Web3 Is Going Just Great | Hacker News Reader

Web3 Is Going Just Great

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23 pointsdotcoma15 comments

This will be right up HN's alley, but going against the grain here: what these cherry picked news sites do is showcase the very worst of the cryptocurrency space, which overshadows the actual merits of the technology. Grifters and scam artists have existed in every novel human venture, from the gold rush to the internet. The fact that they also exist in crypto says more about human nature than crypto itself.

These sites and the people who only propagate negative news as some type of proof that the entire space is rotten do more of a disservice to humanity than the scammers. There are plenty of genuinely beneficial uses of this technology that are worth exploring, and focusing only on the negative is throwing the baby out with the bath water. It only stops healthy discussion and propagates the meme that anything crypto-related is automatically a scam.

I urge everyone to be more nuanced and open minded, especially on this forum.

Why is there no equivalent page with the overwhelming successes of this technology in the real world?

We all know why.

> There are plenty of genuinely beneficial uses of this technology that are worth exploring.

Please inform us of said beneficial uses. Thank you.

For any use case where a decentralized public consensus mechanism would be a good fit. I'm not going to argue for a specific product, but you can use your open mind and creativity to think of a few.

My point is that propagating the notion that blockchain/crypto/web3 is automatically a scam is counterproductive for adopting novel solutions to the problems we currently face.

While I agree that not everything that uses the (sacred) blockchain is necessarily a scam, the technology has been around for more than a decade, and I think we have precious little proof, if any at all, of it being used for anything other than crypto -- and cryptocurrencies haven't been useful for much apart from shady deals and betting that one can find a greater fool than oneself.

If you can't name even one specific product and only have us "creatively think of some" (none of us can come up with, hence asking YOU about it), then maybe there is none.

I can certainly name some, but then this thread will devolve into arguing how these products are actually scams as well, which I wanted to avoid.

But since you all insist:

- Brave's BAT is the best alternative web business model that gets rid of the advertising middleman plaguing the modern web, and all the associated privacy concerns, while having less friction than paywalls.

- Blockchains are a great fit for storing DNS, identity and certificate records. E.g. Handshake domains, Namecoin, etc.

- Despite the overwhelming negativity around it, there are many benefits of cryptocurrencies as well. Projects like Monero preserve privacy, and avoid exorbitant bank wire and middleman transfer fees (Western Union, etc.).

I'm sure someone will be able to list a bunch of reasons why all of these are worse than traditional technologies, and I can certainly name some myself, but this proves my point that these arguments are not done in good faith, and do nothing to address the issues this technology can solve. It would be refreshing to see an opponent of these technologies steelman the case for them, rather than join in the cargo cult against them, which is so easy to do. This is what I'm asking you to do, instead of lazily expect someone else to come up with some proof that meets your unreasonably high standards.

Bank fees are fees. There is no technical requirement whatsoever to come up with blockchain nor cryptocurrency to get rid of fees. They can be set to zero if public will is there. In fact my Citibank account has zero fees for worldwide SWIFT transfers in twelve native currencies plus all others via currency exchange. I honestly don't know a single crypto currency that would reach more people cheaper than that (considering losses on fiat->crypto->fiat exchanges and volatility of cryptocurrencies). Charging exorbitant fees is a business problem not a technical problem.

(e.g. trading stocks with a brokerage used to be very expensive until discount brokers set charges to 0. Now it costs little to nothing to execute trades.)

>Brave's BAT is the best alternative web business model that gets rid of the advertising middleman plaguing the modern web

I don't understand Brave just goes out and signs their own advertising deals. Essentially like using Chrome and using a google site. Google could do this too but would be a nightmare.

>Blockchains are a great fit for storing DNS, identity and certificate records.

As with the other comment, sure you could do it with blockchain but theres often better solutions.

> middleman transfer fees (Western Union, etc.).

The fundamental problem is people still have to deal with fiat money. that conversion always carries a fee.

> I don't understand Brave just goes out and signs their own advertising deals. Essentially like using Chrome and using a google site. Google could do this too but would be a nightmare.

No, it wouldn't be the same at all.

- Brave ads don't track users and violate their privacy.

- Users can earn BAT by viewing ads, which they can then use to support their favorite sites directly.

- Brave ads are opt-in. If you fund your BAT wallet externally, you can disable ads altogether while still supporting the sites you visit. This is the crucial step which allows eliminating the advertising middleman altogether.

Please read more about how BAT works.

> As with the other comment, sure you could do it with blockchain but theres often better solutions.

Better in what way? DNS is technically decentralized, but it's effectively controlled by ICANN and large registrars. Companies own entire sets of gTLDs, and the most popular resolvers are operated by large corporations. Only 13 root name servers resolve queries the entire internet depends on. This system is susceptible to hijacking.

Parts of this are related to registrations, and parts are operational. I'm not saying that the blockchain is the answer to all these problems, but it's a step in the right direction that opens the door to further discussion.

> The fundamental problem is people still have to deal with fiat money. that conversion always carries a fee.

So? That's out of scope for what this technology can help with. Besides, there are stores and entire marketplaces where only crypto is exchanged.

Sorry, but these are all lazy dismissals.

To be fair, there are valid issues that should be addressed with these technologies, but nothing will be done if the conversation is stopped in its tracks at the first mention of bad words.

It reminds me of the discussions around nuclear power. It is perceived so negatively by the public that its use is being abandoned, yet it has a large benefit potential if used correctly. Cryptocurrencies don't carry nearly as much risk, yet are popularly vilified because it feels good to jump on the hate bandwagon, rather than honestly discuss their merits. I expect better from forums like this.

- Brave ads don't track users and violate their privacy.

Yes ad tracking and personalization can be disabled as well through google.

- Users can earn BAT by viewing ads, which they can then use to support their favorite sites directly.

Any ad supported site, you're already supporting by visiting. You can argue its additional but its still supported on visit and display of ads.

- If you fund your BAT wallet externally, you can disable ads altogether while still supporting the sites you visit.

This is fundamentally false. A creator first has to know about it and then sign up and etc.

> opens the door to further discussion.

So you agree.

>Besides, there are stores and entire marketplaces where only crypto is exchanged.

Where can I pay bills with crypto ?

I expect better from forums like this.

I very much struggle to think of an application for blockchain (by which I mean a distrubuted ledger and consensus) which isn't better served by some other approach, except for maybe the core thing they were created for: digital distributed coins. Almost every other application is better off with a different approach, because to interact with anything else in the world you need to trust some specific parties (not necessarily a single one), and at that point while there is quite plausibly value in having a distributed electronic ledger in terms of tamper-resistance, transparency, and efficiency, you might as well delegate consensus to those parties, since you must trust them anyway. If you do otherwise you basically just have made a worse solution (both economically, usually, because you wind up tying everything to some token or another, and technically, because blockchains have terrible capacity for transactions as well as many more risks of errors in whatever 'smart contracts' you concoct).

And this has proven true in practice: blockchain has huge amount of money sloshing around due to the hype, and yet there really are basically no success stories in terms of applying it to acutally solve problems (there's plenty of people selling shovels during the gold rush, of course, but that doesn't represent value to anyone outside the space). They have shown some success as a means of exchange for those who cannot use the normal banking system, which primarily means criminal activity (though there is enough cases where at least it does not seem morally wrong, like escaping capital controls in countries without a stable currency), but this does not justify the valuation and especially does not justify the ranking of the current coins (note that monero, which arguably achieves the best privacy of any coin and sees a lot of use in this case, has a relatively low market cap because it's banned from most exchanges)

Can you name one real world product that doesn't have a better performing non-crypto alternative?

censorship-resistant payments and finance

regulated blockchain applications however, have no utility I can think of

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