> Blockchain is the greatest technological fraud of the last decade. A fraud so simple, so ridiculous and yet so brilliant, it's taken in even some genuine experts in its thrall of empty hype and false promises. On top of this fraud sits the even greater fraud of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, which are nothing more than unregulated, unlicensed, wild west securities. They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity and a Ponzi scheme in effect if not name for everyone else.
Literally every single statement in this opening paragraph is demonstrably objectively false, regardless of where you stand on cryptocurrencies.
It’s not worth abandoning objective reality to signal to your tribe.
> That's one paragraph and already I can feel the simmering controversy, the reddening faces, the indignation and the angry accusations that I don't know what I'm talking about.
What can I do with Web3 that I can't do or have trouble doing any other way?
One thing cryptography solves in web3 that I haven't seen any recent alternatives for is decentralised identity.
You don't need blockchains and other such cruft for a simple signature system, but there's nothing on the web that actually makes use of such a system except for some government systems or intranets. Currently, every website asks for an email address and a username, but for most people that email address can easily be taken from them. This is especially bad for services that work with "magic links".
WebAuthn and now FIDO2 may soon fix this problem, tieing your base identity to a cryptographic key, either in hardware or software, with email as a mere recovery option if the worst were to happen.
As for an answer to your question: use the core protocol to generate speculative value through hype and pyramid schemes and cash out big time in a bigger-sucker scheme before you're found out.
Didn't know PGP created in the 90s was part of web3 even though web2 wasn't coined till the 2000s. Nobody uses PGP because it's a pain in the ass - was back then and still is today. Decentralization is a solution looking for a problem.
There's some hyperbole in there - eg. "They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity" might be more accurate (if less entertaining) rewritten as "Their use as currency is dominated by the criminal sector".
But most of it seems at least arguably in the ballpark. If you really believe it's all "demonstrably objectively false" that should be pretty easy to demonstrate, so feel free to expand. Unless you're mainly aiming to "signal to your tribe"?
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's all a gigantic fraud, as there are some small worthwhile innovations in distributed cryptographic verification.
However, almost every single addition to that point is riddled with corruption and scams for what is essentially a gigantic linked list.
We have lit a metaphorical forest on fire with proof-of-work mining and been told that it's good for the environment.
We have charged a weeks wages in transaction fees for a loaf of bread and been told that it's good for the poor.
We have seen people lose their life savings over typos and been told that it's a good store of value.
We have allowed blockchain founders to walk away with billions of stolen savings and been told that it's decentralized.
As a generalization, blockchains and cryptocurrencies cause more far more damage than good.
> A "great" con would be something that suckered people who aren't greedy or shortsighted.
Everyone's greedy or shortsighted if you hit the right cognitive levers, which is why cons work on everyone, especially on people who think cons don't work on them.
Well, read up on what existed before the 401k in the US, and how retirement works in Europe for comparison. You're betting on stonks going up and then switching to bonds and safer investments closer to retirement, hoping that the caprices of capitalism won't wipe your savings when you need them. Except: https://nypost.com/2022/06/09/401ks-drop-amid-market-turmoil...
My argument is that keeping it in savings, uninvested, or even in a mason jar in the back yard will also show diminishing returns. It will, of course, shrink slower, but the path is downhill along most axes.
European pension funds do exactly the same, the money doesn't just disappear into a vault somewhere. This is good because the profits can help combat inflation over a lifetime of work. The height of the pensions is very much dependent on market factors.
I think a bigger advantage of this system is that the money isn't your responsibility. Many people lack the fiscal responsibility to manage stocks and bonds or will do the smart thing and save up for later when they receive their pay cheque. By shifting responsibility to the individual the most vulnerable of society are most at risk of financial mismanagement and poverty during retirement or even not being able to retire at all.
Because the entire concept is basically designed to just make the rich even richer and puts way more risk on the individual.
Instead of say, social security being significantly higher by people paying more into taxes.. we have convinced people to put money into a 401k.. which is first entirely dependent on "the market", something which is well out of peoples control. The design is that people are 'forced' to contribute this way, which will drive market prices up so the people who actually have substantial money make way more on the market going up than the little guy.
Then on the flip side, when the market does tank it hurts the little guy way more because it's basically ALL of their assets at risk on something they can't control. While the rich are able to have money in a much more diversified set (real estate, business etc).
People also get f'd if they happen to want to retire close to a big market crash and all that. Again, things completely out of their control.
Before anyone starts arguing "I would rather have control on my 401k than the government!!", if the US government couldn't pay social security you would be way more fucked in the market in that situation. We have a stable government- that stable government should be providing security for people in old age.
"Retirement" being linked to the market is so beyond dumb. It's one giant scam to pump up the market and shift risk to individuals.
I’m not saying they’re perfect, but target date funds are meant to solve exactly that. They give you exposure to market upside over a long duration (so you can collect risk premia when you have the longest horizon) and then gradually expose you less to the market as the fund approaches its target date.
My 401k is based on a portfolio of companies, each of which is valuable because of their success in the market. This portfolio changes over time as companies rise and fall.
My future social security is based on the promise that future taxpayers will fund it.
I’ll take my real value (401k) over the promise of value in the future (social security).
There’s nothing “dumb” with building wealth (to finance retirement or otherwise) with stocks/funds. It’s the primary mechanism the rich use to build and retain wealth.
Pensions have major issues. The government has not made a very good case for “we should manage more retirement funds” with the state of the SSI trust. 401ks are a next move to address downfalls and failures with how other options have played out. But yeah anyone can do dumb shit with money to their detriment; that’s very difficult to overcome.
In practice, 401k's have turned out to be significantly less risky for the employee than the pension plans they replaced. I suspect your argument would be better targetted if it was framed around how large social security and other safety net programs should be.
But if you do allow that personal retirement savings should be encouraged and subsidized, the existing 401k program is turning out to be nearly optimal.
Didn't the pension funds all go broke because the regulators let them undercapitalize them to start with on the assumption they could make it up in the market, and then whenever markets went down and they would bust? I mean, I agree that it was a tragedy, but ISTM the blame goes to the people in the 60s and 70s who were like "Oh yeah, we don't need to pre-fund the pensions. GM will live forever, and the market will never go down."
I agree with you for the way in which “great” is used as a measure of quality. But ”great” can also be used as a measure of size and/or impact, e.g. “Sir, your investment proposal contains a great deal of bullshit.”
In that sense, web/3 might be a called a great con.
Really? Personally, I would say that a "great" con is one that makes lots of money, putting Web 3.0 pretty far up the list when it comes to grassroots level scams.
XMPP, bittorrent, now blockchain. All 3 have the same thing in common that they had high hopes of creating a distributed alternative future for their paradigm. The first 2 fizzled into mostly fringe usage. I guess we'll have to wait and see if blockchain follows the same path, but seems to be going that way
Do they still use torrents though? I was under the impression that virtually all companies using torrents had discontinued it as disruption to users internet quality and possibly data usage caps meant it was easier to just pay the cost of distribution.
Companies make weird decisions all the time, like MS killing Skype's p2p system which destroyed the whole app. Quoting mobile as the reason when there was no reason the PC/Mac clients couldn't continue on.
Tbh I can't think of a single commercial p2p product left. Mobile was certainly the driving force, but I think better/cheaper cloud infrastructure contributed. These days all the major content distribution companies have static content positioned inside ISP data centers so its fairly cheap and fast to distribute.
Even laptops probably contributed. A lot of people are going to be using laptops on the go and connected to mobile hotspots. You'd be pissed off if a game client used all of your battery and data cap in the background. Even the p2p of Skype was a pain, you had to carefully coordinate the transfer of large files. You both had to stay online and manually restart them. While now the central server holds it and it’s way more convenient.
Edit: I just remembered that windows lets you opt in to p2p updates but that's the only thing I can think of.
I think what made Skype popular was it worked everywhere and was quite good at bypassing firewalls/DPI. It was everyone's goto as it had a high chance of success especially in schools/uni.
CGNAT could be another explanation.
I still don't see why you wouldn't try and have p2p as a back channel that's attempted.
If it can increase deployment speeds and improve user experience then its a huge plus.
Think of any software updates at schools or Steam updates in a block of units. Most consoles and PC games still spend too much time with loading bars pulling 20 Gb updates.
Slow updates isn’t really fixed by p2p though. Steam downloads run as fast as your internet speed. P2P can’t be any faster than that other than some highly unlikely situation that another machine on your local network already has the game.
And that’s where p2p died. CDNs got really really fast and the user benefit reduced to nothing while the possible disruption from seeding large files remained. Especially as consumer upload isn’t that great so any uploading can disrupt online games.
But I remember back in the Napster days when P2P was going to revolutionise the world and forever alter the media landscape.
And yet despite all the technology having been built and stable the trend in media has been overwhelmingly towards centralisation e.g. Spotify, Netflix and an all you can eat model.
It's because ultimately users care about the experience above all else.
I don't XMPP was meant to be "distributed," at least not in the way that the BitTorrent network is (and blockchains nominally are). XMPP assumes a relatively normal client-server architecture, but with no authoritative index server. That makes it decentralized in the way that IRC and SMTP are, but doesn't imply anything about consensus or peer coordination.
(More stridently: even as "failures," both XMPP and BitTorrent have probably been significantly better for the world, on net, than blockchain projects have been.)
I find this comment surprising because I don’t know what I’d do without BitTorrent - what are the alternatives? Edonkey, gnutella, etc are all dead. Just yesterday I downloaded an entire series in a matter of minutes thanks to BitTorrent. That would’ve taken ages over emule.
> Do you have any problem buying airline tickets now? Do airlines have any problem selling them to you? Of course not; this process is already efficient and optimal.
I don’t know about optimal, there are middlemen everywhere.
Some of the middlemen disappeared. Remember hipmunk? Remember how searching for flights would show airlines that shared data but not all (e.g. Southwest)?
What middleman do you deal with when buying an airline ticket? I buy mine directly from the airline; when I search, the search engines I use directly link me to the airline for the sale.
Airline ticketing itself is suboptimal for historic reasons (complicated fare class coding), but middlemen are no longer a major factor in that. Travel agents no longer dominate booking.
I typically don’t deal with the middlemen directly either (though most people use Booking or Expedia) but they’re underneath it all. Referral fees for search links, payment processors, the ticketing system, security fee, airport improvement fee (which is fine and good), customs fee, immigration fee, animal and plant inspection service, all of these take their cut on the way, and then surveillance ad tech companies mine and sell the data.
And then there’s overbooking.
Some of these are necessary middlemen but I would hardly call this optimal.
Not all of those are middlemen: some are just constituent services you're paying for (the plant maintenance and immigration fees, for example).
Even the payment processor (which really is a middleman) is likely not a source of suboptimal pricing in airline ticketing: the current alternative is cash transactions, which would probably cost the airlines and airports (and us) significantly more in terms of safely moving the money around. Maybe FedNow will improve that.
Middlemen are not always bad. Would you like to have to deal with 50 different suppliers for the basic foodstuffs you might keep in your home? No, you'd much rather go to a disgusting middleman (i.e. grocery store) and buy all 50 of those items from one vendor.
Where middlemen exist in travel these days, it's mostly this. I personally don't want to have to search dozens are individual airline websites for fares.
You can buy almost any air ticket from the airline website.
The only reason to get to a middleman is so that you have a bigger variety of options to chose from, as they can sell from multiple airlines (and also bear some costs and buy in bulk in advance from the airline and sell cheaper).
I always wonder how crypto doomsayers are going to pay the power bills keeping their network alive once the financial doomsday finally arrives. If everything goes tits up as badly as they say, I wouldn't rely on digital currencies to still be viable, especially with the incredible energy and hardware costs associated with proof of work blockchains.
Blockchain may be a good way to hide money (i.e. in a country with runaway inflation where the government has constrained access to banking and foreign currencies) but if the crash is global then nobody is safe.
You just put your InternetCoins on a thumb drive, label it with the amount (and the most recent known conversion rate) and then you try to pawn it off at the apocalypse general store by just saying “trust me as soon as the internet starts working again you’ll be super rich.”
They're far more fungible in the apocalypse, because the algorithm is simple:
- I have something
- Someone gives me bottlecaps for it
- I give someone else bottlecaps for something they have that I want.
I mean, how will someone dilute my store of value? Turn on one of the ancient, rusted bottling plants? Please. Never going to happen; the scavs have already ripped all the important parts out of the machinery.
Something that only received a passing mention in this is that cryptocurrency and related web3 items are sold like a technical panacea to a whole host of other problems with the financial system, governments, corporations, and so on, some of which are real, some are definitely in the realm of fantasy.
From my perspective it's just changing one set of monetary system problems for another set of technical and resource use problems, which IMO is not a step forward.
Overwrought marketing language and idealism are definitely problems, but there's something significant to there now being a chance to create a new financial system, or meaningfully impact the current one.
Specifically, there is energy and capital available, whereas previously it would have been impossible to work on this seriously absent a collapse or crisis in the current system.
As for whether the technological changes imply net neutral outcomes, that seems hard to qualify.
Bitcoins and blockchains aren't giving anyone a chance to create a new financial system. It's the same system. Ever notice how the goal of every prominent crypto company is to just accumulate real hard dollars, not crypto? You still can't meaningfully buy anything legal with crypto without exchanging it for dollars first. There's no reason for this ever to change either. Bitcoin was never even intended to be anything beyond a payment system, that idea that it was going to be "a new form of money" was pushed later by people who didn't understand the system but were attracted to it for ideological reasons. It was pretty obvious by the early 2010s that it was going to fail as a payment system, so a host of new narratives were created and people just ran with it despite none of them making any sense.
This is increasingly important because I've observed the "pull back" in hype has allowed a new breed of charlatans to pretend there is ever more legitimacy to this whole scam. Notably, Big 4 consulting firms have been embracing various Web3 stuff obviously without understanding it, but smelling that there is money to be made. So now legitimate businesses somehow get caught up on this scam based on some business translator misunderstanding of what it is, and have to double down on pretending it's legit. The whole thing needs a big bucket of cold water thrown on it
An example of this is Azure jumping on board the Distributed Identity (DID) bandwagon.
The only reason DID exists is to push crypto. Nobody wants their identity to be put on a public ledger. That's has identity theft built-in as a "feature"!
I feel like you're talking about something totally unrelated with the same acronym.
DID is absolutely, first-and-foremost, about individual personal identity. One of the use-cases listed is that it could be used as a replacement for ID cards such as drivers licenses, passports, etc...
It's the first I've heard of it, but apparently DID (W3C Decentralized Identifiers) is an underlying standard that's separate from what Microsoft is building on top of it.
> 2. Trust System. In order to be able to resolve DID documents, DIDs are typically recorded on an underlying network of some kind that represents a trust system. Microsoft currently supports two trust systems, which are:
> - ION (Identity Overlay Network) ION is a Layer 2 open, permissionless network based on the purely deterministic Sidetree protocol, which requires no special tokens, trusted validators, or other consensus mechanisms; the linear progression of Bitcoin's time chain is all that's required for its operation. We have open sourced an npm package to make working with the ION network easy to integrate into your apps and services. Libraries include creating a new DID, generating keys and anchoring your DID on the Bitcoin blockchain.
> - DID:Web is a permission based model that allows trust using a web domain’s existing reputation.
If you read through the DID/ION, etc... standards, you'll quickly notice the Blockchain / crypto pedigree once you start looking for the keywords.
"Trustless", "decentralized", "ledger", etc... all make a regular appearance.
> Introduction to Microsoft Entra Verified ID
In a similar discussion I tried to politely make the point that despite over two decades of "identity" experience under my belt, I have literally no clue what any of this technical gibberish is trying to solve (other than making crypto a mainstream thing).
I've read the entire Entra document. I've read most of the backing standards papers, like ION.
Why would anyone solve this problem with blockchain!? Or "distributed" anything?
This is a Solved Problem with vastly simpler and more direct (not distributed) solutions.
For example, similar discounts are offered to students and education staff by various shops. They simply ask students to sign up with an email that has an ".edu" or similar suffix.
For this specific example, the shop could simply use any identifier that is PKI-signed by the employer! A simple 2D barcode would do, shown via a simple phone app. Literally just a public key and a barcode. No ledgers, IPFS, wallets, distributed this, trustless that.
A printout on dead trees would suffice.
This all feels like boiling the ocean to make a crypto pot of tea.
A major characteristic of the crypto/blockchain trend I noticed is how so much of it is "creative" gibberish - new concepts, words, systems, architectures - but when I dig down to their essence, it's like a castle made of sand, or a pipe dream made of clouds. I keep thinking, there must be some concrete technical innovations that drive this flourishing new field.
Occasionally there's an insight, like distributed computing, decentralized and trustless - and it gives me hope that something real is happening, that there's practical value. But then I see the ecosystem and market full of pseudo-technical BS and outright fraud. It reminds me of modern financial instruments with intellectual-sounding concepts, derivatives, securities, repackaged loans, and so on, enabling a wide range of tricks and scams upon the public.
As far as scams go, it makes sense that most of it is made up of words, like politics and religion. And maybe some parts of the story can be based on reality, to make it sound more believable.
Microsoft Entra seems to be marketed to enterprise customers, big money. But that's the completely wrong audience to try and sell "decentralized". Enterprise-scale companies need centralization of identities.
---
I gotta admit though, even after the disillusionment and breaking the spell, I'm still a little bit curious and hopeful that the crypto/blockchain hype has at least a few nuggets of real, practical value. It's a great con indeed, and one of the biggest mass "nerd sniping" I've witnessed.
Same thing with the first .com bubble.
AI have been through this too and is now having a revival.
Blockchain and Web 3 is not going anywhere it will just not be championed by the current generation. The coming will use this as it was the most normal in the world.
Feel free to list even one successful Web3 site. Not as in "could be useful in the future", but useful now, and used by a significant number of people for activities that are not directly crypto-related.
Keep in mind that "web 1.0" was immediately useful, to many people, at a large scale. The original web wasn't restricted to web developers doing web development things. It was used by industry, government, and academia at scale almost immediately.
If you don't see the value of what is fundamentally a public ledger database, then I am not sure what to tell you.
It's being used by many people today.
It's not for everyone.
It will evolve and at one point we won't even know we are using it.
The thing about blockchain isn't that it isn't that you couldn't build it with "web2" the thing is it would be unfeasible to do so and still maintaining the trust.
By separating the "owners" of the database from what it gets used to verify, things that are a kind of wicked problem or at least a chicken and egg problem become possible.
Here are a couple of examples from my perspective of what is technically doable but practically unfeasible with a proprietary.
I am pretty convinced that the government will be using this sooner or later too, for things that require transparency, but they are not going to be early adopters (in contrast with the internet where they were)
But I am fine with you not seeing this or agreeing. Time will tell, I put my money were my mouth is :)
> It will evolve and at one point we won't even know we are using it.
It's been more than 10 years and billions poured into the ecosystem since Bitcoin started, and I still don't know anybody who uses a blockchain for anything beyond speculation, even though I'm in tech.
After how many more years without widespread adoption would you be convinced otherwise?
> There is so much use for blockchain especially as infrastructure for society and in 10 years from now we will not even be thinking about it.
So you do seem to think that 10 years matter and that it's the time left before it becomes part of our lives, but still it's unclear what's supposed to change in the meantime and why this hasn't happened yet. There's just as much money lost on a regular basis (maybe even more now that projects are bigger), it's still mostly a speculation platform, no real infra in sight and mostly "ideas" that don't pass a basic business plan analysis or simply the question: "wouldn't it be better to implement this idea, but without a blockchain?".
Bitcoin has changed very little since its inception. The first 10 years haven't fundamentally changed its adoption, there's no reason to think that 10 more would do much more. "Just believe in it" is not very enticing for a technology.
My point is that Web 3.0 is not a great con and that it's here to stay and that down the line we won't even think about it.
It also being used today, but today we are having the same kind of discussions as we had with the internet in the 90's
Bitcoin changed from being currency to being store of value. Quite a big change.
But again I am not sure who you are trying to convince here. I have already provided plenty of examples of what I think is use cases both from business to infrastructure to societally. I never said just believe it and I am not sure why that straw man is being thrown in there.
It's always the same discussion though. People who say they want use cases aren't really interested in them. It's a weird phenomena to me but each to their own.
You are more than welcome to think there isn't a reason to think it's going to work out and then you act accordingly to that belief. I see it differently I do see the need and act accordingly.
> Bitcoin changed from being currency to being store of value. Quite a big change.
It's never really been used as either in practice, because of its volatility. "Store of value" is a big statement for something that was once at 60kUSD and is now at 20kUSD. It's mostly used because "number goes up".
> plenty of examples
I went through your links, they don't pass the test I mentioned, namely: in practice, you're better off without a blockchain. That's why so many of these are just "ideas" and not actual businesses and never take off, even 10 years in and all the tech being there already.
This is the thing. You either understand it or you don't. I can get you to see it. I don't have to, in the future it will be just there.
Web3 is a special case of wild wild west in a market with way too much money inflating it all, but the fundamental principles about having an open database accessible to everyone is here to stay.
The stock market is down up to 90% in some cases.
You need to think about this when some of the problems there are today get resolved and new generations start building with this as part of the toolbox.
But each to their own. I've just seen this so many times before and I can personally see the use cases, they are just not what most people think they are.
They really didn’t. The fact that it was really useful was blindingly obvious to everyone pretty quickly. Like nobody was confused thinking it was better to not be able to check your bank transaction history online.
The question at the time was how useful, and how quickly things were going to be transformed and what it was all worth since the hype and valuations got out of control.
And there were of course dumb ideas that got funded (like the cue cat) and good but early ideas that were overfunded and poorly executed (like webvan).
But life was changing irreversibly at a very visible pace as digital solutions took over. Remember when every business district had a travel agent?
There are no real uses of blockchain technology today that aren’t a variation on financial speculation (aka gambling) and illicit activity.
Don’t get me wrong those are great use cases. Gambling and banned transactions are a major sector. But that’s the limit of the whole affair and that’s been obviously the case for a while.
> There are no real uses of blockchain technology today that aren’t a variation on financial speculation (aka gambling) and illicit activity.
This gets repeated a lot, and it's simply not true. It's a telltale sign that there's simply too much emotion in the arguments around blockchain - any post about tor and bittorrent doesn't receive nearly as many (if any) "but it's only for criminals" comments.
Being able to own and trade a digital asset in much the same way a physical asset is traded is potentially a huge use for blockchains. Large players aren't about to model ownership of the digital goods they sell as items on a blockchain, but it's a big opportunity for smaller players.
The author is correct in almost all his criticism. However, there is an emerging core of blockchain media that is providing real entertainment value to users. Bitcoin itself can be viewed as entertainment media rather than financial disruption. Bitcoin has an entertaining albeit misleading story generating a fan club that generates plenty of drama. Web3 takes the ability for blockchain media producers to service consumers further.
1. Are all crimes, right? Banks will take your consumer money (provider management does get more complicated) for gambling and porn these days. The stuff you can't get past them is almost exclusively criminal. If you don't like the fact that the government made something illegal, why are you blaming money? Also: crimes don't stop being crimes just because you paid in BTC, and those transactions aren't as anonymous as you think.
2. That part is true, largely. You do have to pay a (very large!) fee for the transaction, but it's not to anyone in particular and they don't know any more than the rest of us do about what you're paying for (which, again, is not completely anonymous!).
3. This part is laughably wrong. Even now, post-crash, transaction fees are measured in multiple dollars per. During the boom, it was routine to see entities paying more than $100 to get a transaction to post.
> Are all crimes, right? Banks will take your consumer money (provider management does get more complicated) for gambling and porn these days
Not necessarily. For example, PayPal has recently introduced "acceptable use policy" where they can freeze your account without you violating the law. Banks also have done the same for being "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" etc. All of those things are perfectly legal in the US. So your assertion that only illegal activities require use of crypto is false.
And that's before we get to the fact that just because something is "illegal" doesn't mean it's good to have this banned. Pretty sure the ongoing Iranian protests are illegal.
> just because something is "illegal" doesn't mean it's good to have this banned
No, but it means that the question has nothing to do with money. Using BTC to launder or evade tracking for a transaction that is illegal is simply committing another crime. If you want to be free of prosecution, talk to your government, don't just cheat and figure it's OK because it's crypto. That's how you end up in jail.
First of all, the fact that you completely ignored the first point about perfectly legal "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" behavior being enough to get you banned from PayPal/banks means you accept that there are valid LEGAL use cases of crypto.
As for your suggestion to "talk to your government", yeah I'm sure that will go down well with the Iranian regime trying to crack down on anti-hijab protestors.
Can you maybe cite the folks who are using crypto out of necessity instead of banking with money? Someone getting PayPal miffed at them isn't remotely the same thing as "can't use money", and I think you know that.
What you're doing is extrapolating from "some people sometimes have trouble with a bank" (true) to "the only way to evade oppressive banking censorship is crypto" (bananas).
Or rather, the second frame is true, for a certain subset of transactions that happen to be illegal.
I don't have examples of people getting banned by banks/PayPal for legal activities using crypto, no. But that doesn't mean crypto-based solutions can't fill that void in the future. Note that I never claimed crypto is the "only way" to solve this issue. But, it's a promising alternative. Any centralized solution for these use-cases are tricky because they're niche and don't probably have the necessary scale. Not to mention, any centralized solution is always carries censorship risks. If you have a decentralized, usable, non-crypto alternatives for these cases, I'm open ears.
1. From memory one was payment to real-debrid and another my VPS provider. The blocks seem arbitrary, sometimes payment would go through other times not. In any case after CC and Paypal failed the BTC option just worked.
3. The exchange rates are rarely market rates with most platforms. I think Mastercard/VISA is as good as it gets when exchanging. With crypto the downside is wait times, if you don't want to pay a high fee you don't have to.
> They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity
I think this kind of misses the point.
Cryptocurrency has already accomplished incredible things. For example, it's never been easier to buy LSD. DAOs make it simple to work remotely without needing to reside in a specific location.
All the benefits of crypto come from their ability to circumvent regulations. It lets people do business peer-to-peer over the internet, out of sight from national governments and their laws. That's the point.
You might be entirely correct but my experience tells me that being logically right and the way the world works are two different things. Under a few of these points credit cards should not exist, yet here we are with our overlords.
> Under a few of these points credit cards should not exist, yet here we are with our overlords.
Such as? Credit cards provide huge UX improvements most notably convenience and security. I don't have to carry around lots of cash, and if I have an issue with a transaction, the payment processor can arbitrate the dispute.
Because when you move money from a checking account, it's gone. You might say "ok well just hold the money for a bit" or similar, and congratulations, you've just invented credit.
It absolutely does. I presume you're talking about transaction security, since debit cards have long existed for convenience, and again: once you send money from a checking account, it's gone. If I have a dispute on a transaction, it's far more difficult to reverse.
The very nature of credit makes dispute resolution much easier.
This doesn't seem to cover any new ground or engage with anything interesting outside of finance. Is the author telling all of these researchers (Stanford, MIT, Columbia, etc) that there is nothing interesting or new in blockchain?
That's just ignorant of the large amount of interesting blockchain-related ideas and research going on (again, most of which you don't mention in the article).
Anecdotally, the only “Web 3” that has improved my life is Monero.
It’s the best way I’ve found to send money to strangers on the internet. I’ve opened unofficial bounties and paid open source developers to implement them, as one example.
It really “just works” in a way where other crypto currency doesn’t.
I still support many other projects in this space, but Monero was the only one I felt comfortable actually using.
If you figured out all those variables, they would have to be legally enforced by a legal authority -- meaning there wouldn't be a purpose to use an NFT as a "blockchain authority" anymore. They're fundamentally useless.
Kinda like the idea of using NFTs as tickets (for concerts or stuff like that). We recently had an issue with false tickets during a football match in France, I'm sure you can use NFTs here, with a good UI (so unlike 99% of crypto) (not necessarily on a public Blockchain tbh).
Software developers should universally reject payment in crypto, but especially monero. I know I would if you tried to pay me with that. It's the same situation as tornado cash. By using it you're providing cover for north korea and other sanctioned entities to launder money: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/02/12/north-korea-is-e...
It has no other real legal or legitimate use case, it otherwise works the same as other cryptos. You could just pay those developers in cash. Most developers I've known that aren't hardcore crypto zealots prefer to get paid in cash.
Looks like this got moved off the front page which is too bad, I would love to see it plastered everywhere for a few days
I watched the discussion unfold a bit and it was instructive. Obviously there were a lot of upvotes on the story because I think the thesis is basically commonsense for most people that pay attention. Except for the actual active scammers (or chumps that have somehow been had) who are quickly voting down any comments supportive of the fact that crypto is a scam. It's the contrast between the upvotes of the story and the downvoted common sense comments that is interesting. It happens with political stories sometimes too
I like to read things on HN because they're interesting, not because they're right or wrong.
Maybe most people were voting on this because they think it's right or wrong, not because it says anything new or interesting (I don't see that it does).
> Maybe most people were voting on this because they think it's right or wrong, not because it says anything new or interesting (I don't see that it does).
There's probably some truth in this, in respect of the voting. I certainly never expected it to have a brief stint top of the front page when I submitted it.
As the author I'd like to hope it was an interesting read, but I'll absolutely agree if you're much familiar with the crypto space, it's not new information or a new set of arguments. That doesn't matter to me because for me, for the position I take on this industry, I think what's important is for more people to speak out against crypto, to challenge the hype around blockchain and not be afraid to say it's simply not delivering.
I often read these posts to see if there's any perspective that can convince me I've wasted my time the past few years.
Unfortunately this one didn't add any new information. It's just 'opinion' from someone very unfamiliar with the space.
This is very much in the vein of the infamous Dropbox announcement. Indeed, these technologies in their current form require a leap of imagination to see working at scale.
What's missing from this article is: (1) thoughts on anything specific happening in the space and (2) a sense of wonder about what new things have come from it.
"Crypto" is in one reading a massive flurry of activity to see how cryptography might transform society. Most experiments will probably fail, but it seems untenable to argue that the answer is: it's a fraud. We can approach this with curiosity or with derision. The choice is yours.
Bitcoin went on to create an entirely new industry employing tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, fund thousands of research projects and startups, create financial independence for thousands of people, allow thousands of people to transmit money in situations where it would have been difficult or impossible otherwise, and probably other things. It's a massive cultural phenomenon with global reach and real consequences.
The adoption looks different because it's not an apples to apples comparison. The appropriate comparison would be between "blockchain/crypto" and "cloud." In that comparison, the Dropbox equivalent likely hasn't been released yet. And even still, the technologies are different enough that I'd expect different timelines. The inherent difficulty of implementing cryptographic systems to the highest standards, and the regulatory hurdle implied by the fact that any token is arguably a security, matter.
Also, for what it's worth, you can send money to anyone in the world instantly now.
My personal opinion is that interesting things will start to happen after we realize there's an architectural sleight of hand in the "web3" vision and it doesn't really make sense. Projects that recognize this are already gaining traction.
> The appropriate comparison would be between "blockchain/crypto" and "cloud."
Ok fine, Amazon S3 was launched in 2006, only two years before bitcoin. The entire cloud industry is just a smidge older than crypto.
> Also, for what it's worth, you can send money to anyone in the world instantly now.
You could do that without crypto before, and you can still do it now without crypto. I'm not saying that nobody gets any use from crypto. What I'm saying is that these arguments that we're early in the adoption curve just aren't true. The lack of adoption might be because crypto isn't solving problems for most people.
One of the worst facets of the whole web3 movement is the "thought leaders" and community talking very confidently about how blockchain will replace very well established ways of doing business (FTA "airlines selling tickets"). The author takes a very dim view of the whole blockchain space, and uses the worst possible interpretation of parts of it to make their case, but I don't disagree on this point.
Whether web3 becomes a mainstream "thing" is anyone's guess, but if it makes any headway, it won't be large enterprises leading the charge. Exactly like the author states; "Do airlines have any problem selling [tickets] to you? Of course not; this process is already efficient and optimal." Where it potentially could be used is by smaller entities that don't have well established processes, and don't necessarily have the means to build out some of the required systems.
If I want to build any kind of digital asset (an item in a game*, access to a forum, etc) and I want to allow it to be traded, I have to build that trading platform. If I want it to be traded outside of my platform, then I have to deal with endless integrations. If I'm a multi-billion dollar enterprise that's fine, I can do that. If I'm a small company, that may not be feasible. If I use a blockchain to store that asset (or at least to track who owns it) then I only need to integrate to that blockchain, that is, check that a user owns the asset before I allow them to use it in my system. I'm not saying this is simple, or even currently desirable for most people or companies, but what I am saying is that it is something that is feasible and potentially of value to an end user.
Where this will struggle in the short-term is in the end-user experience. Wallets are awful, most people don't want self-custody, and honestly, the space is filled with slimy individuals that don't exactly inspire trust. I could write for hours about all the things that I view as wrong with with web3 (some of them are technical, the majority are about the people), but to outright dismiss it as a scam/only for criminals/the worst thing on Earth is blindly emotive and is (almost) as bad as the fanatics that are just as emotional about promoting it.
* I'm only referring to tracking ownership, not interoperability across different games. That can go in the "unrealistic things web3 people say" basket.
You raise a good point. As a sceptic of this space, I would counter the UX issue you mention - which is a huge hurdle for any larger scale adoption of blockchain - will realistically only be solved by billion-dollar enterprise involvement, which will inevitably mean centralization, which in turn means we might as well drop the blockchain part.
I tend to agree with that. If I were to predict how blockchain and web3 will play out I'd say it ends in mostly centralization. The majority of people don't care about the decentralized and "trustless" parts of blockchain, but they care about usability, and I just don't see how a fully decentralized system beats a centralized one in terms of usability (or cost, or scalability). Just look at the internet; it started out as something that was (for some definition) decentralized, and in the end centralization won.
> but to outright dismiss it as a scam/only for criminals/the worst thing on Earth is blindly emotive
I mean but you came up with one maybe kinda plausible use case just to better than I could dismiss why it would be a piece of shit anyway - and that most importantly it doesn’t solve the hard problems.
It’s not emotive - I just want an existence proof of something useful that isn’t purchases or transactions I want off the grid.
I don’t think money laundering or concealing transactions is necessarily criminal - but the only real use of crypto assets for transactions is to do stuff someone powerful doesn’t think you should be doing.
Somebody else could build a centralized trading platform, and if you use that, it will be cheaper for all parties.
Whether web3 becomes a thing is not anybody's guess. Anybody who thinks about it clearly can easily conclude that it will never be a thing except among scammers and their marks.
> Somebody else could build a centralized trading platform, and if you use that, it will be cheaper for all parties.
Oh absolutely, a centralized digital assets trading platform for general digital goods would be better in almost every (at least technical) way compared to a blockchain/decentralized platform. The challenge isn't technical, it's getting parties to trust you and your platform, and to use it. That's maybe the one (if not the only) upshot to using a blockchain; I don't necessarily have to trust the platform.
That said, Visa and Mastercard basically have a duopoly on digital payments, so it's not unrealistic to think someone could do the same but with trading/tracking ownership of digital assets.
Game developers already trust services companies with leaderboards and other game services. It's not much harder for them to trust someone who provides a transferable digital asset service.
No one doubts that platforms can be powerful. At least I fully agree with that. But what is the benefit of a decentralized platform powered by blockchain? Spotify is a very successful platform for artists. No blockchain involved.
Spotify is a terrible platform for actually paying artists. Look around[1][2]. Ironically they are now testing NFT and blockchain technology, which might drive some more sales toward artists, but still through Spotify's high rent extraction.[3]
Why use a decentralized platform? Because users are able to escape the walled garden, and have more power over the protocols that distribute and generate sales on their content.
we don't know what's the next step to organize our society, I can see a possibility with blockchain.
getting older and went a lot places and knew quite a few people from different backgrounds and countries, one thing is clear, nothing is as sound/optimal/firm/truth as it should be, if you have a slightest insight of airline industry or any industry, you'll know current arrangement is only the get-by solution, majority of people did not care, not smart or believe strange things, borderline delusional, that's the human condition.
We as humans need a new enlightenment movement, if we are lucky, we will go into a new era of understanding human nature or the reality we can construct, including a blockchain centered society.
Don't you agree it is easier to set up a business through blockchain, and get paid for running some service?
I am building a side-project that runs on Google Cloud. I think most tricky part for me, will be setting up the payment system without breaking any tax laws...Should I just put a Paypal pay button?
I could easily get paid through a smart-contract, verify transaction and run the given CloudRun job all without any 3rd-party involvement, or any worries about tax/business account setup.
>Don't you agree it is easier to set up a business through blockchain, and get paid for running some service?
No.
> I am building a side-project that runs on Google Cloud. I think most tricky part for me, will be setting up the payment system without breaking any tax laws...Should I just put a Paypal pay button?
It’s a pretty easy option, yes (hence your phrasing of “just put a button”) There’s also Stripe or Square etc which are similarly simple.
> I could easily get paid through a smart-contract, verify transaction and run the given CloudRun job all without any 3rd-party involvement, or any worries about tax/business account setup
How do you handle taxes when cashing out or using crypto to buy things? Can you pay for food/rent/insurance with crypto?
No, there aren't. That's not available for Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Argentinians, Nigerians, Thai, South Africans, which is more than 1/3 of the world population and you can't just forget about our existence, you know. Don't say that if you can handle some stuff in your particular country, that makes the whole technology useless worldwide speaking.
We are human beings and deserve to sell our stuff in the internet as much as you do.
Most of the countries you’ve listed have Paypal, so in that case I would suggest that since obviously Stripe and Square aren’t available.
Edit: The only countries you’ve listed that don’t have Paypal are currently under sanctions from the US that can make doing business legally tricky for me. If your sole use case is avoiding sanctions, then yes obviously crypto is useful. That is not an obvious scenario when asked “Isn’t the blockchain easier than (traditional payment platforms)?”
I mostly agree with this critique but OP is coming from a privileged 1st world perspective. I think we should be looking at low trust societies which have different challenges than what you might expect in the "developed" world
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 348 ms ] threadLiterally every single statement in this opening paragraph is demonstrably objectively false, regardless of where you stand on cryptocurrencies.
It’s not worth abandoning objective reality to signal to your tribe.
> That's one paragraph and already I can feel the simmering controversy, the reddening faces, the indignation and the angry accusations that I don't know what I'm talking about.
What can I do with Web3 that I can't do or have trouble doing any other way?
You don't need blockchains and other such cruft for a simple signature system, but there's nothing on the web that actually makes use of such a system except for some government systems or intranets. Currently, every website asks for an email address and a username, but for most people that email address can easily be taken from them. This is especially bad for services that work with "magic links".
WebAuthn and now FIDO2 may soon fix this problem, tieing your base identity to a cryptographic key, either in hardware or software, with email as a mere recovery option if the worst were to happen.
As for an answer to your question: use the core protocol to generate speculative value through hype and pyramid schemes and cash out big time in a bigger-sucker scheme before you're found out.
Perhaps you aren’t interested in that; that’s okay. It’s the main thing that was made possible by this invention that was not possible before.
But most of it seems at least arguably in the ballpark. If you really believe it's all "demonstrably objectively false" that should be pretty easy to demonstrate, so feel free to expand. Unless you're mainly aiming to "signal to your tribe"?
We have lit a metaphorical forest on fire with proof-of-work mining and been told that it's good for the environment. We have charged a weeks wages in transaction fees for a loaf of bread and been told that it's good for the poor. We have seen people lose their life savings over typos and been told that it's a good store of value. We have allowed blockchain founders to walk away with billions of stolen savings and been told that it's decentralized.
As a generalization, blockchains and cryptocurrencies cause more far more damage than good.
Everyone's greedy or shortsighted if you hit the right cognitive levers, which is why cons work on everyone, especially on people who think cons don't work on them.
I mean, I get what you mean.. but we have a -40% differential here to prove you utterly wrong at the moment.
I think a bigger advantage of this system is that the money isn't your responsibility. Many people lack the fiscal responsibility to manage stocks and bonds or will do the smart thing and save up for later when they receive their pay cheque. By shifting responsibility to the individual the most vulnerable of society are most at risk of financial mismanagement and poverty during retirement or even not being able to retire at all.
Instead of say, social security being significantly higher by people paying more into taxes.. we have convinced people to put money into a 401k.. which is first entirely dependent on "the market", something which is well out of peoples control. The design is that people are 'forced' to contribute this way, which will drive market prices up so the people who actually have substantial money make way more on the market going up than the little guy.
Then on the flip side, when the market does tank it hurts the little guy way more because it's basically ALL of their assets at risk on something they can't control. While the rich are able to have money in a much more diversified set (real estate, business etc).
People also get f'd if they happen to want to retire close to a big market crash and all that. Again, things completely out of their control.
Before anyone starts arguing "I would rather have control on my 401k than the government!!", if the US government couldn't pay social security you would be way more fucked in the market in that situation. We have a stable government- that stable government should be providing security for people in old age.
"Retirement" being linked to the market is so beyond dumb. It's one giant scam to pump up the market and shift risk to individuals.
My future social security is based on the promise that future taxpayers will fund it.
I’ll take my real value (401k) over the promise of value in the future (social security).
For the median household, most wealth is tied up in real estate (their home).
Pensions have major issues. The government has not made a very good case for “we should manage more retirement funds” with the state of the SSI trust. 401ks are a next move to address downfalls and failures with how other options have played out. But yeah anyone can do dumb shit with money to their detriment; that’s very difficult to overcome.
But if you do allow that personal retirement savings should be encouraged and subsidized, the existing 401k program is turning out to be nearly optimal.
In that sense, web/3 might be a called a great con.
This could be just one of any of the tech or services written using it.
I would be interested to read. Thanks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning
Companies make weird decisions all the time, like MS killing Skype's p2p system which destroyed the whole app. Quoting mobile as the reason when there was no reason the PC/Mac clients couldn't continue on.
Even laptops probably contributed. A lot of people are going to be using laptops on the go and connected to mobile hotspots. You'd be pissed off if a game client used all of your battery and data cap in the background. Even the p2p of Skype was a pain, you had to carefully coordinate the transfer of large files. You both had to stay online and manually restart them. While now the central server holds it and it’s way more convenient.
Edit: I just remembered that windows lets you opt in to p2p updates but that's the only thing I can think of.
CGNAT could be another explanation.
I still don't see why you wouldn't try and have p2p as a back channel that's attempted. If it can increase deployment speeds and improve user experience then its a huge plus.
Think of any software updates at schools or Steam updates in a block of units. Most consoles and PC games still spend too much time with loading bars pulling 20 Gb updates.
And that’s where p2p died. CDNs got really really fast and the user benefit reduced to nothing while the possible disruption from seeding large files remained. Especially as consumer upload isn’t that great so any uploading can disrupt online games.
https://github.com/HearthSim/keg#what-is-ngdp
Which is why torrents has really fallen away in favour of fast CDNs.
And yet despite all the technology having been built and stable the trend in media has been overwhelmingly towards centralisation e.g. Spotify, Netflix and an all you can eat model.
It's because ultimately users care about the experience above all else.
(More stridently: even as "failures," both XMPP and BitTorrent have probably been significantly better for the world, on net, than blockchain projects have been.)
I don’t know about optimal, there are middlemen everywhere.
Airline ticketing itself is suboptimal for historic reasons (complicated fare class coding), but middlemen are no longer a major factor in that. Travel agents no longer dominate booking.
And then there’s overbooking.
Some of these are necessary middlemen but I would hardly call this optimal.
Even the payment processor (which really is a middleman) is likely not a source of suboptimal pricing in airline ticketing: the current alternative is cash transactions, which would probably cost the airlines and airports (and us) significantly more in terms of safely moving the money around. Maybe FedNow will improve that.
Where middlemen exist in travel these days, it's mostly this. I personally don't want to have to search dozens are individual airline websites for fares.
The only reason to get to a middleman is so that you have a bigger variety of options to chose from, as they can sell from multiple airlines (and also bear some costs and buy in bulk in advance from the airline and sell cheaper).
And usually that there is some big doomsday financial event coming up that only “hard money” like bitcoin can avoid.
Blockchain may be a good way to hide money (i.e. in a country with runaway inflation where the government has constrained access to banking and foreign currencies) but if the crash is global then nobody is safe.
They're far more fungible in the apocalypse, because the algorithm is simple:
- I have something
- Someone gives me bottlecaps for it
- I give someone else bottlecaps for something they have that I want.
I mean, how will someone dilute my store of value? Turn on one of the ancient, rusted bottling plants? Please. Never going to happen; the scavs have already ripped all the important parts out of the machinery.
From my perspective it's just changing one set of monetary system problems for another set of technical and resource use problems, which IMO is not a step forward.
Specifically, there is energy and capital available, whereas previously it would have been impossible to work on this seriously absent a collapse or crisis in the current system.
As for whether the technological changes imply net neutral outcomes, that seems hard to qualify.
The only reason DID exists is to push crypto. Nobody wants their identity to be put on a public ledger. That's has identity theft built-in as a "feature"!
DID is absolutely, first-and-foremost, about individual personal identity. One of the use-cases listed is that it could be used as a replacement for ID cards such as drivers licenses, passports, etc...
"A DID refers to any subject (e.g., a person, organization, thing, data model, abstract entity, etc.) as determined by the controller of the DID."
So, is for anything (where persons are in the set of anything)
> 2. Trust System. In order to be able to resolve DID documents, DIDs are typically recorded on an underlying network of some kind that represents a trust system. Microsoft currently supports two trust systems, which are:
> - ION (Identity Overlay Network) ION is a Layer 2 open, permissionless network based on the purely deterministic Sidetree protocol, which requires no special tokens, trusted validators, or other consensus mechanisms; the linear progression of Bitcoin's time chain is all that's required for its operation. We have open sourced an npm package to make working with the ION network easy to integrate into your apps and services. Libraries include creating a new DID, generating keys and anchoring your DID on the Bitcoin blockchain.
> - DID:Web is a permission based model that allows trust using a web domain’s existing reputation.
Introduction to Microsoft Entra Verified ID - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/ver...
"Trustless", "decentralized", "ledger", etc... all make a regular appearance.
> Introduction to Microsoft Entra Verified ID
In a similar discussion I tried to politely make the point that despite over two decades of "identity" experience under my belt, I have literally no clue what any of this technical gibberish is trying to solve (other than making crypto a mainstream thing).
I've read the entire Entra document. I've read most of the backing standards papers, like ION.
It's wall-to-wall gibberish.
I won't go through the criticism in detail, but let's just look at the the practical example shown in this section: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/ver...
What. The. Eff?
Why would anyone solve this problem with blockchain!? Or "distributed" anything?
This is a Solved Problem with vastly simpler and more direct (not distributed) solutions.
For example, similar discounts are offered to students and education staff by various shops. They simply ask students to sign up with an email that has an ".edu" or similar suffix.
For this specific example, the shop could simply use any identifier that is PKI-signed by the employer! A simple 2D barcode would do, shown via a simple phone app. Literally just a public key and a barcode. No ledgers, IPFS, wallets, distributed this, trustless that.
A printout on dead trees would suffice.
This all feels like boiling the ocean to make a crypto pot of tea.
Occasionally there's an insight, like distributed computing, decentralized and trustless - and it gives me hope that something real is happening, that there's practical value. But then I see the ecosystem and market full of pseudo-technical BS and outright fraud. It reminds me of modern financial instruments with intellectual-sounding concepts, derivatives, securities, repackaged loans, and so on, enabling a wide range of tricks and scams upon the public.
As far as scams go, it makes sense that most of it is made up of words, like politics and religion. And maybe some parts of the story can be based on reality, to make it sound more believable.
Microsoft Entra seems to be marketed to enterprise customers, big money. But that's the completely wrong audience to try and sell "decentralized". Enterprise-scale companies need centralization of identities.
---
I gotta admit though, even after the disillusionment and breaking the spell, I'm still a little bit curious and hopeful that the crypto/blockchain hype has at least a few nuggets of real, practical value. It's a great con indeed, and one of the biggest mass "nerd sniping" I've witnessed.
Same thing with the first .com bubble. AI have been through this too and is now having a revival.
Blockchain and Web 3 is not going anywhere it will just not be championed by the current generation. The coming will use this as it was the most normal in the world.
The .com bubble ratio was more like 33% crap, 33% meh, and 33% gold. The "crash" was that people realised that the 33% crap was crap.
The equivalent crash for Web3 would wipe it out completely, taking the 1% with it.
Also, I don't agree that there is a 1% to begin with. I've never heard of any compelling use-case for Web3.
There is plenty of use for it, it's just not the same as for Web2.
Keep in mind that "web 1.0" was immediately useful, to many people, at a large scale. The original web wasn't restricted to web developers doing web development things. It was used by industry, government, and academia at scale almost immediately.
It's being used by many people today. It's not for everyone. It will evolve and at one point we won't even know we are using it.
The thing about blockchain isn't that it isn't that you couldn't build it with "web2" the thing is it would be unfeasible to do so and still maintaining the trust.
By separating the "owners" of the database from what it gets used to verify, things that are a kind of wicked problem or at least a chicken and egg problem become possible.
Here are a couple of examples from my perspective of what is technically doable but practically unfeasible with a proprietary.
https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1465382119811784708 https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1463539727202754563
I am pretty convinced that the government will be using this sooner or later too, for things that require transparency, but they are not going to be early adopters (in contrast with the internet where they were)
But I am fine with you not seeing this or agreeing. Time will tell, I put my money were my mouth is :)
It's been more than 10 years and billions poured into the ecosystem since Bitcoin started, and I still don't know anybody who uses a blockchain for anything beyond speculation, even though I'm in tech.
After how many more years without widespread adoption would you be convinced otherwise?
Plenty of people use is.
> There is so much use for blockchain especially as infrastructure for society and in 10 years from now we will not even be thinking about it.
So you do seem to think that 10 years matter and that it's the time left before it becomes part of our lives, but still it's unclear what's supposed to change in the meantime and why this hasn't happened yet. There's just as much money lost on a regular basis (maybe even more now that projects are bigger), it's still mostly a speculation platform, no real infra in sight and mostly "ideas" that don't pass a basic business plan analysis or simply the question: "wouldn't it be better to implement this idea, but without a blockchain?".
Bitcoin has changed very little since its inception. The first 10 years haven't fundamentally changed its adoption, there's no reason to think that 10 more would do much more. "Just believe in it" is not very enticing for a technology.
My point is that Web 3.0 is not a great con and that it's here to stay and that down the line we won't even think about it.
It also being used today, but today we are having the same kind of discussions as we had with the internet in the 90's
Bitcoin changed from being currency to being store of value. Quite a big change.
But again I am not sure who you are trying to convince here. I have already provided plenty of examples of what I think is use cases both from business to infrastructure to societally. I never said just believe it and I am not sure why that straw man is being thrown in there.
It's always the same discussion though. People who say they want use cases aren't really interested in them. It's a weird phenomena to me but each to their own.
You are more than welcome to think there isn't a reason to think it's going to work out and then you act accordingly to that belief. I see it differently I do see the need and act accordingly.
It's all good.
It's never really been used as either in practice, because of its volatility. "Store of value" is a big statement for something that was once at 60kUSD and is now at 20kUSD. It's mostly used because "number goes up".
> plenty of examples
I went through your links, they don't pass the test I mentioned, namely: in practice, you're better off without a blockchain. That's why so many of these are just "ideas" and not actual businesses and never take off, even 10 years in and all the tech being there already.
You are proving my point exactly. You set up some arbitrary rules that you want reality to comply too and then you make all sorts of claims from that.
And some of these I mention ARE already businesses some of them.
This is exactly what I knew would happen. "If this is reality I deny reality" is basically what you are saying.
Exactly which part of Web3 are you referring to here? I've not seen anything that matches your assessment.
Web3 is a special case of wild wild west in a market with way too much money inflating it all, but the fundamental principles about having an open database accessible to everyone is here to stay.
The stock market is down up to 90% in some cases.
You need to think about this when some of the problems there are today get resolved and new generations start building with this as part of the toolbox.
But each to their own. I've just seen this so many times before and I can personally see the use cases, they are just not what most people think they are.
Then what are they?
You could suddenly order rare books, book plane flights, find song lyrics, and all sorts of stuff you had wanted to do but couldn’t.
I was there at the time. Every year like 11 new great use cases came along. It’s absolutely nothing like crypto.
People laughed at email, buying online, payment was even illegal in the beginning.
I was also there at the time from the very beginning.
This is the same thing. Hype, then crash then re-construction then normalized.
There is so much use for blockchain especially as infrastructure for society and in 10 years from now we will not even be thinking about it.
It's no different.
The question at the time was how useful, and how quickly things were going to be transformed and what it was all worth since the hype and valuations got out of control.
And there were of course dumb ideas that got funded (like the cue cat) and good but early ideas that were overfunded and poorly executed (like webvan).
But life was changing irreversibly at a very visible pace as digital solutions took over. Remember when every business district had a travel agent?
There are no real uses of blockchain technology today that aren’t a variation on financial speculation (aka gambling) and illicit activity.
Don’t get me wrong those are great use cases. Gambling and banned transactions are a major sector. But that’s the limit of the whole affair and that’s been obviously the case for a while.
Whether I will be right time will tell, I am pretty sure I will, and the idea that this is a useless technology is simply a question of vision.
There are plenty of use cases which are theoretically possible with Web2 but not feasible without Blockchain.
If you can name one that’s not a word salad I’m definitely curious.
This gets repeated a lot, and it's simply not true. It's a telltale sign that there's simply too much emotion in the arguments around blockchain - any post about tor and bittorrent doesn't receive nearly as many (if any) "but it's only for criminals" comments.
Being able to own and trade a digital asset in much the same way a physical asset is traded is potentially a huge use for blockchains. Large players aren't about to model ownership of the digital goods they sell as items on a blockchain, but it's a big opportunity for smaller players.
Nonsense
Its allowed me to pay when paypal/credit cards/my bank have decided they're going to not allow payment to a service.
It's allowed me to get paid cash in hand without having to involve entities who its none of their business why that money has been paid to me.
It's allowed me to bypass currency exchange issues and fleecing.
2. That part is true, largely. You do have to pay a (very large!) fee for the transaction, but it's not to anyone in particular and they don't know any more than the rest of us do about what you're paying for (which, again, is not completely anonymous!).
3. This part is laughably wrong. Even now, post-crash, transaction fees are measured in multiple dollars per. During the boom, it was routine to see entities paying more than $100 to get a transaction to post.
Not necessarily. For example, PayPal has recently introduced "acceptable use policy" where they can freeze your account without you violating the law. Banks also have done the same for being "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" etc. All of those things are perfectly legal in the US. So your assertion that only illegal activities require use of crypto is false.
And that's before we get to the fact that just because something is "illegal" doesn't mean it's good to have this banned. Pretty sure the ongoing Iranian protests are illegal.
No, but it means that the question has nothing to do with money. Using BTC to launder or evade tracking for a transaction that is illegal is simply committing another crime. If you want to be free of prosecution, talk to your government, don't just cheat and figure it's OK because it's crypto. That's how you end up in jail.
As for your suggestion to "talk to your government", yeah I'm sure that will go down well with the Iranian regime trying to crack down on anti-hijab protestors.
What you're doing is extrapolating from "some people sometimes have trouble with a bank" (true) to "the only way to evade oppressive banking censorship is crypto" (bananas).
Or rather, the second frame is true, for a certain subset of transactions that happen to be illegal.
3. The exchange rates are rarely market rates with most platforms. I think Mastercard/VISA is as good as it gets when exchanging. With crypto the downside is wait times, if you don't want to pay a high fee you don't have to.
I think this kind of misses the point.
Cryptocurrency has already accomplished incredible things. For example, it's never been easier to buy LSD. DAOs make it simple to work remotely without needing to reside in a specific location.
All the benefits of crypto come from their ability to circumvent regulations. It lets people do business peer-to-peer over the internet, out of sight from national governments and their laws. That's the point.
What unique properties of a DAO accomplishes this?
> All the benefits of crypto come from their ability to circumvent regulations.
is for all intents and purposes a rephrasing of
> They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity
This doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve managed globally distributed remote teams for the better part of a decade and haven’t had any issues.
Such as? Credit cards provide huge UX improvements most notably convenience and security. I don't have to carry around lots of cash, and if I have an issue with a transaction, the payment processor can arbitrate the dispute.
The very nature of credit makes dispute resolution much easier.
https://adacrunch.medium.com/cryptocurrency-and-blockchain-r...
Disclaimer: I have a small grant from the Ethereum Foundation to research methods of voting and governance/decisionmaking in groups.
a huge ecosystem built on what is in reality a simple data structure which is neither particularly novel nor interesting
It’s the best way I’ve found to send money to strangers on the internet. I’ve opened unofficial bounties and paid open source developers to implement them, as one example.
It really “just works” in a way where other crypto currency doesn’t.
I still support many other projects in this space, but Monero was the only one I felt comfortable actually using.
But you're totally right, only monero have a 'legitimate' usecase (bypass the taxation laws).
So they are theoretically a good idea with no practical application in the real world.
In particular there are a lot of variables around reselling restrictions, profit sharing, meaningful ownership, copyright, etc.
It has no other real legal or legitimate use case, it otherwise works the same as other cryptos. You could just pay those developers in cash. Most developers I've known that aren't hardcore crypto zealots prefer to get paid in cash.
I watched the discussion unfold a bit and it was instructive. Obviously there were a lot of upvotes on the story because I think the thesis is basically commonsense for most people that pay attention. Except for the actual active scammers (or chumps that have somehow been had) who are quickly voting down any comments supportive of the fact that crypto is a scam. It's the contrast between the upvotes of the story and the downvoted common sense comments that is interesting. It happens with political stories sometimes too
Maybe most people were voting on this because they think it's right or wrong, not because it says anything new or interesting (I don't see that it does).
There's probably some truth in this, in respect of the voting. I certainly never expected it to have a brief stint top of the front page when I submitted it.
As the author I'd like to hope it was an interesting read, but I'll absolutely agree if you're much familiar with the crypto space, it's not new information or a new set of arguments. That doesn't matter to me because for me, for the position I take on this industry, I think what's important is for more people to speak out against crypto, to challenge the hype around blockchain and not be afraid to say it's simply not delivering.
Unfortunately this one didn't add any new information. It's just 'opinion' from someone very unfamiliar with the space.
This is very much in the vein of the infamous Dropbox announcement. Indeed, these technologies in their current form require a leap of imagination to see working at scale.
What's missing from this article is: (1) thoughts on anything specific happening in the space and (2) a sense of wonder about what new things have come from it.
"Crypto" is in one reading a massive flurry of activity to see how cryptography might transform society. Most experiments will probably fail, but it seems untenable to argue that the answer is: it's a fraud. We can approach this with curiosity or with derision. The choice is yours.
Dropbox was released a year before Bitcoin, and quickly went on to completely change file storage for the average person (alongside its many clones).
Why has Bitcoin not achieved anything similar?
The adoption looks different because it's not an apples to apples comparison. The appropriate comparison would be between "blockchain/crypto" and "cloud." In that comparison, the Dropbox equivalent likely hasn't been released yet. And even still, the technologies are different enough that I'd expect different timelines. The inherent difficulty of implementing cryptographic systems to the highest standards, and the regulatory hurdle implied by the fact that any token is arguably a security, matter.
Also, for what it's worth, you can send money to anyone in the world instantly now.
My personal opinion is that interesting things will start to happen after we realize there's an architectural sleight of hand in the "web3" vision and it doesn't really make sense. Projects that recognize this are already gaining traction.
Ok fine, Amazon S3 was launched in 2006, only two years before bitcoin. The entire cloud industry is just a smidge older than crypto.
> Also, for what it's worth, you can send money to anyone in the world instantly now.
You could do that without crypto before, and you can still do it now without crypto. I'm not saying that nobody gets any use from crypto. What I'm saying is that these arguments that we're early in the adoption curve just aren't true. The lack of adoption might be because crypto isn't solving problems for most people.
Whether web3 becomes a mainstream "thing" is anyone's guess, but if it makes any headway, it won't be large enterprises leading the charge. Exactly like the author states; "Do airlines have any problem selling [tickets] to you? Of course not; this process is already efficient and optimal." Where it potentially could be used is by smaller entities that don't have well established processes, and don't necessarily have the means to build out some of the required systems.
If I want to build any kind of digital asset (an item in a game*, access to a forum, etc) and I want to allow it to be traded, I have to build that trading platform. If I want it to be traded outside of my platform, then I have to deal with endless integrations. If I'm a multi-billion dollar enterprise that's fine, I can do that. If I'm a small company, that may not be feasible. If I use a blockchain to store that asset (or at least to track who owns it) then I only need to integrate to that blockchain, that is, check that a user owns the asset before I allow them to use it in my system. I'm not saying this is simple, or even currently desirable for most people or companies, but what I am saying is that it is something that is feasible and potentially of value to an end user.
Where this will struggle in the short-term is in the end-user experience. Wallets are awful, most people don't want self-custody, and honestly, the space is filled with slimy individuals that don't exactly inspire trust. I could write for hours about all the things that I view as wrong with with web3 (some of them are technical, the majority are about the people), but to outright dismiss it as a scam/only for criminals/the worst thing on Earth is blindly emotive and is (almost) as bad as the fanatics that are just as emotional about promoting it.
* I'm only referring to tracking ownership, not interoperability across different games. That can go in the "unrealistic things web3 people say" basket.
I mean but you came up with one maybe kinda plausible use case just to better than I could dismiss why it would be a piece of shit anyway - and that most importantly it doesn’t solve the hard problems. It’s not emotive - I just want an existence proof of something useful that isn’t purchases or transactions I want off the grid.
I don’t think money laundering or concealing transactions is necessarily criminal - but the only real use of crypto assets for transactions is to do stuff someone powerful doesn’t think you should be doing.
Whether web3 becomes a thing is not anybody's guess. Anybody who thinks about it clearly can easily conclude that it will never be a thing except among scammers and their marks.
Oh absolutely, a centralized digital assets trading platform for general digital goods would be better in almost every (at least technical) way compared to a blockchain/decentralized platform. The challenge isn't technical, it's getting parties to trust you and your platform, and to use it. That's maybe the one (if not the only) upshot to using a blockchain; I don't necessarily have to trust the platform.
That said, Visa and Mastercard basically have a duopoly on digital payments, so it's not unrealistic to think someone could do the same but with trading/tracking ownership of digital assets.
Why use a decentralized platform? Because users are able to escape the walled garden, and have more power over the protocols that distribute and generate sales on their content.
[1] https://edm.com/gear-tech/steve-aoki-made-more-money-from-nf...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-...
[3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/spotify-reportedly-tests-nft-...
I am building a side-project that runs on Google Cloud. I think most tricky part for me, will be setting up the payment system without breaking any tax laws...Should I just put a Paypal pay button?
I could easily get paid through a smart-contract, verify transaction and run the given CloudRun job all without any 3rd-party involvement, or any worries about tax/business account setup.
Probably, yes. A lot of businesses big and small do this, and they're not in violation of any tax or other laws. Plus you get paid in actual money.
No.
> I am building a side-project that runs on Google Cloud. I think most tricky part for me, will be setting up the payment system without breaking any tax laws...Should I just put a Paypal pay button?
It’s a pretty easy option, yes (hence your phrasing of “just put a button”) There’s also Stripe or Square etc which are similarly simple.
> I could easily get paid through a smart-contract, verify transaction and run the given CloudRun job all without any 3rd-party involvement, or any worries about tax/business account setup
How do you handle taxes when cashing out or using crypto to buy things? Can you pay for food/rent/insurance with crypto?
No, there aren't. That's not available for Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Argentinians, Nigerians, Thai, South Africans, which is more than 1/3 of the world population and you can't just forget about our existence, you know. Don't say that if you can handle some stuff in your particular country, that makes the whole technology useless worldwide speaking.
We are human beings and deserve to sell our stuff in the internet as much as you do.
Most of the countries you’ve listed have Paypal, so in that case I would suggest that since obviously Stripe and Square aren’t available.
Edit: The only countries you’ve listed that don’t have Paypal are currently under sanctions from the US that can make doing business legally tricky for me. If your sole use case is avoiding sanctions, then yes obviously crypto is useful. That is not an obvious scenario when asked “Isn’t the blockchain easier than (traditional payment platforms)?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web