Ask HN: What if a new generation of developers is right about Web3?
Perhaps the really big idea is that lower middle, working class and poor people have access to the financial system that they never had before, and access to business formation that does not have to satisfy the gatekeepers.
In this new world the large corporations, banks, brokerage firms and financial institutions most supremely symbolized by Wall Street and The City in London will suffer a declining influence as security guards watching and controlling access to the immense wealth of the very rich. This could explain why the ultra rich like Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffet hate bitcoin.
Put in a historical context, before the printing press people were ignorant. After the printing press, the common folk had access to books and learned to read, democratizing both information and religion. People no longer had to have a priest to read the Bible to them. This knowledge explosion among the ordinary people fueled the industrial revolution.
Before the internet it was difficult to publish your writings. You had to write a letter to the editor, print pamphlets and hand them out, or if you were lucky get someone to publish you. After the internet everyone could publish to the whole world. People began to teach each other. What people learned was that the money system was rigged against them.
web3 is an attempt to decentralize and democratize finance and business.
When I think about my working class father, who had plenty of great ideas, I remember how he had to go to a stuffy bank hat in hand to try to get a personal loan. This was difficult and mostly did not work.
When I think about myself, I was able to participate in the stock market through an IRA, but I had to deal with a broker and buy in lots of 100 usually and pay a fee. I had to park money and couldn't do anything with it.
Now anyone can download an app and buy fractional shares and then trade them like money. A digital coin is essentially a hybrid between a stock and money. DAO's circumvent normal corporations. And so on.
I could be wrong, I could be right
54 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadNevertheless, the answer to the title's question is: we'll all be living in abject poverty while you're yelling "told you so"
Edit: Currently second page, my mistake.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1482321213045489668.html
They talk about decentralization which has been done so often before and only worked for niche use-cases.
What if crypto is just a big money pump and dump scheme? It‘s sold to the poor to solve their financial situation which mostly don‘t have bank accounts. But the ones loosing the most in crypto crashes is not the new-generation web3 developer earning a good income. It‘s the poor guy somewhere with a bad local currency which was now using crypto which is now not worth anything too.
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People are always repeating that many people didn‘t e.g. saw the need in the internet and had been totally wrong in it. But crypto isn‘t new anymore like the internet was at that time! Bitcoin is almost 13 years old and Etherum 6! The internet had already shown very good usecases after that time and crypto is still searching for it‘s _one_ use case than money speculation on a highly volatile asset which doesn‘t have any real money.
More interesting what will happen to crypto in a real world economy crash like 2008!
What’s an example from earlier generations?
And they are a total empty space. Because it‘s complex to use ans is missing the network effect which is really really hard to get without a central company doing marketing in some form
It’s not a product that needs to be marketed to end users. Think AWS not Amazon.com. The people building products on it will do the marketing.
You might say "those are just digital abstractions — this is native." But so what? What does it matter if my money transfer routine talks to a bank or broadcasts a new block? It does the same thing in the end, except that the blockchain version is slower and more expensive.
Blockchain offers no concrete advantages over traditional finance except for decreased regulation. That's why it's so hard to argue in favour of blockchain as a replacement for traditional financial systems. You end up constructing weak arguments, because you can't play to blockchain's strengths.
Let me present the strong argument in favour of blockchain: "Blockchain helps you make lots of anonymous money through pump & dumps, ransomware, and other assorted scams." This is an unethical argument, but a concretely fact-based one. The track record speaks for itself.
Look how much more robust the strong argument is than any argument about decentralization for its own sake, or about the "native"ness of bitcoin transfers. Occam's razor suggests that the strong argument is the driving force behind blockchain adoption, not the weak ones. Nobody cares about decentralization. They just wanna make a buck.
Obviously this is a double edged sword; having no human override is actually a very bad thing for many things. You can code in human overrides of course, but they are transparent to all parties. When you make a bank transfer or a PayPal transaction, it’s 100% opaque. The terms are not truly binding and it can be reverted or altered for any or no reason.
I’m not arguing this is the reason for valuations currently, but I find it pretty surprising how many people can’t or won’t understand the value of a neutral execution environment for financial transactions. It is not something that exists elsewhere.
2. We aren’t necessarily the target market. Think more large investment / B2B transactions not consumer payments.
Yeah, they can tell that to my lawyer. Banks don't make the rules — regulators do, and I can file suit to have a judge enforce those rules. If my money disappears, I can hold my bank to account.
But a judge can't rewrite the blockchain, so cryptocurrency has become a safe haven for fraud. You've got it exactly backwards: It's blockchain-based banking that puts customers at risk of predation.
> I find it pretty surprising how many people can’t or won’t understand the value of a neutral execution environment for financial transactions
If it had value for banks, banks would be using it. If it has value for customers, then tell me: As a customer, which desirable guarantees does blockchain provide me that banking regulations don't?
It's only with Web 2 that we became addicted to offloading everything to central providers. Their siren call was too much to resist and now they have all our data. It wasn't designed to be like this, we can just go back but a lot lack the skills to roll the full stack now sans AWS/Google Cloud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bridge_Company
"Imagine ... that they're not very good at articulating what the intuitively feel to be right about web3. When they talk about decentralization it much less about technology than routing around the central locus of control that serve as gatekeepers to keep people down."
And this describes exactly people who haven't really thought through the web3 concept -- especially indicated by the emotional perspectives of "feels rights" that the status quo is filled with "gatekeepers to keep people down". This makes it seem like a trend amongst the cool kids, which to me is what it actually is at this point.
[1] https://morksensei.com/learning-deeply-by-explaining-the-fey...
Huh? Routing around? You are advocating for the "central locus of control that serve as gatekeepers to keep people down". You don't eliminate that by "routing around" it. You eliminate it by organization, education and then agitation around it. Advocating that people unhappy with this scurry about trying to "route around" their central locus of control is exactly what they want.
What if blockchains are the best way to conduct personal finance? Digital and physical ownership? What if blockchains are the best way to conduct Big Finance? That's quite a large market, maybe even the largest market there is to conduct. Wouldn't crypto naturally be adopted then? The comparative advantage would make it a "no brainer." It seems to me stranger that we would live in a world where the business of money was perfected in the late 20th century. Do you really think bank transfers are going to take 2 days to clear in the year 2100?
[0] https://jjo.media/articles/cryptocurrency-vs-internet-adopti...
https://twitter.com/dystopiabreaker/status/14701269278180679...
this is a utopian dream. The current state of the web3 dotcom bubble is anything but.
I don't think I follow how crypto would help in your situation. At least your father could get a loan from the bank--and he got that loan because the bank looked at his history, trusted him, and took a bet he would succeed. And he can trust the bank, because it has authority and governmental checks and balances to hold it accountable. There is no trust in crypto as far as I understand it. In fact being trust-less is one of the designing principles of the block chain. Can loans exist in crypto? Wouldn't this be significantly more difficult for someone like your father to break into? And significantly more risk-y? Whereas he could get a loan from a bank with relatively little financial investment and risk, how much time & money would he need to invest in a cryptocurrency before he has enough to do what he wants with the finances? What's the risk?
Sorry if I'm missing something here, my econ-fu is weak.
Web3 has become a useless and triggering term.
Are you implying that HN hasn't already "investigated" what you're asking?
> ... you can't even brainstorm about it here.
Looks like you're implying HN hasn't already "brainstormed" / thought about what you're asking.
> Hacker News is unbelievably closed minded ...
Consider this instead: you asked a question that has been debated many, many times over — to the point of nearly everyone here being tired of the same old debate — and you come in now pretending to be the first one raising this topic, and when you're inevitably shunned, claiming "oh, look, you guys aren't even open to discussing it!".
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> Clearly we need a new Hacker News for people under the age of 35.
Baseless ageism and mis-attribution. I'm far below the age of 35. There's plenty of people on HN above the age of 35 that are wholeheartedly on your side. You're only doing yourself a disservice — and signalling a clear lack of good-faith — when you make remarks like this.
My post was an attempt, probably a lame one, to expand my own thinking and hopefully find one or two others who might look at it with a wide angle lens. Sadly, this didn't happen, so since posting this I've found other communities who are open to back and forth discussions about the topic. I'm an optimist. There's a story about about who is told to shovel manure out of a stable and is very happy about it. When asked why he said "with all this shit, there's got to be a pony around here!" I'm trying to find the pony. HN is the wrong place to look.
Neither your topic nor this place suit emotional debates.
> I'm upset that Hacker News is overwhelming negative ...
Perhaps you should set your emotional upset aside and consider why, instead of blindly rejecting all of HN because of how HN's rejection makes you feel.
> ... focusing on current technology shortcomings
There is a lot of that here, yes, but that has not been the sole "focus" of HN commenters on this topic. I find it easy to ignore and dismiss comments that focus solely on this , and still participate in discussions involving other aspects. Perhaps you should too.
> You say the topic has been debated. I say it hasn't.
I have participated in the debates, rationally (i.e., without emotions). I say you haven't.
> It's been roundly rejected. That's not debate.
I disagree that it's been roundly rejected, but even assuming so (for the sake of this point): a debate does not require "both sides" to win some votes. Unanimous rejection after consideration is a valid result of debates.
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> ... When asked why he said "with all this shit, there's got to be a pony around here!"
Nice story. But there's only so far you can stretch a simple analogy. Trust me, in the history of technology, there's often just "shit", no pony. And as more people keep entering this world, more shit keep getting produced and thrown around. In fact, it is ridiculous how easy it is to produce large quantities of it.
> ... with all this shit, there's got to be a pony around here!
Could it be a donkey instead?
No one can really predict the future, but if I had to put money down on it, I would bet that if Web3 attains its technological goals, it will not attain its social goals. If dapps replace web sites, the infrastructure becomes truly decentralized, cryptocurrencies supplant fiat currencies, and people accept the legitimacy of digital scarcity through NFTs, it will probably be a net benefit to some people, but leave most people worse off.
The impacts will be felt differently between the US, the rest of the developed world, and the developing world. I'll start with the US.
Assuming your father was working class in the United States, and assuming that he was unable to secure a business loan from a bank or attract investment money, prior to crpytocurrencies, his only option for securing a loan would be a loan shark. If this was the 1990s or the 2000s, that loan shark could come in the form of a payday loan service. These services are the logical conclusion of unregulated capitalism for a financially struggling working class. Before they were regulated, they would give out loans with interest rates in the hundreds of percent. These rates were a response to the incredible financial risk the lenders took in lending to people who could not get traditional loans. Many would disappear or file for personal bankruptcy to avoid repayment, so they had to make as much money as they could from the people who made repayments.
Nowadays, payday loans are regulated at the still incredibly high rate of 36%, but if crypto projects like Web3 succeed in circumventing government regulations, I suspect we'll see a return to the hundreds of percent loans that were once ubiquitous across the US. Lenders aren't going to get stupider just because they're lending cryptocurrencies. They're still going to calculate the risks of lending money to people like your father and act accordingly. We know this is how they'll act in the absence of regulation because it's how they acted in the absence of regulation in the recent past. Specifically, the ability to take out loans will not improve for those with little or no capital from what it was before.
For the US and the rest of the developed world, ubiquitous cryptocurrencies will cause an increase in money laundering, scams, and robberies. For whose with access to banking, deposits are insured up to a certain amount. This benefit is largely theoretical for the unbanked, and it doesn't cover enough for the upper classes, but it's typically a good amount of protection for the admittedly shrinking middle class. Storing money in cryptocurrencies loses people that protection. Cryptocurrencies also don't have chargebacks or protections against certain kinds of scams. If cryptocurrencies supplant banks, banking becomes much riskier to the middle class, and thefts and scams will accelerate the decline of the middle class, widening the wealth gap.
The ease at which cryptocurrencies can be stolen and laundered is already helping rouge nations like North Korea to finance weapons development and oppressive regimes. It's not that these regimes couldn't and haven't stolen money in other ways, but the mere existence of cryptocurrencies is making these nations richer than they otherwise would be, and I suspect that will have very negative international consequences. [1] For that matter, the existence of cryptocurrencies is fueling ransomware attacks against hospitals, governments, and infrastructure. I expect those will increase as well.
For the developing world, I'm not sure what the net effect will be. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the details issues facing people in these countries. If I had to guess though, I suspect that crypto will offer them not much more than...
I guess it wasn't clear I am from a working class background, although I mentioned my father not being able to get a loan, which got down voted in negative territory for some weird reason
By plebe I meant the insufferable working class dudes I grew up with who are anti intellectual and tend towards bullying those around them with their muscle mass. I'm not sad they now think they are crypto experts and losing their shirts.
I thank you for your long response. I will study it and get back to you. I don't want to make an off the cuff remark about it.
I know the kind of guy who you're talking about, but I've never heard the term pleb used to describe them. In my experience, the term pleb is used by the well-connected, upper-class jerks (and those who want to be like them) to deride anyone in the middle class or lower. It doesn't describe behavior, only social class.
I did see that you said you had come from the working class, but the use of the word "plebe", combined with posting on HN, signaled to me that you now earn enough money to no longer be considered part of the working class, and now saw yourself above them, or were fabricating your background.
If you did not mean to deride the working class with that comment, then I apologize for the misunderstanding.
Only children and other people with nothing to lose want a world of perfect liberty. Powerful and obsessed people might want that world because they think they are equipped to bend it to their will.
It’s not a paradise, it’s a nightmare. We need social order. We need responsible gatekeepers. I haven’t heard anyone explain how web3 leads to a kinder or safer world.
(or, better yet, move back into consulting and wait until past wisdom is required, which shouldn’t take long).
From what I've seem over past two month it's all about deregulated money, nothing to do w/ decentralization/trustless/demarcation, it's much worse.
Is it a one-in-a-decade career chance? Absolutely, scam unsuspecting plebs, rug dumb coiner/NFTs, be an exchange and be rich, write a mixer/tumbler and laundering blood money. As long as you know when to jump before the heat is too much.
Just...don't lie to yourself. Same stuff, different flavors, world is not going to be a better place because of you, actually, quite the opposite.(Same applies to traditional corps)