I keep hearing this bullshit ancecdotal phrase repeated by some people on HN.

“I have not seen X”.

Well, plenty of other people have. Maybe you haven’t personally experienced hunger, doesn’t mean that everyone in the world is fed either.

Here’s the thing —- whenever someone brings up legitimate applications of Web3, you just ignore them, slink out of the conversation, and then elsewhere continue to say “I have not seen any value provided”. It’s a no true scotsman fallacy all the way down.

The most harm Web3 decentralized finance has done is to people who voluntarily put some of their assets into it — and the vast majority was actually done by Centralized services that claimed to be part of Web3 but were more of the old “trust me” garbage. The kind you like.

By contrast, downsides of other things like fossil fuels, non-biodegradeable plastics and AI are far greater, and you can’t opt out of them.

In every single way, your disingenuous argument against Web3 sucks.

>The telephone and email are also useful for legitimate transactions.

Many people find Ethereum useful for legitimate transactions. In this case, you wouldn't even be using Ethereum. Just the public-private key pairs created by the Ethereum browser wallet.

>They also take many orders of magnitude less electricity than Ethereum

Since implementing the merge, Ethereum uses very little electricity:

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/04/26/ethereums-lifetime-...

>Ethereum’s energy consumption from the blockchain's inception in 2015 until it moved to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism late last year is about equal to that used by all of Switzerland in just a year, according to the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF).

*

>CCAF estimates Ethereum will consume 6.56 GWh of electricity annually. To put that into perspective, the annual electricity consumption of the Eiffel Tower is 6.70 GWh, while keeping the lights on for a year at the British Museum requires 14.48 GWh.

So your criticism is at least two years outdated.

>The internal economics of the whole situation is absurd on its face. It is literally rotten and valueless, except for the purpose of cheating people.

This sounds like another anti-free-market diatribe.

Are you really unaware of the horror stories of Venmo and PayPal freezing customer accounts? Or of governments forcing their constituents to use hyper-inflating currencies?

Arguments like this want a return to serfdom, under the control of officialdom. There is no other conceivable reason why someone would not want people to have at least the option of taking custody over their own money, in a form more useful than physical cash.

In this case, there is nothing more anonymous about the Ethereum approach than a simple username/password. But there are some benefits in terms of data privacy. Most websites, especially social media, don't let you get away with just an anonymous username/password these days if you want to use their full functionality. They may want all kinds of other information from you, e.g. email address (3rd party), your phone number, ID verifcation, linked Google account with certain permissions to access private data, and so on. This data will be sent to their servers (as well as ad providers / Google) and linked with your identity. You have little control over this and can't remove it from their servers either.

With the Ethereum approach, you can control this data about yourself. For example, with zero-knowledge proofs you could prove to a service that "I am over 18 and an US resident with a valid phone number" without sending any actual information about yourself to that party. Twitter shouldn't need your phone number. It just needs to know that you have one.

Logging in with your Google account everywhere is convenient because it contains all kinds of facts about you. But you have no control over what's done with that data, either by Google or the service you're logging into. With "Log in wit Ethereum" you could get the same conveniences, but you still own your data and have full control over what's being done with it or who can access which parts of it.

Old grouch is far better than the disingenuous people running around saying “stop using this technology!! It has no value, I have never seen it and it cant have any value!!”

Basically the difference is that the username and password can be used to authenticate with that specific site and that’s it, while a “wallet” browser extension or app can let the user sign transactions and manage value outside your site, so they don’t have to trust your site (they approve all major transactions) and your site can’t impersonate them. You may think you won’t but one of your devs could go in for example and salami-slice the balances of your members, or change all the votes in a stackoverflow election etc.

The fact that you're creating a user ID on a service is already third party. That service owns your username and you also have to trust them to store your password securely.

Ethereum accounts are not tied to any service. They are just a public/private keypair so they can be used as portable usernames.

With one Ethereum account you can have endless passwords that you don't need to remember

Ethereum is proof of stake and doesn’t use tons of energy.

I get you have an axe to grind but it would be better in a thread about Ethereum tech rather than an application. You are being really annoying and against the spirit of HN.

The electricity argument has been made moot a while ago with the switch the proof of stake.

Not all NFTs need to be bought or sold. They can just as easily be used as membership tokens that are given away.

Also, according to the website, only some of the communities will be locked behind NFTs. Others appear to be free to join just with an Ethereum account used as auth.

I haven't used the service so I'm not going to defend it but it makes sense for web3 communities to base their auth around the tech they're already using, and that is crypto wallets. Everyone in the community already has crypto wallets so the friction to join is very low.

> My understanding is that they use NFTs on the Ethereum chain for authentication

Your understanding is imperfect. You use your private key on Ethereum to authenticate, not an NFT. It does seem like certain NFTs gate access to different parts of the site.

> NFTs are still wildly damaging to the ecosystem, with how much electricity they demand

Not really anymore. As others have pointed out, the switch to PoS massively reduced Ethereum's energy demands, by ~99.5%. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/04/26/ethereums-lifetime-...

> Their sole purpose is to be traded as chits in a series of wealth extractions, until some unfortunate sucker is left holding the bag on a worthless blob of data that (rightfully) nobody wants.

Ya, unfortunately the space is rife with grifters and hype in weird places, but that doesn't seem relevant to this specific project though.

> So I believe it is a reasonable assumption that it is in this form so the creators can get in on the scam-o-sphere that is Ethereum/NFT.

Or they're trying to make something legit within this space. The Internet's early use cases were largely a bunch of scams and over-hyped projects that failed miserably. That didn't exactly hold for long though.

After the Ethereum merge, the Energy Usage of any ETH token is negligible. Do you have any source for this "NFTs are damaging because how much electricity they demand" or is just plain old Hacker News "Crypto Bad" fud?

Oh please. Data has value dependng on how large and powerful a community is.

Votes in an election are data, it’s meaningless unless the outcome of the election results in real world consequences.

Balances are just data, unless people are willing to give goods and services for those balances.

A police officer flashing a badge is data, but be may be in a position to arrest you.

Verifiable Credentials is an entire Web2 standard about data. You dont complain about it … well, Web3 assets are like transferable and mutable Verifiable Credentials. All that certificate validation expiry etc. can be done by the current owner, for instance, instead of third parties. It can achieve self-sovereignty, it can reduce a site of massive liability for which we now reuire surety bonds, and more. Even FINCEN sees the value: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20...