Show HN: Web3 is not community-led, as much as they try to claim they are | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Web3 is not community-led, as much as they try to claim they are

tribecrafters.io

33 pointsjdbohrman23 comments

The basis for the Web3/crypto "community" is to extract value from the next sucker that comes along. There is no community.

There is a community. We write open source contracts, we participate in DAO governance, we build products.

I think they mean that rather than the traditional sense of community (a group with common interests or characteristics who look out for and assist each other, such as farmers helping bring in each others crops if one gets sick at harvest time), Web3 communities are more like an organised crime gang or a cult or something. In that they exist by taking advantage of people outside the group (or at lower tiers within the group) and are generally malevolent.

>We write open source contracts, we participate in DAO governance, we build products

You (and the people around you) might even be some of the genuine believers in web3 and just want to build a cool product or make the world better in some way, but you cannot deny that in the web3 space you're vastly outnumbered by frauds, swindlers, and people generally looking to get rich quick at the expense of others.

> Web3 communities are more like an organised crime gang or a cult or something

This is just not true at all. We discuss governance proposals in open forums, we submit requests for comments, we discuss pros and cons as community members, we sometimes debate vigorously, we sometimes are pretty unanimous. We submit code to Github or Gitlab and publish verified smart contracts to Etherscan for all to review.

Some communities that are interesting that I have participated in include: ENS (Ethereum Name Service): https://discuss.ens.domains/ Rocket Pool: https://dao.rocketpool.net/ Aave: https://governance.aave.com/ Optimism: https://snapshot.org/#/opcollective.eth We Are All Going to Die (decentralized D&D): https://snapshot.org/#/wagdie.eth

etc etc

We're not vastly outnumbered by frauds. The frauds showed up during the peak bull cycle phase to get rich quick, and they make a lot of noise. But a lot of them ended up blowing themselves up on high leverage and have already met their due. I wish there was a way to keep the swindlers completely out of the space, but given its permissionless nature, it's one of those trade-offs, like living in the wild west. You're both free and vulnerable, so you have to look out for yourself.

I think that given time, the scammers shake themselves out, and the cream rises to the top.

In most cases top 5 wallets are friends and family or exchanges. Just an illusion of democracy

DAOs aren't democracies. They are organizations. Like LLCs or foundations or sororities or churches or what have you, they are diverse in their structure and in their governance rules.

Blog posts are usually excluded from 'Show HH', fine as a normal submission of course https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

My apologies, I'm still feeling my way around, I usually don't use this place but I've been checking it out!

The community of scammers begs to disagree

LMAOOO brutal haha

Why is this a Show HN? Seems like a regular old article to me.

I'm still learning where everything goes my bad haha

What would make majority of real humans (not bots and scammers) to agree on some project as the future of Web3?

> I have nothing against the values Web3 claims to stand for. That said, Web3 is not going great.

regarding "web3 is not going great", which links to a web site showing exploits and problems in poorly run organizations, maybe someone should just put up a parallel site that shows the ever expanding group of projects and communities that have existed without incident?

like construction sites that showcase "X days without incident", maybe that industry started putting those signs up in the past because people only saw negative headlines and conflated construction with the entire concept of having office space, like people do with crypto

if there are, for example, 5,000 projects at time of writing, and 300 of them get funds stolen or exploited in some way, thats still a headline of an exploit every single business day of the year and none for the other 4,700 projects. that's pretty much the state of crypto discord today, and its been that way for the past 10 years.

I think it's a good idea. I somewhat pay attention to headlines in that space, but I literally don't know of a single cryptocurrency community that has launched a successful product, outside of perhaps "platforms for trading other cryptocurrencies". My opinion of blockchains is that they aren't actually useful for anything except for implementing currencies, and currencies need a tangible market economy behind them to be useful.

Maybe I am wrong, but I haven't seen it yet.

There's literally one project that I've seen being truly useful: https://pooltogether.com/

It's cool because it's not possible to do this without crypto (in terms of trust). But because it uses a smart contract you can be sure that when you put your money into it, it won't steal it.

thanks, yeah “existing without incident” and “product you would find useful for anyone that you’re aware of” are two different standards

but perhaps seeing a list of things that are going great and wondering what everyone’s up to in those many communities would be a first step

The detractors have already made up their mind. I count myself as one of them in the wider space because I'm pretty much a BTC maxi, but the same applies there.

I mean, Bitcoin has been running for 12 years and there's been, as far as I know, one hiccup (the 2010 overflow bug, before it was worth really anything at all, that was fixed by miners simply abandoning that chain). Yet it's "died" about a trillion times in the media.

It doesn't matter if it works, it doesn't work _for them_.

I think about that standard from maxis and others as well, there are many projects and blockchains that grow much quicker than bitcoin did, but are put to an even higher standard than bitcoin was

“Oh no, block propagation halted for a few hours in your first year since the genesis block, its dead! its unreliable! its different than bitcoin’s similarly embarrassing problems because there’s so much capital involved and all possible confidence must therefore be lost irreparably”

and its like…. not really? the nodes will update their software just like bitcoin did

Please do so.

I've been thinking about it, but there are already so many telegram bots that show smart contract deployments and you can look at the name of the smart contract and find the corresponding community on discord, in some periods of time they are deployments nearly every second

so it's like who is it for? its not really useful for "web3 skeptics", the goal post would just move to something even further unrelated to not having negative incidents occurring to people that interact with the contract

still mulling it over, since it takes time and effort with no benefit

edit: actually, some of the grant programs would likely support development and maintenance of this

A “days without a $1,000,000,000 security incident” billboard?

If it ever goes over 365 everyone gets a free taco.

—edit—

Which reminds me of these “your speed” digital signs with three digits they have in one of the suburbs of Phoenix, at that point it’s more of a challenge than anything.

> A “days without a $1,000,000,000 security incident” billboard?

no project represents the whole industry or concept, that's the point. its frankly weird that is the level of discourse on this topic, currently.

so you might be able to eek out some dopamine from your kind of humor, for now, but I think more accurate information amongst the non-incident creating projects will help the discourse improve

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