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Comment by missblit | Hacker News Reader

I am admittedly extremely biased against cryptocurrencies (stop reading unless you're ready for this re-hashed rant), but I don't see how users (read: people with real money) care about any of this stuff.

On-chain games? I don't want to feel like I'm in a laggy casino, I just want to blast zombies with a rocket launcher and I can already do that perfectly fine.

Uncensorable Github? Yeah, it's called "git".

Decentralized DNS and Postgres? Yeah, it's called "DNS" and "Postgres" respectively.

Web3 twitter?

> The winning Web3 Twitter will ultimately offer the features we have been eager to see: data truly owned by users themselves, uncontrolled by one entity or even one man, multiple clients permissionlessly built, multiple options of curation algorithms that users can choose from.

Congratulations you just described Mastodon and ActivityPub. No blockchain required (though it does depend on those boring web2 technologies like HTTPS and DNS).

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Crypto is still a solution that is searching for the problem it wants to solve.

Crypto did find the problem: How to get VCs invest and a how to dump all on retail investors without an IPO if even a SPAC is too much to bother. Other problems: money laundering, tax evasion and sanction circumvention. All of those are, and I mean that, serious problems to solve for a lot of people with a lot of money on the line.

the problem it is trying to solve is pretty clear at this point and it is „how to funell money to my pocket”

> On-chain games? I don't want to feel like I'm in a laggy casino, I just want to blast zombies with a rocket launcher and I can already do that perfectly fine.

Haven't played any, but I am fan of crypto as a currency.

I _think_ the appeal is the rewards earned (whatever token on offer) can be traded outside of the game ecosystem. So people might feel like they are earning real money.

Just an assumption.

If it’s fungible and you can trade it in the open market, yes, it feels like real money because it is a few clicks away from converting to real money. So it’s gambling.

It’s just gambling—and/or “play to earn”—with all the toxic incentives that brings. The enthusiasm is in this space is just a race to leverage to relative lack of regulation of this form of gambling.

I'm struggling to find a use case where entertainment and "profitable market place" don't collide therefore turning it into work.

Once there is real value on the table won't its extraction be optimized as hell by a small group of determined "entrepreneurs".

It seems that my (casual Gamer) position will always quickly turn into "customer" in this case. Then it's just a plain old microtransaction (for varying sizes of micro) game.

Many people enjoy those (weirdly enough) but once again blockchain adds little.

In this case it seems like it's just an online version of magic which retains the card trading: https://godsunchained.com/

It can't be a very good game given their main selling point on the landing page is the fact that you'll get paid to actually play it.

> the rewards earned (whatever token on offer) can be traded outside of the game ecosystem.

This is vaporware though, real game companies will never create content for tokens they've already sold. The only game I know of that had anything like this was GW Hall of Monuments giving some kind of bonus in GW2, and that obviously didn't require a blockchain, because the company running the game has your account data in a database. And obviously no third party company would ever develop content for a token they didn't sell.

It seems like a lot of the blockchain stuff is like "You give me USD and I give you this stupid dream", instead of looking at it from the other side "why do you want my USD?"

People pitching this universal game currency or items have no freaking idea how games are designed or balanced. It’s a ridiculous idea

> Uncensorable Github? Yeah, it's called "git".

You have to host your git repository at some URL, and the people hosting that URL can be required to pull the content, the hostname can be blocked by firewalls, and the domain name can be revoked at the registrar. "It technically is available, but no one can ever find it" is not "uncensorable".

I think crypto could help with the dns. I don't like the DNS being owned by various corporations

how would crypto help dns?

Make it a 100x slower?

Reads on blockchain is fast enough to power dns infrastructure.

I'm fairly sure current DNS infrastructure doesn't use as much power as a country to achieve usable performance.

But also reading from the blockchain is not fast, and I don't know why you think that.

Blockchains do not necessarily run on proof of work mechanism. Why do you think reads from the blockchain is slow ?

Reads from the blockchain are vastly vastly slower than DNS queries, and even then we have many layers of caching between the root DNS servers and the end user. The important thing is that fundamentally getting usable performance for general users means you are unlikely to ever hit a DNS root server directly. The side effect of that is that any claimed "anti-censorship", etc mechanisms that crypto ostensibly provides immediately disappears - pretty much in line with current restrictions on explicit exchanges accepting transactions involving North Korea, terrorists, etc.

any scientific ground for your claims ?

you keep dns entries on a smart contract.

That doesn't necessarily answer the question of how crypto would help DNS though.

It escapes censorship (i.e DCMA takdowns, gov requests etc). It feels that you actually own something rather than getting a "pre-approval" from various orgs(U.S gov, ICANN, registers, resellers etc)

How? Specifically: say I want to buy foo.com who am I buying that off? if the only restriction is that no one else owns it then there seems to be close to zero cost for anyone just mass creating every domain.

Amazed at the quantity of low-effort posts in this thread. HN used to be more than this. It's hard for me to believe that people are acting in good faith here. I mean, they can't be that low in intelligence, right?

Anyway, there is an obvious application of DNS here. We're talking about a decentralized ledger --e.g., who owns what. A ledger describes who owns what. In the case of DNS, we'd be recording who (public key/address) owns which names.

It's a very sensible application of the technology/networks.

Much like our current system of banking, our current DNS system requires authorities and institutions, and requires us to trust in those institutions (e.g. ICANN).

Want a system which requires no such trust? Put it on a decentralized chain --but understand, there's probably under 3 such chains in existence currently.

> Amazed at the quantity of low-effort posts in this thread. HN used to be more than this. It's hard for me to believe that people are acting in good faith here. I mean, they can't be that low in intelligence, right?

I think HN is one of the few places that actually applies critical thinking when it comes to crypto/web3. It can be a bit jarring if you come from a Reddit echo-chamber.

> Anyway, there is an obvious application of DNS here. We're talking about a decentralized ledger --e.g., who owns what. A ledger describes who owns what. In the case of DNS, we'd be recording who (public key/address) owns which names.

And it all falls apart because the system as described is unable to deal with mistakes nor intentional abuse.

anyone can run their own resolver though. it would be annoying to get people to use your resolver, but that barrier will be there regardless of whether or not you use crypto.

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