bidder33

good title!

similar to https://spawning.ai/ai-txt

“i’m sorry that your warrantless surveillance regime was built on the assumption that people would always need intermediaries to transact”

https://x.com/NeerajKA/status/1346836020927619077

Privacy.

you know stablecoin payments have as much volume as visa right?

as much as people don’t want crypto to be useful, it is. even “solved” problems can have better solutions

having exhausted the number of people he can sell his “crypto bad” books to, gerard has now pivoted to “ai bad”.

nothing new. https://pessimistsarchive.org/

the “kinks to work out” is a funny way of saying “gaping holes that make this idea completely unworkable”

and given the endless stream of indie games government funding doesn’t seem to be a necessity.

i’ve been using it (with a stt->prompt->response->tts loop) for chinese practice and it is very good. being able to say “role play a market” and drop into it and switch mid sentence between languages when i get stuck and it just works it out and helps is amazing. i still think a human tutor is required for foundations but gpt is very helpful for practice.

on the other hand, an opt-in international alternative financial system is a pretty cool idea and warrants further investigation and more hacking

I think playing with money systems, ideas of value etc is interesting. The average contribution was about $50 - so like a kickstarter for a fan club.

and no, the plan is not to burn the book. there is an ongoing joke by a few people in the dao. but they do not represent the majority and the aims of the dao explicitly are to do with the preservation and protection of the book. so thats not going to happen.

but people arent actually interested in conversation here. hn hates crypto. we get it. people hating something they arent a part of and dont understand. But we are still going to have fun and make things, and the good vibes win in the end.

Or maybe it is simply a group of people who love jodos vision for dune. the idea of a film as a guiding prophet, visions of a flowing creative universe. and we want to play with that.

so we raised a bunch of funds and bought a cool book. now we are making an animation. we've been discussing ideas like sending funds to the makers of Jodorowskys Dune documentary which didnt even break even, as a way of thanking them too.

y'know, playing in the way we were taught, as hackers, as kids who grew up on the internet. To go out and do things, make things. hang out with our friends.

but hn would rather take a few snippets, call us all scammers and frauds, and hate on us.

but whatever.. we're gonna keep having fun ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

nft financial speculation is not the problem, it is a symptom.

you dont hate non fungible tokens, you hate the abusive financial system that we all live under.

the funny thing is that p2p programmable money databases and things like nfts could offer us something different. it does seem that a lot of attention (and vc money) goes to people rebuilding existing things 'but on blockchain'. but there is a lot of interesting anti-speculation crypto protocols/standards being built too -> things like circles ubi.

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away." - Stuart Brand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

as the article mentioned, web3 was a term coined back in 2014. It was very much a reaction to "web2.0" silicon valley years which was probably felt a lot stronger back then. the term flew under the radar for a while, but the past six months people suddenly got annoyed by it.

Running nodes is pretty easy with setups like DappNode. Full eth nodes arent that big, i synced a new one in a couple of days last week onto an old ssd.

Most heavy contract data is stored offchain on ipfs, so you can just pin the stuff you are interested in.

Where i would agree is indexing/searching lots of data is a pain. You cant just give an address and get a list of tokens associated with it, you have to call every token and get its balance. It makes sense, but its annoying, and is why opensea api is so popular for nfts. But i have hope with services like TheGraph growing that search and index also has distributed and resilient design and we become less dependant on one endpoint api.

full nodes have access to all the data in an archive node.

imo these nfts that are "host it on an endpoint on our apache server" will die away as their fragility fails them. its mostly quick-buck thinking.

yes you can do a bad job with your nft contract and not think about metadata location etc. but you could also do a good job (ipfs/arweave). There are plenty that will last as long as the chain they are on with no problems.

Opensea shooting themselves in the foot. But its ok Zora and Foundation and others are stepping up and leading the way.

I guess as some counterpoints:

I kind of agree in some ways but i think he underplays the critical point that you have an option for voice and exit from the forming centralising forces (which do get established because people like convenience/reliability/familiarity) without sacrificing your data or belongings, you can leave without losses. That is a critical difference.

His nft is delisted from a platform and his wallet calls the api of that platform. That sucks, up till now we have "too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone". But that isn't the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls it. He can still get all the data, there are other wallets, you can run them in your terminal if you like, or you can set your metamask to use your own - or someone elses - node (instead of infura). There is a choice. There are things like TheGraph making distributed indexers/search engines and something like that will replace opensea as the main nft api (if they arent building it themselves).

Add to this the more recent developments of light clients, which are coming along great and which allow us to run in-app/in-browser direct connections to the chain for calls/transactions without needing infura or a third party node.

> Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going, and this won’t just be a blip. If that’s the case, it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency.

Absolutely agree. there are a lot of people in this space who have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives pursuing their interests in it, and they will. It isn't going away and we should engage with making it as good as we can. Will it be a big thing in ten years? who knows, I can say that everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality. What will we see in the next 5?

We can absolutely bring better privacy too. Layers like aztec are working on exactly that, and zero knowledge proofs and other forms of commitments (sismo) are exploring how to do that. I think a lot of people in the space follow the ideal of "privacy for the individual, transparency for the institutions". We will get there.

> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.

i sort of agree with this, we can accept that full nodes will be ran be organisations, businesses, and nerdy individuals who also have their own funkwhale instances and homelabs. those commited to the ideals -> same as home email servers or mastodon communities.

but we can also find ways to distribute infrastructure to bring resilience to those who dont think much about these things and just want to use an app. (again with things like light clients replacing api calls to third parties). so that we care for the non-committed users and make sure the points of fragility are lessened as much as we can.

I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer "i'll be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn't helpful either.

I'd be much more interested in his thoughts on Whisper/Waku and messaging protocols, tradeoffs in validity/volition/optimistic rollups, distributed indexers, etc. He is smart enough and involved in similar things to just take that extra step to the dev forums and discussions and maybe give meaningful, helpful critique. I'm not sure what response he is expecting tbh?

The rest on gold rush and money i don't have much to say on, but mass speculation and desperation to make money is, imo, a symptom of the abusive system of work and finance that we are all forced into and everyone wants to escape. That didnt just appear with crypto/nfts. So sure, people are using something because they are making money and might not actually care about the details and the ethics - but we are also building a free(libre) opensource p2p programmable value network, and there are lots of people who also think that is amazing and worth indicating as different from the current stacks with the 'web3' tag.

Raised Catholic, but never seriously and after high school the only churches i attended were for weddings and funerals. But at some point in my twenties i lost a close friend, had some weird experiences of suffering and bliss and acceptance. Then started reading all over the place to try understand my experiences. I found the tao to be very helpful, and thomas mertons writing also very helpful. I often come back to his writing on desert mystics to start the day. And I always allow myself the time to watch the sunlight glinting off the leaves of the trees outside my window.

doesnt clash of clan s make like $1M a day or something ridiculous? at least people can resell these later on, or code something on top of them.

> PS: Please buy mine - the market price has already dropped 99%

fwiw the floor price is up from 0.04($160) to 0.14($560) overnight lol. seems these articles and sharing got the whole thing more attention, as they say no such thing as bad publicity.

this is where Minimum Anti-Collusion Infrastructure https://appliedzkp.github.io/maci/ becomes important, ideally someone should be able to prove they have voted without revealing any information of how they voted, which makes collusion difficult. This is achieved in person with voting booths and making it illegal to photograph your ballot. zero knowledge proofs + sybil resistance mechanisms like brightid or proof of humanity might make it possible online too.

There is also defi insurance. And wallets like Argent are working on fraud detection layers within L2 account abstraction (as well as social recovery and ditching seed phrases).

Many people think it will be Fintech in the front, DeFi in the back version of crypto that services mass adoption. The big difference is there is global, permissionless infrastructure for anyone to build tools/apps/services on. No more walled financial system, some kid in India can make a new banking app and it can be as useful as hsbc. They can use the same lending protocols, currency conversion, insurance protocols, and then choose what services they want on top. Maybe someone wants their banking app to be hentai death metal themed and all their moeny to be in picutres of dogs(rather than pictures of the queen or a president). Those who want self ownership and to code their own things, or arent liked by the banks (e.g. sex workers, immigrants, travellers) have just as much access to the system. To me it will be kinda like how lots of people are happy with Windows, but a smaller group like the freedom of Linux.

here is an example of where web3 would be good.

in web2 your handle gets confiscated, in web3 you own it and have the keys https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1470362934496923650

would love to see some concrete examples. because we tried building open networks and they get sybil attacked or spammed, and introducing a token to add cost to the transactions on p2p networks did seem to help their security. People dont seem to like the social aspects of that tokenisation, so whats the suggestion? Whats the next step? Is the future you see more like spotify or more like funkwhale or more like audius? How are you delivering it to the general population? How can we contribute?

Those of us working in the web3/crypto space are interested in the same values as the poster has: local, personal, private, self owned, p2p, permissionless. We are looking for ways to work on those things and provide infrastructure for others to build on.

It is increasingly clear that lots of people don't like the money/token/asset ideas of the crypto theyve seen. So do we just give up hacking on money? because i remember it was the deep distrust in existing money systems was why this all took off in the first place.

Or is money just something sacred we aren't allowed to play with? is it morally wrong? Why is it that pictures of the Queen in my wallet on pieces of paper somehow the best form of money? wouldnt you rather trade pictures of dogs in space? One of those is way more fun and doesnt bow down to a culture of inherited power.

Or is it just the mass speculation, and mania in the public which you dont like?(fuelled by abusive relationships with money and desperation to escape everyday life, which seems a bigger problem than crypto tbh). Is that because you are worried about the impact it has on the vulnerable? Could we try explore efforts in speculation-resistant currencies and trust networks like https://joincircles.net

And one point id highlight is that efficiency is often over prioritised, and resilience is more important to the survival of a network. Hosting private local nodes will never be as efficient as datacenters, so is efficiency really your priority? If everyone used Mastodon would that be as efficient as Twitter? Make the system strong and resilient, then as efficient as possible given the first constraint. First you make something that can survive, then optimise it.

DEXs(uniswap), Auction Houses(zora), Community Voting Systems(snapshot), Reputation and trust networks(circles), public goods funding(clr.fund), self publishing and fundraising(mirror, and now kickstarter), e2ee messaging and chat rooms(status/whisper), ubi and sybil resistance(proofofhumanity). These are all things I and lots of others are interacting with pretty much daily, it doesnt get so much coverage because its not all speculation and imo what people are actually angry about with crypto is more exposure to abusive capitalism games, money is a painful trauma so more of it in new forms is hard to imagine as positive. But there is plenty of useful stuff being built and I think it is progressing pretty well. 5 years ago the ideas of rights management combined with open distribution (rather than DRM that locks down distribution) was a strange idea we didnt know how to make work, now NFTs are mainstream.

In 2004 i was downloading textures and skins for the sims and xplane, and joining forums to chat and share music. Then there was a while imo where the internet felt dominated by facebook/google/youtube, but the past couple of years ive sunk into smaller communities making things in crypto/web3 and its fun and exciting. I spend most of my online time in that space. It feels more like being in a WoW guild than using twitter. There is profit/loss and speculation that excites/angers the masses, but theres also the best online communities ive ever been a part of, doing things like making games and custom skins and sharing music. Some things change and some things stay the same. Im pretty positive on the idea that making new tools, providing permissionless access, and building it with free open source software, people can do neat and surprising things. Till then people will see what they want to see, because its all there. Sturgeons law etc