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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> Blockchain is the greatest technological fraud of the last decade. A fraud so simple, so ridiculous and yet so brilliant, it's taken in even some genuine experts in its thrall of empty hype and false promises. On top of this fraud sits the even greater fraud of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, which are nothing more than unregulated, unlicensed, wild west securities. They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity and a Ponzi scheme in effect if not name for everyone else.

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.

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You forgot the second paragraph

> 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?

With Web3 you get the benefit of knowing that nobody will ever view your content again.

A good question indeed.

One thing cryptography solves in web3 that I haven't seen any recent alternatives for is decentralised identity.

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.

Didn't know PGP created in the 90s was part of web3 even though web2 wasn't coined till the 2000s. Nobody uses PGP because it's a pain in the ass - was back then and still is today. Decentralization is a solution looking for a problem.

Distributed, trustless consensus. This allows for a protocol-issued currency that is censorship resistant without a centralized issuing authority.

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.

There's some hyperbole in there - eg. "They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity" might be more accurate (if less entertaining) rewritten as "Their use as currency is dominated by the criminal sector".

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"?

The rewrite in your first paragraph is also objectively false.

Please enlighten us because from where I stand it definitely looks mostly true.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's all a gigantic fraud, as there are some small worthwhile innovations in distributed cryptographic verification. However, almost every single addition to that point is riddled with corruption and scams for what is essentially a gigantic linked list.

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.

Can you please demonstrate? There are 4 sentences and maybe 8 or 9 statements in there.

I would go so far as to say it’s misinformation, surely there’s no payment processors that would fine them for that.

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