Second, there's a distinction between energy usage and carbon emissions. Energy usage with zero carbon emissions is not bad for the environment. Bitcoin mining is perfect for carbon neutral energy sources because it can be mined anywhere, which is why Bitcoin mining energy sources are between 39% and 73% carbon neutral and growing [1].
Third, I think there is real value in a widely-used currency that is not centrally controlled. There is some cost to do this, manifest in the form of energy consumption. The fiat banking system also consumes substantial energy, and I would be curious to see a complete comparison.
In general, I get a sentiment of "it's ridiculous all these people got rich" followed by "there's a reason to justify my outrage" and, without further research, calls to ban an entire technology.
[1] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
NFTs - yes you can right click and save as. No they haven't figured out at scale how to attach the image / work to the ledger. Yes hype and pyramiding is a fucking disaster and people would go to prison trying those antics in any other industry. But digital art, music, & culture has a real deficit in ownership, provenance, etc.
Cryptocurrency - Yes there is pyramiding and wash trading galore. Maybe tether has inflated the entire market by a million percent. Yes proof of work uses too much energy. But gov't money printing, censorship, property rights, transfer complexity etc has left a vaccum for something that even resembles a currency that serves the individual.
As others have noted many times over we are very early, it is unlikely that we've yet seen what will be a broadly used solution but there is real product market fit here already illustrating massive demand.
On HN in particular how do you build something to serve to that end?
There are several NFT "thought leaders" who have casually floated the idea of eliminating "right-click save-as" functionality for NFT'd images. So it seems to be slowly evolving in the direction of a DRM scheme.
The problems we have (long, inefficient transactions for example) are there because it's hard to do regulation right. You're not helping anyone by creating something impossible to regulate. It's like trying to solve misjudgements by completely getting rid of law, or trying to do law by public opinion (the consensus problem).
Also there's always been a lot of new companies that serve customers with new financial tools. How you do banking did not stay the same in the last 20 years right? Yes it's slow but, as I said, it's hard to do innovation when you are playing with people's life savings.
But suddenly a ponzi scheme comes and all sense is out of the window.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
"It's still early stage, PoW/Ethereum/NFTs are just the first iteration, there are potential applications in the future" is the perennial crypto investors' motte.
"PoW/Ethereum/NFTs are revolutionary, they're here to stay, you would be so cool if you bought a hexagonal ape profile picture" is their bailey.
In practice it results in one of the biggest retail markets. That's good for everyone involved.
Fascinating. How much interest have you had?
Blockchain NFTs do about $800k/day in sales, mostly on the Ethereum book, which is worth about $23B.
How many NFTs are being add to your book per day? How much is the total value of that book worth?
If your book and the value of the ownership that it annotates is larger than Ethereum, then you've really got something special going on, and all these crypto bros should probably give up and join your project.
Now you might be thinking "that's not fair, this is a growth project! we just started!". Ok, maybe you've not displaced Ethereum yet, but you will soon.
Are you experiencing hypergrowth? Are investors clammoring for a share of your book? If so, I'd like to learn more about what they find interesting and how I might invest. If not, it sounds like your project might not be a good investment opportunity.
You guys don't see how solving byzantines general problem is ground breaking? You guys don't see any potential in decentralised networks resistant to sybil attacks? No value in being able to "own" things in the digital world? You guys couldn't imagine any uses for something like Zero Knowledge Proofs?
Its just stupid. Most of you guys are over payed dorks who lack any sort of vision or imagination..
You don't need to be genius to see that we are in a euphoric bubble when jpegs of apes as selling for millions and its pretty cool to point out/warn people of the scammers and charlatans in this space.. but to dismiss the cambrian explosion of innovation happening here..
I mean.. I'm baffled.. tech people? I know this sounds harsh but the sheer stupidity in a phrase like "blockhains are a solution in search of a problem"...
There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space, even if you think the state of the community today is not healthy. Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs). Most of them will fail and be forgotten, but there is a chance that _some_ of them will create genuinely novel and interesting products. Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?
While you are correct in that most things borne of the blockchain space are scams, it's important to understand that it's not much different from the "technology" of the FAANGs, in terms of the harm principle.
We like to denigrate NFTs and Tether, and slag on the enormous climate and social costs of BTC speculation, while we turn a blind eye to the fact that social media and adtech are fundamentally parasitic and socially destructive technologies that are far worse for the climate, our mental health, and our privacy than an exit scam or an overpriced NFT could ever be
It's fine to criticize this space, but it's particularly funny when this criticism comes from people fully invested in GOOG, FB, NFLX, and SNAP, or who are actively writing code to enable our modern Panopticon.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
You can build a pyramid scheme on facebook too, but facebook is not a pyramid scheme.
It's not really cryptocurrency that is fueling it. It is the absolute silliness around NFTs and the rush to import some "blockchain" to otherwise uninteresting products and companies to make them somehow relevant. This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI.
> Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs).
Skepticism is what happens when the thousands of failures start failing. There are sure to be some winners, but the space is overheated, and the silliness that has ensued over NFTs is the kind of thing that happens when a space gets overheated.
> Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?
Yes, but part of that is realizing that maybe your time is served better by hacking on something else where there are not thousands of failures happening. I don't see this as unhealthy community, it feels like maybe the market is maturing and you are going to get that signal earlier here than you will in the general market. Why? Because a lot of technology elites are here.
Game companies (Epic, Activision-Blizzard-Microsoft, etc.) have been (a) creating (b) limited number (c) digital goods that (d) can only be acquired / traded on their platforms and according to their terms.
How are NFTs not (a)+(b)+(c), except without the post-sale, first party control of (d)?
Personally, I think NFTs are the least interesting part of the space. But I think it's odd to say "This is unlike anything legitimate that has come before!", when there are billion dollar gaming companies doing exactly that, in a more restrictive way, every day.
First we saw a lot of anti-BTC posts: PoW criticism, usefulness criticism, transactionality criticism and energy use criticism.
Then, we got new technology as ETH, that improved on usefulness, now the criticism was about transactionality, "silliness" of use cases, etc.
Then, we got uses like Compound, Aave, Golem, etc. And the criticism about energy use and transactionality.
Then we got PoS and L2s like Polygon, Lightning, etc... and additional criticism came in
Then we got low-fee or no-fee solutions (XLM, NANO), and Web3 is the next criticism.
I've learned to ignore the destructive criticism in HackerNews. I understand that it has "grown" to be what SlashDot was in my hayday (late 1990s and early 2000): Suddenly all those "young and innovative" dudes that grew up using Walkmans, DiscMans, Commodores, BSDs, Linux PCs, Usenet and HTTP, became too old to understand iPods, Web2, and SaaS. The same thing is happening to people in this news.ycombinator forum: Blockchain technology is disrupting a lot of our preconceived notions (I'm 40... i've gone 3 times through this), and a lot of people are just finding it hard to understand.
But they ARE financially incentivized to bring more people into the ecosystem, which makes for a very loud and persistent hype machine.
I find the negativity here refreshing, to be honest. The proponents of the tech are so organized but the skeptics have the choice to just ignore it.
Plenty of its advocates very clearly WANT to force people to partake though. Anything to keep that number going up.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/el-salvad...
Advocates evangelize heavily, sure, but will you provide some examples of this? I keep track of the headlines in this space, but I'm not familiar with / haven't experienced what you're describing.
I'm really waiting for these novel and interesting products based on blockchain. like, waiting every day to see one break into the daily workflow of the average consumer. Until then I'm going to treat this technology trend with the great skepticism that it deserves.
So, from that perspective, crypto/web3 is bloodletting some of the crazies from the legacy financial system, which probably isn't the worst thing.
The very explicit goal of NFT folks, for example, is to commodify everything. I can't just not use the technology, because if they get their way it will greatly affect me. So I'm forced to stake out a position.
And yet we're all being impacted by the externalities such as higher energy costs in some jurisdictions, poor GPU availability, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. There's also a growing risk that when the music stops parts of crypto will be deemed "too big to fail" and the public will be stuck bailing out large crypto speculators.
It’s true that nobody is being forced to use cryptocurrency but we have to live on the planet blockchain proponents are polluting, and we know that many people will lose money speculating on systems which do not work. Even if you don’t care about them, that causes economic disruption and diverts resources away from better business ideas.
Absolutely, completely wrong.
Bitcoin is using HALF A PERCENT of the electricity on the ENTIRE PLANET. That affects every single person living on this planet. It will affect people living here into the future. It is an absolute catastrophe that is hurting everyone. We don't get to "not partake" in that.
Bitcoin is the one single thing that has enabled the ransomware epidemic by making it possible for ransomware to be massively profitable. Critical infrastructure and hospitals get shut down by this. This affects millions of people, putting some at deadly risk. We don't get to "not partake" in that.
And once we get to smaller, less dramatic negative effects of cryptocurrency, the list just goes on and on. We are affected by this. We don't get to opt out.
Ban cryptocurrencies NOW, before they do any more harm to us and our planet. They are worthless and damaging.
(i) ability to split governance layers more, i.e., what was once thought of as one monolith could be run along many dimensions
(ii) things like AMMs in DeFi might point the way towards making market making more investable in general
(iii) The possibility for creation of new asset classes/creation of new volatility. This might not be crypto/not only crypto, but (also) markets in entirely different things
This is a low point for humanity, for tech. Thanks for your concern but we're going to keep going on about it.
I find it amusing how most of the interesting things in crypto are centralized.
https://twitter.com/mcm_ct/status/1485295498806403077
Unfortunately Michael Saylor is the rule rather than the exception. Crypto marketing is extremely coercive, with slogans like "have fun staying poor!", intended to maximize shame and peer pressure to encourage the vulnerable and ignorant to become "believers". This is explicitly bullying behaviour.
Like I wasn't forced to participate in the resolution and the fallout of the housing crash?
And yet we are here, 20 years later.
Last but not least, almost nobody really cares how web is implemented as far they can browse to their favourite porn site or facebook page or blog or something else.
If the selling point of your product isn't the product, it seems like you're focusing on the wrong thing
For now. That won’t remain the case if we don’t continue to push back. And we all breathe the air that the crypto miners pollute, we all suffer from the GPU shortages, whether we participate or not.
Depending on what you mean here, I don't agree. Every novel idea I've seen coming out of cryptocurrency/defi can be generally applied to distributed computing and is useful in other fields or with other forms of finance. The ideas that are explicitly dependent on cryptocurrency appear almost exclusively to be the really terrible ideas. (NFTs, smart contracts, DAOs, etc)
Indifference is just fine as indifference is biologically possible.
There does not have to be a debate; agency cannot be forced.
Hacker News does not have to make you feel warm and fuzzy about every technology.
K8s and Kilo or Linux and Wireguard; boom federated
Web3 is an alternative option for machine state but it’s not the only one. It does not need to win or be debated.
Today. Advocates insist that cryptocurrencies will replace state currencies, that NFTs will replace other forms of ownership like deeds and manage your participation in all communities, and that DAOs will replace corporations and other governance systems.
Many of us think that this world is a worse world, with more opportunities for capitalists and corporations to exert control over our lives and buy and sell every component of our being.
People buying and selling bored apes doesn't affect me. But the reason people buy and sell bored apes is because they believe and advocate for a world where everything functions like bored apes.
Nobody is forcing anyone to burn fossil fuels, either, but we all breathe and thus can't opt out of its negative externalities. This argument only works when externalities are acceptable or nonexistent.
e: This isn’t meant to be a rhetorical question. Ever since Mark Cuban tweeted something about some loans that defi enables I’ve been wondering why I should care.
I can't help but feel it is, at least in part, coming from (perhaps unconscious) shame. We are at the sunset of a Californian Ideology where VC could save the world, Twitter could facilitate democracy, YouTube could democratize entertainment, culture. We are in a situation where any possible tech-minded business models can only promise to become so monolothic that they become de facto libertarian states, or be so fractured and specific that they inevitably prey on specific mental ticks of their users, or otherwise contrive value through subscriptions.
Everything has led to this, whether you all can accept that or not, whether you should feel "responsible" or not (you shouldn't). This almost comically absurd force of computers and money and energy now comes forward, with an army of infrastructure and knowledge and VC funding ready to greet it. You can see all our sins wrapped up into it, along with some newer things as well.
I think people are so angry because they see that, they see a likeness, even if distorted, in the macro structures of crypto, and in that they feel shame. It's as if there was quick a shortcut taken to the worst possible evolution of everything everyone was already working on in this space, big or small. And there is shame in realizing that this is what we were working towards, a secretly terrible teleology realized.
And so, to attempt to atone, you write a blog post about how evil it all is, as if it was something that literally came ex nihilo to threaten all our good work from before, denying that, in fact, it is merely a secret, forbidden wish granted. The logical culmination of this wild ride of capitalism and technology we have been riding. We are all guilty.
Most of the articles are fairly detailed, people put in effort.
Yeah, there's problems with cryptocurrency remaining to be solved. Yes, there's shenanigans and scams. Yes, it's not great for the environment (and I cannot wait for a smartass to reply with the word "understatement").
But the technologies surrounding cryptocurrencies can solve problems. It's just that crypto primarily solves trust issues. If you can trust your currency, trust your banks, and trust your payment processors, cryptocurrencies don't do that much for you. Mainline digital banking does a better job than cryptocurrencies currently do. Yet I'm glad that Bitcoin and other coins exist; in an increasingly authoritarian world, such things can be a last resort for those who become "depersoned", and I suspect that one day I'll be depersoned. And if there comes a point where cryptocurrency becomes so perfect that the banks can't compete, then what's there to complain about?
Unfortunately, countless hordes looking to get rich quick have latched on to these things because they're so accessible to anyone with too much time on their hands. The tired word "blockchain" is so abused that upon hearing it I have sadness in me. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about blockchains. A blockchain without a consensus algorithm won't amount to much, but you can have consensus algorithms without necessarily having a blockchain. But blockchain sounds more mysterious to the average person, thus it's the buzzword of favor. You don't even need to know what a blockchain actually is. Just say the word blockchain and you'll be one of the cool people!
A lot of people on the other side of the coin (yuk yuk) don't even have the faintest clue of how cryptocurrencies work or how even traditional fiat currencies work. One guy I was talking to recently said that "if people didn't think they could make money off of Bitcoin, it would be worth absolutely nothing." Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception. He didn't understand that there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, and that it wouldn't be easy to change that number without a majority of the nodes agreeing, and that there are practical reasons why some would want to use Bitcoin over fiat. If anything, fiat currency better fits his mental model. This is not uncommon, in my experience. Very few people actually read anything.
Oh my f---- ----... is every USB power bank a f---- piece of s---??? ARGGG. Sorry, side tangent.
The value of pretty much everything is defined by how much people are willing to pay for it. Bitcoin is just some numbers in a database that a lot of people have convinced each other are worth something. US$ is some pieces of paper and some numbers in a database that a much larger number of people have convinced each other are worth something. Your labor is worth some amount because that is what you have been able to get people to pay for it. So is mine. A sandwich is worth some amount, so is the labor of the people who made it.
Not every topic has middle-ground though. Things can be overwhelmingly negative or positive. I've been following BTC passively since 2011 and I've seen the messaging change from "It's going to revolutionize transactions" to "Its a great store of value!". It's no closer to reaching widespread adoption as a currency than it was in 2011 because it doesn't function well as a currency. If its not a currency then what is it and why should people want it?
>Yet I'm glad that Bitcoin and other coins exist; in an increasingly authoritarian world, such things can be a last resort for those who become "depersoned", and I suspect that one day I'll be depersoned. And if there comes a point where cryptocurrency becomes so perfect that the banks can't compete, then what's there to complain about?
It would be very very very bad for your average person for the government to not have control of the monetary supply. The actual risk of the government "deperson"-ing someone is nearly zero, why would they? I feel like this is a classic crypto argument though. Crypto is good because it might solve some abstract problem that doesn't actually exist.
>Unfortunately, countless hordes looking to get rich quick have latched on to these things because they're so accessible to anyone with too much time on their hands. The tired word "blockchain" is so abused that upon hearing it I have sadness in me. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about blockchains. A blockchain without a consensus algorithm won't amount to much, but you can have consensus algorithms without necessarily having a blockchain. But blockchain sounds more mysterious to the average person, thus it's the buzzword of favor. You don't even need to know what a blockchain actually is. Just say the word blockchain and you'll be one of the cool people!
This has been crypto since I started watching it. I'm not sure when you started counting but crypto has always had 'get-rich-quick' boosters pumping it up and selling wild fantasies about how crypto is going to change the world with blockchain/trust/decentralization. This pumping is the core of any other pyramid scheme.
>A lot of people on the other side of the coin (yuk yuk) don't even have the faintest clue of how cryptocurrencies work or how even traditional fiat currencies work.
Lots of people into crypto also don't understand how it works or how fiat currencies work.
>Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception. He didn't understand that there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, and that it wouldn't be easy to change that number without a majority of the nodes agreeing, and that there are practical reasons why some would want to use Bitcoin over fiat. If anything, fiat currency better fits his mental model. This is not uncommon, in my experience. Very few people actually read anything.
It IS entirely in peoples perception. Something being scarce doesn't give it inherent value. There is only a finite amount of my dirty underwear but I somehow don't see my used underwear becoming valuable.
Right. And there's a 100% certainty that most of the products that already exist are vehicles for scams at worst, and gambling at best.
Web3 consequently is also bound by this. If people are still interested in Web3 when crypto goes down 10% YoY forever then maybe there’s some inherent value there.
- Oligopoly of the hyperscalers -> rent server from small provider like ovh/hetzner/netcup (there is plenty).
The reason AWS, Azure and GCP are so popular is because people don't care.
- Privavy intrusions -> Adblocker/DNS Blocker/Turn off JS/Use browser settings
This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist because there is a demand.
So what is being fixed?
Crypto is really great if you’re a drug dealer or some other kind of criminal.
Me too.
It's been posted on HN, without much uptake, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041948
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30036937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30027175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30032406
It's one of those articles that you don't plan to watch through, because it's extremely long, but watch all of anyway, because it's extremely and consistently good.
I feel that I'm going to watch all 2h18 more than once before I'm done with it.
Does it matter?
It feels like most web3 discussion is just discussion and none of the core parts exist at all…. and some folks just threw nfts and crypto currency into the bucket to have something concrete to point to.
I don’t have a problem with discussion about meta discussion but I’m also skeptical that it matters/ that this is just meta about meta …. with nobody doing any of this web3 stuff.
I guess the reason it pops up on HN so often is that Y Combinator has some money in web3 related projects: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=blockchain
A lot of those investments strike me indeed as unlikely to have any ROI worth reporting on. But they did get lucky with Coinbase. So, a few of those achieving some level of success is not completely unthinkable.
A truly decentralized, unregulated network will therefore lead to more power being seized by fewer. That is, a decentralized financial network will tend to lead towards the centralization of the value represented within that network. Without the ability for democracy to step in and regulate that network.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are an inherently anti-government project, through placing all governments in a single authoritarian perspective and insisting that they must be decentralized; "crypto" is fundamentally anti-democratic. Throwing the baby out with the bath water.
It not only covers the technical limitations, but also the ideological flaws.
that's my hopefully take
> Keep in mind that it was still early when the dot-com bubble popped. Google Maps hadn’t been invented yet, nor had the iPhone and Android. Online payments were in their infancy. No Twitter or Facebook. No AWS and cloud computing. Most of what we rely on today didn’t yet exist.
> I suspect it will be the same for crypto. So much is yet to be created. Let’s focus on the parts of the Web3 vision that aren’t about easy riches, on solving hard problems in trust, identity, and decentralized finance. And above all, let’s focus on the interface between crypto and the real world that people live in, where, as Matthew Yglesias put it when talking about housing inequality, “a society becomes wealthy over time by accumulating a stock of long-lasting capital goods.” If, as Sal Delle Palme argues, Web3 heralds the birth of a new economic system, let’s make it one that increases true wealth—not just paper wealth for those lucky enough to get in early but actual life-changing goods and services that make life better for everyone.” https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excit...
And I tend to agree.
Actual web3 users, if they exist, have to convert IRL money to coin to power a dApp. Thus, the price of coin rising against IRL money represents inflation in the cost of using the dApp.
In this fashion, web3 is similar to housing. The enthusiasts want it to be a great investment, but to be best for fulfilling human needs it should be a poor investment. The only difference is you can’t opt out of needing shelter.
>>Even with the increased amplification of skepticism, the crypto and Web3 space continue to grow rapidly. Only time will tell if we will have a new decentralized blockchain-based utopia or if the skeptics were correct all along.
So basically, this is now just falling off the "Peak Of Inflated Expectations" into the "Trough of Disillusionment" on the Gartner Technology Hype Cycle graph[0][1].
Perhaps notable that it is going through the cycle so quickly. I expected a more substantive analysis, but it seems to be merely pointing to the name-calling ("a solution in search of a problem". "con job") of a few skeptics.
Actually I now recall lasers being called "a solution in search of a problem" for several decades, but now they are ubiquitous, although it does mean that the initial laser manufacturers were not necessarily the big winners.
[0] https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/research/image...
[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...
I don't actually see why people are skeptical of this, people who don't care about "data ownership", "distributed web", etc have incentive by some "free" money, decent amount of political incentive for some people to move to less "centralized" authorities of discussion and online socializing, and a growing political incentive for "privacy and ownership of your own data".
Whether you care or agree that it's a problem, or if it's solving any of the issues and arguments has very little bearing on actual adoption of this stuff when being able to get "paid" (even in shitcoins) for seeing ads/seeding assets/doing computations when AFK, is alluring and marketable to a lot of people and I think there are enough smart folks that want to figure out a way to get a more distributed web along with a profit model that I don't know if i'm as bearish on this iteration of "web3" as the comments on HN tend to portray.
> [...] as crypto becomes more mainstream and people experience its downsides, critics' warnings are starting to be heard.
I'm not sure that public sentiment is actually being measured or is shown to be changing, or at least there's no evidence presented here.
The biggest thing happening right now is the selloff, and I think that's happening due to the economic headwinds that face all asset classes. Look at the stock market - it's not doing any better.
It looks like we're in for an extremely rough 2022, and people are selling off their crypto (and everything they can) to prepare for the storm. 7% inflation on cash is nothing compared to the loss in equity valuations. Now is the time to hold cash.
(I'm a crypto skeptic, so don't take this as a defense of crypto.)
Really? As of writing, the S&P500 is down ~10% from its all-time-high. Bitcoin is currently down over 50% of its ATH. Other cryptocurrencies are faring even worse. The stock market is doing significantly better.
This is an oft frustrating topic in the world of cryptocurrency enthusiasm. The contemporary American banking and finance system is awful. It's worthy of a great many of criticisms. But crypto solves none of them, and removes the few, feeble protections that are in place to protect average everyday people.
I don't find this to be an ethically OK way to act.
Saying that you cannot participate is reaching the same level of saying that you cannot participate in the use of the internet. In ten years or so, you'll likely be having to use Bitcoin whether you stand against it now or not. Just as someone that said the internet was a scam or a fad back in 1999-2003 era of the web.
People who are anti-cryptocurrency often like to conflate Bitcoin with all these other scam coins. It's true that all of them are a scam besides bitcoin and that none of them have security or decentralization. There is only Bitcoin. It does not matter what is agreed upon, only the truth matters. Only the math matters. Only code matters.
If they are a foreigner in Tunisia, they might also need to provide a passport, valid visa, etc., as well as deal with someone in a foreign language.
I'd prefer my money to go to my phone and not have to deal with anyone in person or give up my personal information, especially over small amounts like $1000.
ETH is L1. There are alternative L2 blockchains that cost pennies to send funds.
We need to understand the current fiat system, how is fiat money is made? How exactly is the USD brought into the world?
Many of you might be quite shocked on how the current system works, all based on debt, or just arbitrary printed to suite the needs of big government. Its quite interesting. Did you know 40% of all USD in existence was create last year based on nothing for instance?
Fiat, and crypto have their merits, and failures. Some obvious issues, others underlying, and needing to be addressed.
The DNS was a pretty big deal. There are some people who think that web3 is a pretty big deal as well.
But they don’t hide it
Take the united states... people are basically free to sneak in, without becoming residents, without "downloading the American OS into their brains" aka citizenship.
Now, what if all countries allowed this? Or, what if a "decrentralized country" offered citizenship with no actual geographic location?
Does American citizenship offer people benefits overseas? For example hostage situations? What if there was a better, decentralized country, that would come to your aid?
Decentralized ideologies are what's being practiced right now; and in fact, it's part of the USA's geopolitical strategy of pushing democracy onto countries, whether subtle or otherwise.
And in any case, any individual should be focused on empowering other individuals to the point they can at least vote with their own wallets and migrate to another country or group should the need arise.
I guess what I'm saying is we should start a new country that will be constitutionally immune to some of the new challenges of modern times.
What is a religion, if not an extension of citizenship overlayed onto existing governments? It's basically additional rules you follow, with some benefits of membership.Isn't that what american taxpayers fund the US military for?
At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud. I don't care that it might contain cool tech.
The same goes for e.g. ransomware. It might be innovative. It's still a huge blight on humanity.
And yet... In this case I find myself guiltily agreeing.
Unregulated casino with eco-friendly tech is quite nice actually. No government should be able to forbid me to gamble imho.
As a tech enthusiast, that's just sad to hear.
however, the fact that too many people seem to think that there is in fact a connection between web3 and cryptocurrency just adds to the smell.
If the entire crypto/defi/nft/gamefi/play2earn etc marketcap was 0 then nobody would even bother with interacting/developing with web3.
In-fact, nobody would even be interested in blockchain tech.
One thing we know for sure is that it ain't gold since it moves with the market rather than against it.
The stock price can drop to 0, and it would be ok. There's no stores to close due to unpaid rents, no workers to furlough, etc. In a weird way it's immortal.
Currently it’s unknown if crypto has intrinsic value. It certainly has extrinsic value, though.
It smells like a made up buzz word that did not originate organically. Someone coined this termed and released a bunch of press releases to get it to catch on. I don't even know why people are giving it the time of day. It's someone's marketing speak and it smells awful.
And furthermore, decentralization is not new nor is it unique to the web, nor does this "web 3" garbage have anything to do with the web either. Web 2.0 was also buzzwordish but at least it was referring to a genuine paradigm shift in the way that websites work. The inclusion of the XHR request API in browsers and the birth of publicly available RESTful APIs that web-sites could consume which helped lead to the split between frontend and backend development as specialties that we see today (whether that's a good thing or not is another discussion).
"web 3" is just marketing PR garbage for "crypto is the next big thing ... somehow."
It's not fixing anything.
It's only adding a way to force people to pay ETH gas fees to like posts and add comments. It's probably most useful for early crypto adopters to keep growing their pyramid with a captive audience and for criminals who want to hide more identities, launder money, and obscure illegal transactions from law enforcement.
"But it can run without crypto," sure and why would anyone want that? You still need the Internet. Now you want to make it slower and burn more of the worlds energy so that we can independently audit who "liked" which post? So that you can "hypothetically" own your profile pic? Give me a break. I'm tired of the centralized services as anyone but there are ways we can solve this without the foregone conclusion that blockchains are the only viable way. They're not technologically sufficient, they're terrible for privacy, etc, etc.
If you want to fundamentally improve the Internet you're going to have a better time improving things that already exist. Find more energy efficient transport layer protocols for modern usage patterns. Make it more secure. Improve privacy. There's a huge demand for this really unsexy, unhyped work that needs to be done.
Heck, if you're interested in improving payment systems in the US there's a fair bit of catching up to do to reach par with some of the international systems.
1. Ownership by default. NFTs are kinda a silly example, but since your wallet ("You") own your the token that represent your assets being able to transfer them around with you whenever you go somewhere new is cool.
2. Authentication with your wallet makes things much better. SSO for the whole web.
3. Alignment of incentives for users + service providers. (DAOs, traditional corps, etc.).
So with a concrete example.
In Web2 social network, the social graph is closed off along with all your account info. If you want to move to a different social media website, you have to reenter all your info and re-friend everyone etc. The corporation chose to ban people, and the only way you can in theory get a vote is through owning a share.
In (the ideal) Web3 social network, the social graph is open b/c all your friends are attached to your wallet. If you want to move websites you can take them with you, or even have you be on multiple front ends. Even better you might get tokens to vote for certain proposals in the DAO, for example such as banning people off the site etc.
Decentralization is valuable b/c it allows the above to happen, not because it's valuable in it of itself. Without a decentralized network there wouldn't be enough trust in the network for anyone to use it (long term).
After all blockchains are basically one giant shared database, if someone thought you can modify it, it loses all value (Similar to fiat money in a way ;) )
Please explain how adding a crypto wallet or blockchain into this mix changes anything meaningful.
There's another big issue, what if your friends don't want to exist on that front end? Either events/posts are private, or they're on the public ledger and distributed. There's no way to keep interactions private.
In the end, if we think of having these messages sent to clients directly and stored locally, have the clients being able to subscribe to groups, have the clients maintain the friend list, and people being able to post to sets within that list. We have this already. Its called email.
SSO for the whole web means if you do something deemed "bad" you can be blacklisted from every service at the same time. How is this good?
Web3 is less centralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon. For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1]
This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract)
This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve.
In contrast, in traditional web2, companies gatekeep this information so hard that there are 10B+ companies such as plaid that mostly just scrape user bank account data. Just recently AA is suing The Points Guy for scraping their website. [3] I recall there's even a comment in this thread about someone getting their own scraper banned because they were trying to scrape their own data.
> rent server from small provider
If everyone rents a server and we make these servers talk to each other, that is what I would call decentralization. If you rely on a server operated and rented by someone else, you are subject to their whims: arbitrary bans, censorship, bait & switch, security issues, downtime, etcetra.
I don't believe web3 fixes this but in I don't think decentralization is in principle a useless concept.. It's just hard to do right and harder than that to get enough people on board. And now with cryptocurrency, it's harder than ever to get people on board who aren't just looking to profit off of their buttcoin investment.
Maybe all these things will fade into obscurity and come back one day and "fulfill their true purpose". If all goes well, barely any of us will care about the underlying technology of the problems they solve.
However, using AWS for some things and pinning stuff to IPFS and blockchain for others does prove convenient (I don't have to worry about egress costs w/ IPFS for example)
IPFS isn’t magic: you have to pay for hosting somewhere - you can use it like a CDN to pick cheaper networks but that’s maintenance optimization.
In some cases you can align incentives differently than with traditional solutions. For example with DEXs you can spread the profit and work (such as providing liquidity) to participants rather than a central operator.
It's also easier to prove what mechanism of the operation can and cannot be changed as the code is right there and if you are trading you only have to trust them for just the one function call rather than for holding your funds in their hands longer like with traditional exchanges.
Prove might be too strong a word to use in this instance.
Saying it is this way because this is the way people want it strikes me as a bit fatalist. Is it this way because it's what "people" want or because there is no viable alternative?
Nothing is being "fixed" per se, an alternative vision of how things could be is being experimented with. Key tenets of this are trying to better align user and creator / provider incentives.
You want to organize the worlds information and build a search engine. Okay, you create a google coin. You issue 21 Million coins.
As soon as you announce it people are going to buy in and you will in a period of a few months become a billionaire. With no product. Just an idea.
And then you get to dump your shares on the "investors" and you get to be a billionaire.
There is no incentive to further develop your idea.
Look at what happened to ICP. The VCs got in at 3 cents a coin. Each coin shot up to $750 per coin. Then the VCs dumped it on the retail noobs making a lot of money with absolutely no working product.
A global blockchain enables millions of people to access banking services -- globally -- that they are currently shut out of.
Also there is already multiple platforms with little to no regulation/'censorship' (namely onion service, telegram, kiwi farms, the chan boards, gab, parler...) and we all know how that worked out
(It's an extremely well presented video, but still!)
No one wants "currency" that just up and loses half it's value.
Or what about the VTI (total u.s. stock market index) which has also declined 15%?
The truth is crypto currencies such as BTC and ETH are maturing with institutional investment. Their value relative to USD tends to correlate more with the markets and especially tech now.
My personal (admittedly Don Quixotesque) stance on the matter is that I will never ever accept to be paid in crypto currency for products, services or whatever: their value over here is less than zero.
> Insiders who spoke to journalists as part of a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, have suggested that HSBC may not have appropriately shared the information with the monitoring team installed by US regulators in 2012 after HSBC allowed drug cartels in Latin America to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through its accounts.
Maybe someday all these anti-crypto activists will rail against the banks and their fiat financial system too. We gotta stop the druggies! ;)
Encryption is really great if you’re a terrorist or some kind of pervert.
Email used to do that, I guess, but now if GMail doesn't like you there may be problems.
If these are problems that don’t exist for you, consider yourself lucky and remind yourself of the opportunities for many that you’re advocating against.
I dont disagree there are a number of less than scrupulous people floating around selling worthless tokens, BUT to solely focus on them is to ignore a real core of interesting computer science advances.
What's motivating this is people with deeply vested interest (a16z investors, in no small part) in crypto tokens (e.g. ETH) increasing in price.
The goal is to give people control of their online experience again (like in web1) without throwing out the benefits that came along with web2 (simplicity for the end user and the ability to execute online commerce). In the goal-oriented mindset, blockchain is one of many solutions that could work, but predicting it will be the one is would have been like predicting that PayPal, Google, and Amazon were going to happen at the beginning of the dot-com boom.
Too much focus on the technology increases the likelihood that nothing will happen. Remember, "web3" had already been used previously to refer to online assistants like Alexa and Siri before this blockchain craze; predicting the socioeconomic future by scrying technology is a fraught game.
I’d argue the opposite-the benefits of decentralization are too abstract for most people to appreciate.
In reality, if cryptocurrency takes power from the elite they will make it illegal and arrest 95% of its users who are incapable of learning how to mask their network participation. This is not reassuring for an idea whose decentralized powers are predicated on mass adoption.
edit: Central point of failures, ownership, privacy, etc etc.
The proposed identity models sometimes involve blockchains and smart contracts, but can also use simple private keys, or trustful P2P models like holochains. The solutions for value exchange are where crypto-tokens enter the picture (setting aside the perverse incentives of Supply attempting to create its own Demand); but one could certainly envision the same technology working with state-backed digital currencies, while still disintermediating finance middlemen (credit card fees, eBay fees, brokerage fees, etc).
[0] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2012/11/when_it_com...
For me it was about decentralized platforms to emancipate people from large social media moguls that have enough info on user behavior that they can influence behavior. Interconnectedness would ensure that the draw of peers using the same network would vanish. At least theoretically.
You're far better off with spreading ideology.
Lately I'm enjoying the indiehackers community, which is way more constructive.
You can't tell someone who is arguing for decreasing excessive use of air conditioning that "well if you don't like it, don't use it".
I have no skin in the game, I don’t hold much crypto and wasn’t building related stuff in years. So it saddens me to see people here who are generally very smart, being ruled by their prejudices,
I just did a catch-up research after missing out for 3 years and there’s literally a ton of super exciting stuff happening. DAOs blowing up, social products starting to pop up, blockchains themselves becoming much more scalable.
It saddens me to see my fellow folks here having such a biased and outdated perspective and aggressively evangelizing it.
I don't think they are. In practice they also suffer from (d) because the large majority of NFTs appear to be traded exclusively on Opensea. I don't expect this to change at all because any system like this requires some kind of centralized authority to enforce initial ownership of the art before it's placed on the chain, otherwise you get people selling stolen art. Put another way: there is no value to anyone in having alternate trading platforms for these goods, all value is derived from being verified by a particular platform and baked into that platform. It's the same for video game goods, e.g. there is no value in trading a Fortnite dance outside of Fortnite.
> there is no value to anyone in having alternate trading platforms for these goods, all value is derived from being verified by a particular platform and baked into that platform
Some value is derived from being verified. People sell stolen merchandise and art all the time, albeit at a discount to actual price. And there's nothing intrinsic to that verification that requires Opensea.
If there were an equally trustworthy provider, or even a provider that offered better title insurance, why would people still use Opensea?
> there is no value in trading a Fortnite dance outside of Fortnite
And here's where I think the slightly interesting component is. Isn't there?
If Epic says "ownership of this digital thing gives you this other thing in game", imagine there are two ways to trade that digital thing: (1) within Epic's internal platform, or (2) on an open Blockchain.
Doesn't it stand to reason that (2) is a clearer ownership claim, with less control, and therefore more valuable? And if it's more valuable, then isn't Epic incentivized to sell their digital goods on Blockchain (and get better prices for them) than their internal platform?
Sure, but now we're back to talking about properties of the good old common law legal system, which in some ways is already decentralized. It's not benefiting from anything provided by blockchains and crypto.
>If there were an equally trustworthy provider, or even a provider that offered better title insurance, why would people still use Opensea?
To me, it's the same reason everyone still uses Amazon. Blockchains don't change this dynamic.
>If Epic says "ownership of this digital thing gives you this other thing in game", imagine there are two ways to trade that digital thing: (1) within Epic's internal platform, or (2) on an open Blockchain.
Public blockchains do not provide any additional value here. The only important part is if there is consensus between the two parties to agree that the digital thing should mean something in both places. A public "trustless" blockchain is just noise as far as this goes. The whole thing doesn't work if there is no trust between the two parties to agree that token A should correspond to both item B and item C.
>Doesn't it stand to reason that (2) is a clearer ownership claim, with less control, and therefore more valuable? And if it's more valuable, then isn't Epic incentivized to sell their digital goods on Blockchain (and get better prices for them) than their internal platform?
I don't see how this is the case. If I'm not mistaken, you're talking about transferring an item from an Epic game to another game. That means Epic gets the initial payout for the item and the company making the other game gets nothing but still has to expend time and money supporting items that Epic got paid for. I can't see why they would agree to that.
The ownership claim also isn't clearer, both companies could still just decide to shut down their games simultaneously or retire those items and now you're left with nothing.
In contrast, the blockchain world has consistently failed to produce anything which many people want to buy. The lure of high returns on speculation has attracted more people than any of the products, but there's no durable business hook the way there was for, say, going back to buying plane tickets over the phone.
As long as it's centered around the value of BTC, this is false. BTC has totally failed as a currency and is completely dependent on speculators pushing its valuation up to keep the miners profitable. I'll be willing to concede this point to you if eventually all proof-of-work coins disappear and the BTC maxis go away, and the incentives change to move away from mining and towards providing real services, but I doubt this will ever happen given this was the whole reason the crypto bubble happened in the first place.
Perhaps you want to define web3 in a more vague way like "any web business that uses a merkle tree publicly in some fashion". You can do that but either you're still left with BTC maxis leading the charge on that, or you have to expand it in such a way that the term becomes meaningless because it applies to a lot of unrelated things. Was google a web3 business before anyone knew what that was because they used a merkle tree in google drive, and google drive was public? How about github with their public git repositories? See what I mean here?
I think that's part of why there's so much backlash from the tech community -- it feels like a small group of people (who largely haven't built much on the web besides React apps) have decided that they get to call what they're working on the new web, even though it's currently mostly vaporware and bad art.
Don’t get me wrong - I share plenty of the same concerns others have shared throughout this thread, and tend to think “web3” is not a good thing to call this, but don’t see the “by force” claim as valid at this point.
Plenty of apps/projects brand themselves as the next coming/generation/evolution/whatever. Only adoption will tell us if they’re right.
The idea is that no one needs permission in both cases, and the message can be sent only to the intended recipient without a middleman reading its contents. BTC is the same with money.
The same FUD was ignited against encryption back in the day, and "save the children" hysteria still is ablaze if you live in the UK.
But the code on chain can't be changed by anyone, has no admin functions, and doesn't rely on external data feeds. UI for it can be developed and hosted by anyone or skipped entirely by anyone willing to deal directly with the contract using standard tools. So I'd say Uniswap meets your request above for something that doesn't require a centralized entity. The entities you mention could disappear and Uniswap would keep going.
I'd assume a social network's storage layer would be distributed as well, on IPFS or something similar with an encrypted blob that includes all your content.
Paired with a privacy focused scheme like Monero's where you can't see the contents of wallets you could keep the contents of social graph hidden, and do some transactions around.
I'd also say that privacy wise it's not like our current systems are perfect. You had reddit admins deleting and modifying people comments for example.
Not as bad as the general public being able to see your interactions, but not great if employees at these companies can see all your things you'd rather keep private. (And the design of these services makes it so that from a business perspective they want to see that data for targeting, and from a customer service perspective you want to be able to debug issues unlike crypto which rn has no CS expectations.)
0: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
See what happened to Alex Jones, regardless of if you think it was justified or not.
With a crypto wallet, you don't have to start from scratch with a new account on a service that doesn't ban you because you own that data, in theory you could even port your social graph over.
I don't think this is inherent to crypto, but it is inherent to decentrazlied open standards like Mastedon for example. The advantage that crypto "wallets" have here is that it's not just for social media, it can be for payments etc.
There are massive amounts of time and money spent on getting people to eat less fast food and avoid multi-level marketing scams because they're predatory industries (some more than others). Crypto is a predatory industry too, and defending people from it is completely reasonable.
It seems like you're saying something like "stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons." What are those reasons? If I see someone trying to scam others, why shouldn't I warn those people?
> stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons
No, that's not what I'm saying, at least in your brutal interpretation.
Should society allow anyone to be scammed? My answer to that question is a clear no, especially when it comes to fraud. Society functions orders of magnitude better with a level of self-control than it would otherwise.
Does this mean that society should protect people from themselves? Or rather, if someone believes they are going to get rich putting their life savings into cryptocurrencies because they lack foresight or technical aptitude, should we do what we can to prevent people from being this foolish despite the existing level of trickery that we are willing to tolerate? If people need to be saved from cryptocurrency, then why aren't we saving them from payday loans, or guzzling HFCs in sodas, or wasting time smoking weed, or gambling at casinos? All of those are examples of tricks (yes, they are tricks) designed to extract wealth and lifeforce. Hell, our monetary system itself is a trick. At times we may point them out as evils, but we don't take them so seriously because life can't be so safe. Unless something radically changes in our societies, for all intents and purposes, we are allowing some of us to hang ourselves by our own rope.
Yet somehow crypto bears more fault for some? To me, that doesn't follow. If I create an NFT for my soul, put it up for sale for $1000, and someone actually buys it, are they being scammed? If I fork Bitcoin into a new cryptocurrency, publish a bunch of poppycock about how it will be the next big thing because I got rid of its limits, and I sell those coins and run off with the money, is it of no fault of the customer that they believed such a specious lie?
No and no, in my opinion, because it's not reasonable for society to protect people to such an extent as it would neither be sustainable nor good for every business to be scrutinized to the degree necessary to provide said protection.
Counterexample: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/exclus...
Music creation is for most people just a hobby, with zero financial incentives to engage in, yet countless amount of people make music as a hobby and release it for free via various channels. Same goes for software with free/open source software.
Not to talk about BitTorrent (or it's predecessors in the P2P space) where people had the opinion of "sharing is caring" and shared data with each other, again with zero financial incentives.
How do you reconcile these facts with your outlook?
Because random hashes are not inherently interesting to most people and the core concept is built around an opinionated finance model. The only value to the blockchain network is in the ability to make transactions, and that's why all of the push around it is very heavy-handed FOMO “buy now or you'll have to pay more later” which is a sharp contrast to previous new technologies which focused on what new things you could do.
As an example, I suspect no one would buy old power plants and turn them into Bitcoin miners if there was no return on investment. The operating costs of this kind of infrastructure are too high to justify as a "hobby".
That's not true of those other things.
https://blog.mollywhite.net/abuse-and-harassment-on-the-bloc...
https://blockcast.cc/news/a-new-type-of-nft-scam-beware-of-s...
And you can never delete anything from a blockchain so your second point is completely false as well. And even if you could delete something from a chain it could not "drain" your wallet unless you explicitly gave it permission to use your coins.
I wouldn't say it's very high, where crypto is here now, and the default design is with ownership in mind. Plus with crypto's money side you can find different business models than traditional web companies. (As a matter of fact with a public blockchain data probably becomes a lot cheaper on a mass scale.)
Crypto maximalism IMO is a "doomer" position, the idea of burning down more efficient and established systems for a new one.
I personally don't know if it's a functional idea, but I can see a case.
The interesting questions are how much and where do you place your skepticism?
NFTs sound enough alarms for me that I feel the need to drop anchor on that before steering to any BS with potential financial consequences.
> At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud
Obviously the "at best" part is still a negative, just like the "at worst". That's no way of starting a curious conversation and frankly, it makes for boring reading no matter if you're for/against cryptocurrencies as a whole.
I don't understand what more there is to say about NFTs but maybe I'm just taking crazy pills.
According to what? According to the global charts on Coinmarketcap, Ethereum is still around 20% of the total marketcap of cryptocurrencies (BTC being at ~40%) today, coming from growth since January 2020 (where Ethereum started at ~7.5%). By that metric, Ethereum seems to be growing, but you might have a better source/metric to share?
One may claim that cryptocurrency has survived many bear markets if you only look at cryptocurrency. Someone else may claim that the only reason cryptocurrency hasn't died out is because it's standing on the shoulders of the longest running bull market in history when looking at stocks. There is so much money and confidence about that people are just looking for places to park it. The question is: Does cryptocurrency remain when the fun and games end, or was it just tulips?
And there isn’t an upper limit to who can buy into bad ideas or how badly they can go wrong.
> BUT to solely focus on them is to ignore a real core of interesting computer science advances.
Examples? Specifically, which advances are you referring to which solve a problem other than “now you can do something you could do before but by paying me instead”?
See: Whisper [1] and Swarm [2]
I think my clients would show me the door if I asked them if they can pay me in some crypto...
"Predictably, it found that, as time went on, links were more likely to be dead: 6 percent of links in 2018 articles were inaccessible, while a whopping 72 percent of links from 1998 were dead."
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22447690/link-rot-researc...
First: Blockchain transactions are only accepted when they’re added to the blockchain, so participating in the blockchain necessarily directly enables the drug (etc.) transactions in a way which isn’t true for fiat or commodity currencies.
(I happen to have the opinion that almost all drugs should be legally available in some form for personal use, but that’s a different argument; partly but not solely because I think legalisation will help to stop criminals getting the money).
Second: inverting group membership like that is poor logic.
Consider for example, that the fruit of atropa belladonna is poisonous. The fact that most poison isn’t derived from belladonna does not change this.
Even if you believe that all drugs should be legal for informed personal use, that doesn't change the predatory and destructive nature of drug dealers and cartels in the system as it exists today. If you want to support personal, recreational use of drugs, the ethical, responsible way to do that is through campaigning for reform of our laws, not through enabling and funding violent organized crime groups that profit massively off keeping people so addicted they can't function in society.
No one is claiming that MSFT stock should be used as a currency for transactions. If the US dollar lost 20% of its spending power in a few months, many people would be baying for blood. It's bad enough when gas prices rise 20% in a short time.
AFAIK, Bitcoin does not have a mechanism for doing something like this to stabilize the currency.
>> No one wants "currency" that ...
Who uses Microsoft stock as currency?
There is a ton of uncertainty and that is really what is driving the craziness in the markets. Over 97% of my portfolio is in fiat and trust me this makes me very uneasy.
The fact that Bitcoin does not have levers is the appeal to a lot of people.
The Venn diagram of web3, cryptocurrency, and blockchain proponents is substantially similar to a circle.
The way it's shaping up, improper or overzealous incentives will be the undoing of the second wave, but that movie has yet to play out.
Predictably, this element of the law was not well received and is not being enforced after large scale protests
Edit: typos
I used to be very interested in defi but I can't anymore when it's evident that the same market forces and consolidation and network effects keeping traditional banking afloat are also keeping BTC afloat because too many people are invested in keeping it the dominant coin. I really hope I'm wrong and BTC is not "too big to fail" but if I am then I expect you'll see these fancy web3 startups pivot back to making "boring" web 2.0 banking systems because there is no big money in defi anymore.
The original web was more decentralized than what web3 proponents are selling, but over time users consistently chose a few major services. Why will they switch back and what will avoid that repeating again?
"People are too stupid/naive so let's not make anything better for anyone" is essentially what I'm hearing.
Central point of failures, ownership, privacy, etc etc. Obvious stuff I don't want to ramble about.
Only HN would try to downplay decentralization, something we know the benefits of, only to bash crypto/web3.
There's a reason that the process of going from web1 to web2 involved quite a bit of centralization. If web3 cannot meet its goals in a way that either maintains those benefits or creates a new benefit that substantively offsets the cost of losing them, people won't care. And if people don't care, this web3 will be as much an empty buzzword as when web3 referred to Siri and Alexa.
ie, in the US, I can't sell bitcoin and withdraw US dollars using coinbase without providing identification documents. The US government will have a record of the transaction that enables them to tax or seize the funds. This seems like it's the case with any government and coin wallet.
Unless Navaly can buy ads or pay staff in bitcoin, what good does the money do him? Given the current volatility of the BTC price at the moment, it seems even less valuable for doing anything practical. He'll have lost 20% of his millions raised just this week.
Can the average Venezuelan buy groceries or pay rent with bitcoin? Don't they need to convert to bolivars at some point to take part in the normal economy? Maybe I just don't understand this and someone can explain it.
Or a crutch. It may be allowing some countries to stagger along with support of a grey/black market rather than collapse, wipe out debts, and install new leadership. And it may be the worst type of crutch: one that you trust to hold you up but will one day snap and injure you worse than before.
And there are always workarounds. It wouldn't be impossible to use an exchange in another country, for one.
Also - in that case you are just talking about hiding assets from the government. While the use case for dissidents is good - to me I would wager the amount of people who are using it for fraud is far greater.
He can if he's got the private key.
If you want (more?) anonymous you need Monero or Zerocoin.
Lots of illegal activity goes on fiat too, at least I have more control over my assets on crypto.
Those are nice nouns, but have you any specific argument? Bitcoin's origins were designed to redress this very issue.
> Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non- reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
> What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.
Nothing in there about corruption.
Also, designing a means of transaction that is independent of governments and banks - two of the most corrupt institutions in every society - is surely a deliberate move against them?
Finally, the genesis block of Bitcoin specifically mentions bailouts of banks. The arrival of Bitcoim amid the 2008 financial crisis is no coincidence.
I welcome anything that weakens their hold and means my money doesn't lose half its value over my lifetime.
These tokens have to be worth something in order for the security to functionally exist. You can't separate the monetary side from the security, because the monetary side incentives the security. And security is the only thing blockchain adds.
Not wanting it to be public should be obvious. Immutable though, what if I need to change my name/gender to match reality?
It's not enough to just update the value, because the old value still exists on the blockchain. That's just another method to find my deadname and use it for harassment.
But the points you raise, are exactly the issues I've been thinking could be solved with web3. I am imagining using it to give control to the patient of who has read access(to what and when), who can add data, etc.
I.e. give full transparency and control to the patient. Instead of the current situation where a patients data is on different systems, you don't know what it actually says, besides what a doctor tells you.
What's so special about the upcoming year?
Tangently if you want to start a journey to understanding why the movement away from centralised infrastructure is important (and arguably unavoidable) from a fundamental perspective, go and read one of the primary sources for crypto libertarinism - https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transi... this book was published in 1997 it describes cryptocurrencies and their terminal implications on prevailing powerstructures and so much more. The Author was a member of the House of Lords in the UK and his son is now the current Leader of the House of Commons.
This seems suspiciously like you are unable to. Note how unusual that is for true innovation — HN is full of posts where people can say they switched to something because it was faster, better, cheaper, etc. If all you have is a book from the previous century which predates those systems existing, that does not speak well for their merits.
I'm not going to waste my energy further, you are dismissive and closed minded. The prior art you allude to is all from the previous century too, your point?
Frankly I couldnt care less if you dont end up getting "Web3", although it would be a shame for you if you didn't bother to make a concerted effort on your own behalf beyond trite comments.
I for one just like the progression and the technology, and the empowerment it gives users vs operators. I guess that's lost here.
I don't think web3 is dead in the water... I wouldn't even discuss it if I thought it was. But the challenges of creating a new paradigm that displaces the old one aren't technological alone... They're how to solve real problems real people have. What I have seen of the blockchain based solutions suggests to me that they aren't doing much to simplify using the blockchain itself, and I don't think we're going to boil the ocean of converting most web users to even neophyte cryptographers to get them on board with the trust model necessary for the blockchain to help with web3.
If you object became more criminals are using it, then we simply need to promote its use among B2B and B2C. A trustless and decentralised electronic currency is surely a freedom-enabling idea and should be promoted. It has long been the dream of cryptopunks and cryptographers.
Lots of crime is facilited by, and done in the name of fiat currency too. BTC can limit that. It's just a currency and one consciously designed to avoid the inherent flaws of fait.
I agree it wouldn't be a sufficient reason, but I think it is a step in the right direction and an illustration of how it enables freedom.
Your wallet is a ten word phrase/a private key. This is something we haven't seen before, money can move just like that. All one needs is internet access.
So yes, totalitarians will have a stranglehold under the current system, but it certainly loosens their grip when we wrest the money supply from their hands.
To those with different priorities than what I listed (privacy, ownership) they usually care about usability, and decentralized platforms can be just as usable and popular.
I think all the hate is from the powers at be being threatened by Web3 and the power/control it gives users. If they can't shut it down or gobble it up, they'll run hate campaigns and convince smart people to hate it for them.
Noone is hating on Web2 monopoly tech as much as this, let's just love all of the internet.
Ask yourself, why are you rooting against this thing?
But the really really cool thing about Web3 is, it doesn't matter what the haters say, it's here to stay and IS the future because it can't be stopped.
- edit -
> I'm rooting against scammers using something I do care about as a sales tactic for something which has failed to find market demand.
A moral crusade then. Maybe tackle scamming on Web2 first?
I'm rooting against scammers using something I do care about as a sales tactic for something which has failed to find market demand.
Sorry, but this is just plain ignorant libertarian nonsense. If you want to be taken seriously you need to do at least the bare minimum of understanding an issue before making big claims.
> If you want to be taken seriously you need to do at least the bare minimum of understanding an issue before making big claims.
OK, so since this is your principle, will you retract your claim that bitcoin wasn't invented to combat corruption? Even if you don't agree with the method or ideology, there is good evidence this was their intention.
And please explain how inflation benefits me, a saver with ever rising bills to pay. I'd be very curious to hear it. Relieve me of my ignorance.
2) If you have debt, like a lot of people do, inflation means you now have less debt.
3) You have provided zero justification for why "bitcoin was invented to combat corruption", except through your unjustified claim that inflation and corruption are somehow connected.
But as far as I understand, it should be possible for a user on a blockchain, to have their set of data encrypted in the ledger. It should also be possible to implement a sort of permission scheme.
So I am imagining, instead of relying on things like Epic Systems and other EHR systems, that control your data and might have incentives to not share them with other systems. One could imagine a EHR system based on a blockchain. The patient can then grant permission to, say a hospital, to read certain data from the ledger. This could be scoped to what is necessary in the context of their visit or procedure. After the visit to the hospital, the patient has full transparency to read what data has been added to their own records.
Anyway, I am not capable to give a full technical solution, since I have not thought it fully through, and not nearly knowledgable enough to actually know. So I might be very wrong in my assumptions, and would gladly be told otherwise if that is the case.
Then there's the whole issues of how do you get existing systems as Epic to integrate with said "blockchain EHR".
Edit: This might be of interest: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14604582198663...
Immutable, as a patient you would want to know exactly what your data looks like at any given time. Again insurance is a good example.
If the blockchain is private, could it not be part of the implementation that does the access checking? Can't part of the ledger be unencrypted while other parts are not?
It might be wishful thinking. It's just an idea I have floating in my head, as an actually useful real world implementation for a blockchain.
I shared the link in another comment, but you might find it interesting as well: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14604582198663...
