Web 1.0 and 2.0 were created by engineers to solve problems. Web 3/3.0 was invented by finance bros to disguise their various scams as the next technology revolution.
Web3, not Web 3.0, not the same thing at all, the latter is the next incarnation of Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the web and has nothing to do with finance and crypto bros.
It's important to make the distinction because 3.0 is actually important.
They really don't even distinguish between Web3/3.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
Anyone here like using PayPal? What if instead you had the equivalent of cash that you could use on the internet?
Web3 is attempting to create an economy decoupled from existing currencies (fiat). Unlike a country seigniorage determined ahead of time, and is publicly visible for all to see.
If the idea of creating an internet native economy with its own currency and financial tools is not intellectually stimulating to you, then look elsewhere instead of completely hating on the space.
Yes there are scams; no that is not why the tech was created.
That's the sales pitch, but the implementations all require basically anonymous, unaccountable intermediaries that are trusted.
That is in effect what your statement is implying.
I’ll preface this by stating: running financial experiments on retail investors is immoral and likely criminal.
That being said, how many failures did Goddard have before his first successful liquid rocket? A lot!
He was ridiculed in newspapers, touted as crazy, and seen as a failure by a broad community.
If you’re interested, pay a visit to NASA’s Goddard Space and Flight center (named after the father of modern rocketry).
Why should failures of the past (most of which were human folly or greed) inhibit us from innovating our way to the future?
Crypto isn’t actually trying; the intermediaries that need to be trusted are fundamental to the concept, despite the sales pitch.
If you want to direct commerce without trusted intermediaries, just do that, it’s called barter and it works in certain circumstances.
The “problem” crypto pretends to solve is that turning that in to monetary exchange that is, replacing at least one part of that direct exchange with a fungible token traded not for its own direct utility but instead optimized for use in exchange with third parties for other goods and services, makes it suddenly rely on trusting external actors and social systems, but that isn’t a solvable problem, it is unalterably inherent in the very concept of monetary exchange. All any system can do is obscure that, reducing the probability that the trust extended is warranted.
Web3: you stop paying a network, your data stays online. Either because it's permanent by default (blockchain, blockweave) or because people deem it interesting and pin it (IPFS)
Seems like a fundamental improvement to me.
https://coloradosun.com/2022/11/21/brush-eastern-colorado-se...
> Two school administrators on Colorado’s Eastern Plains were accused of possessing child pornography when they investigated a school sexting case last April. No one said the men were trying to distribute the images or had bad intent. The girl in the photos and her parents begged police and prosecutors to drop charges against the men. But one of them, 32-year-old Bradley Bass, is facing up to 12 years in prison and the possibility of being branded a sex offender. He’d have to give up his career in education, and wouldn’t be able to parent his toddler and baby boy.
> Bass violated a Colorado law that says even unintentionally possessing explicit images of kids is akin to having child pornography. Even parents could be prosecuted under the broad language of the statute.
That's not gonna be a fun collision between technology and the legal system.
Web3 - stores a few text files and rotten hyperlinks to jpgs of (if you're lucky) poorly-drawn apes and (if you're unlucky) rugs, while setting billions of dollars on fire.
Your assumptions seem to be based on the (rather specific) use-case of art NFTs. They got quite some hype, but to be honest, I didn't get them either.
FTFY.
Also, nothing stops you from storing the critical data in S3 too. I wouldn't bet what will last longer as a permanent storage.
2. Dropbox and Drive are cheaper and better. S3 is cheaper.
2. And gone if you stop paying.
2. No, it'll just be gone if crypto crashes enough and the miners sell or turn down their hardware (Probably precipitated by some fraud in some other part of the ecosystem unwinding).
There's a reason nobody has built the next Dropbox on Filecoin. [1]
[1] I mean, you can do that, if you have Einstein hair, and your goal is to grift dumb VC money, but you're not going to put together a better product.
Are Filecoin nodes all hosting files for free? I can put a terabyte of files on there and it'll never go away?
A seamless on-ramp from a bank account to a crypto wallet will really change the way we pay for things online. I believe this on-ramp is coming with CBDCs.
Edit: HN is hopelessly anti Wayne Gretzky when it comes to crypto :D
Edit 2: I should have mentioned 'online'
I have to use my physical card maybe once every 2 months/once per quarter as an anti-fraud step. My phone contactless pays for everything, and anything it can't (like a car or whatever) I can do sub 2 hour but in practice instant bank to bank transfer.
Moving money instantly and without transaction costs is a decade plus ago solved problem
Where? Having lived in various cities in Europe, Asia and Australia, I can assure you, Visa and Wise and Remitly is still taking from half to 3 percent of all your transactions.
And the other commentor is right, using credit cards in any non-american country is super simple and completely without hassle. Same with sending money to anyone I know, I just need their email address or phone number. Happens in seconds, is completely safe and ensured and best of all, reversible if there is a mistake.
For real, who has issues paying with a CC at a register? Or contactless payments?
Don't crypto payments like bitcoin take a bit to go through? Like longer than you'd want someone tying up a cashier line?
Modern credit payments from a consumer standpoint is tap a card or a phone on a reader.
If you're claiming that there are vendors giving a 2.5% discount for using crypto for anything, you've got some evidence to produce.
P.S. It's not always 2.5%, either. Could be 1.5% at scale.
Or more, yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OxtTGml564 that said technically Visa will punish you by removing you from their network for doing this.
What? Why? Here in Europe, you can just pay with SEPA direct debit. You don't need credit cards or paper checks to pay for stuff, neither in the meatspace nor online. The only thing services like PayPal are good for is fraud protection (for both sides).
So much of what we see in the US financial industry and the workarounds created to bypass their bullshit - anything from "payday loan" places advancing money for a paycheck over paychecks or rent checks themselves to Bitcoin to bypass transaction fees - is just not an issue here. Our wages get automatically deposited into our bank accounts, rent gets either automatically sent by your bank or drafted by the lender's bank, and any kind of card transaction is capped at 0.2 (DC)/0.3%(CC) [1].
[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015...
I am fascinated by the ridiculous claims that this somehow makes things hard.
... and pay a lot of interest to their banks as a result. Here in Europe, we don't need to pay interest for credit cards or worry about paying CC bills on time to avoid them, as we have strong consumer protection laws in general and SEPA direct debits can be clawed back no-questions-asked for three days.
How many people have the financial discipline or the financial education? Banks are making a truckload of money on that not being the case.
... and when you talk about "experience", what do you mean here? I doubt there's a much slicker payment experience than Apple Pay when a vendor supports that, and I'm also pretty sure that my disputing a transaction with Chase is better than an equivalent crypto experience.
I bought a subscription to a tool called Icy.tools a while back. The sign-up process was as follows:
- Click the "Sign-Up" button on the website - Click the "Sign" button on the web wallet pop-up. - Click "Pay" on the next screen - Click "Approve Transaction" on the web wallet pop up.
That's it. No forms to fill. No emails to share. No credit card info to fill up. An equivalent non-crypto experience would be Sign-up > Share email > Verify email > Fill payment details > Enter OTP on credit card website
I use Sign In with Apple[0], and it's literally a single click which hides my email, and one more click with biometric confirmation for payments. That's... one fewer click than crypto, and was easier to set up than your crypto wallet, without putting my funds at risk.
Apply Pay Express Transit payment flow for e.g. the subway: touch phone to sensor and go.
Speculating on 'crypto' can indeed be considered nonsense.
Owning your identity (instead of Google) and being able to communicate and send money directly to your peers for almost free (instead of Facebook / Twitter controlling who youcan communicate with, and Visa / Wise.com taking a chunk of all your transactions) is a MASSIVE deal.
The second isn't as much of a killer app as you think to normies, and neither is the first.
I don’t live in the US and I assure you Visa is still a very big part of daily life in all of Europe, Asia and Australia.
If you google decentralized service in an incognito tab you’ll see why people ask this. The rest of the world gets Wikipedia articles about engineering distributed systems (like database clusters) and distributed consensus (like raft). Since that’s (probably) not what you mean, I submit that as the person using a standard term in a non-standard way that it’s on you to define it.
You are asking it bad faith hoping I was a cryptobro. It’s an obvious red herring and I’m not feeding the troll.
Questions have been asked, and vitriol has been your only response. Who’s actually the troll, one wonders.