Because VCs have heavily invested over the last few years in blockchain companies and cryptocurrencies in general, they need to keep pumping this bubble, so NFTs, web3 etc became necessary to invent.
Web3 is just the latest excuse to keep the game of musical chairs going and preserve the chimera of use-value for cryptocurrencies since very few people want to use them to actually transact.
You mean the thing when the ETH people are going to hand the power over the people with the most money? I'm sure this idea is deeply chilling to... venture capitalists, they're probably shaking in their boots.
How do you think proof of work operates now? Do you think big mining operations don’t take massive capital? They do, and also waste ungodly amounts of power at the same time.
POS only works with an active economy i.e. validation requires something to validate e.g. consumers using ETH to buy goods and services. This implies the general population has access to large amounts of liquidity of the currency.
A new institutional investor just needs to start hoarding that easily accessible liquidity and the biggest players in the space will need to give up their share or risk the price of the currency dropping to zero because it’s too hard to transact in it and therefore it’s no longer profitable to tie up 32 ETH and run validators.
You're conflating bitcoin mining with ethereum mining. Anyone with a GPU can mine eth and therefore the capital requirements are far lower. Now, of course if you want to make big money, then that requires big capital... but that could be said of nearly any business out there.
You gain more power by having more money in both PoW and PoS. In PoW it means you can buy more hashing power, in PoS it means you can buy more of the network's currency to stake. Even under PoS, the network's upgrades still rely on social consensus, as in node operators (!= validators) agreeing to forks, and the network's finality requires 2/3 of the network's almost 300'000 validators to come to consensus.
"Actually both systems give power to those who are already wealthy" isn't the argument for democratization and decentralizations crypto believers apparently think it is.
Gatekeeping access to (edit: online, but I suppose this could also apply to offline) resources based on digitally verifiable ownership and the subsequent rent-seeking is a capitalist wet dream. I'm not the least bit surprised the VCs are slavering over web3.
There's no reason why a business trying to use "web3" wouldn't need to raise a round. Every business that wants to grow more quickly than the founders can manage alone needs some sort of capital to pay people to help. One way to do that is by giving up a bit of equity in return for money.
That sounds a lot like, you know, web 2.0. Let's scheme this out: Facebook (and its corporate policies) is often named a motivating factor for web3. If I wanted to make a web3 replacement (let's call it MastoCoin), how would the economics of that actually work? People would still want to upload lots of posts and pictures and stuff, and that would presumably continue to live on S3 (etc.). Somebody needs to pay the bills for that monthly. So even if I had to pay $3 bucks in gas to post my sarcastic tweet, someone else would incur an indefinite expenditure on it, no? I really cannot think of a non-pyramid model here.
Society should certainly protect people from being scammed by others, but I don't think that's what web3 is. It's not a "pyramid scheme" in the traditional sense because it's not a scheme. It's just a pyramid. It's a collective delusion. If people believe in it, great. If they think they can profit from it then they should try. If they win, cool. If they lose, also cool.
I definitely don't think web3 should be 'stopped' on moral grounds. Maybe it should on environment grounds, or on the grounds of how annoying web3 evangelists are, but stopping it to protect people from investing in something silly is not a good idea. Let people learn from their mistakes (or maybe I'll learn to be less cynical when NFTs turn out to be the next BTC, which I also regret not buying, or Amazon stock that I didn't buy, or Apple, or Pixar, or MSFT... this is a long list.)
Filecoin, Sia, and Arweave are three of the bigger chains involved in decentralized file storage. A combination of IPFS for data verification and one of these services for storage is typically enough. Many apps will store both on S3 and on Filecoin and link the IPFS hash for redundance. It's not a pyramid model, the native tokens are used to purchase storage and incentivize the bootstrapping of the storage network build out. Arweave has created an endowment like structure to guarantee data storage for 200 years.
What makes you think it needs it? If every person in the world shilled something they called Web3 that wouldn't change the conclusion of this blog post? What are you on about, exactly?
Because Proof of Work requires computational power, which is expensive and thus requires a lot of capital, and Proof of Stake requires controlling a significant amount of the currency, which also requires a lot of capital. Basically the consensus is built around ways to demonstrate you already have a lot of money, either through conspicuous consumption (PoW) or flaunting your balance (PoS).
As to why VCs would invest in it: it's currently dodging most regulations that apply to financial transactions (money laundering, pyramid schemes, pump & dump schemes, etc) much like loot boxes dodge most gambling regulations (and it turns out selling gambling to kids is extremely profitable). This makes the market uniquely profitable to invest in right now with promises of extreme ROI as long as it remains unregulated.
"Humanitarian" campaigns to normalize tracking public records and qualifications on the blockchain in technologically underdeveloped countries also produce a high amount of technological lock-in while increasing the capabilities of automated decision making on the blockchain without having to bother with externalities. For example, if one's ability to use an NFT on social media hinges on demonstrating ownership of that NFT, copyright law becomes a tangential consideration much like systems like ContentID make it harder to claim fair use rights because the ContentID claim is not based in copyright law but in the terms of service.
Additionally a lot of the more vocal tech VCs are libertarians bordering on anarcho-capitalism (i.e. free market maximalists who think humanity's survival and progress hinges on a few Great Men rather than the unsophisticated masses). The greater Web3 ecosystem is trying to solve cooperation with people you actively distrust and represents every interaction as a financial transaction. This is extremely appealing to them. Their problem with capitalism isn't that it inevitably leads to a massive wealth disparity (because after all, some people are "just better") but that the government gets in the way. This makes the promise of decentralization (even if it defers to consensus between the already wealthy) ideologically appealing to them.
Based on my conversations with web3 believers, they would generally agree with most of what I said but object to the language I'm using because it doesn't sound very flattering.
regarding "free market maximalists who think humanity's survival and progress hinges on a few Great Men rather than the unsophisticated masses" -
Libertarianism may have changed in character, or perhaps more in how it is characterized in media, but it used to be that libertarians believed in lots of little people acting freely and that states and the large corporations they are mutually supported by are the opposite of what they want.
Hopefully it is because the little people have largely left the relatively pointless large media spaces online and does not represent a genuine change in how the majority of libertarians, who used to not be terribly wealthy if they were wealthy at all, think.
I think this is a common misunderstanding because "libertarianism" nowadays can refer both to what is now called "libertarian socialism" (i.e. anarchism, individuals cooperating voluntarily for the common good) and right-wing libertarianism (i.e. laissez-faire capitalism or "anarcho-capitalism", natural selection via the free market).
The latter generally believe some people are inherently superior (though they will not always make a point of where this comes from) and that everyone therefore deserves their lot in life because those at the bottom either are inherently inferior (and thus undeserving) or failed to activate their potential (and thus undeserving).
The former generally believe we don't stand on the shoulders of giants so much as on the shoulders of billions and billions of people no worse or better than us. Some individuals may have genuine innate talent making them better at one thing or another without trying but while that may make their opinion on those matters more qualified it doesn't justify any claim to power as societal decisions (such as allocation of resources) should be reached by gaining consent from everyone affected.
Without regulation, markets naturally tend towards centralization and thus a significant power imbalance. Heck, if you were to fully abolish the public commons and the state, you would inevitably reinvent feudalism as the owners of the largest corporations would need to hire private militias to subdue their workers and defend their property claims against competitors, customers and colonies. This is why many right-wing libertarians still want a public police and military and why libertarian socialists generally don't want markets as a political instrument even if they may be favorable towards coops as an intermediate step or for the production of commodity goods.
Even deeper question. Why does "web3" need to make money? Wouldn't it be better to go hobbyist providing services? Or everyone running their own things at their own cost, marginal let's say 10 or 100 a year? Like true decentralization, that isn't burden to profit...
Because incentives. The beauty of crypto/web3 is to reward the service providers with incentives for their services. Nobody is going to provide things for free and even if they do it won't be sustainable in the long run.
VC funding is needed to raise funds for software engineers and provide access to mentorship and community, like every other software company that uses VC funding. You can raise funds through other means (bootstrapping, ICOs, etc) but these have their own sets of downsides.
There are actually two rooms. A big one full of people who barely know what a data structure is, yelling about whether or not Web3 is a Ponzi scheme. And a much smaller room where Engineers are actually building things.
It seems like the VC's are coming to harvest crypto. They will try to regulate it and squeeze out all the tech and profit for themselves, but at least they will counter the much worse regulation that would submit crypto under the control of central banks.
One person in the comments there asked about how its better from a corporate marketer’s angle, I think Web3 has the perfect funnel.
For any application The funnel is practically nonexistent, except to the luddites that still need onboarding into a wallet. No different than trying to show an existing experience to an AOL user in 1995 versus showing it to the people writing editorials questioning what the World Wide Web was. “Is there any useful application on the World Wide Web, why has nobody convinced me for me, why has everyone started ignoring my bait about what useful means! I swear I wont move the goalpost if you talk to me, this time!”
For marketing theory its matches perfectly, get a user to pay $1 and you’ve found the audience that would pay more, while bouncing the freeloaders. Any web3 application has authorized payments built in and users prepared to create a transaction with a fee.
> some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana.
What bothers a lot of us isn't the libertarian nirvana ideal, it's the fact that most loud proponents have a financial interest and stand to gain by increasing adoption, even if only temporarily. Even if they truly believe the technology is pointless and has no future, they are incentivised to pretend that it is revolutionary in order to increase the value of their investments so they can offload their holdings. This makes it difficult to trust anybody writing positively about cryptocurrency-related topics. It's like knowing a manufacturer pays people to write positive reviews about their product and then suddenly seeing lots of blogs and comments raving about how great the products are with little justification.
If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it. However, without the get-rich-quick aspect I suspect such a technology won't get nearly as much excitement overall. Mastodon and Diaspora are already working examples of decentralised social networks and this article doesn't state what advantage web3-based products would have over them and people generally don't seem very excited about them.
The standard you want is not reconcilable and you will simply have to find other signals to pay attention to.
The general idea amongst crypto enthusiasts is:
no conflict, no interest.
So its not about just listening to someone and trusting them, its about having the tools to find something that works for a goal you have, within that ecosystem.
You make a good point, and you deserve appreciation for your ability not to confuse all of Web3 with the vocal majority behind Web3 right now - who I agree are empty salesman.
> If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it.
Tough pill to swallow for you: the consensus mechanism fundamental to Bitcoin and blockchains in general (assuming they are fully decentralized) is economic. It relies on block producers spending or staking their money for no profit if they lie or cheat. The tokens or coins associated with the network are the digital collateralizations of that money, and are therefore subject to shift in valuations relative to anything else you might trade it for.
Crypto is inherently financial as long as its consensus mechanism is economic - that is not a bad thing, but it should inform how communities interact with the topic. Despite believing in crypto, this is why I believe some spaces should not consider it polite to talk about specific crypto-currencies versus others, as it quickly deteriorates into shilling of one's own holdings. This is the same reason novice's can't reliably make money in the market - since everyone advertises coins/tokens they hold as the next coming of Jesus, the only productive way to make decisions about which are good or bad is to not only have a deep understanding of them but also their context in the market as it is currently. Even then you might fall victim to the 'clown market' when hype trumps fundamentals.
Long story short crypto-currencies are inherently economic and therefore financial and subject to price fluctuations which attract speculators. This does not make "crypto" a scam, but it does mean that novices have little recourse for understanding the space sans becoming more independently competent or having a trusted advisor.
> Put differently: it turned out that permissionless publishing alone was insufficient. We also need permissionless data.
Has the author ever heard of OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, or a million other projects like them? I'm also not quite sure "permissionless data" is how I'd describe a database that stores tiny amounts of data at a massive cost. Pay-to-play is permissionless iif you have the money.
Wikipedia database is managed by the wikimedia staff. You have the permission to edit it for now but can not guarantee it will be make available always. This is what the author meant.
I believe they do; you can download archives at [0].
It mentions that the edit history can be downloaded by looking for dumps with page-meta-history in their name at [1]
The same is probably true for OpenStreetMap et al.
They're just rows in a MySQL database. Traditional RDBMS for OLTP are built around the assumption that all data is mutable. An unscrupulous Wikipedia DBA could unilaterally delete new history rows before anyone downloads a hard-copy and then no-one would be the wiser.
On the topic of OLTP RDBMS: things are changing though: ISO SQL (and at least MS SQL Server) have added support for "LEDGER" tables that extend the Temporal Table system (...that we know and love...er...hate) with immutability secured with cryptographic keys. Basically, you get to have your own centralized blockchain-like table.... so long as you trust your DBMS (and DBA) with the keys.
There's two types: append-only and updatable (which is still append-only under-the-hood, as destructive DML operations are still just appended to current history, just like with git).
It's pretty cool, I'll admit - I've been wanting support for true "read-only" tables for ages - the only thing I'm dreading is having to put-up with poor tooling support for a decade or two (e.g. Entity Framework Core still doesn't support temporal-tables, and SQL Server still only supports SYSTEM versioning and not the (far more useful) APPLICATION versioning system, argh).
That said, I don't think Wikipedia would really want crypto-signed page edit histories: it would obligate them to host truly objectionable content (otherwise the hash references would break), and there's far too many sociopathic griefers online for that to not happen...
Opensea is managed by opensea staff, Bitcoin and Etheream are in a very concrete way managed by the devs. You absolutely cannot guarantee anything about access in the future for sites based on web3 - if anything it is worse as there are two gatekeepers, the site owner and the cryptocurrency (so for example gas fees might go up making a tiny transaction very expensive, or a currency might fail).
Nobody wants a truly distributed org because it is impossible for anything to get done, just as nobody actually wants to use a distributed currency because the costs outweigh the benefits, and the web we have is distributed enough, though of course it has flaws and is in some ways too centralised now, but I don't see how web3 as currently sold helps to solve that.
The biggest problems currently are around identity (SSO), and microtransactions, but neither of those are solved well by existing cryptocurrency solutions or things like NFTs.
Opensea is just a viewer and tool to interact with contracts. If your NFT is removed from opensea it could still be interacted with through another platform or a platform you make yourself (see notlarvalabs).
E.g the developer of a large NFT platform called hicetnunc had a temper tantrum and deleted their entire platform. But because it’s decentralized another platform (objkt) now provides all the same functionality with the same data.
Because of this you can see why there are such passionate people either side, a lot to gain but also a lot to lose if you’ve normally profited from owning data.
Microtransactions will be solved by Brave/BAT. They have the largest user base which is very important for negotiating with publishers and advertisers.
> can not guarantee it will be make available always
True! However I trust the wikimedia foundation, and the fact that because it is a valuable dataset there are many copies of it. If they really did restrict access, anyone could spin up their mirror.
Most of the decentralisation arguments seem to rely on some fetishistically absolute version of the world where you cannot trust any single person or entity, and crypto/web3 is the only reasonable solution if that is true. I, however, have more faith in other people, and am fine placing trust—to varying degrees—in others.
> some fetishistically absolute version of the world where you cannot trust any single person or entity
And even then, there’s still trust necessary to the extent that web3 things interact with the real world. You can have provable on-chain voting in a DAO, but if the DAO owns any non-crypto assets, you’re trusting a human to execute the consensus decision.
You are missing the point. Obviously society runs based on mutual trust. One can not ignore the fact that a few people or group in power can create great damage. Crypto makes it possible to create "trust by design" systems so that a small group can not do great damage or censor things that undermine their power.
That's a great example of decentralization, but expecting anything which gains value from being decentralized ala Wikipedia to be handled solely or even marginally by volunteers is unrealistic.
> When (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee invented the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) he unleashed what we now think of as permissionless publishing.
1. Retconning
2. As always, web3 and crypto is the next WWW, and the next Internet, and the next car, and the next wheel. Even though literally all signs are pointing to it being the next Juicero or the next Enron.
> We also need permissionless data. Why do we need this? Because otherwise we are left with a few large corporations ... We of course know where this winds up and that’s why pretty much everyone hates their cable company and their electric utility.
That's quite a logic leap. We need permissionless data because that's why everyone hates their cable company.
> prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn’t know how to have permissionless.
1. We did.
2. Retconning yet again. Bticoin paper is literally this:
--- start quote ---
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
--- end quote ---
The etire paper mentions permissions or permissionless exactly zero times.
> It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is.
Yes, you have. Yoi have just significantly overstated how big it is.
> As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide
Ah yes, regulations. Which, if I remember from just a few paragraphs above "then leads us to all sort of regulatory contortions aimed at rectifying the power imbalance but in practice mostly cementing it. "
> And if widely adopted Web3/crypto technology will also start to improve along other dimensions. It will become faster and more efficient.
And that will surely happen just because you say it will happen. Also because innovation I guess?
> And much like the PC was a platform for innovation that never happened on mainframes or mini computers, Web3 will be a platform for innovation that would never come from Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.
Innovation never came from Juicero either. Somehow, your web3 is surely the next Internet, and not the myriad of failed "innovations".
> No single entity or small group of entities controls it
In practice they will. The moment +50% of miners agrees on any transaction, regardless of it happening - it will happen. So having +50% of Bitcoin miners means you control the Bitcoin market. And we're back to square one.
Edit: Fine they only control current transactions, but forking as a solution to this implies the current network won't be able to just join and takeover a new bitcoin fork. Which is highly suspect.
This is inaccurate, especially in the case of Bitcoin where the blockchain is relatively small (around 300-400gbs). Hash majority has zero influence on transaction validity. Invalid transactions are never accepted by the vanilla software, and those running nodes have no reason to accept them. Even if 99% of the network accepts an invalid transaction, the network will simply fork into an obviously invalid state and a valid state. Users will simply choose the one without foul play, and the majority of Bitcoin holders, even those who don't run nodes, will know which fork is valid and simply price the invalid fork at $0.
You are confusing a 51% attack, or a block re-org attack, with complete control over the network, which it does not grant.
So what if you are incorrect? Is that what you mean to say?
What about double spending allows miners to control all future transactions afterwards? Double spending is of course undesirable but its hard to imagine its profitable to organize such an attack when it immediately begins burning money once word gets out, and if it didn't it would devalue the miners' own infrastructure when people lose faith in the currency.
You can dream up many a scheme where it can happen, and renting hash is certainly a problem down the road for many coins, but you're exaggerated presentation of the 51% attack is clearly flawed and stemming from your simple understanding how the network reaches consensus.
If you own 51% or more of net you may double spend as much as you like. Essentially you get to print money for yourself, while screwing over someone.
Sure, you might fork it, but nothing prevents previous 51% mining rigs from taking over the fork.
Bitcoin like any p2p tech relies on concensus. Which is fine when it comes to torrents, less fine when it comes to online games, and downright catastrophic when it comes to money.
No, you do not get to print money. The value of Bitcoin, for example, is what people are willing to trade it for. You cannot stealthily sustain a 51% attack and will therefore be devaluing your equipment (you are the most invested person in the network likely by far).
There are cases where this isn't true. If you are able to rent the hashpower then you can 51% attack without worrying about equipment devaluation; if there is an equally valuable coin which uses the same hash function you could migrate to it after. These are somewhat unlikely; Why would one ever rent out 51% hash? Gaining 51% hashpower is extremely expensive and relies on the network community not reacting to it.
But lets say the unlikely happened. If I hold Bitcoin and I understand that someone holds 51% hashpower by credible reports of malicious re-orgs, I simply do not send. At this point I would wrap my tokens onto another blockchain if I needed to send them and wait for a solution. Its certainly not catastrophic, and the majority of people on the network will not lose their coins. The community reaction greatly hinders profitability of an attack. Its also very unlikely - not a significant concern, but also not an unsolvable problem should it become one.
I'm slowly coming around to web3 as an idea after giving it a lot of thought. For me, MMOs are a great boostrap for thinking about this. People pay real money for in-game items and currency...usually from the developer, but web3 enables players to buy/sell directly (and allowing this can be a product draw, much like APIs were for Twitter). Web3 technologies can enable an ecosystem for this without a bunch of bespoke work that likely isn't core to what a business is trying to achieve.
However, I don't see it as a "web3 all the things" like web2 was, but as a set of protocols for certain kinds of behavior we're beginning to see online more and more. We'd probably add it in without thought (like we did Facebook's share buttons 10 years ago) if the tech weren't so complicated and the energy concerns so pernicious.
A lot of the success will come down to how successful everyone is at standardizing on schemas. In a decentralized world, I'm skeptical of that working out better than it did for web2, but I wish everyone luck.
> but web3 enables players to buy/sell directly (and allowing this can be a product draw, much like APIs were for Twitter). Web3 technologies can enable an ecosystem for this without a bunch of bespoke work that likely isn't core to what a business is trying to achieve.
I'm old enough to remember that in the ancient history of just 10 years ago Diablo III was released with an auction house that let people buy and sell items from other players for real money.
I'm also old anough to remember that in the ancient history of just 7 years ago it was removed from the game and I also am old enough to remember the reasons.
Having players trade in-game items is not as good a proposition for "what a business is trying to achieve" as you think it is.
It's likely because you can make more money by holding more control over the supply. Even users of the Steam Market would scoff a bit at it - they would rather have it be without taxes and exchangeable for real money. I wonder if there is a web3 solution already in place which could achieve that...
That's my mistake - indeed nothing is free, but when the protocol is open source and interchangeable the market will settle on a sustainable marketplace which users prefer the most; price will of course play a role in that. Point being I'm not sure Steam is simply compensating their database operations with their marketplace tax, and that they have no competition for market making their own items.
> It's likely because you can make more money by holding more control over the supply.
Because, surprise-surprise, businesses are not charities. They do need to earn money.
> they would rather have it be without taxes and exchangeable for real money.
Of course users want all the perks with none of the responsibilities: let the business support all these items in perpetuity while users trade them outside of the business' purview.
> Because, surprise-surprise, businesses are not charities. They do need to earn money.
And?
> Of course users want all the perks with none of the responsibilities: let the business support all these items in perpetuity while users trade them outside of the business' purview.
Everyone would like all the benefits with no cost in all cases; that's not what's being suggested as its obviously impossible. The more decentralized service simply has the potential to be a better deal for users at the cost of centralized business - it does not mean costs disappear. You say yourself the business need to earn money (which is only true for sub profit margins), so you seem to understand that the money goes somewhere, why not let it go more to users willing to shoulder some cost while also giving them more freedom?
With all due respect, the point of all these crypto buzzwords is to forgo what's 'good' for [centralized] businesses in favor of what users want. I can imagine the vast majority of Diablo players (assuming the market was ran legitimately) would prefer to still have the market, while Blizzard discovered they could make more money closing it. A high ideal (to me) for web3 is that users can uphold the system they want and be compensated for doing so at the same time.
While the web3 example still features a creator and early investors who may make the most money, users will prefer the market which promises to stay up via its contract code. We may be a long way from enough users understanding this to influence developers, and it may never reach that perfectly, but that's the direction web3 can hopefully push things.
> the point of all these crypto buzzwords is to forgo what's 'good' for [centralized] businesses in favor of what users want.
The point I was replying to was literally this: "Web3 technologies can enable an ecosystem for this without a bunch of bespoke work that likely isn't core to what a business is trying to achieve."
The core business can actually be hurt by unchecked trading of items.
> I can imagine the vast majority of Diablo players (assuming the market was ran legitimately) would prefer to still have the market
Why don't you go and ask the vast majority of Diablo players before making these assumptions?
> We may be a long way from enough users understanding this to influence developers,
How do you "influence developers" by trading some items outside the core of what the developers are building?
BTW, building tradable items can and usually is still outside the core of what business is building.
> but that's the direction web3 can hopefully push things.
Ah yes, the hope that web3 may push towards unchecked trading of meaningless items (meaningless outside the game/business in question) that actually ruins the core game experience.
> The core business can actually be hurt by unchecked trading of items.
Again, that's the point. Its obvious centralized market makers only make money when they control the market and limit market freedom, which is why its easy to imagine the players in general would prefer to avoid such a tax/manipulation/centralizing forces.
> How do you "influence developers" by trading some items outside the core of what the developers are building?
By placing personal value in systems that give users more freedom and assurance of the protocols they initially bought into. When people can understand that that is what they are being offered with a 'web3' approach, they can influence developers to build what's most demanded, i.e. basic economics.
> Ah yes, the hope that web3 may push towards unchecked trading of meaningless items (meaningless outside the game/business in question) that actually ruins the core game experience.
Ahh so Diablo items are meaningless now? Maybe to you, but certainly not to many other players as you've demonstrated. What about decentralized exchange protocols is unchecked? Its as safe as the blockchain itself - perhaps you are thinking of government regulations.
Core gameplay: is being hurt by players only chasing it in hoping to make money
Cryptopeddlers: yes, that's the point.
Thank you.
> they can influence developers to build what's most demanded, i.e. basic economics.
Core gameplay: is being hurt by players only chasing it in hoping to make money
Cryptopeddlers: yes, that's the point. That's what devs should build: ways to monetize assets in the game. That's what influence and basic economics is!
> Ahh so Diablo items are meaningless now? Maybe to you, but certainly not to many other players as you've demonstrated.
What part of "meaningless outside Diablo" did you not understand?
Don't bother. Judging by your answers there's very little of what you understood from my message.
> Core gameplay: is being hurt by players only chasing it in hoping to make money
That's just your opinion, man. I've heard from more Diablo players than just you that they dearly miss it. But I guess if all the value of your game is extracted to the team running the servers and zero of it to players is what you find compelling, feel free to fritter away on centralized grinding for truly and practically worthless pixels.
Clearly those items weren't meaningless outside Diablo when they sold for real money. How thick can you be? You think its that impossible to decentralize a market? You think it hasn't already been done?
> It's amazing how you totally dismiss the opinion of all the players who didn't like and didn't want the marketplace as irrelevant
It's amazing how you dismiss the opposing. Or is it? I had to stop reading after that, its clear this is isn't hitting for you as I'm forced to keep backtracking for your sake.
A novel platform that can’t block its users from deploying on it, or commerce, and people have trouble seeing some value in that?
Even the somewhat centralized platforms have so much high speed commerce on them that they don’t disrupt anyone. Even people that quickly exit to the bridges are not stopped and couldn't be, on the centralized-ish ones.
That’s a lot of alpha and value extraction to miss. Especially if you invest in the bridge :)
Don’t worry you’ll read about it late, in 2030, ngmi
> Even the somewhat centralized platforms have so much high speed commerce on them that they don’t disrupt anyone. Even people that quickly exit to the bridges are not stopped and couldn't be, on the centralized-ish ones.
What do you mean by "high speed commerce" and "people that exit to the bridges"? Why do you talk in riddles?
There is lots of trading, borrowing, arbitraging, building and releasing new products, marketplaces. Thats the commerce, a lot of it is high speed.
Bridges are the technologies that move assets between blockchains, so because there are trillions of dollars of assets in this ecosystem already, they dont rely on the exchanges to move fiat in and out anymore, they rely on the bridges to move other assets to other blockchains. There usually is a service fee to the bridge operator. It is lucrative.
> riddles?
I’m not here to explain, I’m just using the terms as they are. If people are stuck in 2017 or earlier with their older skeptics arguments, then they wont try to learn and just be more and more confused as the space keeps evolving, not my problem.
> There is lots of trading, borrowing, arbitraging, building and releasing new products, marketplaces.
I’ve seen you post about crypto many times before, and you obviously have a large bag.
But all of the trading you’re talking about is of crypto, the very thing we’re trying to establish what the usecase is. There are no products outside of crypto, and building a bridge/exchange/marketplace for assets does not automatically confer value to either the assets or the venue.
> But all of the trading you’re talking about is of crypto, the very thing we’re trying to establish what the usecase is
Or just look at the market needs, build the bridge, and collect a toll from everyone using it. Your standard is "I can't tell why people are using the bridge and they might stop, so therefore its a fools errand to build the bridge for income", "also income built from other people's speculation is not a use case, and my participating for income at all is also speculative so therefore I can't take it seriously"
With that kind of standard, you'll never reach a reconcilable conclusion, while continuing to miss all opportunities. Its an impossibly high standard when the same questions apply to every SaaS product or physical world commerce too. The whole world is built on consumption and speculation, and when the variables change everyone stops commuting over any particular bridge.
if you want dollars, get passive income from a product you built for that market niche, and convert your income to dollars. if you make anything that's used, then you've made a minor improvement for people in the space, which is good enough.
I’m a trader by profession, so fulfilling a market need because it exists for whatever reason isn’t something I struggle with. These threads aren’t about whether or not there is demand for the things you mention. Nobody disputes that.
The discussion is more nuanced about scale and longevity and that demand.
Its an emerging market that its participants are optimistic about. Nobody knows the answer they just try to get a piece of a growing pie. The time to market is hours, instead of months/years, for the same or greater monetization, and thats all there is to it.
If you’re waiting for the consensus on which quantitative analysis to use to justify your participation, then you’ll miss it.
Given the superior paths to monetization and liquidity, and the shorter lifecycle from inception to market, than everything else digital or software related, its easy for many people to just conclude that its not worth debating about and just act.
You're telling people not to think, not to analyse, and to impulsively throw money into something, just because it's there. This is terrible advice. You're not helping anyone with that kind of advice.
> There is lots of trading, borrowing, arbitraging, building and releasing new products, marketplaces. Thats the commerce, a lot of it is high speed.
No, that's not commerce. Trading, borrowing, arbitraging, building and releasing new products, marketplaces is not commerce. Commerce is the exchange of goods and services.
As someone who has just heard the name Web3 over and over again, is there anything tangible that I can try? I have tried IPFS, but I don't know if it's "web3".
there are a few clones of social media sites like https://orbis.club/, there are others that are like reddit or similar but I don't remember their urls.
As other commenter mentioned below, "web3" is mostly storing transactional info into a blockchain and then linking stuff to ipfs + some layer on top to display this.
For example that orbis site, indexes/caches the data in the bc to be able to display it as per their use case. So the only real difference is that the "tweets" are not owned by them but by each user. For anything else it's still a normal web app.
I don't know how this works legally, but there was a link from Vitalik's blog a few days ago explaining this. Say if a user uploads CP or some other illegal/offensive content the site can hide it but can't delete it. I'm not sure where liability would fall on here.
Similar, the case with Twitter blocking Trump a few years ago, maybe another site could still allow him to continue if they wish to do so by displaying the same content
I guess there are more use cases that distill from here, not sure how beneficial they are or might be, and just as many things in technology it is not 100% neccessary that the solution is better than something that already exists, it just needs to get traction and attract people/investment. Whether that happens with web3 is just to be seen I suppose.
Also descentralised exchanges are things coming up, but this gets even muddier with all the compliance requirements so not sure where those will end up
> The canonical example here is the personal computer (PC). The first PCs were worse computers than every existing machine. They had less memory, less storage, slower CPUs, less software, couldn’t multitask, etc. But they were better at one dimension: they were cheap. And for those people who didn’t have a computer at all that mattered a great deal. It is exactly this odd combination that made existing computer manufacturers (making mainframes down to mini computers) ignore the PC.
Wow. There are so many factual errors in these sentences that I’m not even sure where to start.
I’ll start by giving the author the benefit of doubt and assume that by „personal computer” they meant the IBM PC (1981) and its family. (Otherwise we’d have to assume that they completely ignore the existence of pre-PC home computers, many of which were both less powerful and significantly cheaper.) It’s also not true that the PC was unable to multitask (remember Concurrent CP/M-86?)
First, note that IBM, at the time of introducing the PC, was – and continued to be, well into the 21st century – _the_ major purveyor of mainframes. So saying that they „ignored the PC” implies that they ignored themselves, which doesn’t make sense.
Second, the initial PCs were just not powerful enough to compete with mainframes or minicomputers. The sets of usecases of „big” computers vs. PCs were almost completely disjoint until perhaps the 1990s. There were reasons why the PC exploded in popularity in the 1980s (open architecture being the #1 reason), but the author is silent about that.
I know this is tangential, but I see a lot of handwaving in this post and, frankly, not much else. Why should I listen to someone who can’t get their facts straight? Why bother, indeed?
The only concrete point in your rant seems to be this:
> So saying that they „ignored the PC” implies that they ignored themselves, which doesn’t make sense.
This makes perfect sense to anyone who has seen a large lumbering schizophrenic beast like IBM. It's commonplace for one division to despise, ignore and undermine another.
That vision of Web3, "Just put everything on the blockchain" is doomed to fail and I don't know anyone who ever seriously proposed it.
Blockchains are best suited for data subject to manipulation, i.e. data in which there is profit to alter. If we were to naivly build "Web3" in theory with this in mind, then the majority of activity would be peer-to-peer, federated, or partially centralized, while the exchange of security credentials would take place on an efficient broadcast layer.
The trick is to do as much off chain as possible - and if trust becomes an issue, develop a minimally on chain scheme. Its still early days, if you ask me how exactly this looks in 20 years I couldn't tell you.
How do you develop a minimal chain scheme for increasing trust? As in, do you first get people to your website and then ask them to contribute in decentralization by downloading the chain?
Bitcoin cannot work without people noticing and liking Bitcoin. If it didn't get traction, it'd still be centralized haha - only one entity would have the whole chain.
Not sure why you’re downvoted because this is a legit question. Even if web3 is build on a large number of blockchains, you still need whole blockchains downloaded in order to be trustless. Currently probably only a tiny percentage of crypto users have downloaded whole blockchains, and instead defer to third parties.
Exactly, the chain would increase indefinitely begging 2 questions:
- Who would even want to keep it?
- Is using blockchains even worth it? Like, if you defer the download to third parties - isn't it again being centralized?
This is a common misconception. Web3 mostly exists off chain. Storing everything on the blockchain would not only take a lot of space (and thus be extremely expensive) but also be horribly slow. Web3 apps generally use the blockchain more as an audit log. There's a reason most of the web3 apps crypto believers give as examples for web3 apps that actually work are trading apps.
FWIW I think most people base this of a misunderstanding of how NFTs work based on the claims around it: NFTs prove ownership of a hash. That hash is associated with a URL. That URL points to a JSON document. That JSON document points to the NFT art piece (i.e. the "JPEG"). If the service hosting the JSON document (or the service hosting the art piece) goes away, the hash becomes a simulacrum, an identifier with no identifiee. It still indicates ownership but only to those who already know that this is what it does. There can be JPEGs on the blockchain (and allegedly there is already CSAM on at least one of them) but due to the size constraints this isn't how things usually work.
This isn't even getting into multi-layer approaches which came about because while web3 is built on ETH, actually doing anything with the ETH chain is extremely rate limited and has extremely high transaction costs, so other chains have been built on top of it that as I understand it just bulk commit hashes of snapshots or something to it.
FWIW the "first you download the Internet" solution already exists and is called IPFS. There is also a solution called Freenet that focuses on anonymity and avoiding censorship. Predictably the biggest problem with downloading the Internet is that you unknowingly (or knowingly) start collecting illegal content like CSAM, which may be a serious crime depending on where you live.
So, is blockchain therefore even needed? Why should you even "first you download the internet" (or even a subset of it)? I just want to watch some cat videos.
Confirming data integrity and origin is already solved - thanks digital signatures and checksums.
The only thing blockchains add is a strict ordering.
So someone can now sign a message A saying "I give this picture to X" and everyone will know that any future message B from that person saying "I give this picture to Y" is "invalid" because everyone agrees that message A happened before B. Anyone who downloads the whole blockchain can see this.
Well, as long as everyone agrees to believe that blockchain.
In case my bias wasn't clear enough: no, they're a solution looking for a problem and right now the biggest problems they're targeting seem to be a lack of grey market money laundering and pyramid schemes.
Web3 will handle IP address and DNS storage, sale, and search using basically NFTs on the blockchain. Meanwhile, HTTP content hosting will still be kept separate (maybe IPFS, maybe something centralized depending on the need).
Current example: NFTs typically store metadata on the blockchain and the content in IPFS.
99% of the foundation of crypto seems to be grift. Just waiting for the bubble to pop when they run out of suckers. Lets see how much their ugly JPEGs are worth then.
Which is important if you’re talking about whether lay people should buy random crypto. It’s totally irrelevant if you’re talking about the potential of the technology.
It’s weird that this article waffles on about PCs and how the author thinks that’s a good analogy. It’s not very convincing because you could easily pick another technology pair and show it the other way (often worse is just worse).
But the thing that really seems weird is that all you need to do make it interesting is 1) define what you mean by web3 (it’s a slippery weasel word that changes meaning whenever the people using it needs it to) 2) define a few uses that are obviously better than the alternatives and justify them without hand waving (including explaining why what would appear to be fundamental show stopping flaws are not in fact that)
If you can’t do that (and no one seems to be able to) the maybe, just maybe, it is bullshit?
Me I d define web3 by referencing the websocket arrival that evolved from Ajax polling to have better data subscription and the rise of full js frameworks which transformed the amount of work clients do on web resources that sometimes couldnt be done by the backend (drawing a financial graph full of beautiful indicator and refreshing live for instance).
I can understand web4 could be self financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority able to close them but I dont see yet a proper use case beyond criminal endeavour. Plus, we're far from it, we'd need an organic transmission network that goes out of the traditional ISP system, like a global bluetooth peer to peer mobile network every phone contributes to in exchange for payment... that would be fast enough...
Criminal endeavours are not equal. Some are trading drugs and murdering people, others are overthrowing authoritarian dictators like Putin or Lukashenko.
As you can imagine, the latter activity is criminal in Russia and Belarus.
That depends on drugs. If you hook people on highly addictive expensive drug with severe withdrawal symptoms, like heroin, it naturally spawns more crime, because addicts would resort to anything to get the next doze: theft, robbery, prostitution, murder, etc.
I think you misunderstand how this works in reality. Nobody walks to a shady oerson standing near the corner and says, "hi, I'm joe, today i want to try this meth stuff I've been hearing about, how much for a dose?" When a person is in a vulnerable state, there is always a 'friend' who offers first dose for free, and says, that it is ok and totally safe to try a few times. Consequences come later when it is too late.
Opioids are added to less addictive drugs to make the customer more regular and thus drive more profit. It's never smart business to kill your customer but it's also not smart business to have a customer that only texts once every few months.
Of those three things “crypto” is ok for trading drugs, not very good for murdering people (not for lack of people trying but luckily it seems like death prediction markets and dark web assassins aren’t really a thing), and not at all useful for overthrowing dictators. It’s absolutely fantastic for dictators who want evade sanctions and continue enriching themselves.
It is absolutely critically useful for overthrowing dictators. Currently that's the only sure way for Russian citizens to fund anti-Putin opposition without immediate consequences.
I’m absolutely sure that Putin and his cronies will find enough use for crypto (avoiding sanctions, carrying out criminal enterprise) that they’ll be more than happy about this minor inconvenience.
You are missing the point. Putin and his cronies will find ways to do their criminal business with or without cryptocurrencies. His opponents have little other choice BUT cryptocurrencies to fund their operations.
Dictators are overthrown at a rate of fewer than one in three years (maybe even lower), and Bitcoin has entered the public consciousness no earlier than in 2017. Give it some time.
> Currently that's the only sure way for Russian citizens to fund anti-Putin opposition without immediate consequences.
This seems like incredibly irresponsible advice: if you're worried about consequences for a political donation, leaving a signed public confession is the police's dream come true. Compromise someone's computer and you now have proof of a crime as well as something you can use to pressure everyone they transacted with, even if you had no idea to investigate them at the time it happened.
Best of all, nobody knows if that's happened unless you tell them so you can continue to quietly map out the opposition network and pressure each person you link to a Bitcoin transaction to identify their partners but otherwise stay quiet.
When I studied at University 15 years ago web 2.0 was in full swing and the academics where busy talking about web 3.0 which was at the time understood as "the semantic web".
Web 2.0 was never a thing. It was just a vague term some people came up with so they’d have something to say in their magazine articles/blog posts. There is no Web 2.0 or in fact web2.
Web 3.0 I have a soft spot for. It was a stupid name and the ideas didn’t really work but the semantic web people had their hearts in the right place.
BS. Web 2.0 was the conjunction, refinement and broader availability of several different web-related technologies, notably JavaScript and AJAX, among other things. They enabled an interaction model for web stuff that was impossible with earlier versions of the web.
Nobody said "web2", indeed, but that doesn't invalidate that Web 2.0 described a very distinct and substantial evolution of what is possible in the browser.
Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, DuckDuckGo would all be great examples of self-financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority distributed across a peer-peer mesh network.
Unclear if the value prop is large enough to overcome the activation energy of such an endeavor.
Wikipedia and OpenStreetMaps absolutely have central authorities and are not peer-to-peer or distributed on a mesh network. If they shut down you could probably access their data from an archive, but that does not mean that they are decentralized.
DuckDuckGo is even more centralized since it uses the index of one of the largest search engines (bing), is not at all self-financing, is not at all unstoppable (if the central authority was shut down any replacement would need to access bing's result) and is not at all peer-to-peer.
Either you don't actually know what those terms mean or you don't know how those websites function.
Ok, since there is clearly a trend my comment was too focused on responding to the grandparent and lacked enough context for all readers. Let some amend it to:
> Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, [WebSearch] would all be great examples of [potentially operating as] self-financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority distributed across a peer-peer mesh network.
> Unclear if the value prop is large enough to overcome the activation energy of such an endeavor [to convert these currently centralized services into an entity like what the grandparent describes].
People choose to do that because it’s convenient. There’s nothing in any of the nebulous ideas around “web3” that would change that.
You can use a federated social network RIGHT NOW. Or you can just make your own website TODAY. No permission needed, you get complete ownership. It’s the amazing decentralised dream that was (and is) the internet. Only thing it won’t do is potentially make you rich (at the expense of others) just for getting in (and out!) at the right time.
Very good points. I can't see Joe the Plumber using or caring about web3 if it requires any more effort then the current internet ( which is arguably already decentralized ... )
- You need permission from the central root certifying authorities (aka. getting a domain) for people to be able to find your site.
- You need to remain out of the shitlist of a handful of “spam and anti-evil” authorities (getting on a list means your site gets blocked by all the big browsers and can be permanent or take a long time to resolve)
- You need permission to host your content from the: hardware / cloud provider, the datacentre if you self-host, and / or intermediary ISPs for peering (if no-one will peer, your site may as well not exists)
There are some other parties you need permission or blessing from that don’t come immediately to mind.
Freenet and Tor have existed for a while and are solutions to these problems for those that need them. You’re not interested in that though are you? No coins so no option for speculation.
Web3 as it currently stands (as I said before it’s a slippery weasel word so no don’t you’ll change it to suite) also needs all that stuff. Most “web3” apps are served via Cloudflare ffs!
A couple questions to dig into each point: What problem does it solve? Could web3 have the same problem? If so, how will web3 solve it?
Most of the points mentioned are security features to shield people from bad actors, something that crypto does not seem very good at thus far, which is why I’m curious how web3 solves similar things.
I'm most excited for digital asset marketplaces. I don't work in the space, and I only have a look at where things are every few months, so I'm probably the last person you should be asking.
Just like any paradigm change though, it's going to rely on the "killer implementation" to take off to kickstart the paradigm reaching mass appeal.
>You need permission from the central root certifying authorities[...]
>You need to remain out of the shitlist of a handful of “spam and anti-evil” authorities
And the exact same will happen in the world of 'web3'. Except you won't sign your terms and conditions in English but in from of a smart contract. The internet is a distributed computer, blockchains are distributed computers. Whatever people built on top of it will be as permissioned and have as many authorities as anything else.
You think you can't do encrypted, peer-to-peer communication without authorities on the good old internet? Of course you can, there's nothing technically in the way of it at all. It's just that nobody runs a business that way and they won't do it in the world of 'web3' either.
Some of the web3 concepts I've seen are indeed not using DNS in the practical sense you are implying. Why use CA's when you can run your own name service? There are plenty of other methods too.
Not exactly sure why you think TCP, the protocol, is relevant here? Creating or interacting with a web contract in a blockchain is a different ballgame to hosting a web site, and are treated as such by ISPs. One is indistuishable with normal web browsing, and the other is often treated as a business. The threat of having your ISP cut you off because they don't like what you are browsing remains a threat though, and hence a weakness by requiring their permission.
You say that; but after almost 20 years of attack at every one of those levels I can still connect to https://thepiratebay.org. And https://wikileaks.org. That wouldn't be possible if there was a true single entity in charge, both of those sites have enemies. In the case of wikileaks, enemies with literal firepower and secret agencies working to shut it down.
I never said there was a single entitiy in charge, nor that it was impossible to host politically damaging or ifringing content. I only said that you need permission from several parties. Both wikileaks and thepiratebay have obtained permission (or at a minimum did not attract ire) from all of the parties I listed. If they did not, then they would not be accessible.
Do you think either site managed to purchase and control a domain name without the approval of a domain registrar?
Do you think either site is accessible without the approval of the ISP providing a connection to their server?
If your point is that one human can't admin an entire internet then sure you are technically correct (best type). But that isn't a useful point - the web is still highly decentralised even though it takes more than one person to run it.
Both those domains at various times have had disagreements with their registrars, with their ISPs and with bodies on the internet more powerful than that. Hasn't made any difference to whether I can connect to them or not, because there are always alternative paths and vendors. Which is more or less what it means to be decentralised. In practice, being able to replace any party and keep on going is the capability that matters.
My point, as stated originally, is that "web3" and all the hype around it in its current form will require less (practically none) permission for users to interact with it than the existing web paradigm we are familiar with.
It's a cultural shift that is epitomized by trends like WSB, $GME, and Robinhood. To older people it doesn't make sense. So you can scream and shout that it is illogical (like many have re: gold, silver, etc) and adoption will continue to increase and the value of the underlying assets will go up.
It’s funny you should bring up other situations in which people in the know manipulate “less sophisticated” actors for their own benefit.
And that you think the alternative you’re arguing away from is investing in gold and silver is kind of hilarious. Precarious metal “investors” are just a different generation of poor fools.
Part of the profit part of the web does not include decentralizing tech... This is the one thing that makes everything a scam. If you mint a new coin or NFT, there is always a bunch of actions a seller or buyer can take to either bolster or undermine the price of the asset.
Web 3 is also based on an economy of popularity and/or financial backing to either increase value or disparage an asset, which makes manipulation rampant, and it also makes the "Web 3 economy" inherently corrupt. Frankly, it's not a movement, it's really to me just a mutation of MLM and pyramid-scheme marketing online.
Sorry to be so harsh, but the way it's being spammed at all of us every day, and infecting real online commerce is abhorrent, and growing to the point where not much can be trusted when Web 3 is mentioned for me.
I don't really know much about web3 or what it will happen in the future, but these same debates happened ith other techs before which are now mainstream in a similar fashion as this here.
People like pointing out echo chambers all around while they are also in one.
Remember all the feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers! web2.0 s just ajax requests!
If people dump money into it, then something is likely to come out whether is better or not than what it was before. Maybe is worse, or maybe something will be built on top of it that will be better or some othere political event might make it relevant. Who knows
Before we mostly had to deal with people emotionally invested in a new thing, now they’re all financially invested as well. It makes for a different conversation.
Yes: the financial aspect definitely seems to have changed this — I share Simon's impression, and what this reminds me most of wasn't tech but the adjacent stock market circa late 1999/2000. If you knew a day trader at the time, they would be hyping up random stocks talking about how it was a sure thing to be the next Pets.com but if you asked them any questions at all it immediately became apparent that they had no idea about how that company worked, what the competitive environment was like, or how they could possibly become profitable. Some of them made fairly large amounts of money talking things up and selling before the inevitable drop but quite a few others were left holding the bag.
That level of confident ignorance is the prevailing tone of the cryptocurrency world: everyone talks about changing the world but it's extremely hard to find someone who actually understands the details of the business they're trying to get into or why it works the way it currently does, but they don't let that stop them because they've already bought in they stand to lose potentially quite large sums of money if they can't find buyers.
It’s called survivorship bias. Most things that people called bullshit we don’t remember because they were bullshit so why would we remember.
Now “crypto” is a little different because the the promise (not always followed though on, it’s still negative sum) of money to anyone who can bring themselves to believe. Like many bubbles and ponzi-like schemes before it’s primary functionally is to promote itself, and damn that’s one of the few things it’s really good at.
> feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers!
Unlike the crypto ecosystem, those offered a tradeoff of higher cost and less control for greater convenience and ease of management. Which was hugely successful.
They're also not ... hegemonizing? in the way that cryptocurrency seems to be advocated.
My main point being that such tradeoff wasn't obvious at the time, and also the cloud offering back then was very inferior to what it has evolved into and that we are familiar now
I'm not saying the same will neccessarily repeat with so called web3, but we might be at a similar stage - in this case the sensation(?) of ownership of one's content is a desired attribute at the expense of efficiency in computing/processing terms for some use cases
it's pretty much the wild west now and not fully understood, but if it attracts investment with time something might come out of it.
Maybe the onus is on the skeptics to conclusively prove that web3 is BS? Since none can effectively prove so, then maybe it is not BS?
The skeptics are always inventing new reasons why it will fail, and yet it's still here and bigger than ever, day after day, making the skeptics seems crazy at this point, pointlessly arguing for lack of use for something that is clearly useful, judging by the sheer amount of capital and development resources used, if nothing else.
There is obviously monetary value, but us skeptics see that it is driven by illicit trade, money laundering, tax evasion, pump & dump schemes, ponzi schemes, wash trading scams, etc. All things that are a net negative for society.
Yes it’s totally normal to take a word with no real definition (or at best a definition that shifts depending on what’s needed) and have to “prove” it’s BS.
If I tell you that web4 is all about complete freedom and an end to world hunger and it’s based on cow farts is it up to you to prove that it’s BS? (It’s early days for cow farts, you can’t judge them o what they can do right now)
I think his point is that what you claim to be "here" and "now" is different than what is actually here and now. Just having funding and effort getting put into it does not mean it actually delivers on it's promises. That said I find no reason that cryptocurrencies couldn't deliver given enough time. I just find what they are delivering to be something I rather wish wouldn't exist.
Is your theory that anything with lots of money shoved into it must be good? If so, can I interest you in some tulips? Or, more recently, a few thousand shipping containers of unsellable 3D TVs?
I think the PC analogy is solid. I think the observation that we need a way to permissionly interact with data is spot-on, and I agree that that could bring a second wave of value creation and innovation.
Think of having a Facebook-like social graph, not controlled by Facebook. Or a merchant aggregation system like Amazon's without Amazon. A system not driven by maximizing exposure monetization (via ads, paid placement, etc.) but by something like a Nash equilibrium that maximizes value creation for participants.
This is what I work on, and I think it can be done.
So what you are saying is that the internet should be built on a model where people can upload children pornography or propaganda from state actors and nobody can do anything to stop it? Thanks I pass. I'm also curious about how to provide distributed storage that competes with google in terms of size, reliability and performance.
The fun thing about cryptography is that allows building internet services that can beat the blockchain. There is nothing preventing you from creating a service where people upload encrypted stuff that is only associated to a key id. In fact there are already services that kind of do this.
Why consider data redundancy the use case at all? If you really care about a file you could always back it up on multiple local drives and email it to those who want it - that's not what Web3 or crypto is about. Its about the storage of valuable data i.e. data whose integrity holds a lot of value: Public keys, account balances, etc.
I'm interested in culling the superfluous aspects of crypto, heaven knows they exist, so if you want to be involved in helping with that you should first become more competent on the subject.
I just find it a little concerning that there are people out there, who are blindly following this Web3 "trend" by spending their money on digital "art".
For the average person, there is no real use for Web3 because there is no actual definition for it.
My impression is that Web3 is being praised as decentralized, yet it is people with a lot of money who are the one's regulating the pace right now.
And that is a tad bit concerning to say the least, because if I invest millions into something (whether as an individual or a VC) - I'd like to feel a sense of "ownership", otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes.
I'd go as far as saying that for most people, including those entrenched in spending their hard earned money, the word Web3 is immediately associated with NFTs, not the actual blockchain technology. And that says a lot.
> otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes
It bleeds their personal opinion and hampers the debate. Apperently you think "digital art", or cryptocurrencies are not a "real cause". Which begs the question: who defines what "a real cause" is? The International World Causes Committee?
Isn't anything that people want to spend money (resources) on by definition a real and worthy cause to at least those people?
I'm talking about ownership, more specifically - market control. I don't care about "Web3" if a handful of people/companies are the one's controlling its growth.
It's so stupid it actually hurts my brain just to type it.
Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm (founded by former partners of both Sequoia and Coinbase), Solana Ventures, and surprisingly quite a few Facebook alums (Anthony Pompliamo, Chamath Palihapitiya)
I think that, as with any debate, “worthwhile causes” cannot be defined so absolutely.
I know people who “want” to spend money on addictive and destructive drugs, because they’re continuously compelled by a pathological chemical imbalance to do so.
Does that mean an addiction to heroin or Xanax is a “real and worthy cause”? How about an addiction to online gambling with generative art of monkeys/lions/pixel art?
There's far more innocuous examples, such as french fries and soda and sweets. Is it a real and worthy cause for someone to create a restaurant that serves junk food? Junk food that causes diabetes and heart disease?
Apparently it's okay to be Coca-Cola or McDonald's or Mars. Those are real and worthy corps blessed by boomers of yore.
If someone is addicted to gambling, there are plenty of casinos which are also worthwhile businesses apparently. Legal in many states, nations and territories.
Again, none of this can be defined so absolutely. That is my point. And all of the things you mention are already regulated (gambling, etc.), or under consideration for regulation (such as New York City banning soda [0]).
I'm not saying that I'm for or against these regulations, but obviously there are boundaries where society needs to intervene, in one way or another. Portugal handled their drug problem in a very innovative way [1], and that's my preferred modal for ending the "drug war" (decriminalization and support for addicts). But it's still some form of regulation.
Not OP but no. If someone buys in to a multi-level marketing scheme and starts peddling weight loss pills on Facebook, they certainly have spent real money on that and yet it is not a worthy cause because their only expectation is profit. NFTs have the possibility that the buyer is just genuinely a collector with no concern whatsoever for the value of the asset, but art collection is largely a financial venture. Not to mention that this simple art purchase contributed to higher gas fees for everyone else - why should we have to suffer just because you purchased something? - I don’t consider that a worthy “cause” at all.
In this space, you can donate to the EFF, sponsor open source projects, use services with subscription models over advertising models, donate to charities expanding internet and computing access globally, etc. which are all more “cause worthy” than buying digital art alone.
People sometimes claim that there's a generational divide in crypto adoption — younger people "get it" while older people (those who came of age with the early web) are stuck in their ways.
But there’s a large group of older people who cling to crypto because they think it'll make their ideas sound relevant again. While appearing "disruptive", the crypto space actually privileges those (generally older) folks who already have money to burn (like the Winklevoss twins, whose payout from FB provided more money than they could ever spend on themselves in one lifetime).
> I found the idea of a non governmental controlled currency with an upper bounded amount interesting, as inflation can't be a thing.
As I'm sure you would realise if you give the textbooks a chance, deflation is much worse than inflation. Nor is bitcoin truly inflation-less; the prices swing like a yo-yo, it's simply deflationary on average thus far.
How about as a means to provide financial security to the world's 1.7 billion unbanked, a means for those who live under oppressive rule to preserve wealth in the face of rampant currency debasement, in a form that cannot be confiscated or stolen. Money-printing drives inflation which is is a regressive tax that disproportionally hurts the poor, who don't own real estate or stocks. It accelerates the wealth gap, which further strains our society. Bitcoin is a means to expand financial inclusion, and help level the playing field just a bit. It's not just about greed.
Regarding energy use, Bitcoin mining inherently seeks out the lowest cost electricity which turns out to be either stranded energy (not usable for anything else) or renewable (solar, wind, hydro). This is yet another reason to push governments to stop subsidizing fossil fuels. Also, since Bitcoin mining can be done at any time and in any place, it is able to act as the buyer of last resort for renewable projects whose energy production does not line up with grid demand. Having this extra buyer can greatly reduce the payback period for a proposed solar/wind project that otherwise would not have been able to attract the investment to build it.
You could think of where you store your wealth as a vote for the system which best represents your values, and for the system you would like to see proliferated. Your inclusion adds value to the network, which strengthens its security and helps push it up the adoption s-curve. The more users there are, the more services appear, and the more accessible and useful it becomes.
I was never that interested in monetary policy or the history of money until I found out about Bitcoin and started doing my own research.
My house on the countryside and self sustaining lifestyle (obviously not totally hermitic, but way more than the average person) votes for the system very loudly I'd say.
I am very interested in the history of money, but it made me a Marxist, or rather a Trotskyist ;)
If Bitcoin can be spent, its owners can be coerced to spend it, so it can be stolen. Regarding excess energy, I'd rather have energy storage firms be that buyer.
Cryptocurrencies may have a part to play in the future of humanity, but Bitcoin will not be it. It's a proof of concept that's overstayed its welcome.
A person's Bitcoin holdings can be distributed across any number of wallets. How does the thief know (1) their mark owns Bitcoin, (2) how much Bitcoin they are stealing, and (3) whether they have coerced the owner to hand over the keys to all of their wallets?
Energy storage is inefficient and expensive, so a new renewable project based around this is less likely to be funded and built than one that can directly monetize the excess. Profit and greed is the incentive structure for much of human society.
Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of the future. The energy expenditure is required to provide the highest level of security and decentralization which is needed for a global reserve asset. Any other system is vulnerable to attack or centralization, which will inevitably succumb to human greed like every fiat system in history.
> A person's Bitcoin holdings can be distributed across any number of wallets. How does the thief know (1) their mark owns Bitcoin, (2) how much Bitcoin they are stealing, and (3) whether they have coerced the owner to hand over the keys to all of their wallets?
Are the unbanked really going to operate a number of different wallets, including decoy wallets, to prepare for this scenario?
> Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of the future.
Its parameters were picked on a whim by somebody nobody can ever find. "Completely unchangeable parameters handed down from the equivalent of God" is not a property that I look for in a monetary system.
The safest and most effective method for storing wealth that the unbanked currently have is to bury gold jewelry somewhere. Gold holds its value better than fiat, but is not easily divisible and there is a large cost to converting it to/from fiat. Bitcoin keys can also be buried, but if necessary they can also be memorized and transported across borders without risk of seizure. Also, having multiple wallets is not complicated; you may be underestimating the cleverness of the unbanked.
The parameters of the Bitcoin code are changeable (and have changed multiple times since inception) via hard-fork based on the 'voting' of the nodes which verify all new blocks and number in the tens of thousands distributed across the globe. The parameters of the protocol are set such that anyone can run a verification node on only a couple hundred dollars worth of hardware, thereby encouraging decentralization.
> The parameters of the Bitcoin code are changeable
In principle, yes. But look at the clusterfuck that was the BCH fork. Something as basic as blocksize led to an outrageous amount of venom and two communities hating each other. Now imagine if the core devs wanted to change things that more directly affected the relative wealth of early adopters. Could you believe the anger if they proposed that we double the number of eventually mined bitcoins?
Inflation is not just caused by printing money. You can still experience inflation (rising prices of a basket of goods) without any change in the amount of available currency.
I'm generally a web3 skeptic, turned off by all the hype and ideology, but the interesting thing about "web3" is you a potentially critical mass of zealots working together and building on ideas. I'm sure something interesting will emerge out of that. Will it require crypto? Maybe, but probably not. In fact, I think what will likely happen is interesting ideas will come out of web3 but then they'll just end up implemented without crypto/decentralization.
I rememeber someone on Twitter describing the invention of public blockchains by way of an analogy of computers being invented as part of an effort by someone to invent pong.
A permissionless database was invented as part of an effort to create p2p electronic cash.
Absolutely agree - any technology is only useful if it solves a problem.
IMO, Blockchain/Crypto seem to come from a perspective of "how can we apply blockchain to X?" rather than asking "What problem are we trying to solve, and what requirements would any solution need to meet?" BEFORE deciding what technology options there are which could solve it.
Pitching 'Web 3' as a technical solution rather than solving a problem inevitably leads to 'when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail' (which is my personal opinion of the whole crypto space).
The phrase is "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We can stretch the analogy but I'll reiterate my point literally:
Longstanding problems do not have bootstrap solutions, i.e. they are longstanding because simple hard work and known strategies could not solve them. To think that you can go around looking at longstanding problems and come up with solutions top down is out of touch with how innovation drives technology.
Innovations are small miracles - there is no formula for them, they don't come around often. When rare advancements are made it makes sense to test what good they can do for problems which do not give way to the old toolset.
To put it back in the analogy: When you invent a hammer to drive nails, check and see what else it might be good for.
You may not like the over extension of applied crypo currencies, but nobody is forcing you to invest in any of it. I for one would rather have experimentation with failure than none at all.
> To put it back in the analogy: When you invent a hammer to drive nails, check and see what else it might be good for.
This is exactly what I disagree with - It's generally a bad strategy to look for things to apply crypto/blockchain to in my opinion, we should be looking for problems and defining how we want things to work in the future, and then seeing if crypto is the right technical solution to achieve that. I.e. we shouldn't start with the technology and work back to what problems it could be used to solve - this will end up discounting technical solutions and solutionizing before requirements are understood.
We don't do this for other technologies - for instance it's just as valid that a NoSQL database could solve an issue, however we don't go around looking for problems NoSQL databases could solve.
There's a distinction that we're talking past each other with, as evidenced by your NoSQL example. NoSQL is not as much a discovery as distributed consensus is - its more of a forward step in database technology (down a certain branch).
Distributed consensus was not all that incremental nor precedented. Its not quite something that was imagined much before it was around in any fine detail. Considering how novel the innovation was, and how out of the blue it came, it makes sense to consider it more a 'new' thing that may have applications not easily thought of.
I'm sure in the smaller domain of databses NoSQL has been discovered to be useful for businesses or processes after its invention.
The point isn't that Blockchains are or aren't more novel than a NoSQL database - it's that both are technologies and not a solution to a clearly defined problem.
Basic solution design says start with a problem that needs to be solved and understand the key requirements, and then decide what technology best matches the requirements. That might be blockchain, or it might be something else.
Asking 'what can we build as a blockchain' is poor engineering, lazy thought process and symptomatic of a technology bubble IMO.
Web3 is 'the future' if you're invested in crypto.
If you're not (or have been and got out), then it's nothing but the delusion of a sect of believers who want to wish it into existence.
Being invested fundamentally changes the way people think and allows them to come up with any justification for their investment. It's not just crypto, but pretty much everything else where people expect easy returns at the expense of other people, nature, other countries, the future, etc.
There is nothing special or magical about this technology. Just because it uses an immutable data structure called 'block chain' and cryptographic hashes left and right, doesn't automatically make it useful or needed. In fact, the opposite is true due to the POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.
The fact that the vast majority of crypto enthusiasts, who have absolutely no idea how it works and what it represents, decided to part with their fiat in the hope that money grows on Merkle trees and pushed the price to astronomical levels does not validate the technology itself, but rather is an example of human psychology and greed at work.
I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
For fairness then I think we should consider that everyone that is anti web3 and has no crypto might have too much Google and FB stock according to your logic?
Or simply sour grapes. He is right that your investments cloud your thinking, but maybe he doesn't have enough experience to understand that the desire to see the price go down against something you decided to never buy, or recently sold, is driven by the same bias.
For context, I've been an early bitcoin core contributor and paid 7.5 btc for this old laptop.
In all fairness, I've only profited from btc and am still invested, but it doesn't change the conclusions I've had to accept.
All good reasons not to get involved. But I don't think that's as cogent an argument to convince others despite it being used as such on this board quite often.
Exactly. Recentralisation is under-appreciated by the decentralists; decentralisation is not a magic dust, and almost all decentralised services are made more convenient by intermediaries .. who will tend to consolidate. See e.g. OpenSea for NFTs.
If you've been following crypto currencies' history, you'll be aware that weakly decentralized (read: centralized) attempts always fall prey to decentralized protocols. The underlying principle is that a process controlled by nobody is more anti-fragile than one directly controlled by a few. Control is a liability.
Over the long term, protocols outcompete hosted services. E.g. Automated market makers will be much longer around than any centralized exchange like e.g. Coinbase.
People say that, but almost everything brought forward has non-crypto equivalents that are likely superior, and don't involve the opportunity cost of burning large amounts of fossil fuel, and redirecting huge amounts of valuable compute resources towards merely sustaining it.
Maybe someday some clever smart contract thing will really take off; and maybe someday some non-PoW coin will really matter, and maybe one day all the stabilizing regulatory infrastructure will be replicated for that hypothetical coin. It could happen. But it hasn't happened yet; so far it looks more like a ponzi scheme. And even if the tech really does evolve into something truly valuable, the route to that promised land could still have some surprising ups and downs, and if coins really continue growing, real-world economic pains along the way. Also - the tech behind it all isn't the same thing as the specific instantiation of todays coins. Even if the tech finds a niche, todays coins could still turn out to be a ponzi scheme.
It's because you're comparing a company to a category.
If I were to say that Coinbase and Uniswap have a clear value prop but AI doesn't, it also wouldn't make much sense as I'm not comparing apples to apples.
I'm the author of the parent comment and I haven't compared FB to e.g. a category like web3. Re-read it. I pointed out the unfairness of assuming that "everyone arguing for web3 is an investor" while simultaneously ignoring that anyone opposed to those ideas may have investment-bias too.
E.g. HN is known for being anti-crypto but suspects anyone pro crypto to be a crypto-invested shill.
But then at the same time I think it must be considered that e.g. anyone being anti-crypto also has a stake or interest in non-crypto related endeavors. I doubt there are people on here without some form of stake simply arguing for "the universal truth".
For all your trivia recitations you failed on a crucial point.
> POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.
POW is a consensus mechanism that secures the entire Bitcoin network. At times that has represented over one trillion USD worth of value. The benefit of Bitcoin's consensus is to all the money locked up in it, without it, or even if the profit to hack Bitcoin were only slightly marginal, the whole thing would fall apart, almost one trillion in value.
It is not for the very few that consensus mechanisms reward, it is for the whole network (in the ideal case). So in a way, when Bitcoin is driven to astronomical prices, and the incentive to break into it becomes irresistible to the most powerful people in the world yet they still cannot accomplish it, it does validate the technology.
The trillion dollars is a dream, it's not real.. Fugazzi.
Once the price starts falling, the scared 'investors' will get rid of it at any price to reduce loss. The network won't handle the load, so the price will drop even more. It happened before with BTC, where the 'billions' evaporated in hours, it will happen to the 'trillions'.
Funnily enough Dogecoin started as something completely antithetical to all the things about web3 'culture' HN hates the most. It was something to make fun of the venture capitalists wowing novices with buzzwords to part them from their money. I would say its now obviously overvalued considering the amount of money which flows there rather than to projects making real innovations. But then again, how do price a meme anyways?
That was not point. I feel it was fairly clear: Its not a dream when the hackers could turn it into 'real' money, which they easily could have (not all of it, but enough). But they couldn't crack into the pot despite the insane amount of honey right in front of them.
The article you linked refers to a centralized service being hacked to steal data - truly only related to crypto network security superficially.
SHA-1 exploits were found by researchers, if SHA-256 had the same forewarning protocols would initiate an emergency fork with a more secure hash function.
Do you think not being invested and watching the value grow 500x over the past few years leaves you embittered and too pessimistic to see the value? Or is it only the one side of the coin that clouds judgement?
I think it's both sides, but asymmetrically: I'm not being paid to not (re-)invest into crypto, and while I might make less than the true believers, there's an incentive to not be idologically skeptical (unlike some narratives, nothing stops banks, notaries, paypal etc. from simply absorbing crypto instead of being replaced by it, cryptocurency coding isn't fundamentally more difficult than other payment and distributed systems).
But if you are invested into crypto, you have a double incentive for delusion: you need to convince yourself and others that it will grow so it can grow and for the price not too collapse.All while having to deal with the temptation to cash out.
If real value is created, this problem doesn't exist as much. And of course, I might be biased and this might be a just so story, but I buy it.
> There is nothing special or magical about this technology...
I hope this is not the same thing as the 'use rsync' response when Dropbox was introduced. [0]
> I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
Right. Let us make a start rather than continuously talking about it since it is very difficult for everyone here to ignore it and we will see yet another HN post about cryptocurrencies, Web 3, etc.
How do we get rid of crypto entirely then? Stop everyone using it, shut it down and ban all of it?
EDIT: Good luck attempting to ban cryptocurrencies entirely. Either way, the undeniable trend in all of this is going towards regulations for cryptocurrencies.
It is not going away and we will still continue to keep talking about it and for many on this thread, it will be excruciatingly difficult to ignore it.
My big problem with crypto at the moment is that 99% of normal investors are just using exchanges. It’s like we’ve claimed to invent a new technology to replace rsync and it really does exist but it’s worse than rsync, and everyone who thinks they’ve bought in to the new technology are actually buying things from companies that claim to use the new technology and do genuinely have the ability to use the new technology but actually are using rsync 99.99% of the time. Or to put it another way - almost all the transactions are actually off-chain.
That doesn't necessarily change how exciting the tech is. The exchanges are working in an asset with known, predictable and locked-in inflation. 3rd parties (cough the US cough) cannot weaponize that asset against the traders. Inter-exchange transfers of wealth are relatively quick and trustworthy, even across borders without trusting any other exchange.
That is a pretty substantial change from any existing asset. It isn't all sunshine and roses, but there are a combination of properties here that never existed before.
People losing all their money (in an entirely foreseeable way) is a tragedy. But it isn't new, that has been a show on repeat for millennia. This time, at least the losses will be in something new.
Much like how the first dot com bubble doesn't change the transformative nature of the internet, a massive crash in crypto isn't going to be the end of this story. We might outlive Bitcoin, but no-one alive today will outlive cryptocurrencies. The only real question is how much change they will cause.
It's better for society than our current banking system, because the government considers our current system "too big to fail," so banks know that the government will bail them out if things get too bad, and the banks engage in risky behavior accordingly.
Yes but banks are subject to a wide array of regulations, liquidity requirements and frequent third-party audits. And then, in crypto, you have Tether, whose reserves claims are dubious at best
And of course the financial system as a whole is "too big to fail", but that would be true regardless of the implementation. Are you saying that if we switch to crypto then suddenly the financial system failing is OK?
> an asset with known, predictable and locked-in inflation
What's your definition of inflation, because by my definition Bitcoin experienced more than 100% inflation during this year, since which time it has experienced roughly 30% deflation.
There's going to be about 300k Bitcoin created in the next 12 months, and someone more motivated to care than I am could put some tight boundaries on that estimate if they wanted to.
If a bank is about to send me Euros, how many Euros will they get to create out of nothing in the next 12 months? I could probably make some educated guesses based on past rates; but there is a lot more certainty in Bitcoin.
Ironically given the price swings, the actual asset involved here is more stable and predictable than any asset that has ever existed in human history. That is going to matter somehow, although I'm not going to guess how. In a very similar way to how the internet making communication effectively free had (or; is having) far reaching consequences that were difficult to predict. This sort of never-before-seen certainty is going to have consequences.
land is a fixed resource, and new property is pretty predicable when you factor in planning law.
speculation in property and asset price inflation in this asset class has pretty much universally been a disaster for any change of a coherent, developing and fair society.
It's contributed massively to generational inequality, which has intern massively effected our politics. It's contributed to falling birth rates. It's facilitated organised crime both domestically and caused instability internationally . Plus every 20 years of so it completely crashes the whole economy.
indeed. the promised advantages include de-centralisation, on-chain, and no big financial institutions taking a cut or manipulating rates.
yet to practically trade in it you are back to centralisation, off-chain, and the exchanges taking a cut and manipulating rates.
and if it made any sense to use it as an actual currency, e.g. to buy coffee, then you are back to centralisation, off-chain, and wallet providers taking a cut.
Eyeballing the numbers on Coingecko DEXs seem to have a lot more than 1% of the volume (and this has been steadily growing). Further, most of web3 isn't about payments and where people invest and trade in them has little to do with whether those projects have potential.
We invented a new technology to replace CVS/Subversion/SourceSafe/$CENTRALISED_VCS, and it really does exist, and it's better than all of those old systems partly because it really is decentralised, and it's also based on crypto(graphic) primitives, but 99% of the people who think they've bought into it are actually just using another centralised service all over again. Or to put it another way - when GitHub goes down a disturbingly high proportion of a) git users are unable to get any work done at all, and b) build systems just break.
(Ok, git didn't invent the DVCS. But it was better enough on a number of important axes than those that came before it - including "being used by a high-profile project" - that you can say that it made DVCSs happen.)
using git with github is still a DVCS. You can branch, commit, merge, whatever without access to the central repository. None of that was possible with the classic VCS - if the central server went down, you were stuck with your current working copy, or copying a colleague's state on removable media
> How do we get rid of crypto entirely then? Stop everyone using it, shut it down and ban all of it?
Govts around the world could start treating tokens and NFTs as just another kind of security. Bitcoin and Ethereum would also qualify. Free speech never allowed anybody to issue ownership in projects for future gains without satisfying the regulations.
I think 10-15% of the web3 bag is potentially a good idea to do what Dropbox did to many parts of society. Constant, transparent, ubiquitous tracking of shit. A task no one wants to do but causes a lot of friction.
I think it's feasible to define "proof of waste" in a way that makes it possible to ban it, in the same way and the same rationale as you can't sell inefficient vehicle engines or lightbulbs.
Anonymous/pseudonymous money, unregulated securities, gambling, etc. are already on a collision course with regulators who are largely unable to keep up. On the other hand, I don't think the problem is big enough to trigger massive action yet, it would have to be on the scale of 1MDB.
"Just use rsync" have the same problem as "don't use Discord". The alternatives are way less convenient, not as polished, not as pleasant. Thankfully there is nothing convenient, polished or pleasant about using crypto other than going around regulation.
The difference was that "use rsync" was several steps specific to Linux that required some knowledge about how it all worked.
Vs.
Signing up for Dropbox.
Using any crypto is more akin to the "use rsync" side of things as there are several steps you have to perform before actually getting to the asset.
Vs.
Paying cash.
I think crypto in general has run into the same problem Uber/DoorDash/Airbnb and other similar "disruptor apps" have, but much sooner: Every seemingly stupid rule has a reason.
The cab industry operated as it did because it already ran into the problems Uber faced. DoorDash is finding out exactly why these restaurants did not offer delivery in the first place. Airbnb is learning a lot about why the hotel industry works as it does.
Crypto/DeFi enthusiasts are learning that maybe a little less De would make the Fi more plausible.
Dropbox did the same thing rsync did but made it so simple that my grandma who barely understands
the difference between single and double click could use it. There's a clear value proposition there.
web3 so far mostly makes things more complicated. My grandma (still going strong) is not going to figure it out.
>> Web3 is 'the future' if you're invested in crypto.
While investors for sure talk and promote their bags, I do think this statement of yours is overly cynical and ignores the fact that professional educated investors also invested in the first place because they truly believe it is the future.
A16Z and USV, for example, could certainly be wrong about web3. But they are both some of the best early stage investors of all time, and have consistently had a thesis about the future, bet on it in face of ridicule, and been proven right in the end.
I frankly think both A16Z and USV genuinely believe in the future of this technology, and betting billions on it reflects that, and is not some cynical pump n dump scheme.
And given their history of being correct versus the average HN commentator, my money is on them being right.
But surely one of the hallmarks of VC is to bet on multiple possible futures, only a minority of which needs to have a large payout? You could coherently believe that the web3 future is only 15% likely to arrive, but still justify investing in it -- and then once you've put in the money of _course_ you want it that future to be realized, and so you may as well act in ways that support it.
> A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc.
Please Mr Albert Wenger. You are a VC and not a technical expert on what is a database or a blockchain.
It makes absolutely no sense to compare a database to a blockchain. These things are completely different and have entirely nothing in common except that they persist data. You wouldn't compare a file to a database to make a point, would you? Also, you don't have the authority anyways to make that comparison as I doubt you know the technical details that differentiate a database from a blockchain.
Databases aren't blockchains and blockchains aren't databases. Stop comparing them for your ignorance's sake.
Publishing a website is not permissionless. You have to get a public IP address and register a domain name with an ICAAN provider, and various ISPs have the power to block your site. Actually promoting your site, scaling your site, integrating with common services, require more centralized servers, they're just just more implicit and you can choose from multiple providers (e.g. AWS or Azure). But you can choose to post to Facebook or Twitter.
The problem isn't centralization. It's centralization through a company which exerts too much of its own influence and censorship and monetizes your usage for its own benefit. Plenty of centralized databases allow free speech and don't seem to monetize your data: look at HN or if you're more radical, 4chan.
Idk if all centralized services are doomed to be corrupt so decentralized is the best we can do, like all monarchies are doomed to be corrupt so democracy is the best we can do. But unlike monarchies that hasn't really been shown. Maybe if someone invents a more efficient way to serve decentralized data the web will transition, but until then most decentralized services are most useful only as a backup to centralized services.
End of day you have to deal with physics. All those bits have to be stored somewhere. Have we really reached the point where the Facebook database can be stored in a distributed system across personal devices? Hell no! As a matter of fact, being centralized, FB can store that amount of data more efficiently than any Blockchain can even dream about.
560 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadSomeone suggested it is because they have invested heavily in ETH mining.
Web3 is just the latest excuse to keep the game of musical chairs going and preserve the chimera of use-value for cryptocurrencies since very few people want to use them to actually transact.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/eth2-devs-put-out-call-to-com...
With PoS the consensus chooses if they want to give up power and you can only gain decentralization if they choose to give it up.
A new institutional investor just needs to start hoarding that easily accessible liquidity and the biggest players in the space will need to give up their share or risk the price of the currency dropping to zero because it’s too hard to transact in it and therefore it’s no longer profitable to tie up 32 ETH and run validators.
"Actually both systems give power to those who are already wealthy" isn't the argument for democratization and decentralizations crypto believers apparently think it is.
There's no reason why a business trying to use "web3" wouldn't need to raise a round. Every business that wants to grow more quickly than the founders can manage alone needs some sort of capital to pay people to help. One way to do that is by giving up a bit of equity in return for money.
I definitely don't think web3 should be 'stopped' on moral grounds. Maybe it should on environment grounds, or on the grounds of how annoying web3 evangelists are, but stopping it to protect people from investing in something silly is not a good idea. Let people learn from their mistakes (or maybe I'll learn to be less cynical when NFTs turn out to be the next BTC, which I also regret not buying, or Amazon stock that I didn't buy, or Apple, or Pixar, or MSFT... this is a long list.)
As to why VCs would invest in it: it's currently dodging most regulations that apply to financial transactions (money laundering, pyramid schemes, pump & dump schemes, etc) much like loot boxes dodge most gambling regulations (and it turns out selling gambling to kids is extremely profitable). This makes the market uniquely profitable to invest in right now with promises of extreme ROI as long as it remains unregulated.
"Humanitarian" campaigns to normalize tracking public records and qualifications on the blockchain in technologically underdeveloped countries also produce a high amount of technological lock-in while increasing the capabilities of automated decision making on the blockchain without having to bother with externalities. For example, if one's ability to use an NFT on social media hinges on demonstrating ownership of that NFT, copyright law becomes a tangential consideration much like systems like ContentID make it harder to claim fair use rights because the ContentID claim is not based in copyright law but in the terms of service.
Additionally a lot of the more vocal tech VCs are libertarians bordering on anarcho-capitalism (i.e. free market maximalists who think humanity's survival and progress hinges on a few Great Men rather than the unsophisticated masses). The greater Web3 ecosystem is trying to solve cooperation with people you actively distrust and represents every interaction as a financial transaction. This is extremely appealing to them. Their problem with capitalism isn't that it inevitably leads to a massive wealth disparity (because after all, some people are "just better") but that the government gets in the way. This makes the promise of decentralization (even if it defers to consensus between the already wealthy) ideologically appealing to them.
Based on my conversations with web3 believers, they would generally agree with most of what I said but object to the language I'm using because it doesn't sound very flattering.
Libertarianism may have changed in character, or perhaps more in how it is characterized in media, but it used to be that libertarians believed in lots of little people acting freely and that states and the large corporations they are mutually supported by are the opposite of what they want.
Hopefully it is because the little people have largely left the relatively pointless large media spaces online and does not represent a genuine change in how the majority of libertarians, who used to not be terribly wealthy if they were wealthy at all, think.
The latter generally believe some people are inherently superior (though they will not always make a point of where this comes from) and that everyone therefore deserves their lot in life because those at the bottom either are inherently inferior (and thus undeserving) or failed to activate their potential (and thus undeserving).
The former generally believe we don't stand on the shoulders of giants so much as on the shoulders of billions and billions of people no worse or better than us. Some individuals may have genuine innate talent making them better at one thing or another without trying but while that may make their opinion on those matters more qualified it doesn't justify any claim to power as societal decisions (such as allocation of resources) should be reached by gaining consent from everyone affected.
Without regulation, markets naturally tend towards centralization and thus a significant power imbalance. Heck, if you were to fully abolish the public commons and the state, you would inevitably reinvent feudalism as the owners of the largest corporations would need to hire private militias to subdue their workers and defend their property claims against competitors, customers and colonies. This is why many right-wing libertarians still want a public police and military and why libertarian socialists generally don't want markets as a political instrument even if they may be favorable towards coops as an intermediate step or for the production of commodity goods.
VCs own ETH from the presale not from investing in mining.
These things have names. Web3 is a name without being a thing.
Then it’s just as meaningless to argue against it as it is to argue for it.
For any application The funnel is practically nonexistent, except to the luddites that still need onboarding into a wallet. No different than trying to show an existing experience to an AOL user in 1995 versus showing it to the people writing editorials questioning what the World Wide Web was. “Is there any useful application on the World Wide Web, why has nobody convinced me for me, why has everyone started ignoring my bait about what useful means! I swear I wont move the goalpost if you talk to me, this time!”
For marketing theory its matches perfectly, get a user to pay $1 and you’ve found the audience that would pay more, while bouncing the freeloaders. Any web3 application has authorized payments built in and users prepared to create a transaction with a fee.
What bothers a lot of us isn't the libertarian nirvana ideal, it's the fact that most loud proponents have a financial interest and stand to gain by increasing adoption, even if only temporarily. Even if they truly believe the technology is pointless and has no future, they are incentivised to pretend that it is revolutionary in order to increase the value of their investments so they can offload their holdings. This makes it difficult to trust anybody writing positively about cryptocurrency-related topics. It's like knowing a manufacturer pays people to write positive reviews about their product and then suddenly seeing lots of blogs and comments raving about how great the products are with little justification.
If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it. However, without the get-rich-quick aspect I suspect such a technology won't get nearly as much excitement overall. Mastodon and Diaspora are already working examples of decentralised social networks and this article doesn't state what advantage web3-based products would have over them and people generally don't seem very excited about them.
The general idea amongst crypto enthusiasts is: no conflict, no interest.
So its not about just listening to someone and trusting them, its about having the tools to find something that works for a goal you have, within that ecosystem.
> If you can separate the distributed database technology from the financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic about it.
Tough pill to swallow for you: the consensus mechanism fundamental to Bitcoin and blockchains in general (assuming they are fully decentralized) is economic. It relies on block producers spending or staking their money for no profit if they lie or cheat. The tokens or coins associated with the network are the digital collateralizations of that money, and are therefore subject to shift in valuations relative to anything else you might trade it for.
Crypto is inherently financial as long as its consensus mechanism is economic - that is not a bad thing, but it should inform how communities interact with the topic. Despite believing in crypto, this is why I believe some spaces should not consider it polite to talk about specific crypto-currencies versus others, as it quickly deteriorates into shilling of one's own holdings. This is the same reason novice's can't reliably make money in the market - since everyone advertises coins/tokens they hold as the next coming of Jesus, the only productive way to make decisions about which are good or bad is to not only have a deep understanding of them but also their context in the market as it is currently. Even then you might fall victim to the 'clown market' when hype trumps fundamentals.
Long story short crypto-currencies are inherently economic and therefore financial and subject to price fluctuations which attract speculators. This does not make "crypto" a scam, but it does mean that novices have little recourse for understanding the space sans becoming more independently competent or having a trusted advisor.
Has the author ever heard of OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, or a million other projects like them? I'm also not quite sure "permissionless data" is how I'd describe a database that stores tiny amounts of data at a massive cost. Pay-to-play is permissionless iif you have the money.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
The same is probably true for OpenStreetMap et al.
[0] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ [1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
On the topic of OLTP RDBMS: things are changing though: ISO SQL (and at least MS SQL Server) have added support for "LEDGER" tables that extend the Temporal Table system (...that we know and love...er...hate) with immutability secured with cryptographic keys. Basically, you get to have your own centralized blockchain-like table.... so long as you trust your DBMS (and DBA) with the keys.
There's two types: append-only and updatable (which is still append-only under-the-hood, as destructive DML operations are still just appended to current history, just like with git).
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/le...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/le...
It's pretty cool, I'll admit - I've been wanting support for true "read-only" tables for ages - the only thing I'm dreading is having to put-up with poor tooling support for a decade or two (e.g. Entity Framework Core still doesn't support temporal-tables, and SQL Server still only supports SYSTEM versioning and not the (far more useful) APPLICATION versioning system, argh).
That said, I don't think Wikipedia would really want crypto-signed page edit histories: it would obligate them to host truly objectionable content (otherwise the hash references would break), and there's far too many sociopathic griefers online for that to not happen...
Nobody wants a truly distributed org because it is impossible for anything to get done, just as nobody actually wants to use a distributed currency because the costs outweigh the benefits, and the web we have is distributed enough, though of course it has flaws and is in some ways too centralised now, but I don't see how web3 as currently sold helps to solve that.
The biggest problems currently are around identity (SSO), and microtransactions, but neither of those are solved well by existing cryptocurrency solutions or things like NFTs.
Opensea is just a viewer and tool to interact with contracts. If your NFT is removed from opensea it could still be interacted with through another platform or a platform you make yourself (see notlarvalabs).
E.g the developer of a large NFT platform called hicetnunc had a temper tantrum and deleted their entire platform. But because it’s decentralized another platform (objkt) now provides all the same functionality with the same data.
Because of this you can see why there are such passionate people either side, a lot to gain but also a lot to lose if you’ve normally profited from owning data.
https://blockzeit.com/opensea-nft-marketplace-stops-hacker-f...
This is very much controlled by the intermediary (as well as the chain it uses).
True! However I trust the wikimedia foundation, and the fact that because it is a valuable dataset there are many copies of it. If they really did restrict access, anyone could spin up their mirror.
Most of the decentralisation arguments seem to rely on some fetishistically absolute version of the world where you cannot trust any single person or entity, and crypto/web3 is the only reasonable solution if that is true. I, however, have more faith in other people, and am fine placing trust—to varying degrees—in others.
And even then, there’s still trust necessary to the extent that web3 things interact with the real world. You can have provable on-chain voting in a DAO, but if the DAO owns any non-crypto assets, you’re trusting a human to execute the consensus decision.
The board members change so it can go wrong.
> ..where you cannot trust any single person..
You are missing the point. Obviously society runs based on mutual trust. One can not ignore the fact that a few people or group in power can create great damage. Crypto makes it possible to create "trust by design" systems so that a small group can not do great damage or censor things that undermine their power.
That's one perspective, another is: privilege.
Untrue. You can download the entire database now, and there are many clones.
1. Retconning
2. As always, web3 and crypto is the next WWW, and the next Internet, and the next car, and the next wheel. Even though literally all signs are pointing to it being the next Juicero or the next Enron.
> We also need permissionless data. Why do we need this? Because otherwise we are left with a few large corporations ... We of course know where this winds up and that’s why pretty much everyone hates their cable company and their electric utility.
That's quite a logic leap. We need permissionless data because that's why everyone hates their cable company.
> prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn’t know how to have permissionless.
1. We did.
2. Retconning yet again. Bticoin paper is literally this:
--- start quote ---
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
--- end quote ---
The etire paper mentions permissions or permissionless exactly zero times.
> It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is.
Yes, you have. Yoi have just significantly overstated how big it is.
> As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide
Ah yes, regulations. Which, if I remember from just a few paragraphs above "then leads us to all sort of regulatory contortions aimed at rectifying the power imbalance but in practice mostly cementing it. "
> And if widely adopted Web3/crypto technology will also start to improve along other dimensions. It will become faster and more efficient.
And that will surely happen just because you say it will happen. Also because innovation I guess?
> And much like the PC was a platform for innovation that never happened on mainframes or mini computers, Web3 will be a platform for innovation that would never come from Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.
Innovation never came from Juicero either. Somehow, your web3 is surely the next Internet, and not the myriad of failed "innovations".
> No single entity or small group of entities controls it
In practice they will. The moment +50% of miners agrees on any transaction, regardless of it happening - it will happen. So having +50% of Bitcoin miners means you control the Bitcoin market. And we're back to square one.
Edit: Fine they only control current transactions, but forking as a solution to this implies the current network won't be able to just join and takeover a new bitcoin fork. Which is highly suspect.
And things like DAOs replacing "single entities or small group of entities" with the rule of the mob, which is just as scary.
You are confusing a 51% attack, or a block re-org attack, with complete control over the network, which it does not grant.
They would be able to double spend and control any future transacations.
At that point. Blockchain reinvented Bank with extra steps, that emits enough CO2 to replace Sweden.
What about double spending allows miners to control all future transactions afterwards? Double spending is of course undesirable but its hard to imagine its profitable to organize such an attack when it immediately begins burning money once word gets out, and if it didn't it would devalue the miners' own infrastructure when people lose faith in the currency.
You can dream up many a scheme where it can happen, and renting hash is certainly a problem down the road for many coins, but you're exaggerated presentation of the 51% attack is clearly flawed and stemming from your simple understanding how the network reaches consensus.
Sure, you might fork it, but nothing prevents previous 51% mining rigs from taking over the fork.
Bitcoin like any p2p tech relies on concensus. Which is fine when it comes to torrents, less fine when it comes to online games, and downright catastrophic when it comes to money.
There are cases where this isn't true. If you are able to rent the hashpower then you can 51% attack without worrying about equipment devaluation; if there is an equally valuable coin which uses the same hash function you could migrate to it after. These are somewhat unlikely; Why would one ever rent out 51% hash? Gaining 51% hashpower is extremely expensive and relies on the network community not reacting to it.
But lets say the unlikely happened. If I hold Bitcoin and I understand that someone holds 51% hashpower by credible reports of malicious re-orgs, I simply do not send. At this point I would wrap my tokens onto another blockchain if I needed to send them and wait for a solution. Its certainly not catastrophic, and the majority of people on the network will not lose their coins. The community reaction greatly hinders profitability of an attack. Its also very unlikely - not a significant concern, but also not an unsolvable problem should it become one.
Hope that clears things up for you.
However, I don't see it as a "web3 all the things" like web2 was, but as a set of protocols for certain kinds of behavior we're beginning to see online more and more. We'd probably add it in without thought (like we did Facebook's share buttons 10 years ago) if the tech weren't so complicated and the energy concerns so pernicious.
A lot of the success will come down to how successful everyone is at standardizing on schemas. In a decentralized world, I'm skeptical of that working out better than it did for web2, but I wish everyone luck.
I'm old enough to remember that in the ancient history of just 10 years ago Diablo III was released with an auction house that let people buy and sell items from other players for real money.
I'm also old anough to remember that in the ancient history of just 7 years ago it was removed from the game and I also am old enough to remember the reasons.
Having players trade in-game items is not as good a proposition for "what a business is trying to achieve" as you think it is.
I see no reason why this blockchainless centralized solution couldn't be replicated by anyone else in industry... No need for NFTs. Just do it...
They will not have the competition. Because it's their items, and they chose to only support items sold through their marketplace.
Because, surprise-surprise, businesses are not charities. They do need to earn money.
> they would rather have it be without taxes and exchangeable for real money.
Of course users want all the perks with none of the responsibilities: let the business support all these items in perpetuity while users trade them outside of the business' purview.
And?
> Of course users want all the perks with none of the responsibilities: let the business support all these items in perpetuity while users trade them outside of the business' purview.
Everyone would like all the benefits with no cost in all cases; that's not what's being suggested as its obviously impossible. The more decentralized service simply has the potential to be a better deal for users at the cost of centralized business - it does not mean costs disappear. You say yourself the business need to earn money (which is only true for sub profit margins), so you seem to understand that the money goes somewhere, why not let it go more to users willing to shoulder some cost while also giving them more freedom?
While the web3 example still features a creator and early investors who may make the most money, users will prefer the market which promises to stay up via its contract code. We may be a long way from enough users understanding this to influence developers, and it may never reach that perfectly, but that's the direction web3 can hopefully push things.
The point I was replying to was literally this: "Web3 technologies can enable an ecosystem for this without a bunch of bespoke work that likely isn't core to what a business is trying to achieve."
The core business can actually be hurt by unchecked trading of items.
> I can imagine the vast majority of Diablo players (assuming the market was ran legitimately) would prefer to still have the market
Why don't you go and ask the vast majority of Diablo players before making these assumptions?
> We may be a long way from enough users understanding this to influence developers,
How do you "influence developers" by trading some items outside the core of what the developers are building?
BTW, building tradable items can and usually is still outside the core of what business is building.
> but that's the direction web3 can hopefully push things.
Ah yes, the hope that web3 may push towards unchecked trading of meaningless items (meaningless outside the game/business in question) that actually ruins the core game experience.
Again, that's the point. Its obvious centralized market makers only make money when they control the market and limit market freedom, which is why its easy to imagine the players in general would prefer to avoid such a tax/manipulation/centralizing forces.
> How do you "influence developers" by trading some items outside the core of what the developers are building?
By placing personal value in systems that give users more freedom and assurance of the protocols they initially bought into. When people can understand that that is what they are being offered with a 'web3' approach, they can influence developers to build what's most demanded, i.e. basic economics.
> Ah yes, the hope that web3 may push towards unchecked trading of meaningless items (meaningless outside the game/business in question) that actually ruins the core game experience.
Ahh so Diablo items are meaningless now? Maybe to you, but certainly not to many other players as you've demonstrated. What about decentralized exchange protocols is unchecked? Its as safe as the blockchain itself - perhaps you are thinking of government regulations.
Core gameplay: is being hurt by players only chasing it in hoping to make money
Cryptopeddlers: yes, that's the point.
Thank you.
> they can influence developers to build what's most demanded, i.e. basic economics.
Core gameplay: is being hurt by players only chasing it in hoping to make money
Cryptopeddlers: yes, that's the point. That's what devs should build: ways to monetize assets in the game. That's what influence and basic economics is!
> Ahh so Diablo items are meaningless now? Maybe to you, but certainly not to many other players as you've demonstrated.
What part of "meaningless outside Diablo" did you not understand?
Don't bother. Judging by your answers there's very little of what you understood from my message.
That's just your opinion, man. I've heard from more Diablo players than just you that they dearly miss it. But I guess if all the value of your game is extracted to the team running the servers and zero of it to players is what you find compelling, feel free to fritter away on centralized grinding for truly and practically worthless pixels.
Clearly those items weren't meaningless outside Diablo when they sold for real money. How thick can you be? You think its that impossible to decentralize a market? You think it hasn't already been done?
It's amazing how you totally dismiss the opinion of all the players who didn't like and didn't want the marketplace as irrelevant
> But I guess if all the value of your game is extracted to the team running the servers and zero of it to players
Ah yes, making a better game whose goal is no longer a rush to monetize assets is "giving no value to the players".
> Clearly those items weren't meaningless outside Diablo when they sold for real money. How thick can you be
Because they literally have no meaning or value outside the game for which they were designed and that only work within that game.
> You think its that impossible to decentralize a market?
Ah yes. The good old "let's pretend my opponent said and thought this thing and bravely fight this argument I invented for my opponent"
It's amazing how you dismiss the opposing. Or is it? I had to stop reading after that, its clear this is isn't hitting for you as I'm forced to keep backtracking for your sake.
No. You stopped reading way, way before that.
> I'm forced to keep backtracking for your sake.
You'd not have the feeling of backtracking if you actually read what I wrote, and stop reacting to arguments you think I'm presenting.
You'd also not have this feeling if you stopped pretending that the only way for the world to operate is by monetising assets of everything.
Even the somewhat centralized platforms have so much high speed commerce on them that they don’t disrupt anyone. Even people that quickly exit to the bridges are not stopped and couldn't be, on the centralized-ish ones.
That’s a lot of alpha and value extraction to miss. Especially if you invest in the bridge :)
Don’t worry you’ll read about it late, in 2030, ngmi
What do you mean by "high speed commerce" and "people that exit to the bridges"? Why do you talk in riddles?
Bridges are the technologies that move assets between blockchains, so because there are trillions of dollars of assets in this ecosystem already, they dont rely on the exchanges to move fiat in and out anymore, they rely on the bridges to move other assets to other blockchains. There usually is a service fee to the bridge operator. It is lucrative.
> riddles?
I’m not here to explain, I’m just using the terms as they are. If people are stuck in 2017 or earlier with their older skeptics arguments, then they wont try to learn and just be more and more confused as the space keeps evolving, not my problem.
I’ve seen you post about crypto many times before, and you obviously have a large bag.
But all of the trading you’re talking about is of crypto, the very thing we’re trying to establish what the usecase is. There are no products outside of crypto, and building a bridge/exchange/marketplace for assets does not automatically confer value to either the assets or the venue.
Or just look at the market needs, build the bridge, and collect a toll from everyone using it. Your standard is "I can't tell why people are using the bridge and they might stop, so therefore its a fools errand to build the bridge for income", "also income built from other people's speculation is not a use case, and my participating for income at all is also speculative so therefore I can't take it seriously"
With that kind of standard, you'll never reach a reconcilable conclusion, while continuing to miss all opportunities. Its an impossibly high standard when the same questions apply to every SaaS product or physical world commerce too. The whole world is built on consumption and speculation, and when the variables change everyone stops commuting over any particular bridge.
if you want dollars, get passive income from a product you built for that market niche, and convert your income to dollars. if you make anything that's used, then you've made a minor improvement for people in the space, which is good enough.
The discussion is more nuanced about scale and longevity and that demand.
If you’re waiting for the consensus on which quantitative analysis to use to justify your participation, then you’ll miss it.
Given the superior paths to monetization and liquidity, and the shorter lifecycle from inception to market, than everything else digital or software related, its easy for many people to just conclude that its not worth debating about and just act.
No, that's not commerce. Trading, borrowing, arbitraging, building and releasing new products, marketplaces is not commerce. Commerce is the exchange of goods and services.
I don't care which phrase you use, a lot of it is happening
and even centralized-ish chains don't block any of it, and would be too slow to even if they were compelled to
that was the point, not the semantics
As other commenter mentioned below, "web3" is mostly storing transactional info into a blockchain and then linking stuff to ipfs + some layer on top to display this. For example that orbis site, indexes/caches the data in the bc to be able to display it as per their use case. So the only real difference is that the "tweets" are not owned by them but by each user. For anything else it's still a normal web app.
I don't know how this works legally, but there was a link from Vitalik's blog a few days ago explaining this. Say if a user uploads CP or some other illegal/offensive content the site can hide it but can't delete it. I'm not sure where liability would fall on here.
Similar, the case with Twitter blocking Trump a few years ago, maybe another site could still allow him to continue if they wish to do so by displaying the same content
I guess there are more use cases that distill from here, not sure how beneficial they are or might be, and just as many things in technology it is not 100% neccessary that the solution is better than something that already exists, it just needs to get traction and attract people/investment. Whether that happens with web3 is just to be seen I suppose.
Also descentralised exchanges are things coming up, but this gets even muddier with all the compliance requirements so not sure where those will end up
Wow. There are so many factual errors in these sentences that I’m not even sure where to start.
I’ll start by giving the author the benefit of doubt and assume that by „personal computer” they meant the IBM PC (1981) and its family. (Otherwise we’d have to assume that they completely ignore the existence of pre-PC home computers, many of which were both less powerful and significantly cheaper.) It’s also not true that the PC was unable to multitask (remember Concurrent CP/M-86?)
First, note that IBM, at the time of introducing the PC, was – and continued to be, well into the 21st century – _the_ major purveyor of mainframes. So saying that they „ignored the PC” implies that they ignored themselves, which doesn’t make sense.
Second, the initial PCs were just not powerful enough to compete with mainframes or minicomputers. The sets of usecases of „big” computers vs. PCs were almost completely disjoint until perhaps the 1990s. There were reasons why the PC exploded in popularity in the 1980s (open architecture being the #1 reason), but the author is silent about that.
I know this is tangential, but I see a lot of handwaving in this post and, frankly, not much else. Why should I listen to someone who can’t get their facts straight? Why bother, indeed?
> So saying that they „ignored the PC” implies that they ignored themselves, which doesn’t make sense.
This makes perfect sense to anyone who has seen a large lumbering schizophrenic beast like IBM. It's commonplace for one division to despise, ignore and undermine another.
Blockchains are best suited for data subject to manipulation, i.e. data in which there is profit to alter. If we were to naivly build "Web3" in theory with this in mind, then the majority of activity would be peer-to-peer, federated, or partially centralized, while the exchange of security credentials would take place on an efficient broadcast layer.
The trick is to do as much off chain as possible - and if trust becomes an issue, develop a minimally on chain scheme. Its still early days, if you ask me how exactly this looks in 20 years I couldn't tell you.
Bitcoin cannot work without people noticing and liking Bitcoin. If it didn't get traction, it'd still be centralized haha - only one entity would have the whole chain.
FWIW I think most people base this of a misunderstanding of how NFTs work based on the claims around it: NFTs prove ownership of a hash. That hash is associated with a URL. That URL points to a JSON document. That JSON document points to the NFT art piece (i.e. the "JPEG"). If the service hosting the JSON document (or the service hosting the art piece) goes away, the hash becomes a simulacrum, an identifier with no identifiee. It still indicates ownership but only to those who already know that this is what it does. There can be JPEGs on the blockchain (and allegedly there is already CSAM on at least one of them) but due to the size constraints this isn't how things usually work.
This isn't even getting into multi-layer approaches which came about because while web3 is built on ETH, actually doing anything with the ETH chain is extremely rate limited and has extremely high transaction costs, so other chains have been built on top of it that as I understand it just bulk commit hashes of snapshots or something to it.
FWIW the "first you download the Internet" solution already exists and is called IPFS. There is also a solution called Freenet that focuses on anonymity and avoiding censorship. Predictably the biggest problem with downloading the Internet is that you unknowingly (or knowingly) start collecting illegal content like CSAM, which may be a serious crime depending on where you live.
Confirming data integrity and origin is already solved - thanks digital signatures and checksums.
So someone can now sign a message A saying "I give this picture to X" and everyone will know that any future message B from that person saying "I give this picture to Y" is "invalid" because everyone agrees that message A happened before B. Anyone who downloads the whole blockchain can see this.
Well, as long as everyone agrees to believe that blockchain.
Web3 will handle IP address and DNS storage, sale, and search using basically NFTs on the blockchain. Meanwhile, HTTP content hosting will still be kept separate (maybe IPFS, maybe something centralized depending on the need).
Current example: NFTs typically store metadata on the blockchain and the content in IPFS.
In the old times we called this "a solution in search of a problem", but these solutions are imaginary.
This, probably, hints the the top of a couple of bubbles.
But the thing that really seems weird is that all you need to do make it interesting is 1) define what you mean by web3 (it’s a slippery weasel word that changes meaning whenever the people using it needs it to) 2) define a few uses that are obviously better than the alternatives and justify them without hand waving (including explaining why what would appear to be fundamental show stopping flaws are not in fact that)
If you can’t do that (and no one seems to be able to) the maybe, just maybe, it is bullshit?
I can understand web4 could be self financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority able to close them but I dont see yet a proper use case beyond criminal endeavour. Plus, we're far from it, we'd need an organic transmission network that goes out of the traditional ISP system, like a global bluetooth peer to peer mobile network every phone contributes to in exchange for payment... that would be fast enough...
As you can imagine, the latter activity is criminal in Russia and Belarus.
Source: I'm from Russia.
This seems like incredibly irresponsible advice: if you're worried about consequences for a political donation, leaving a signed public confession is the police's dream come true. Compromise someone's computer and you now have proof of a crime as well as something you can use to pressure everyone they transacted with, even if you had no idea to investigate them at the time it happened.
Best of all, nobody knows if that's happened unless you tell them so you can continue to quietly map out the opposition network and pressure each person you link to a Bitcoin transaction to identify their partners but otherwise stay quiet.
Web 3.0 I have a soft spot for. It was a stupid name and the ideas didn’t really work but the semantic web people had their hearts in the right place.
Nobody said "web2", indeed, but that doesn't invalidate that Web 2.0 described a very distinct and substantial evolution of what is possible in the browser.
Unclear if the value prop is large enough to overcome the activation energy of such an endeavor.
None of those resources operate peer to peer, none of them operate in anything resembling a mesh network. DDG is absolutely stoppable and centralized.
Not that I don't love all those projects and all of those qualities.
DuckDuckGo is even more centralized since it uses the index of one of the largest search engines (bing), is not at all self-financing, is not at all unstoppable (if the central authority was shut down any replacement would need to access bing's result) and is not at all peer-to-peer.
Either you don't actually know what those terms mean or you don't know how those websites function.
> Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, [WebSearch] would all be great examples of [potentially operating as] self-financing unstoppable web resources with no central authority distributed across a peer-peer mesh network.
> Unclear if the value prop is large enough to overcome the activation energy of such an endeavor [to convert these currently centralized services into an entity like what the grandparent describes].
If you look how people interact with the web, it’s highly centralized to a handful of apps by a handful of companies.
You can use a federated social network RIGHT NOW. Or you can just make your own website TODAY. No permission needed, you get complete ownership. It’s the amazing decentralised dream that was (and is) the internet. Only thing it won’t do is potentially make you rich (at the expense of others) just for getting in (and out!) at the right time.
- You need to remain out of the shitlist of a handful of “spam and anti-evil” authorities (getting on a list means your site gets blocked by all the big browsers and can be permanent or take a long time to resolve)
- You need permission to host your content from the: hardware / cloud provider, the datacentre if you self-host, and / or intermediary ISPs for peering (if no-one will peer, your site may as well not exists)
There are some other parties you need permission or blessing from that don’t come immediately to mind.
Web3 as it currently stands (as I said before it’s a slippery weasel word so no don’t you’ll change it to suite) also needs all that stuff. Most “web3” apps are served via Cloudflare ffs!
Most of the points mentioned are security features to shield people from bad actors, something that crypto does not seem very good at thus far, which is why I’m curious how web3 solves similar things.
Just like any paradigm change though, it's going to rely on the "killer implementation" to take off to kickstart the paradigm reaching mass appeal.
>You need to remain out of the shitlist of a handful of “spam and anti-evil” authorities
And the exact same will happen in the world of 'web3'. Except you won't sign your terms and conditions in English but in from of a smart contract. The internet is a distributed computer, blockchains are distributed computers. Whatever people built on top of it will be as permissioned and have as many authorities as anything else.
You think you can't do encrypted, peer-to-peer communication without authorities on the good old internet? Of course you can, there's nothing technically in the way of it at all. It's just that nobody runs a business that way and they won't do it in the world of 'web3' either.
Not exactly sure why you think TCP, the protocol, is relevant here? Creating or interacting with a web contract in a blockchain is a different ballgame to hosting a web site, and are treated as such by ISPs. One is indistuishable with normal web browsing, and the other is often treated as a business. The threat of having your ISP cut you off because they don't like what you are browsing remains a threat though, and hence a weakness by requiring their permission.
Do you think either site managed to purchase and control a domain name without the approval of a domain registrar?
Do you think either site is accessible without the approval of the ISP providing a connection to their server?
Etc. down the list I provided.
Both those domains at various times have had disagreements with their registrars, with their ISPs and with bodies on the internet more powerful than that. Hasn't made any difference to whether I can connect to them or not, because there are always alternative paths and vendors. Which is more or less what it means to be decentralised. In practice, being able to replace any party and keep on going is the capability that matters.
And that you think the alternative you’re arguing away from is investing in gold and silver is kind of hilarious. Precarious metal “investors” are just a different generation of poor fools.
Web 3 is also based on an economy of popularity and/or financial backing to either increase value or disparage an asset, which makes manipulation rampant, and it also makes the "Web 3 economy" inherently corrupt. Frankly, it's not a movement, it's really to me just a mutation of MLM and pyramid-scheme marketing online.
Sorry to be so harsh, but the way it's being spammed at all of us every day, and infecting real online commerce is abhorrent, and growing to the point where not much can be trusted when Web 3 is mentioned for me.
You can choose your social network - if you don't like it, create one.
You can choose where to store your data - if you don't like it, move it.
You can choose where to host your website - if you don't like it, you have options...
etc.
People like pointing out echo chambers all around while they are also in one.
Remember all the feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers! web2.0 s just ajax requests!
If people dump money into it, then something is likely to come out whether is better or not than what it was before. Maybe is worse, or maybe something will be built on top of it that will be better or some othere political event might make it relevant. Who knows
They really didn't. In my 20+ year tech career I have never seen any new technology prove anywhere near as divisive as web3/crypto.
That level of confident ignorance is the prevailing tone of the cryptocurrency world: everyone talks about changing the world but it's extremely hard to find someone who actually understands the details of the business they're trying to get into or why it works the way it currently does, but they don't let that stop them because they've already bought in they stand to lose potentially quite large sums of money if they can't find buyers.
Now “crypto” is a little different because the the promise (not always followed though on, it’s still negative sum) of money to anyone who can bring themselves to believe. Like many bubbles and ponzi-like schemes before it’s primary functionally is to promote itself, and damn that’s one of the few things it’s really good at.
Unlike the crypto ecosystem, those offered a tradeoff of higher cost and less control for greater convenience and ease of management. Which was hugely successful.
They're also not ... hegemonizing? in the way that cryptocurrency seems to be advocated.
I'm not saying the same will neccessarily repeat with so called web3, but we might be at a similar stage - in this case the sensation(?) of ownership of one's content is a desired attribute at the expense of efficiency in computing/processing terms for some use cases
it's pretty much the wild west now and not fully understood, but if it attracts investment with time something might come out of it.
What will your opinion be of web3 should the number start to continually go down?
If I tell you that web4 is all about complete freedom and an end to world hunger and it’s based on cow farts is it up to you to prove that it’s BS? (It’s early days for cow farts, you can’t judge them o what they can do right now)
The dot-com bubble was similar.
The onus is on the cryptobros to prove its usefulness, not the other way around.
Think of having a Facebook-like social graph, not controlled by Facebook. Or a merchant aggregation system like Amazon's without Amazon. A system not driven by maximizing exposure monetization (via ads, paid placement, etc.) but by something like a Nash equilibrium that maximizes value creation for participants.
This is what I work on, and I think it can be done.
The entire argument rests upon this premise and the author doesn’t explain it one bit.
The fun thing about cryptography is that allows building internet services that can beat the blockchain. There is nothing preventing you from creating a service where people upload encrypted stuff that is only associated to a key id. In fact there are already services that kind of do this.
I'm interested in culling the superfluous aspects of crypto, heaven knows they exist, so if you want to be involved in helping with that you should first become more competent on the subject.
For the average person, there is no real use for Web3 because there is no actual definition for it.
My impression is that Web3 is being praised as decentralized, yet it is people with a lot of money who are the one's regulating the pace right now.
And that is a tad bit concerning to say the least, because if I invest millions into something (whether as an individual or a VC) - I'd like to feel a sense of "ownership", otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes.
I'd go as far as saying that for most people, including those entrenched in spending their hard earned money, the word Web3 is immediately associated with NFTs, not the actual blockchain technology. And that says a lot.
But when people say things like
> otherwise that money could have been spent helping real causes
It bleeds their personal opinion and hampers the debate. Apperently you think "digital art", or cryptocurrencies are not a "real cause". Which begs the question: who defines what "a real cause" is? The International World Causes Committee?
Isn't anything that people want to spend money (resources) on by definition a real and worthy cause to at least those people?
It's so stupid it actually hurts my brain just to type it.
I know people who “want” to spend money on addictive and destructive drugs, because they’re continuously compelled by a pathological chemical imbalance to do so.
Does that mean an addiction to heroin or Xanax is a “real and worthy cause”? How about an addiction to online gambling with generative art of monkeys/lions/pixel art?
Apparently it's okay to be Coca-Cola or McDonald's or Mars. Those are real and worthy corps blessed by boomers of yore.
If someone is addicted to gambling, there are plenty of casinos which are also worthwhile businesses apparently. Legal in many states, nations and territories.
I'm not saying that I'm for or against these regulations, but obviously there are boundaries where society needs to intervene, in one way or another. Portugal handled their drug problem in a very innovative way [1], and that's my preferred modal for ending the "drug war" (decriminalization and support for addicts). But it's still some form of regulation.
[0]: https://globalyouth.wharton.upenn.edu/articles/big-gulp-new-...
[1]: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid
No, not if they’re being misled or scammed, or simply making financial decisions under wrong assumptions about outcomes. Just some examples.
In this space, you can donate to the EFF, sponsor open source projects, use services with subscription models over advertising models, donate to charities expanding internet and computing access globally, etc. which are all more “cause worthy” than buying digital art alone.
But there’s a large group of older people who cling to crypto because they think it'll make their ideas sound relevant again. While appearing "disruptive", the crypto space actually privileges those (generally older) folks who already have money to burn (like the Winklevoss twins, whose payout from FB provided more money than they could ever spend on themselves in one lifetime).
Relatively young, not at all into crypto, due to environmental reasons
I found the idea of a non governmental controlled currency with an upper bounded amount interesting, as inflation can't be a thing.
But as a means to satisfy greed... Nope, I am happy with what I have.
So there are other spaces in science and computer science I am more invested and interested in.
As I'm sure you would realise if you give the textbooks a chance, deflation is much worse than inflation. Nor is bitcoin truly inflation-less; the prices swing like a yo-yo, it's simply deflationary on average thus far.
Regarding energy use, Bitcoin mining inherently seeks out the lowest cost electricity which turns out to be either stranded energy (not usable for anything else) or renewable (solar, wind, hydro). This is yet another reason to push governments to stop subsidizing fossil fuels. Also, since Bitcoin mining can be done at any time and in any place, it is able to act as the buyer of last resort for renewable projects whose energy production does not line up with grid demand. Having this extra buyer can greatly reduce the payback period for a proposed solar/wind project that otherwise would not have been able to attract the investment to build it.
Let them eat crypto
I may be the chosen one, but am I that important?
To phrase it differently: all you said may (sic!) be true, doesn't change my personal interest though.
I was never that interested in monetary policy or the history of money until I found out about Bitcoin and started doing my own research.
I am very interested in the history of money, but it made me a Marxist, or rather a Trotskyist ;)
Cryptocurrencies may have a part to play in the future of humanity, but Bitcoin will not be it. It's a proof of concept that's overstayed its welcome.
Energy storage is inefficient and expensive, so a new renewable project based around this is less likely to be funded and built than one that can directly monetize the excess. Profit and greed is the incentive structure for much of human society.
Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of the future. The energy expenditure is required to provide the highest level of security and decentralization which is needed for a global reserve asset. Any other system is vulnerable to attack or centralization, which will inevitably succumb to human greed like every fiat system in history.
Are the unbanked really going to operate a number of different wallets, including decoy wallets, to prepare for this scenario?
> Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of the future.
Its parameters were picked on a whim by somebody nobody can ever find. "Completely unchangeable parameters handed down from the equivalent of God" is not a property that I look for in a monetary system.
The parameters of the Bitcoin code are changeable (and have changed multiple times since inception) via hard-fork based on the 'voting' of the nodes which verify all new blocks and number in the tens of thousands distributed across the globe. The parameters of the protocol are set such that anyone can run a verification node on only a couple hundred dollars worth of hardware, thereby encouraging decentralization.
https://river.com/learn/can-bitcoins-hard-cap-of-21-million-...
In principle, yes. But look at the clusterfuck that was the BCH fork. Something as basic as blocksize led to an outrageous amount of venom and two communities hating each other. Now imagine if the core devs wanted to change things that more directly affected the relative wealth of early adopters. Could you believe the anger if they proposed that we double the number of eventually mined bitcoins?
A permissionless database was invented as part of an effort to create p2p electronic cash.
Where are the mass usage use cases beyond "get rich quick" schemes?
We have had the technology for years and all we got are NFC schemes, speculation and hot air.
IMO, Blockchain/Crypto seem to come from a perspective of "how can we apply blockchain to X?" rather than asking "What problem are we trying to solve, and what requirements would any solution need to meet?" BEFORE deciding what technology options there are which could solve it.
Pitching 'Web 3' as a technical solution rather than solving a problem inevitably leads to 'when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail' (which is my personal opinion of the whole crypto space).
i.e. work out the problem you want to solve, then see what the right technology is afterwards.
Longstanding problems do not have bootstrap solutions, i.e. they are longstanding because simple hard work and known strategies could not solve them. To think that you can go around looking at longstanding problems and come up with solutions top down is out of touch with how innovation drives technology.
Innovations are small miracles - there is no formula for them, they don't come around often. When rare advancements are made it makes sense to test what good they can do for problems which do not give way to the old toolset.
To put it back in the analogy: When you invent a hammer to drive nails, check and see what else it might be good for.
You may not like the over extension of applied crypo currencies, but nobody is forcing you to invest in any of it. I for one would rather have experimentation with failure than none at all.
This is exactly what I disagree with - It's generally a bad strategy to look for things to apply crypto/blockchain to in my opinion, we should be looking for problems and defining how we want things to work in the future, and then seeing if crypto is the right technical solution to achieve that. I.e. we shouldn't start with the technology and work back to what problems it could be used to solve - this will end up discounting technical solutions and solutionizing before requirements are understood.
We don't do this for other technologies - for instance it's just as valid that a NoSQL database could solve an issue, however we don't go around looking for problems NoSQL databases could solve.
Distributed consensus was not all that incremental nor precedented. Its not quite something that was imagined much before it was around in any fine detail. Considering how novel the innovation was, and how out of the blue it came, it makes sense to consider it more a 'new' thing that may have applications not easily thought of.
I'm sure in the smaller domain of databses NoSQL has been discovered to be useful for businesses or processes after its invention.
Basic solution design says start with a problem that needs to be solved and understand the key requirements, and then decide what technology best matches the requirements. That might be blockchain, or it might be something else.
Asking 'what can we build as a blockchain' is poor engineering, lazy thought process and symptomatic of a technology bubble IMO.
If you're not (or have been and got out), then it's nothing but the delusion of a sect of believers who want to wish it into existence.
Being invested fundamentally changes the way people think and allows them to come up with any justification for their investment. It's not just crypto, but pretty much everything else where people expect easy returns at the expense of other people, nature, other countries, the future, etc.
There is nothing special or magical about this technology. Just because it uses an immutable data structure called 'block chain' and cryptographic hashes left and right, doesn't automatically make it useful or needed. In fact, the opposite is true due to the POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.
The fact that the vast majority of crypto enthusiasts, who have absolutely no idea how it works and what it represents, decided to part with their fiat in the hope that money grows on Merkle trees and pushed the price to astronomical levels does not validate the technology itself, but rather is an example of human psychology and greed at work.
I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
Over the long term, protocols outcompete hosted services. E.g. Automated market makers will be much longer around than any centralized exchange like e.g. Coinbase.
The exact opposite happened with email
Maybe someday some clever smart contract thing will really take off; and maybe someday some non-PoW coin will really matter, and maybe one day all the stabilizing regulatory infrastructure will be replicated for that hypothetical coin. It could happen. But it hasn't happened yet; so far it looks more like a ponzi scheme. And even if the tech really does evolve into something truly valuable, the route to that promised land could still have some surprising ups and downs, and if coins really continue growing, real-world economic pains along the way. Also - the tech behind it all isn't the same thing as the specific instantiation of todays coins. Even if the tech finds a niche, todays coins could still turn out to be a ponzi scheme.
If I were to say that Coinbase and Uniswap have a clear value prop but AI doesn't, it also wouldn't make much sense as I'm not comparing apples to apples.
E.g. HN is known for being anti-crypto but suspects anyone pro crypto to be a crypto-invested shill.
But then at the same time I think it must be considered that e.g. anyone being anti-crypto also has a stake or interest in non-crypto related endeavors. I doubt there are people on here without some form of stake simply arguing for "the universal truth".
> POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the benefit of very few.
POW is a consensus mechanism that secures the entire Bitcoin network. At times that has represented over one trillion USD worth of value. The benefit of Bitcoin's consensus is to all the money locked up in it, without it, or even if the profit to hack Bitcoin were only slightly marginal, the whole thing would fall apart, almost one trillion in value.
It is not for the very few that consensus mechanisms reward, it is for the whole network (in the ideal case). So in a way, when Bitcoin is driven to astronomical prices, and the incentive to break into it becomes irresistible to the most powerful people in the world yet they still cannot accomplish it, it does validate the technology.
Once the price starts falling, the scared 'investors' will get rid of it at any price to reduce loss. The network won't handle the load, so the price will drop even more. It happened before with BTC, where the 'billions' evaporated in hours, it will happen to the 'trillions'.
That being said, I don't own Dogecoin and my previous comment was mainly in reference to btc and eth.
(I wonder what happens if attacks are ever found against SHA-256 as they were for SHA-1?)
SHA-1 exploits were found by researchers, if SHA-256 had the same forewarning protocols would initiate an emergency fork with a more secure hash function.
But if you are invested into crypto, you have a double incentive for delusion: you need to convince yourself and others that it will grow so it can grow and for the price not too collapse.All while having to deal with the temptation to cash out.
If real value is created, this problem doesn't exist as much. And of course, I might be biased and this might be a just so story, but I buy it.
I hope this is not the same thing as the 'use rsync' response when Dropbox was introduced. [0]
> I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
Right. Let us make a start rather than continuously talking about it since it is very difficult for everyone here to ignore it and we will see yet another HN post about cryptocurrencies, Web 3, etc.
How do we get rid of crypto entirely then? Stop everyone using it, shut it down and ban all of it?
EDIT: Good luck attempting to ban cryptocurrencies entirely. Either way, the undeniable trend in all of this is going towards regulations for cryptocurrencies.
It is not going away and we will still continue to keep talking about it and for many on this thread, it will be excruciatingly difficult to ignore it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
That is a pretty substantial change from any existing asset. It isn't all sunshine and roses, but there are a combination of properties here that never existed before.
so what happens when there is a run on an exchange, and it turns out that it does not hold the assets that it has on its books?
Much like how the first dot com bubble doesn't change the transformative nature of the internet, a massive crash in crypto isn't going to be the end of this story. We might outlive Bitcoin, but no-one alive today will outlive cryptocurrencies. The only real question is how much change they will cause.
They just wouldn’t be able to use quantitative easing (easily - i.e. without global consensus) to do it.
Tether is a counterfeiting operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banks_acquired_or_bank...
And of course the financial system as a whole is "too big to fail", but that would be true regardless of the implementation. Are you saying that if we switch to crypto then suddenly the financial system failing is OK?
I consider this a feature, not a bug.
What's your definition of inflation, because by my definition Bitcoin experienced more than 100% inflation during this year, since which time it has experienced roughly 30% deflation.
If a bank is about to send me Euros, how many Euros will they get to create out of nothing in the next 12 months? I could probably make some educated guesses based on past rates; but there is a lot more certainty in Bitcoin.
Ironically given the price swings, the actual asset involved here is more stable and predictable than any asset that has ever existed in human history. That is going to matter somehow, although I'm not going to guess how. In a very similar way to how the internet making communication effectively free had (or; is having) far reaching consequences that were difficult to predict. This sort of never-before-seen certainty is going to have consequences.
speculation in property and asset price inflation in this asset class has pretty much universally been a disaster for any change of a coherent, developing and fair society.
It's contributed massively to generational inequality, which has intern massively effected our politics. It's contributed to falling birth rates. It's facilitated organised crime both domestically and caused instability internationally . Plus every 20 years of so it completely crashes the whole economy.
yet to practically trade in it you are back to centralisation, off-chain, and the exchanges taking a cut and manipulating rates.
and if it made any sense to use it as an actual currency, e.g. to buy coffee, then you are back to centralisation, off-chain, and wallet providers taking a cut.
We invented a new technology to replace CVS/Subversion/SourceSafe/$CENTRALISED_VCS, and it really does exist, and it's better than all of those old systems partly because it really is decentralised, and it's also based on crypto(graphic) primitives, but 99% of the people who think they've bought into it are actually just using another centralised service all over again. Or to put it another way - when GitHub goes down a disturbingly high proportion of a) git users are unable to get any work done at all, and b) build systems just break.
(Ok, git didn't invent the DVCS. But it was better enough on a number of important axes than those that came before it - including "being used by a high-profile project" - that you can say that it made DVCSs happen.)
Govts around the world could start treating tokens and NFTs as just another kind of security. Bitcoin and Ethereum would also qualify. Free speech never allowed anybody to issue ownership in projects for future gains without satisfying the regulations.
https://www.seclaw.com/what-is-a-security/
Because, invariably, everything crypto is "the next big thing". And not, you know, Theranos. Or Google Nexus Q. Or AT&T's ISIS mobile wallet. Or...
Anonymous/pseudonymous money, unregulated securities, gambling, etc. are already on a collision course with regulators who are largely unable to keep up. On the other hand, I don't think the problem is big enough to trigger massive action yet, it would have to be on the scale of 1MDB.
Vs.
Signing up for Dropbox.
Using any crypto is more akin to the "use rsync" side of things as there are several steps you have to perform before actually getting to the asset.
Vs.
Paying cash.
I think crypto in general has run into the same problem Uber/DoorDash/Airbnb and other similar "disruptor apps" have, but much sooner: Every seemingly stupid rule has a reason.
The cab industry operated as it did because it already ran into the problems Uber faced. DoorDash is finding out exactly why these restaurants did not offer delivery in the first place. Airbnb is learning a lot about why the hotel industry works as it does.
Crypto/DeFi enthusiasts are learning that maybe a little less De would make the Fi more plausible.
web3 so far mostly makes things more complicated. My grandma (still going strong) is not going to figure it out.
While investors for sure talk and promote their bags, I do think this statement of yours is overly cynical and ignores the fact that professional educated investors also invested in the first place because they truly believe it is the future.
A16Z and USV, for example, could certainly be wrong about web3. But they are both some of the best early stage investors of all time, and have consistently had a thesis about the future, bet on it in face of ridicule, and been proven right in the end.
I frankly think both A16Z and USV genuinely believe in the future of this technology, and betting billions on it reflects that, and is not some cynical pump n dump scheme.
And given their history of being correct versus the average HN commentator, my money is on them being right.
Please Mr Albert Wenger. You are a VC and not a technical expert on what is a database or a blockchain.
It makes absolutely no sense to compare a database to a blockchain. These things are completely different and have entirely nothing in common except that they persist data. You wouldn't compare a file to a database to make a point, would you? Also, you don't have the authority anyways to make that comparison as I doubt you know the technical details that differentiate a database from a blockchain.
Databases aren't blockchains and blockchains aren't databases. Stop comparing them for your ignorance's sake.
You wouldn't compare a file to a database to make a point, would you?
If the comparison fitted the abstraction level the conversation was at, absolutely.
For most purposes that have ever been implemented on a blockchain, a database of some kind would just be a far superior persistance backend.
The mistake is thinking that interesting underlying technology gives something de facto justification for existing in 'user' space when it does not.
The problem isn't centralization. It's centralization through a company which exerts too much of its own influence and censorship and monetizes your usage for its own benefit. Plenty of centralized databases allow free speech and don't seem to monetize your data: look at HN or if you're more radical, 4chan.
Idk if all centralized services are doomed to be corrupt so decentralized is the best we can do, like all monarchies are doomed to be corrupt so democracy is the best we can do. But unlike monarchies that hasn't really been shown. Maybe if someone invents a more efficient way to serve decentralized data the web will transition, but until then most decentralized services are most useful only as a backup to centralized services.