Ask HN: What Is the “HN” of “Web3”, Crypto, DeFi, NFT, etc
These technologies have mindshare and will be part of our world’s future. As an engineer, where can I read about these technologies discussed regularly, so I can learn & understand through exposure? Is HN that venue? (If not, why not? What are the boundaries of our bubble here). I’m interested in the tech/practical applications, as opposed to the hype/emotion.
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Reddit is fine, but it heavily depends on what you want. r/ethdev is good if you're interested in creating something, and r/ethfinance for quality discussion focused on what you can do on Ethereum.
There are also a lot of us who are strongly against Proof of Work because it is not only extremely inefficient, it is also extremely irresponsible in the face of Climate Change. PoS will solve that - but like nuclear fusion, it is always a year away.
We're now at the point where the specs for the merge transition are ready [2], clients are already being modified to target the release-spec [3], and the first long-lived testnet will go live by December. I'd personally expect the Merge to happen by May.
[1] https://beaconcha.in [2] https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/merge... [3] https://notes.ethereum.org/@djrtwo/kintsugi-milestones
Basically all online communities have hatred towards cryptos. Not because of understanding or assumptions, but because the shill army of shitcoiners that try to pump their shitcoins in every possible community there is. And of course the numerous spampots and scammers who also spread the negative image for cryptocurrencies.
Even though "crypto" has been short for "cryptography" since before cryptocurrency existed, increasingly people interpret it to mean "cryptocurrency" instead. It's a bit like the linguistic fight over the redefinition of the term "hacker": it's a lost battle.
My understanding of Bitcoin doesn't change the fact that it's pretty obviously a Ponzi Scheme. The only way to make money with Bitcoin is selling it to a greater fool. Bitcoin is largely not used for real transactions because it's slow and expensive to transact with. For the typical user, who is concerned with risks like losing their keys, being hacked, or being scammed, Bitcoin is vastly less secure than established banking solutions.
It sounds like you have a good understanding of the tech, but I’m not sure that’s common on HN. Imo HN mostly dismisses anything new until it’s obviously dominant (sometimes even then).
I'm actually in agreement that bitcoin is overvalued, and therefore largely a bubble with ponzi-like elements at this point. But I think the other things mentioned are incredibly nascent emerging technologies whose potential is still largely untapped.
HN isn't going to be that venue at the moment, seems pretty hostile to web3/crypto. That'll change eventually, but for now you gotta look elsewhere.
Strongly agree. It’s hard to find anyone honestly discussing crypto things on Twitter because any mention of a project or currency becomes a magnet for low-effort pump efforts. Saying anything negative results in weird, low-effort pile ons and attacks.
It’s also just plain boring. Everyone is posting “how NFTs will change _____” threads now that don’t even make sense. That’s because they’re not interested in actually using NFTs, they’re only interested in collecting followers and “selling shovels” in the latest iteration of the crypto gold rush.
It's much more fruitful to talk down someone buying too much hype and learning the one component that maybe isn't hype than arguing with someone on HN that is stuck in 2017 and still thinks there's absolutely no value in web3/crypto tech.
Crypto twitter certainly suffers from hype and flavor-of-the-day profit chasing, but it's also got thoughtful discussion of real problems. Twitter isn't the ideal format for a lot of it, but it's what we have today.
I actually don't think HN is hostile to web3/crypto specifically. I think HN is suspicious of hype, and the hype level around those things is pretty insane.
I see a lot of skeptical comments that boil down to "but what is it actually good for?", and there's never really a good answer posted to that question. To me, that's an indication that there's more hype than substance. But who knows? That could change in the future.
What are elections good for in a country of 350mm people?
Crypto is a social movement, they are much more massive and powerful than technological ones. They also provide huge returns when you embrace that you are making a social-movement type bet.
When Soros bankrupted the Bank of England it was a social bet on the various cogwheels falling in place for the short-selling to work.
The profit of that short is real money, even though it was not a bet on technology.
There are many ways to skin a cat, people have to understand that betting on technological trends is kind of a new thing, for our whole history as a specie we only bet on social movements
And also there is almost no technological bet that is purely that.
For example, people betting on Microsoft in 1994 were not only betting on the company, but also making social-science type bet that people would fall in love with the computer via a GUI, in a way that didn't happen up to then via the command interface.
OK, but HN is primarily a technical forum, and so cryptocurrency is typically viewed mostly with that filter.
Presenting it as a social movement makes it immediately more in the political realm -- and that only raises more questions and potential problems. It also brings in the potential for genuine controversy without clarifying much.
Wasn't Windows 95 a social movement?
Maybe there wasn't a sense of rage from the masses towards the few people who could use a computer (via a Command line interface) but the end result is the same as the aims of cryptocurrency movement.
Moving from a world where a very few % of the population is able to use a particular tool towards a world where everybody can do it.
Reverse repos, loans off appreciating assets and so forth are only availible to few.
Umm, no? Or, if it was, that aspect of it was never apparent to me, even when I beta tested it.
How many people had access and were capable to use a computer before Windows 95? And how many after?
Before win95 it was a small club of elites, after it was everybody
Crypto is trying to do the same thing with complex financial operations such as reverse repos and loans backed by appreciating assets.
> Before win95 it was a small club of elites, after it was everybody
I don't think I fully agree with this assertion, either, but I do understand what you're getting at here. Even if this assertion is entirely true, though, I wouldn't call it a social movement.
Once you remove the libertarian component of crypto and people who don't want to pay taxes and people who hate the Federal Reserve...you are left with people who'd love to be able to do reverse repos and getting loans off their appreciating assets, and other complex operations which are not availible to retail.
Is the unavailibility [of complex financial operations] to the general public due to a political and social stance that society has?
Or is it lack of understanding of the market by the existing financial players?
Because if it's the latter then it's not that different than companies trying to force feeding Command line interface to people before Microsoft decided to go full GUI and ship Win95
No, StackOverflow is primarily a technical forum.
HN is primarily a forum made up of technical people, talking about shit that might be interesting to technical people (hackers!).
Gonna try starting with only following the core devs of the top projects and see how that goes
As for HN, the conversations here bring in a lot of folks that have a very low opinion of crypto assets in general, so that makes it harder to have more detailed conversations about the underlying technology.
But, twitter isn't just the "HN" of crypto. r/ethereum may be closer to the HN of crypto.
In crypto, Twitter is the town square, the watering hole, the stadium, the newspaper, the social club, and so much more. It's very hard to overstate the importance of twitter to the crypto industry.
However, HN seems to be in large anti-crypto, so I think you will not be exposed here to anything "bleeding edge", more like major news. Also I have not seen any Show HN or similar of people developing applications for the crypto space.
So I have been asking myself the same question as you. There are a lot of websites with great resources for crypto (similar to the regular finance world, the amount of free websites with good information is substantial). There are also some really good substack newsletters (however, some of the writers are invested, so I take their information with a grain of salt).
But there is no forum or similar venue that I know of where actual users or contributors discuss or share experiences (except for some discord servers maybe).
I've studied this for about ten years, and came to the conclusion there is none, other than crazy financial structures and mechanisms that make the 2008 subprime mortgage scandal look like a Fischer-Price toy. If you find an interesting, practical application for anything blockchain or cryptocurrency, please let me know as well.
Funny, my impression is the opposite. Blockchain and DeFi are still quite limited in what they can do relative to what’s going on Wall St. It’s the blockchain stuff that’s still a toy. A novel and fun toy, but still comparatively a toy.
Also fwiw, so far cryptocurrency is a debtless financial system, since without identity you can’t have credit ratings or any way of enforcing repayment. So a 2008-style credit collapse is impossible. It’s highly volatile of course, but at least not subject to a GFC or Great Depression style credit collapse.
(There are flash loans, but those loans are made and repaid instantly in the same smart contract, and if they can’t repaid then the smart contract fails and the loan was never made. I don’t think a buildup of risk similar 2008 can happen with those)
Even DeFi creates gigantic leverage while being "debtless" - the typical usecase for DeFi is just financial leverage:
- have BTC you lock up, get a stablecoins in exchange
- buy volatile crypto with stablecoins
- voila! You're leveraged
You can see this very easily in how the Total Value Locked in various protocols is essentially an index of the price of Bitcoin
Most stablecoins are run by a centralized, trusted third party maintaining a dubious peg to the centralized USD and will probably get taken down by some Soros breaking-the-pound style attack eventually.
But Bitcoin and most other major cryptocurrencies predate stablecoins, and will survive them.
Additionally, most of the collateralized DeFi leverage schemes you reference require over-collateralization. Since no identity makes margin calls impossible, effectively the margin call is done up front as a contingency in the form of over-collateralization.
A debtless, over-collateralized financial system is an interesting case study in financial in/stability. It’s certainly a different beast from the traditional financial system.
By comparison, Bitcoin has existed for ten years and hasn't let anybody do anything yet, because a slow time stamping algorithm (proof of work) turns out not to be that practical for many important applications.
only because the first is not viable does not mean that blockchains as a whole is a stupid idea.
Bitcoin created a scarce digital good, modeled after gold in many ways, that promised a sound money for the internet, digital cash, a reserve currency powered by proof of work. A currency that unlike fiat, could never be debased no matter how tempting it might be for a politician. I could see how one might not value these things as an individual but I think it's a bit much to boldly claim that "it hasn't let anybody do anything yet."
After all, it's made many people rich, particularly those curious souls who went down the rabbit hole to investigate it early and were therefore rewarded. Growing wealth, providing a savings vehicle that beats inflation over time, or making the owner rich - are all valuable outcomes for a new technology designed to offer a new type of monetary asset.
Bitcoin is incorruptible money with a fixed and predictable inflation rate and monetary policy that cannot be manipulated by any politician or central bank - no matter how tempting it may be. There is value in that, even if not everyone can see it.
Kind of like sports: the winner of a sporting event doesn't practically matter, it's just entertainment, but fans can feel extreme emotion from a win or loss, and many people form part of their identity around a team.
That said, entertainment itself is practical and necessary, and had been around longer than our modern financial systems, so maybe it does answer your request !
I do still think crypto will eat the world in every way it can, even if it shouldn't.
https://timroughgarden.github.io/fob21/l/l1.pdf
“Future generations of computer scientists will be jealous of your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this new area—analogous to getting into the Internet and the Web in the early 1990s. I cannot overstate the opportunities available to someone who masters the material covered in this course—current demand is much, much bigger than supply.”
EDIT: I made a new post for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140393
I wrote off blockchains after a cursory investigation into applications in supply chains about 4 years ago. I’m planning to take a second look after seeing so many accomplished people gush about it like TR here.
The interesting application looks something like this.
You have an internet connection, a Raspberry Pi and a USB hard drive. You get paid in cryptocurrency to host some data for the decentralized web. Now you have it and can use it to pay for things over the internet, anonymously. Having an anonymous digital payment system that regular people could use for small transactions would be a big advantage. No more Amazon keeping track of what books you read on your Kindle and having to worry about getting put on a list. It also provides funding for decentralized content hosting.
The current problem with this is that existing popular blockchains have high transaction fees and low transaction volumes. That's a technical problem that could be solved in the future, but right now it's an impediment.
The current solution is to use third party custodial services, which can handle arbitrary transaction volumes and have low fees because they're just rearranging numbers in their own private database. But then they're subject to KYC regulations and that's a blocker because people are going to get to the point where some shady internet company they've never heard of wants their social security number and say "hell no" and that's the end of it. Also, this erases the privacy benefit.
So to be useful we need one of two things. Either solve that technical problem, or get regulatory changes that waive KYC requirements for small transaction amounts, e.g. for accounts with less than a $1000 balance.
Or they exchange their cryptocurrency for cash in some place or context without KYC rules. The seller could be anywhere in the world.
The IRS is likewise not famous for its laxity with tax fraud.
You know that some public key had some amount of cryptocurrency and then it went somewhere else, possibly into a cryptocurrency tumbler. You don't know the identity of the person holding it and as soon as they have enough to buy something they can stop using that now-empty wallet.
Also, Monero solves this more robustly, doesn't it?
> The IRS is likewise not famous for its laxity with tax fraud.
Who said anything about tax fraud? You can report the income on your tax return without specifying how you spent the money.
How do you think it works with physical cash? The advantage here is that it can happen over the internet.
Their current implementation is more proof of concept, but they are useful and they are being used daily by at least a few hundred thousand people.
The challenge with web3 is that almost nobody is actually using web3 for anything other than doing more web3 speculation. That makes this virtually impossible to find this:
> I’m interested in the tech/practical applications, as opposed to the hype/emotion.
Even the people discussing the potential practical applications aren’t the people who are using it. The people talking about it are the people trying to sell it or speculate on it.
I don't really want tags or silos. I'm not great at searching the site. Given how often questions exactly like this post show up here, I'm clearly not the only one who wishes they could find HN-like discussion for a specific subject area.
I'm bothering to make this comment in hopes that one of two things will happen:
1. Someone will give me a solution for how to more readily find what I want on HN.
2. Someone will create some kind of tech solution in response to seeing this observation.
https://hn.algolia.com/
I would love an easy way to readily find recent active discussions and articles with high karma for medical topics. But you have to search on words that were actually used in the title.
And that's kind of a variation of the question in this post. If there was an easy way to find "crypto related articles and discussion" right here on HN then you wouldn't need to ask "What other forum can I go to?"
I've been on HN more than a decade. It's bigger than it used to be and a lot happens here. It's easy to miss out on a lot of things pertinent to your interests.
I don't know of an easy fix for that.
I share your quest for finding the HN of "Web3". I've long been on CryptoTwitter but I've decided that I don't want to spent a lot of time on Twitter anymore.
Since then, I've tried to understand where there could be a technical and philosophical community of tech+crypto people on the internet.
- HN is full of haters, sadly
- everything on reddit is slightly too non-technical and hype mentality
- I haven't found a low noise Discord server
- I haven't found a good hacker news clone either.
- CT is too self-important
I don't strictly want to have this totally crypto-biased community either. I'm in the camp of "'yes' to crypto but I'm critical".
For the last year or so, I've simply started to foster my own community. I write a blog on crypto that you may like: https://timdaub.github.io/ My headlines are kinda clickbaity but I think they're legitbait :) Check it!
I'd be up for starting a proper crypto community. I even have reserved a name for it: neoactuary.com. I checked out the lobster code base and I think it'd be a good fit too. But those things take ages to get established: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
- "Blockchains never forget": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/05/25/blockchains-never-forg...
- https://blog.simondlr.com/posts/decentralized-autonomous-art...
- https://www.notboring.co/p/crypto-bezos
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Z5BnBuFyE
Potential others are:
- https://www.untitledfrontier.studio/
- https://molochpilled.substack.com/
- https://vitalik.ca/
Let's start with my summary: techbro discovers the concept of paying people for their time, and also keeping records about it, and waxes philosophically about that whole idea for way too long. Techbros really need to get out of their bubble once in a while......
You're also calling that author a "techbro" which I guess they don't fully deserve. I don't know them or if they're a "techbro". I appreciate that they put so much time into writing a free public blog.
Anyways, I still believe that there's an interesting and respectful conversation to be had.
I think you've been disrespectful as you immediately resorted to name-call the author a "techbro" that's all.
The philosophy articles are interesting because you can get a sense what people are manifesting towards as they imagine, build, & use these technologies.
NeoActuary sounds interesting - I like the name. What’s needed to make it reality? When someone we admire expresses their goals and needs, other people feel subconsciously driven to help them. You could try it out here…
https://ethresear.ch
And the Ethereum Magicians
https://ethereum-magicians.org/
What have you found?
People here always say the value of YC is in the network, and that may translate well to a decentralized model.
I would imagine where Bitcoin started would be one of them, perhaps there's references to other communities there. Sometimes discords are good but still suffer from bad management.
it's true. Nowadays all websites you're supposed to visit daily are "background-color: white" and owned by Facebook. From its wild days, the internet has become pretty boring.
“Crypto” in your list is more broad and can also include the Development & Research sub forum of Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0
Beyond those, find the “Community” sections of the specific projects you care about. They’ll usually have either a forum or a Discord or a Telegram.
ethresear.ch is definitely a really great tip for technically minded people. Seconded!
/r/medicine is also pretty interesting, albeit more diffuse.
You have to be a certain kind of person and a certain kind of commenter to benefit from the kinds of rules and norms we have here. We reward curiosity and heavily penalize single-layer jokes and memes. But unlike heavily moderated subreddits, we also value quality asides and off-topic branches, so long as, again, they reflect curiosity.
Perhaps the biggest blocker to HN-like communities for other fields is we're allowed to be wrong on the internet. And we're allowed to point it out, correct each other, and gratefully accept corrections.
HN & Rationalist groups can accept and integrate new information, and we can accept that some people are misinformed or having a bad day, and that they're not malicious or trolls.
Whereas in most online communities you can be either "right" or you can be gone.
There are many clever minds here and I have followed by far the most witty discussions on various topics on this platform. Whenever the topic of cryptocurrencies comes up, substantial concerns are expressed about the technology and its added value for society and the financial system.
At the same time, I don't get the sense that this is unfounded reluctance. Rather, fundamental questions reveal themselves upon closer examination. And the participants in the discussion are in best of company. Many smart people have expressed concerns about crypto currencies in the past (e.g. Bjarne Stroustrup or Waren Buffet to name a few).
I have the feeling that the vast majority of cryptocurrency advocates have no idea about the matter themselves. They are simply spreading slogans on Reddit and Twitter proclaiming the next big hype. I think that's one of the reasons why you can find so little neutral and highly qualitative information on the subject - there is none.
Online public discussions of cryptocurrency never get past the stage of "is crypto even real?", so it's no wonder that discussions have moved to private Discords and invite-only subreddits. If, every time you tried to ask an in-depth question that would get an informational, insightful, and highly qualitative answer, and the majority of replies are of the level "hurr durr your question is teh stupids and you're an idiot for thinking about this", wouldn't you move away from the public eye?
Questions like: how does Bitcoin need to change in order to operate on an interplanetary scale (aka Mars' transmission delay)? or How best can a proof of work system be designed to be resilient to quantum computing?
Both those questions are actively being worked on and have interesting answers, though they are few and far between, but that doesn't mean they aren't being worked on. The people doing the work are too busy doing the work to talk about it, and the dilettantes are too busy repeating half-truths to each other for there to be the answers you seek on Twitter.