Web3 is the crypto nonsense. It was a rebrand attempt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
It’s sad that blockchain went the way it did, because it’s probably a great technology when you don’t expect it to revolutionize the entire internet.
It really isn't. There's nothing legal it can do that something else can't do better. It's not even that good at the illegal stuff.
Eh, Treasuries should probably be traded on a blockchain. Cryptocurrency is nonsense. But the tech has legs. It just needs to, ironically, clear its way of the crypto/web3 crowd first.
A blockchain without the economic carrot-stick power to protect its own integrity and internal rules, power that comes from aligning the behavior of otherwise unrelated and even mutually antagonistic custodial participants by incentivizing their common interest in getting rich (or at least not losing their existing wealth), is no more than a database with superfluous "decentralization theater" yak shaving bolted on.
If defecting from the game doesn't cost you a meaningful penalty (and such cost is defined by a fixed unit of measure, in order to distinguish in-game gains from losses) then you are not compelled to follow its rules except by your own conscience. This would be noble, but it would not be a blockchain.
seems like it would work...
Bitcoin ATMs are an interesting example because they involve at least one trusted third party - the Bitcoin ATM operator.
This is one significant advantage of Bitcoin, that it works for the unbanked.
One thing I definitely didn’t need any more of back then was glamorized systems of financial predation and exploitation targeting me because of it. There’s no version of the world where the cryptocurrency ecosystem as it actually is, rather than how it is idealized to be, would have made my plight better had it existed at the time.
In any case, it still seems like a non-sequitur.
I’m just laughing at the premise that the many, many, many billion dollar investments and valuations of cryptocurrency firms, and the unending deluge of fraud and scams they reliably leave in their wake is meaningfully offset by the total amount of money transacted in the niche of homeless friends who need fast cash from their wealthy friend who is half way around the world outside of normal business hours. I mean, if that’s the case, then it would really behoove Western Union and MoneyGram to keep a few locations open on the weekend.
I don't know; who does? I said it was bad at all the things.
It's a back door attempt to fundamentally rewire how value is routed through society, and in the abstract this _might_ be a good thing (perhaps too generous with that 'might') in practice it cannot possibly happen due to physical constraints on consensus formation at the global, realtime scale that it would have to happen. As a result shortcuts are taken (or appear organically, i.e. exchages) in the form of centralized nodes of consensus settlement (what the promoters like to call Layer 2, sharding, or similar), and it's the people controlling these centralized nodes who end up becoming the new kings of this "revolutionized" system, the trust-me-bro's of trustlessness. I've met some of them, and they are not people who I would ever want to have anyone I care about to be under the thumb of.
That's fundamentally a bad thing. I want my social contracts enforced socially. The rot is at the heart.
* were not for HN's character limit my username would have started with the word 'block'
Web 3.0 as Tim Berners-Lee envisions it might have some legs, but web3 was a always an empty marketing vessel.