plus.
Think of any software updates at schools or Steam updates in a block of units. Most consoles and PC games still spend too much time with loading bars pulling 20 Gb updates.
And that’s where p2p died. CDNs got really really fast and the user benefit reduced to nothing while the possible disruption from seeding large files remained. Especially as consumer upload isn’t that great so any uploading can disrupt online games.
Which is why torrents has really fallen away in favour of fast CDNs.
And yet despite all the technology having been built and stable the trend in media has been overwhelmingly towards centralisation e.g. Spotify, Netflix and an all you can eat model.
It's because ultimately users care about the experience above all else.
(More stridently: even as "failures," both XMPP and BitTorrent have probably been significantly better for the world, on net, than blockchain projects have been.)
Same thing with the first .com bubble. AI have been through this too and is now having a revival.
Blockchain and Web 3 is not going anywhere it will just not be championed by the current generation. The coming will use this as it was the most normal in the world.
The .com bubble ratio was more like 33% crap, 33% meh, and 33% gold. The "crash" was that people realised that the 33% crap was crap.
The equivalent crash for Web3 would wipe it out completely, taking the 1% with it.
Also, I don't agree that there is a 1% to begin with. I've never heard of any compelling use-case for Web3.
There is plenty of use for it, it's just not the same as for Web2.
Keep in mind that "web 1.0" was immediately useful, to many people, at a large scale. The original web wasn't restricted to web developers doing web development things. It was used by industry, government, and academia at scale almost immediately.
It's being used by many people today. It's not for everyone. It will evolve and at one point we won't even know we are using it.
The thing about blockchain isn't that it isn't that you couldn't build it with "web2" the thing is it would be unfeasible to do so and still maintaining the trust.
By separating the "owners" of the database from what it gets used to verify, things that are a kind of wicked problem or at least a chicken and egg problem become possible.
Here are a couple of examples from my perspective of what is technically doable but practically unfeasible with a proprietary.
https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1465382119811784708 https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1463539727202754563
I am pretty convinced that the government will be using this sooner or later too, for things that require transparency, but they are not going to be early adopters (in contrast with the internet where they were)
But I am fine with you not seeing this or agreeing. Time will tell, I put my money were my mouth is :)
It's been more than 10 years and billions poured into the ecosystem since Bitcoin started, and I still don't know anybody who uses a blockchain for anything beyond speculation, even though I'm in tech.
After how many more years without widespread adoption would you be convinced otherwise?
Plenty of people use is.
> There is so much use for blockchain especially as infrastructure for society and in 10 years from now we will not even be thinking about it.
So you do seem to think that 10 years matter and that it's the time left before it becomes part of our lives, but still it's unclear what's supposed to change in the meantime and why this hasn't happened yet. There's just as much money lost on a regular basis (maybe even more now that projects are bigger), it's still mostly a speculation platform, no real infra in sight and mostly "ideas" that don't pass a basic business plan analysis or simply the question: "wouldn't it be better to implement this idea, but without a blockchain?".
Bitcoin has changed very little since its inception. The first 10 years haven't fundamentally changed its adoption, there's no reason to think that 10 more would do much more. "Just believe in it" is not very enticing for a technology.
My point is that Web 3.0 is not a great con and that it's here to stay and that down the line we won't even think about it.
It also being used today, but today we are having the same kind of discussions as we had with the internet in the 90's
Bitcoin changed from being currency to being store of value. Quite a big change.
But again I am not sure who you are trying to convince here. I have already provided plenty of examples of what I think is use cases both from business to infrastructure to societally. I never said just believe it and I am not sure why that straw man is being thrown in there.
It's always the same discussion though. People who say they want use cases aren't really interested in them. It's a weird phenomena to me but each to their own.
You are more than welcome to think there isn't a reason to think it's going to work out and then you act accordingly to that belief. I see it differently I do see the need and act accordingly.
It's all good.
It's never really been used as either in practice, because of its volatility. "Store of value" is a big statement for something that was once at 60kUSD and is now at 20kUSD. It's mostly used because "number goes up".
> plenty of examples
I went through your links, they don't pass the test I mentioned, namely: in practice, you're better off without a blockchain. That's why so many of these are just "ideas" and not actual businesses and never take off, even 10 years in and all the tech being there already.
You are proving my point exactly. You set up some arbitrary rules that you want reality to comply too and then you make all sorts of claims from that.
And some of these I mention ARE already businesses some of them.
This is exactly what I knew would happen. "If this is reality I deny reality" is basically what you are saying.
Exactly which part of Web3 are you referring to here? I've not seen anything that matches your assessment.
Web3 is a special case of wild wild west in a market with way too much money inflating it all, but the fundamental principles about having an open database accessible to everyone is here to stay.
The stock market is down up to 90% in some cases.
You need to think about this when some of the problems there are today get resolved and new generations start building with this as part of the toolbox.
But each to their own. I've just seen this so many times before and I can personally see the use cases, they are just not what most people think they are.
Then what are they?
You could suddenly order rare books, book plane flights, find song lyrics, and all sorts of stuff you had wanted to do but couldn’t.
I was there at the time. Every year like 11 new great use cases came along. It’s absolutely nothing like crypto.
People laughed at email, buying online, payment was even illegal in the beginning.
I was also there at the time from the very beginning.
This is the same thing. Hype, then crash then re-construction then normalized.
There is so much use for blockchain especially as infrastructure for society and in 10 years from now we will not even be thinking about it.
It's no different.
The question at the time was how useful, and how quickly things were going to be transformed and what it was all worth since the hype and valuations got out of control.
And there were of course dumb ideas that got funded (like the cue cat) and good but early ideas that were overfunded and poorly executed (like webvan).
But life was changing irreversibly at a very visible pace as digital solutions took over. Remember when every business district had a travel agent?
There are no real uses of blockchain technology today that aren’t a variation on financial speculation (aka gambling) and illicit activity.
Don’t get me wrong those are great use cases. Gambling and banned transactions are a major sector. But that’s the limit of the whole affair and that’s been obviously the case for a while.
Whether I will be right time will tell, I am pretty sure I will, and the idea that this is a useless technology is simply a question of vision.
There are plenty of use cases which are theoretically possible with Web2 but not feasible without Blockchain.
If you can name one that’s not a word salad I’m definitely curious.
This gets repeated a lot, and it's simply not true. It's a telltale sign that there's simply too much emotion in the arguments around blockchain - any post about tor and bittorrent doesn't receive nearly as many (if any) "but it's only for criminals" comments.
Being able to own and trade a digital asset in much the same way a physical asset is traded is potentially a huge use for blockchains. Large players aren't about to model ownership of the digital goods they sell as items on a blockchain, but it's a big opportunity for smaller players.
Nonsense
I don’t know about optimal, there are middlemen everywhere.
Airline ticketing itself is suboptimal for historic reasons (complicated fare class coding), but middlemen are no longer a major factor in that. Travel agents no longer dominate booking.
And then there’s overbooking.
Some of these are necessary middlemen but I would hardly call this optimal.
Even the payment processor (which really is a middleman) is likely not a source of suboptimal pricing in airline ticketing: the current alternative is cash transactions, which would probably cost the airlines and airports (and us) significantly more in terms of safely moving the money around. Maybe FedNow will improve that.
Where middlemen exist in travel these days, it's mostly this. I personally don't want to have to search dozens are individual airline websites for fares.
The only reason to get to a middleman is so that you have a bigger variety of options to chose from, as they can sell from multiple airlines (and also bear some costs and buy in bulk in advance from the airline and sell cheaper).
https://adacrunch.medium.com/cryptocurrency-and-blockchain-r...
Disclaimer: I have a small grant from the Ethereum Foundation to research methods of voting and governance/decisionmaking in groups.
a huge ecosystem built on what is in reality a simple data structure which is neither particularly novel nor interesting
And usually that there is some big doomsday financial event coming up that only “hard money” like bitcoin can avoid.
Blockchain may be a good way to hide money (i.e. in a country with runaway inflation where the government has constrained access to banking and foreign currencies) but if the crash is global then nobody is safe.
They're far more fungible in the apocalypse, because the algorithm is simple:
- I have something
- Someone gives me bottlecaps for it
- I give someone else bottlecaps for something they have that I want.
I mean, how will someone dilute my store of value? Turn on one of the ancient, rusted bottling plants? Please. Never going to happen; the scavs have already ripped all the important parts out of the machinery.
This could be just one of any of the tech or services written using it.
I would be interested to read. Thanks.
I think this kind of misses the point.
Cryptocurrency has already accomplished incredible things. For example, it's never been easier to buy LSD. DAOs make it simple to work remotely without needing to reside in a specific location.
All the benefits of crypto come from their ability to circumvent regulations. It lets people do business peer-to-peer over the internet, out of sight from national governments and their laws. That's the point.
What unique properties of a DAO accomplishes this?
> All the benefits of crypto come from their ability to circumvent regulations.
is for all intents and purposes a rephrasing of
> They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity
This doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve managed globally distributed remote teams for the better part of a decade and haven’t had any issues.
I am building a side-project that runs on Google Cloud. I think most tricky part for me, will be setting up the payment system without breaking any tax laws...Should I just put a Paypal pay button?
I could easily get paid through a smart-contract, verify transaction and run the given CloudRun job all without any 3rd-party involvement, or any worries about tax/business account setup.
Probably, yes. A lot of businesses big and small do this, and they're not in violation of any tax or other laws. Plus you get paid in actual money.
No.
> I am building a side-project that runs on Google Cloud. I think most tricky part for me, will be setting up the payment system without breaking any tax laws...Should I just put a Paypal pay button?
It’s a pretty easy option, yes (hence your phrasing of “just put a button”) There’s also Stripe or Square etc which are similarly simple.
> I could easily get paid through a smart-contract, verify transaction and run the given CloudRun job all without any 3rd-party involvement, or any worries about tax/business account setup
How do you handle taxes when cashing out or using crypto to buy things? Can you pay for food/rent/insurance with crypto?
No, there aren't. That's not available for Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Argentinians, Nigerians, Thai, South Africans, which is more than 1/3 of the world population and you can't just forget about our existence, you know. Don't say that if you can handle some stuff in your particular country, that makes the whole technology useless worldwide speaking.
We are human beings and deserve to sell our stuff in the internet as much as you do.
Most of the countries you’ve listed have Paypal, so in that case I would suggest that since obviously Stripe and Square aren’t available.
Edit: The only countries you’ve listed that don’t have Paypal are currently under sanctions from the US that can make doing business legally tricky for me. If your sole use case is avoiding sanctions, then yes obviously crypto is useful. That is not an obvious scenario when asked “Isn’t the blockchain easier than (traditional payment platforms)?”
Unfortunately this one didn't add any new information. It's just 'opinion' from someone very unfamiliar with the space.
This is very much in the vein of the infamous Dropbox announcement. Indeed, these technologies in their current form require a leap of imagination to see working at scale.
What's missing from this article is: (1) thoughts on anything specific happening in the space and (2) a sense of wonder about what new things have come from it.
"Crypto" is in one reading a massive flurry of activity to see how cryptography might transform society. Most experiments will probably fail, but it seems untenable to argue that the answer is: it's a fraud. We can approach this with curiosity or with derision. The choice is yours.
Dropbox was released a year before Bitcoin, and quickly went on to completely change file storage for the average person (alongside its many clones).
Why has Bitcoin not achieved anything similar?
The adoption looks different because it's not an apples to apples comparison. The appropriate comparison would be between "blockchain/crypto" and "cloud." In that comparison, the Dropbox equivalent likely hasn't been released yet. And even still, the technologies are different enough that I'd expect different timelines. The inherent difficulty of implementing cryptographic systems to the highest standards, and the regulatory hurdle implied by the fact that any token is arguably a security, matter.
Also, for what it's worth, you can send money to anyone in the world instantly now.
My personal opinion is that interesting things will start to happen after we realize there's an architectural sleight of hand in the "web3" vision and it doesn't really make sense. Projects that recognize this are already gaining traction.
Ok fine, Amazon S3 was launched in 2006, only two years before bitcoin. The entire cloud industry is just a smidge older than crypto.
> Also, for what it's worth, you can send money to anyone in the world instantly now.
You could do that without crypto before, and you can still do it now without crypto. I'm not saying that nobody gets any use from crypto. What I'm saying is that these arguments that we're early in the adoption curve just aren't true. The lack of adoption might be because crypto isn't solving problems for most people.
Literally every single statement in this opening paragraph is demonstrably objectively false, regardless of where you stand on cryptocurrencies.
It’s not worth abandoning objective reality to signal to your tribe.
> That's one paragraph and already I can feel the simmering controversy, the reddening faces, the indignation and the angry accusations that I don't know what I'm talking about.
What can I do with Web3 that I can't do or have trouble doing any other way?
You don't need blockchains and other such cruft for a simple signature system, but there's nothing on the web that actually makes use of such a system except for some government systems or intranets. Currently, every website asks for an email address and a username, but for most people that email address can easily be taken from them. This is especially bad for services that work with "magic links".
WebAuthn and now FIDO2 may soon fix this problem, tieing your base identity to a cryptographic key, either in hardware or software, with email as a mere recovery option if the worst were to happen.
As for an answer to your question: use the core protocol to generate speculative value through hype and pyramid schemes and cash out big time in a bigger-sucker scheme before you're found out.
Perhaps you aren’t interested in that; that’s okay. It’s the main thing that was made possible by this invention that was not possible before.
But most of it seems at least arguably in the ballpark. If you really believe it's all "demonstrably objectively false" that should be pretty easy to demonstrate, so feel free to expand. Unless you're mainly aiming to "signal to your tribe"?
We have lit a metaphorical forest on fire with proof-of-work mining and been told that it's good for the environment. We have charged a weeks wages in transaction fees for a loaf of bread and been told that it's good for the poor. We have seen people lose their life savings over typos and been told that it's a good store of value. We have allowed blockchain founders to walk away with billions of stolen savings and been told that it's decentralized.
As a generalization, blockchains and cryptocurrencies cause more far more damage than good.