I have yet to see any value provided by Ethereum, full stop. Its sole purpose is to enable wealth extraction. 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.
“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.
Let me put it simply: the ecosystem is built on bad tech. Immutable transaction history is stupid because it enshrines bad transactions as absolute fact, making the fight over established history competitive and zero-sum. The transaction times make legitimate transactions inconvenient or impossible. The gas fees are unconscionable in how large they can inflate and how rapidly they shift. Proof of Stake is designed to entrench the power of early movers by ensuring marginal rewards go to those with more.
It is a bad system by which to organize people.
It prevent some entity arbitrarily deciding which transactions are deemed bad
> The transaction times make legitimate transactions inconvenient or impossible
I'm guessing all you know is Bitcoin 10min block times, that's ancient tech and the industry has moved past that. Transactions confirm in seconds, and near instant on rollups
> The gas fees are unconscionable in how large they can inflate and how rapidly they shift
Again, rollups are cheap and only getting cheaper (should be 1/100th progressively over the next 2 years)
> Proof of Stake is designed to entrench the power of early movers by ensuring marginal rewards go to those with more
This is a fallacy and has been debunked time and time again
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.