All the Web3 criticisms remind me of my experiences with Star Trek.
For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art.
But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men.
This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions).
I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed?
Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions.
But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software.
So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become.
I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.
So, that's a good argument for why you shouldn't dismiss a show or a thing in general based only on negative secondhand impressions. The lesson to takeaway is that you should judge a thing by its own quality, not by your negative impression of the fanbase.
But from that, there is no way you should conclude that cynicism is wrong in general. You should not overreact to too much cynicism by discarding criticism entirely! You should react by seeking better information.
I think the GP is trying to say that there are some people who are so horrified by a few cringeworthy aspects of Star Trek that they want to create a huge blanket stigma against it to ensure that nobody watches it, and anybody who does watch it is buried in ridicule. Likewise, there are some people who react to blockchain scams and BS by trying to create a blanket stigma against anything related to the topic.
I haven't personally looked into blockchain or related ideas enough to get excited (I'm harder to excite now that I'm older, and I have less time) but sometimes I feel like I ought to, just because the flavor of the criticism reminds me of the smug nastiness that got directed towards people who were interested in things like computers and Star Trek when I was young. These nerds think they're onto something cool, and we have to mock them until they can't believe in it anymore. I almost feel like I should start learning the technology out of solidarity with the little kid I used to be who embraced computers despite knowing how hopelessly dorky that made him.
Of course the concept of nerdiness has been socially rehabilitated since the 1980s, and now the stigma is nominally directed towards scams and environmental waste, but the people delivering the stigma have designed the blast radius to work pretty much the same. The entire topic is stigmatized, any interest or optimism is stigmatized. I think the history of computing and the internet shows that it's hopeless to try to disentangle the utopian hope for social transformation from the grifting and greed. Scam artists can smell the hope for progress and transformation like sharks can smell blood; it means a meal for them. It's a crude distortion to argue that either optimism or greed alone properly characterizes "web3" without the other. When we look back twenty years from now they'll both be part of the story, whether these ideas fizzle out or have a transformative impact or something in between.
I don't think that's GP's conclusion. GP's conclusion is that crypto is rooted in real innovation and the noise surrounding it gives the false impression that the tech is just a scam.
...relying on the evidence-free invention of not merely some specific fictional benefits of the technology, but a category of material improvements in the world:
> And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved
Cynicism should be discared because it's cynicism. It is a pathologicaly warped worldview misshapen by deep narcissism of people who got conned into believing something false and have instead of changing their beliefs made their disillusionment into their identity.
The best critiques of blockchain tech, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi, etc. describe fatal flaws at the core of those technologies. For example, the lack of monetary policy and regulations, privacy and security shortcomings, and high transaction costs.
It'd be great to read a positive analysis of the core merits (the math and the incentives) and how those can be applied to solve problems.
Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit, as I see it. That has some value, and NFTs are kind of the perfect vehicle to use the technology.
But does it have any practical use? That's the question. NFTs are hot right now as an investment vehicle, or as a way for artists to sell unique creations (leading to investment vehicles, I suppose). I'm not sold on the utility, long term.
Decentralized proof of ownership only matters if people with guns think it matters.
I saw a short video of Keanu Reeves laughing at NFTs because they had value but are easy to copy.
Which I found somewhat funny. Keanu gets paid a lot because he acts in things that have value but are easy to copy (movies).
The reason why those have a high value is because of copyright. The people that financed the film have control over the copying of the film. Because people with guns agree with the copyright scheme (US government).
NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them.
NFTs do not have to be links to pictures on cloud / decentralized storage. That is just their primary implementation right now, but they can quite literally be a token to represent anything, not simply a jpg. But even in this case, yeah it's easy to make copies of the pictures. However, there is intrinsic value in owning something that is legitimate.
However, I want to focus on the other possibilities for NFTs - I am making an NFT project that does have the art aspect, however the tokens also provide access to unique services like hooking into a video game engine to allow users to interact with their art. Since it's trivial to detect forgeries and ownership, even if someone was to create an NFT pointing to even the exact same piece of art, they would be denied access to the service as it is a forgery.
Right now proof of ownership is usually in the form of discord bots allowing access to servers, but there's much more you can actually do with this concept than we are seeing now, like the example above.
>NFTs cannot have actual value unless people with the ability to enforce that scarcity cares about them.
You're confusing the hyperlink with the destination. The hyperlink has scarcity and is impossible to copy. You can make a new near identical hyperlink, but it's not the same as the original, the community says so and will ignore the imposter. The hyperlink are what people are buying and flipping. It has whatever market value other participants agree it has.
To me cryptocurrency sounds like monorail or electric bus. Both technologies were designed to fix one aspect of existing transport systems.
Monorail concept appeared around 1900, trying to reduce the elevated railways problem. One designer thought of reducing the use of metal. Wuppertal suspension railway uses much more metal for tracks than conventional trams. There is a special monorail in Britain, built in 1940s, that stands on A-shaped legs. The only rail is supported by some metal triangles, using the same amount of metal. Later models, first built in Disneyland, use concrete (which contains a lot more iron in the concrete itself besides the reinforcement), and rubber wheels (sacrificing the advantage of low friction). Their biggest problem is switches: they're heavy and huge. Suspended monorails use big box instead of a rail, because swaying carriages are uncomfortable, and to hold them, the track must resist the force of a long lever. Errr... what was the reason to go for all that, in the first place? Make simpler track and use less rails/metal? Not achieved at all.
Electric buses... just 2 words: they're 3-5 times more expensive, and a whole route of e-buses requires just as much electric equipment as trolleybus line. Plus, e-buses spend twice more time charging than riding. Which means you need to triple the fleet of triple-quintiple more expensive vehicles. Even if battery technology progresses, as some insist, let it improve for private, not public money.
It seems that blockchain is similar: couple of advantages, lots of big disadvantages.
You can use the technology to make products that are quite unique. I used a game engine to generate art and also provide a bunch of ways to interact with the art, and tokenized the generated pieces. Owners of the pieces will be able to load their art into this game and interact with it directly. Yes, I could have done this with traditional web infra, however it would rely on me managing certs to prove ownership, and there is not an easy way to transfer ownership to other users on a secondary market. There's a lot of parts of the web3 tech that I've been interested in and think it's just a pretty unique ecosystem.
The way I look at it is that this is a tool. The way it is used is up to the creativity of the engineer(s) working with it. I think that using NFTs in this manner is a lot easier for me to manage than other approaches, and it's pretty fun. Practical use? Idk it's a fun art project that I hope people enjoy, but yeah I do think it was easier for me to implement in this method than a traditional web app.
But I do think there are plenty of practical use cases that you could leverage this technology for in terms of access based on ownership of the digital assets.
Did it? Today's computers are mostly descendents of more heavyweight '80s computers. I know there are like a few C64s running webservers and stuff for kicks.
Home computers were good for games or learning to program, not sure they were actually that useful outside of those things.
Edit: Ok Atari STs were good for music and Amigas were apparently good for graphics rendering.
The peoblem with public blockchains and related technologies is that they have been list in the middle of huge speculation markets... which brings all sorts of bullshit and scams.
That's why I like to look at hyperledger and similar technologies. If you remove the money incentives, you are left with the pure technology essence. And then you can judge it by what it is.
> Decentralized proof of ownership is the core merit
But it's neither decentralized nor a proof AT ALL. NFT literally can't facilitate anything by itself, without adding some centralized DB to it and some centralized humans governing all interactions between clients.
Well at minimum at least something, at maximum - fully what cryptobros already promise today (so that their messages won't be lies) - proof of ownership, transfer of ownership, enforcement of ownership, decentralization, universal standards and so on. Nothing special, only the things crypto fans already say today to the gullible buyers.
Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product
> transfer of ownership,
The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership?
> enforcement of ownership,
Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product.
> decentralization,
How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really?
> Ask for a reciept. An NFT is not selling "proof of ownership", its selling you a product
No, it's not, unless you are calling an entry in DB with an URL inside "a product". NFT system is selling NFT only, and NFT itself is almost nothing and useless.
> The so called "gullible buyers" would not be buyers without this process occurring. An NFT is not selling "transfer of ownership", the transfer is the process itself. It consists of a seller (aka crypto fan), a buyer (aka gullible buyers) and a product (the NFT). The product is what is being being transferred, so how can what is being transferred also facilitate the transfer of ownership?
Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file.
>Again, ask for a reciept. If someone robs you, sue them or call the police. That "enforcement of ownership" you seek is a separate product.
I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :)
>How much more decentralized do you want a jpeg on the internet to be, really?
Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today.
>What universal standards exactly?
That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.
> No, it's not, unless you are calling an entry in DB with an URL inside "a product". NFT system is selling NFT only, and NFT itself is almost nothing and useless.
Calling an entry in a DB? What kind of db exactly... maybe a public distributed ledger (aka a blockchain)? Hmmmm.....
The Mona Lisa itself is almost nothing and useless. Just some paint splashed on a canvas hundreds of years ago. Totally worthless. To someone out there. Just like NFTs are totally worthless to you. Heres a small life tip: do not waste your time, energy or money in anything in life that has no value to you, because you find it totally worthless to you. But you are just one being, among seventy billion others alive today. So what is important to you, will be worthless to billions of others. Does that make them idiots? No. But it kind of makes you one if you expect everyone else alive to value only exactly what you value. Live and let live.
> Ok, I see you really calling the NFT itself a product. This is amusing but I must tell you that you are either misled or malicious, because other cryptobros sell people not NFT but the stuff it links to - digital file usually. And they brainwash buyers that they (buyers) are really buying the digital file.
You used to term "gullible buyers". The key word here being BUYERS. The definition of buyer is someone who takes ownership of a PRODUCT... in this case an NFT from someone else. I'm glad you find the concept amusing. Welcome to the world of trade and capitalism. The buyers are usually speculators. Look that term up. Ever heard of the dot-com mania? The tulip mania? If you think they were just buying flowers, you have a lot to learn about human emotions and motivation. Coca-cola is not just selling "colored sugar water".
> I won't write long here, but we can see here that NFT don't facilitate any kind of "proof of ownership" and even NFT fans agree with this - you need some centralized receipts and police according them too :)
So what? If I buy an NFT, I wont be buying it because of "proof of ownership". The very fact that I can buy it today, and sell it to someone else at a profit tommorow is all the proof of ownership I need. Got that? Thousands of NFTs are being bought and sold daily, in a marketplace. Not sure what other proof of ownership (the ability to legally sell something) you are looking for... but like I said, it seems you're still new to this world of trade and capitalism. You'll learn eventually. Hopefully.
> Decentralized proof of ownership, which is impossible today.
It is possible. You just dont understand how it works. The only impossibility here is your ability to understand what proof of ownership in the digital word entails. Can you proove that you own the hacker news account you are posting from? How? Did you just say email account and password... DING!DING!
> That was about new NFT fad I'm seeing - gaming NFTs, where bros expect that different competing corporations will for some reason implement a universal standard for items between different competing games and voluntarily implement and support it. Pure BS but that is one of the NFT promises today.
Fads will come and go. It is human nature. NFTs are no different. Websites were once a fad in the dotcom boom. Some fads help advance our tech and knowlegde.
Am not sure how you came to that conclusion of dishonesty in others. Did anyone ever claim that the only reason they were selling you crypto was because they love you, and wish the absolute best for you, and have nothing to gain at all from it other than seeing you happy? If they actually said that, they are liars, and you are a fool.
Exactly. If you want to buy any NFT, you have to go to a centralised marketplace like opensea.io. On top of that you probably have to exchange fiat to ETH in a centralised exchange.
If any of those two stop existing your NFTs become worthless, at least when denominated to fiat.
And if you can't convert to fiat or buy real things, it's all imaginary.
> If you want to buy any NFT, you have to go to a centralised marketplace like opensea.io.
With hicetnunc.xyz, there is already one example of a "marketplace" shutting down and being immediately replaced with alternative interfaces - which works because the underlying smart contract doesn't care what system people use to interact with it. The "blockchain is a distributed database" part does indeed work if a system is designed to use it.
If two NFTs point at the same underlying asset, how do I go about deciding which one is authoritative without relying on exactly the same sorts of trust and authority relationships that I'd use in the absence of a blockchain?
The problem (as others have said) is ownership is a legal construct not a mathematical one. A smart contract may not be recognized as a valid contract in a court of law, or have precedent over say the actual handshake agreement.
Even ignoring that, many NFTs do not convey any ownership of the digital work, but rather of the NFT itself.
So far the most likely value is in a platform that actually lets you leverage that ownership, such as Meta letting you put a framed monkey on the wall in your virtual home. But that sort of platform tie-in means it is basically the same as say the DRM-encoumbered media stores we've seen go bye - ownership which is only recognized within a platform is only really providing durable value to that platform.
How does decentralized proof of ownership better provide for developed economies than modern monetary policy with robust tooling to e.g. ease economic downturns, prevent high (20%+j inflation and prevent hoarding of capital to incentivize investment?
There's also fatal flaws at the heart of capitalism and a centrally controlled currency whose value is manipulated at will completely outside a citizen's power to control.
These fatal flaws have not prevented capitalism from blooming all over the world.
Lest you think I'm some species of these crypto libertarians, I believe it's an imperfect solution to hand humans more greed levers to go about life dictating their actions by perverse incentives.
The solution for me looks more like a free net whose power is contributed by a mass group of volunteers. But who then will run the datacenters? With what materials will they build them and who will freely give it to them?
Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence.
> Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence.
I agreed up until your last sentence: is the state the bigger problem (versus multi-billion corps and capitalists)? is currency the main lever of states (versus diplomacy, infrastructures, military, etc)?
> But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail.
This strikes at one of my primary complaints with crypto/web3 discussions: Advocates switch between specific cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrency in general, and the concept of a blockchain in general as convenient for their arguments.
The concept of a cryptocurrency will always exist, but that doesn't mean that we can't be critical of the current financial shenanigans going on in the space.
If it helps, remember that the thing people talk about the most when discussing cryptocurrencies is always the price. But cryptocurrencies don't have any built-in notion of price. 1 BTC is 1 BTC. What people are really excited about is the exchanges and the on-ramps and off-ramps, which have nothing to do with the blockchain or cryptography.
This concept (context switching) reminds me of the current USSR fans (yes, they exist). They pick and choose ONLY the positive parts of each specific decade of USSR history as it fits them and blindly ignore all the negatives. E.g. some bit of space race (the successful part of course) ignoring gulag which facilitated it; the victory part of WW2 ignoring all other countries and it's own participation in 39-40; the corruption trials ignoring literal mass killing with out trial at the same time; cheap budget living ignoring dying economic of the same period; and the list goes on.
Crypto bros do the same. Adoption - "look, Bitcoin", but its not working - "look, shitcoin1", but it's premined - "look, shitcoin2", but it's used by 3 persons including devs - "look, Bitcoin". And so on and on.
> What people are really excited about is the exchanges and the on-ramps and off-ramps, which have nothing to do with the blockchain or cryptography.
Isn't that like saying that what gets people really exciting about beer is the euphoric feeling after consuming it, which has nothing to do with the liquid itself?
If it wasn't for the exchanges and on- and off-ramps then cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist at all. Potentially spending it one day is the only thing that makes the crypto world go around.
> If it wasn't for the exchanges and on- and off-ramps then cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist at all. Potentially spending it one day is the only thing that makes the crypto world go around.
"Spending" it doesn't require cashing it out in a hypothetical cryptocurrency future. People can, and do, transact in cryptocurrencies. Though it's actually quite painful, slow, expensive, and lacks all of the benefits of traditional transactions so everyone avoids it if possible.
But this exposes another flaw in the currency argument: If the on-ramps and off-ramps were to become so cheap, fast, and ubiquitous that we could transact instantly in cryptocurrencies for free, then suddenly the underlying coins wouldn't need to have any speculative value. If I could click "buy" on a product and the exchange into crypto, transfer, and end-user exchange out of crypto was basically instant, then the exchange rate doesn't actually matter at all because I'm only holding for a brief instant. Yet that would break the speculative use case entirely, so the hype tends to follow the deliberately inefficient coins. Crypto proponents don't actually want cryptocurrency to be easy to use. They only want you to buy it, then do nothing with it. Ever. If you lose it, even better (for everyone else).
> Though it's actually quite painful, slow, expensive, and lacks all of the benefits of traditional transactions so everyone avoids it if possible.
It’s really not. For several years, paying with crypto has been faster and easier than credit card or PayPal.
No arbitrary blocks, guessing traffic lights, aligning shipping and billing names and zip codes, figuring which card will work for what country and payment processor, biyearly renewals, SMS confirmations, risk of having it abused despite having good opsec, being on the phone with PayPal, etc etc.
I just open my wallet, unlock it used my preferred method, [scan a qr code/copy-paste something], click OK, done.
I understand that many people on HN get profiled “white” enough by “the algorithms” to not have to experience the Kafkaesque frustration of the status quo.
For the rest of us, cryptocurrency is faster, easier, and sometimes cheaper. Today.
> It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail.
It's easy for me to make that case. Ransomware aside, there's no underlying value in cryptocurrency, unlike currencies which have the full faith and credit of governments. This is a fundamental problem that I see no way around.
I'm sure you'll roll your eyes at this response, but a large chunk of economists don't believe there is value in anything. Your definition of "value" might mean "utility" or "what the US treasury says this is worth", or something else entirely. Starting a discussion with "well, it doesn't have any value" is more or less meaningless, and borders on economically illiterate, excuse the harshness.
My stuffed animal from when I was a baby has no "value", but I find it quite valuable. This isn't pendantics either - it determines more or less your entire economic perspective. If you believe in a utility or labor theory of value, of course crypto is a scam. A subjective theory? Not so much.
If someone trades an ETH for a Dollar, has value been changed? Moved around? Created? Has someone been scammed? Has wealth been created? Has net happiness been increased? Value is an extremely non-trivial thing and will lead you to love or hate the exact same situation depending on your chosen definition.
At any rate, I agree, crypto contains no value intrinsically. That said, I'm buying at the current price!
Those crypto-fans who are saying "ah well the -network- has intrinsic value" are missing the point. Value does not exist in the world. Value is like beauty or color - it's a subjective experience. All statements in the form of "X has no value" must be concatenated with "to me".
If anyone finds this incredibly interesting, and a fairly ignored part of epistemology, I strongly recommend reading Carl Menger's "The Origin of Money"
> I'm sure you'll roll your eyes at this response, but a large chunk of economists don't believe there is value in anything.
Food and shelter have value which is pretty near to objective. In fact it is routinely used to compare economic levels throughout history or societies. In fact it's quite useful to distinguish market price from usage (intrinsic) value. Usage value is variable from individual to individual, but there is a hierarchy of things we usually agree on, at the bottom being water, then food, then light, ... (biological stuff) then social interactions, intellectual stimulation, ... (more complex social stuff), then things like healthcare or gun access which will obviously depend on your political ethic (but which still are largely clustered, just not universal). So sure market price doesn't denote value, and intrinsic value is a fuzzy hierachy that is more and more precise given more and more assumptions on social norms, but the bottom of this hierachy is non-trivial (not everything at 0) and the top isn't that diverse.
Marx & Engels had a (critical) theory of capitalistic value where value is actually pretty well defined, as the amount of human work which has gone into something. That may be seen as an extension of what i first said (the value of human time being at least cost of life for that time).
While pragmatically what you've said is entirely true - if we treat the subject with some rigor it's extremely easy to find examples of people who have valued food and shelter at zero. What of the self-immolating buddhist? They valued Tibet's freedom over their own life, and certainly over food and shelter.
So sure, most reasonable people would agree on food and water - but that's introducing a very very powerful new actor - your ability to judge other peoples actions as reasonable or rational. If you reserve that right - then sure, let's call crypto irrational - let's stand on the sidelines and say "well I wouldn't do that!" - let's start building the hierarchy of "reasonable values". I'm only suggesting that our ability to call someone else's valuation irrational behavior is dubious at best and aggressively violent, the birth of social engineering, the sourge of humanity, at worst (hyperbole maybe, but maybe not).
That impulse to guide "rationality" is exactly why we have modern monetary policy, and the only philosophical reason to like cryptocurrencies: a well designed, well distributed immutable ledger is more or less immune from such "guidance".
Edit: Obviously, I disagree strongly with the labor theory of value. I don't have anything handy, but there is a lot written on this (and I think the labor theory of value is fairly well demolished!). Let me know and I'd be happy to send links!
I'm gonna nitpick on your nitpicking, but for me the self-immolating buddhist did value life/means of existance just like everybody else, it's just that they valued some more complex thing more (that thing being of course extremely rare). I mean i'm pretty sure my view is (at least superficially) consistent (eg i believe i can find alternate interpretations for any counter examples) so we have to look a bit deeper!
About your pick on judging other and building a hierarchy of reasonable values: well that's politics/ethics/moral (i'm no philosopher so i don't fully understand the difference between these concepts)! I'm not here saying there a is a total order between value systems, mostly a partial order based on inclusion/precision. And i'm asserting that whatever the set of living things you're taking, they'll have a non-trivial greatest lower bound (eg there is a common notion of intrinsic value) (but i think you got that).
About rationality: perhaps we don't understand the same thing by rationality but i believe one cannot be irrational, it's kinda vacuous. One can be in irrational with respect to some value system, but every one is (boundedly) rational with respect to his values (and it's by this axiom that we can infer peoples value systems). My comparison of value systems isn't on qualitative comparison between alternatives (me good you bad), it's a comparison on commonness/shared-base (this specific to me, this specific to you, this common).
on your edit: :) you feel nice to disagree with, send already, but i'm not promising i'll read! Btw i'm not sure i'll actually disagree with such critics, i personally don't really believe in value (as a homogeneous unit) because different things aren't always comparable and even different orders of magnitude of the same thing aren't always comparable (i've got no value for 0.01 house or 100 house, or more precisely it's not 0.01 resp 100 times my value for 1 house).
What's going to happen when people start trying to retire by selling crypto?
Many people will be selling at the same time, and suddenly the subjective value for everyone will be lower because it will be easier and easier to buy it.
My sense is that there is a cap on the demand for purchasing crypto, but the supply is very low because mining decreases over time, and generally people holding lots of crypto are younger and have no need to sell in order to pay for things, they can just pay with their fiat income.
This equation will change drastically as people start to retire and need to sell lots of crypto in order to fund their lifestyle without working.
Thats the rub - a currency which you can't actually spend is more of a speculative investment. A currency which you can only exchange for other more stable currencies even more so.
When you try to take a digital currency and exchange it for digital items and digital ownership, you do so in a realm where "information wants to be free" - ownership of data is not often as interesting a concept as you want.
Finally, when you try to exchange digital currency for physical goods, you start to realize ownership itself only means anything as part of the existing legal constructs - a distributed ledger "title" will only be valid when the government says it is, and a successfully executed smart contract can be effectively overturned by a judge's order.
The parties/exchanges that don't acknowledge any of this and push the decentralized, out-of-government-control messaging seem like they are tending to be the ones who are structured corporately to be highly resistant to being taken to court over false claims by their customers/victims.
I’d argue there’s an underlying value in tokens like Ether that is similar to paying for compute power and storage on AWS. I’m not saying the price right now is correct, but that there is an intrinsic value.
It cost compute power to produce the tokens, but that's sunk cost, not intrinsic. All that matters afterward is whether people want the tokens and will exchange things of value for them.
If your debts and bills are denominated in the currency of your country, the bills and coins have value because you know how many of them you need to pay what you owe. So yes, if we ever got to the stage where your rent is priced in some coin, that coin would correspond to a currency. But until then, it's more like a volatile stock and "currency" is a misnomer.
Why, there is value in crypocurrency. Maybe not the kind of value society actually wants. Crypto can be redeemed for drugs on the darknet. And you can use it to launder money, or to dirty money (taking your legitimate income and funneling it anonymously somewhere else).
Many cryptocurrencies have been ruled securities. Securities are not "currencies", but still have value, don't they? Even if it is just speculative value (you don't know whether the underlying business is goiong to be successful, or if it is even a scam).
Of course, there is a value: it's a decentralized write-only database that can be used for things like proof of ownership without the requirement of a central authority. A famous use-case is the illicit online drug trade, which cannot currently be achieved (to my knowledge) with fiat currencies.
It might never replace government-backed currencies (or it just might, who knows), but to say it literally has no utility betrays a lack of knowledge about the system.
No, it can't be used for "proof of ownership" at all. Crypto only barely works because it lives inside blockchain completely. Anything external to the blockchain (which is practically everything) can't be verified using blockchain. Only using some centralized and opaque/corrupt additions to the blockchain some rights can be maybe transferred (but not enforced even then), but at that point blockchain is useless can be safely removed if data is stored centrally.
Assuming if the banks are bad, please tell me why are we replicating them them again but in worse way? (opaque, unregulated, anonymous and usually sitting in offshore fearing IRS sanctions)
You seem to have a very flawed, fundamental misunderstanding of either the term opaque, or what a public ledger is. There is nothing opaque about bitcoin transactions. They are all (every single one of them) open to the public. They are more traceable than cash transactions and more public than bank transactions.
> please tell me why are we replicating them them again but in worse way?
But this is just your disputed opinion. It is like asking "why is Kanye always singing and selling bad new songs, and we already have the beatles". Because they can and want to.
Bitcoins are transparent, that I don't contest. Now please tell me how do Bitcoins specifically facilitate "proof of ownership" of stuff? Because that's where this thread started, that crypto will somehow do this, according to crypto fans.
Lolno. You are completely mistaken about what ownership means. I don't own my bank account (it's complicated), I don't own my HN account. Password is only used to authenticate and authorize me on the digital property owned by someone else - PG or bank corporation.
You do own your hacker news account.
If someone hacks into your computer, and makes stupid comments while pretending to be you, you have every right to seek compensation. Because you actually OWN your hacker news account, in the very same way you OWN the house you are renting. Your landlord cannot just rock up to your house tomorrow, walk in and sit in your yard for an hour because they "own" the house.
So yes, you are right! Ownership is and can be complicated, and NFT ownership is no different. ;)
It can be used for proof of ownership not to be confused with proof of identity because anyone can check the public blockchain to determine that funds sent from account a belongs to whoever setup account a.
It allows proof ownership without proof of identity.
No it doesn't allow proof of ownership. Ownership is a set of intellectual rights encoded via laws. NFT can't do anything about IPs or laws, and won't be able in future.
Having a private key provides ownership over an account. That ownership allows you to transfer money. It allows you to accept money.
This is outside of IP or laws. You can move money without laws.
NFT are a differet topic. NFT are a way of having a digital token attached to something that can be used to determine ownership to an account. Do they need to be decentralized? No but it opens up ownership to all not just the approved.
Most currencies have no underlying value. The value of a dollar is drawn from dollar supply and trust that others will accept and value the dollar.
When a currency goes through hyperinflation, that generally happens because the government goes crazy printing the currency and the trust that others have in accepting the currency goes down.
If crypto collapses, it will likely be because it just becomes computationally infeasible to work with. The problem with the blockchain is that every action on the blockchain requires the whole blockchain. As time goes on simply storing the blockchain will be something that's simply not reasonable.
An issue specifically with bitcoin is that as time goes on, transferring a single coin in a day, month, or year becomes computationally impossible. Bitcoin is quickly rushing to a point where holders of bitcoin will be incapable of trading it.
That, IMO, will be the collapse of crypto. If you can't move the currency, it doesn't matter how much others value it. It'll become a game of hot potato. with the last few holders getting more and more desperate to unload the potato for money.
Hyperinflation after money printing is not the result of "trust going down". It's the result of increased dollars increasing aggregate demand in a system that cannot keep up with productive capacity.
At this point currency is an abstraction relying on computers. I handle cash personally once a month.
Amazon cashier-less stores are just as much to normalize the behavior of not paying as reducing jobs).
Producing currency, securing it, moving it, the old banking infra just for finance management has a huge environmental impact.
Banks are easily socially engineered. Corruption is rife.
Eth shouldn’t be pegged to a dollar. It’s not a currency. It’s an information network.
What crypto should be is not property but the technical network abstraction we develop and roll over.
Grifters are trying to generate traditional wealth off the idea it’s a literal thing but we could just keep rolling new protocols out. Up to you to store your work.
It’s a logical substrate for transmitting and storing information that can’t be monopolized like physical money if we see it as such.
Unlike banks with full vaults, ephemeral network control can be coded out. No one person can become a black hole with disproportionate pull on social agency.
Instrumentalizing a show whose essential message was that living in a post-scarcity society is possible and where people pursue their interests genuinely rather than in the name of economic gain to make a case for crypto is so on brand with the actual post we're commenting on you could put it directly on the website
It's even more ironic, because the entire point of NFTs is to create artificial scarcity in an environment without scarcity (the digital world).
I guess you could argue that NFTs isn't the main aspect of cryptocurrencies, and I think you'd be right, but I find cryptocurrency projects in general seem to lean heavily into the scarcity aspect, and promise that early adopters will be able to cash in that scarcity later.
I wouldn't say large groups of people invent governments. I think they arise from infighting between small groups of people and then a majority of people that didn't really care much about what was being fought about are just "ok with it".
I don't know if government is a terrible idea, but if you agree that monopolies are a terrible idea then maybe at least you should give people against the concept of a government some attention regarding the "monopoly on violence" contradiction that's pretty much alive in all forms of government in place today.
You could have said the same thing but change "without government" to "with electricity" in like 1830 and be right. History doesn't suggest anything, people suggest things, and "it didn't happen yet so it will never happen" is useless as a historical argument.
History suggests what the stable state of something is as much as reading tea leafs suggests it.
The math is there, yes. Its cool and exciting. But thats all. All the incentives are to control the plane and grab the next big thing, like Facebook and Google grabbed the Internet Advertising. Any form of decentralization is not possible, it won't work. Just look how hard it is for people to agree on anything very basic. The higher the stake, the more people will try to grab as much as they can. How would imagine for people to get a consensus about upgrades and changes in the protocol. Just look how much bitcoin staled because of that. Everything is controller by developers of given technology. If there is a reason, they will force their agenda. It's been happening over and over.
While I agree with all your sentiment here, I think it's ok to be critical of web3 and still see a future for crypto. With all of the hyperbole and real issues both technical and social around the web3 ecosystem I'm reminded of being an outsider spectator of the dot com bubble crash. I was a senior in high school living in the east bay and something that kind of blew my mind at the time was grocery delivery. The idea of ordering some food online and getting it delivered was very exciting, the reality was it wasn't a tenable service. 12 years later with the advent and proliferation of smart phones the idea had legs and now I can and do order groceries from a variety of stores. Including a local speciality asian food place. I feel like the promises of web3 is in the phase of some good ideas that aren't ready for mainstream, similarly to grocery delivery in 1999
Like that one episode of TNG where they wake up all the people from the nineties, but it's one guy who keeps asking Picard how much BTC is at, how the blockchain is doing, etc.
It's kind of how I feel about crypto – cautiously observing, investing money I can afford to lose, toying with ideas on how and which real problems it could solve, and doing my best to ignore the parts that smell like pure hype, MLMs, and land grabs.
There is something here and I don't know what yet. I doubt NFTs are it. And we already know it doesn't quite work as a currency.
Cui bono as they say. Crypto won't fail because of the group that is driving most of the demand. It's a small group of people with lots of money. If it was a big group of people with little money, you could make the case that cryptocurrencies will fail. It's success has little to do with the math and quality of the technology.
You could have said the same thing about the ~2017 ICO bubble, which had a bunch of smart money VC involvement. As far as I can tell, the big VCs did just fine, because they liquidated enough of their tokens on the little guy before the market crashed.
Exactly. Unfortunately the little guys don't decide the winners and losers so they suffer as they must. You saw it in the end of the 90s with the tech bubble, and in the 1980s with personal computing. I doubt anyone would agree the best technology won during any of those periods. I mean, would anyone consider Windows, for example, the pinnacle of OS tech? Or even today, bitcoin and ethereum the pinnacle of blockchain tech? When a small group drives most of the investment and decision making, you end up with a lot of collateral damage. It's actually sad since there are likely really technically great blockchain systems out there that will just die in the wind, and it will have nothing to do with the system's quality.
It doesn't matter, it revolves around a bizarre ideology that doesn't and can't work in theory or in practice. I suggest everybody look up the story about the cruise ship Satoshi to get a glimpse of how deluded these people are.
They literally don't have money in Star Trek. Their society considers itself to have advanced beyond the need for money entirely. This couldn't be further from the future envisioned by web3 people, who seem to want to further financialize, marketize, and commodify all of human experience and interaction.
I’ve never really watched Star Trek either. Now my impression of it is that people watch it for the same reason that they watch The West Wing;[1] to fawn at the Leadership and Decorum of the Wise men (and women!).
(Probably not though.)
I’d rather interact with cosplaying nerds than with those haughty-taughty process and procedure geeks.
I’ve spent enough time in fintech to know where this ends.
The interest in it is purely because of the vast problems it creates are opportunities to gain something. These are numerous compared to the roughly single benefit and the technology itself.
It’s yet another market created to manipulate arbitrary wealth tokens. The masters are different that is all.
Math is indeed there, multiplication, division etc. I just fail to understand why is that important for you? Incentives are also there - the infamous FOMO. I think it's not a thing to be proud of.
I find it both sad and funny watching folks discard efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems, and turn to a decentralized one and deal with the constant scams that such a system would obviously produce. Irreversible transactions, 90% wash trading, the hilariously bad idea of "smart contracts," and surprisingly inefficient core technology designed to become more wasteful as it scales.
Who knows what the future holds, though. There's clearly huge hype in this space. Will anything come of it once the pyramid scheme and ponzi scheme foundational core of web3 is realized and replaced? Or will that day never come? I don't think it will and this is just another gold rush.
Some people are surprisingly open about it, running scams and hyping up other people to try to strengthen their own pump-and-dump scams. We see things like this with people Tweeing/Telegraming/Reddting/whatever about AMC stock too. At least in regulated markets this is easier to catch and change, and it's the minority of trades, where it's the foundation of cryptocurrency.
Thinking more about it, I think I feel bad for the people caught up thinking this will be useful or game changing technology. I wonder how much they realize the core technology has limited use, and all of the hype is around trading unregulated, untaxed asset bubbles.
I find it sad and funny watching folks use this tired argument that forget how filled with scams the current financial system is. A good 3/4 of dotcom, penny stocks, boiler rooms, and even highly regarded stocks like Nikola prove that it doesn't matter where it is, money attracts scams and the SEC and others do nothing to prevent it. Try not living in such a naive world longing for a nanny state that doesn't/can't exist at least to protect people before the fact. Try owning responsibility for your financial existence. We'll still be here growing and taking on the financial world that exists to leech upon the naive and empowering people to create their own wealth and comfort.
To the proponents of the "efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems" I want to ask - why can't I pay $0.10 to a random paywalled site to access a single article?
Because an advertiser will pay more and most people don't want to pay anything? There's a technical problem of handling micropayments but those are a lot smaller than the social/business problems: think about what the experience would be like clicking around with “Please deposit $0.25 to continue” prompts, and whether sites would bother with that when Google will give them a check every month for less work.
Google has tried this with Contributor back in 2015, and then again in 2017, but it wasn't popular because you were committing to pay a noticeable amount of money every month (which is more than many people think they can/should pay) and the people who would pay that would only pay that if they didn't see ads at all (since you were effectively bidding for your own ads, this wasn't a given). If, as is common, you hit sites which weren't using Google's ad network, you'd still see ads and the prospect of paying more to buy those out wasn't going to be a fun sale.
Now, maybe Google isn't trustworthy here but they're far from the only party to try this and there are also services like Apple News or Blendle which are trying a more targeted approach. I don't know how their sales look but the fact that it hasn't been newsworthy suggests that the status quo isn't going anywhere quickly.
Why pays the advertiser? More often than not it's me and you when we buy something online, even if we never click on ads. Advertisement is just another cost of doing business and it's built into the price. I can't imagine paying for content via all these middlemen would be more efficient than paying for it directly. That said, what's different is who's doing the paying and I suspect that a small minority of users are paying for everyone.
Don’t forget offline sales, too – the profit margin on one person buying a $60k SUV pays for a ton of ad sales, which is why you see so many ads for big ticket items.
Direct cost efficiency isn’t the only factor: I think site operators value the simplicity of not needing a relationship with each visitor (especially internationally) or needing to ask permission to access content, and visitors like that they don’t have a taxi meter ticking as they browse around.
I’m definitely not saying the system is perfect but any time something is this resistant to change I would assume it’s better at a factor we’re not considering. Ads certainly aren’t perfect and the major publishers would drop Google/Facebook in a heartbeat if they thought they could afford it, so I would look at proposed replacements from that perspective.
A blockchain based system has a few obvious challenges but the biggest one for me is the assumption that enough people don't like ads enough to pay a comparable amount of money & deal with thinking about transactions. That experiment has been tried enough times that I think the failures are an important lesson about revealed consumer preferences.
Insufficient consumer demand, and the economics of it don't work for publishers/creators. There've been plenty of attempts - Flattr, Coil, Dropp. If people want it, it could be built but there doesn't seem to be much market demand.
See, that's the whole problem with the approach though.
Paywalls are shitty. Nobody wanted that to happen except for the money-men. It's for this very reason that if an article gets linked here and has a pay-wall, a few volunteers will go hunt down a free version of the article and post it on archive.org for everyone else to view. You may see this as flawed - but I see it as beautiful. The way the "good parts" of the web still work.
Money/currency/blockchain absolutely does _not_ have to be a fundamental structure of the internet. There is zero reason why a currency needs to be fundamental to the basic operation of "the web" other than for incumbents to try to increase the value of said currency. Like - seriously; the internet was supposed to be about democratization of information. I realize that didn't exactly happen due to big-tech extrapolating value out of everything - but the "solution" you are proposing is to say "oh you don't have any [insert coin here]? Yeah - you'll need to exchange 20$ USD first before you can even use our internet. Or if you don't have any cash we can give you some freebies so you can shill for us." Like - what? No. Not going to work.
So you'd rather choose privacy invading ads just because it's technically not a paywall? I'll take microtransactions every time. In fact, I'll argue that the current state of the internet can be directly attributed to content producer's inability to directly monetize their work so they have had to find an indirect way to get paid.
Information can be copied almost for free, but it still takes a fixed amount of work to produce even one copy of something. It is better to sell more copies at a fraction of the price assuming the revenue ends up the same because more value is created in the world. Unfortunately you can't charge people low enough amounts via the current financial system as they're not interested in innovation. So we are stuck with ads.
Those are decent points. I'll admit to some dormroom philosophizing in my original comment.
Moving on:
> So you'd rather choose privacy invading ads just because it's technically not a paywall? I'll take microtransactions every time.
Surely there is some middle ground there? I find _both_ ends of that spectrum deplorable. At least with the freemium model I can bring my own ad blocker. But no, I don't "choose privacy invading ads". I accept that the current internet has flaws. You understand that cryptocurrency is going to get co-opted by mainstream elites and the top 1% though, right? Sometimes I feel like I'm watching history repeat itself.
> the current state of the internet can be directly attributed to content producer's inability to directly monetize their work so they have had to find an indirect way to get paid.
I agree and I think the causation is actually reversed; the internet has enabled cheap copying of 0's and 1's since its inception. This has of course caused all sorts of issues and I agree that content creators should have a more direct way to monetize their work.
What I don't see is how NFT's enable that. Yes, they enable a content creator to collect currency from a one-time transaction, or perhaps a smart contract setup to provide a commission. But; the file contents are not actually encrypted anywhere. So ad-based websites can still easily steal content and profit from it. Further, even if they were; it would be ad-based networks buying the best content as they can afford to.
Oh, I'm ashamed to admit that I don't really know what NFTs are, but I was thinking of something along the lines of Patreon. I use it and like it, but it's still a third party that both sides need to sign up with so not everyone's on it and it's not available everywhere due to the limits imposed by traditional banking, among other things. A third party can still host the content and mediate access and charge fees for the service, but it should be working for the creator and not the other way around.
I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web.
Consider this: if you are absolutely, 100% convinced that all of this is bogus, is going to go nowhere (despite the high number of talented individuals flocking to it...), fair enough: bet on it disappearing overnight or over long cold crypto winter.
But if you think there's a slim chance that web3 may persist, and that it's not all just the bad bad things you think it is, do take a look, play around, join a community like Corruption(*s) (https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1470525607104684032) - I assure you you will reconsider your stance if you look close enough, and it'll position you in a much better way for what's to come compared to continuing to ignore it.
> I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web.
If you're familiar with the space, you have to at least admit that it's filled to the brim with grifters and people looking to acquire life-changing wealth for themselves by hyping things that they have a vested financial interest in.
There is a lot of energy in the space, but that's because it's just about the only thing web3 has going for it right now. The value of an asset has an exponential relationship with the hype around it, so everyone is working overtime to hype hype hype. Few people are interested in discussing what's underneath all of the hype, though, and instead allude to all of the vague future uses of the technology (which will allow everyone to flip their current investments for huge profits, or so the narrative goes).
In a way, this is a reflection of real life. Just as in politics and public space, we see the race to the bottom, to be the most horrible (and visible) human being possible, as part of performative assholery and grift.
I've worked on and off in the crypto space for 4 years, and I've often said that crypto attracts some of the best and the absolute worst of humanity. The key, I think, is to realize that it's still very much a "wild west" industry, and there will be heartache to endure. We continue on because we believe in the unrealized potential of decentralization.
People are quick to forget the cesspool that 90s internet was with the spam, fraud and abuse that happened in that new technology during those times.
Shit, I remember I received snail mail spam of penis enlargement crap in my town here in Mexico . They forget what brought the US legislators to the CAN SPAM act, and being 100% legal, also to the DMCA and all new legislation to prevent rampant copyright infringement (now... I dont agree with copyright law, but it's still the law).
We are at the same stage in the crypto space. Theres really interesting new tech and ideas (the Yahoos, Amazons, Googles, CD-Nows, MySpaces of the 90s), and theres also plenty of shady and blatantly illegal stuff (the Napsters, emules, Edward Davidsons of the 90s') .
That doesn't decrease the value of the technology.
Yeah, this kind of culture absolutely exists, but tbh I'd compare it to Reddit in that regard (hear me out): I don't particularly enjoy most of Reddit, and there are some vile subreddits I'd avoid at all costs, BUT there are many communities and subreddits that I immensely enjoy hanging out in.
That said, my entire "consumption" of web2 communities like Reddit (AND HN!) has honestly been replaced with the amazing and kind communities I met "on" web3 (a misnomer in that context, as the entire comms stack is Twitter and Discord).
Unsurprisingly, the quality of Web3 communities IMO is inversely correlated to how much price-talk they engage in (e. g. in token-gated Discord servers).
> That said, my entire "consumption" of web2 communities like Reddit (AND HN!) has honestly been replaced with the amazing and kind communities I met "on" web3 (a misnomer in that context, as the entire comms stack is Twitter and Discord).
So your "web3" consumption happens entirely on web 2.0? And its existence doesn't actually require anything web3 related?
What makes it web3, other than the fact that maybe someone built a bot that requires NFT ownership to get into a Discord? Just the fact that people are talking about web3 in it?
A bunch of things, which also define what web3 means to me:
- Yes, NFTs: just like most websites are crap, so are most NFTs, and the tulip bubble that has formed around them will eventually bust (but return in different ways...). What will IMO almost certainly remain is the significant paradigm shift on two aspects: 1. indisputable ownership of digital goods that unlock other things: logins to apps, usage of software, access to certain communities / social clubs. 2. A dramatic unbundling of the way software is designed and used. Entire game universes will be build in the NFT space that are permissionlessly composable. A game designer may take an character NFT and build a game around them. Take a look at Loot Project, the first of this kind. Corruption(s*) by Dom is my favorite here: https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1470525607104684032
- DAOs will profoundly change the way in which we work. Wrote an article here: https://www.daos.fm/blog/daos-and-the-civstack
Most NFT communities eventually become minimal DAOs as they often at some point pool a bunch of NFTs into a community wallet that they govern together. Sometimes for lols, sometimes to fund public goods
- Permissionlessness may sound like a buzzword, but it's huge. I think the NFT space will move toward a CC0 model in many parts, which means that anyone can build on top of existing things and expand on a successful model with an existing community.
- Most importantly, community, and this isn't fluff: consider this - most on chain tech is by definition open source and easily forkable - it's on a public chain! The differentiating factor for a project then is solely how well the community works, and how well its community is rewarded for helping the project out. Take the ENS (Ethereum Naming Service), which let's you shorten your ETH public key to a "domain.eth" one. They incorporated as a DAO and as a token of gratitude to their early adopters airdropped ENS tokens into every early users wallet. These tokens were immediately worth around 15k USD and instantly tradeable. Many didn't trade them but instead used them to vote for a delegate to represent them in the ENS DAO.
> most on chain tech is by definition open source and easily forkable - it's on a public chain
This indicates that you are either disingenuous or ignorant. I could put any closed binary on a public chain, that doesn't somehow magically make it open source.
In a vacuum, nothing. But it's generally good to disclose to others when the investment advice you're offering will also materially benefit you.
It's funny that cryptocurrency proponents will often lambast the traditional banking system for being corrupt and self-serving but then ask a question like this. Is cryptocurrency supposed to be a more fair way to invest/bank/move money or not?
> In a vacuum, nothing. But it's generally good to disclose to others when the investment advice you're offering will also materially benefit you.
This should be obvious. When was the last time you saw a coca-cola add? Did it say "please buy this because we are vested in it" or did it say "coca-cola tastes great".
> Is cryptocurrency supposed to be a more fair way to invest/bank/move money or not?
I honestly don't think so. It's great for some use cases though, like cheap, instant cross border payments.
So someone enticing you to BUY "sugar water" is not financial advice, but being enticed to buy fake internet money somehow is? How exactly did you reach that conclusion?
Well, if you create a project where the primary motivation is to enrich yourself, and you recognize that money shuffling in crypto is zero sum, it's pretty apparent that these "founders" are borderline scamming people.
In most other spaces the idea has real world utility. Not like, invent virtual land and sell it to people. Oh but no use for it for now. It could be worth lots later!
You do realize there are almost 100 000 coins out there. How many of those have you actually researched about and come to the conclusion that they lacked "real world utility". Does a casino provide "real world utility"? What about a boxing match.. is there any "real world utility" in that?
100,000 coins is a perfect example of why it's all a scam. These things are created out of thin air and sold as if they have any real value.
You fork a project, put up a webpage with aspirational talking points, and dump your premined coins onto the rubes that buy in.
Gambling has real value, and that's about all the value crypto provides. Which is the hot pyramid scheme of the month so I can make money off less intelligent people who don't understand it's all a scam veiled by perfectly valid technology?
It will all inevitably implode the next time any risk off sentiment takes hold.
For me it comes down to utility: the web was full of immediate, obviously beneficial things you could do with it and that just grew with web 2.0. Normal people would come to you with ideas about how it’d make their lives or businesses better.
Cryptocurrency has been the opposite: we’re over a decade into endless talking it up from the sales people but there’s still no reason to buy in unless you like day trading. The pitch of “wouldn’t it be great if everyday life was as full of microtransactions as a mid-2000s mobile game?” just isn’t appealing, and the need to recruit others so your down line makes you rich is actively repellent to many, especially for those of us who grew up in an era where the dream of the web was making everything accessible to everyone, not just the rich.
Why do you thing HN and for example /r/programming communities are united in telling visitors that Web3 is scam, cryptocurrencies is a scam and so on? Maybe it's a time to stop and reflect on their opinion, instead of blindly listening to blatant lies?
(before anyone writes indignant answer to me - for example "NFT facilitates decentralized proof of ownership" is a complete and utter lie in our face, "like "black is white", and it was written by multiple users just in this topic, and same happened in every other discussion too, it's always the same story and the same lies)
You can use NFTs for proof of digital ownership though? Not sure what you're even saying lol. I've heard more lies from people claiming everything in the space is a scam (when their own knowledge is obviously lacking) than scammers in the space trying to get rich quick.
You can literally make a project that has tokenized assets in the form of NFTs, and provide services based on ownership of that collection. It's trivial to detect whether an NFT is a forgery, and also trivial to detect if a user actually owns the NFT they claim to own. So when you are making claims that this is a lie, I have no idea where you are even coming from. It's literally proof of digital ownership for essentially a ticket/token into a service.
What net-beneficial applications of crypto would you suggest I look at if I wanted to re-evaluate my perspective on crypto?
I was a very early crypto fan, loved talking about decentralized trustless networks, legal smart contracts, that kind of thing. But after years and years of just getting burned by the space being taken over by financial people spouting cultist rhetoric, the space has lost it's shimmer to me.
Asking somebody to join a community and look around themselves is a huge demand of trust when the industry has coordinated rugpull after rugpull using social tactics very similar to your own.
I would very much like to hear about promising applications of crypto and blockchain outside of some esoteric financial ploy for more money.
What I am most interested in is making something like game cosmetics into NFTs that can be traded around players. For example: Imagine getting a rare Season 1 helmet in the new Halo game, and then being able to trade it with your friends in season 2 for something else. The blockchain is actually useless here aside from the fact that it's a protocol that defines ownership outsde of the game so that the central authority can't place limits on trading.
But I just haven't seen anything in that capacity so you'll still have to color me cynical
I always say blockchain is just another database tech.
Are you excited by Cassandra, cockroach db , scylla or similar technologies? Then you can be similarly excited with Blockhain databases.
The concensus mechanisms in public blockchains are an interesting mechanism from the purely academic PoV. But yeah... what is happening now is like if a bunch of non-technical marketing and sales people took MongoDB in a MLM campaign.
Take a look at Loot project by Dom Hof (the creator of vine, but now mostly known for Loot...:)
It is exactly how you describe, but so so much more: why limit your Halo / skyrim character to one game world when you could take it into any other format and play with it there? NFT composability is a huge topic and extremely exciting in terms of these optionalities. Again: https://www.lootproject.com/
Also see my comment above with some more examples in response to another question...
None of that requires anything provided by a blockchain, but does require significant effort by developers to form consensus around formats, representations, and access[0].
[0] one could just decide to ignore the NFT after all, or mint their own NFTs for the same asset.
I can totally see Nintendo wanting to enable you to bring your collection of fancy, rare high-powered guns from Borderlands, carried by your favourite shiny Pokémon, into a no-holds-barred Mario Kart match so you could turn a fun all-ages racing game into an absolute bloodbath. Totally fits with their brand image etc.
Despite the likely bad PR, fiddly intellectual property issues, and the fact auctioning off high value gameplay items to the highest bidder turns games into tremendously boring pay2win experiences, the value in NFTs is that a game company might let players use assets bought or acquired in one game in a different game, even though they could do that already do that by just making private contractual relationships between existing game companies.
But your video on twitter, although very creative, documents exactly the type of accelerating self-referential tornado that that makes people skeptical. All just one big art project? Just a fun game? That'd probably be fine with everybody, skeptics included, but that's not what the proponents are saying. They say it will change everything. Energy and community are necessary but not sufficient for these claims.
Yes, you're right generally, though specifically in THIS case, we are actually talking about an obscure and extremely nerdy art project / game. That doesn't mean everything has to be one big art project. I'm in various other communities doing amazing stuff around climate change, for example, and the energy is just as intense and friendly as in the art/game projects. I linked to this because the community is one of the best I've experienced online in 3 decades of using the web.
> there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web.
Just like communities pumping AMC and other meme stocks. People get hyped easily when they can get something out of it. Why is that a criterion for anything?
> bet on it disappearing overnight or over long cold crypto winter.
Did you actually look into this? Because it's way riskier than you make it sound. In particular, I don't think it's financially sound to make this kind of bet as long as Tether exists with so little transparency.
> I assure you you will reconsider your stance if you look close enough, and it'll position you in a much better way for what's to come compared to continuing to ignore it.
After reading all your comments here, I still don't know what I should look at, beyond the "community and energy". The tech might be advanced and hard to grasp, but that's actually the part I do understand. What I'm still not seeing is the business case. Take any of the blockchain projects you seem to be fond of: what would happen if you just removed the blockchain? Would it really be worse off?
Many people are scammed all the time from this garbage, and there's usually no legal recourse because either the malicious actors reside in countries which encourage these scams, or they hide their identities well enough that you can't find out who to sue.
It's a totally fraudulent industry and certainly deserves the anger directed at it. It undermines trust in society, and the people participating in this fraud deserve prison and asset forfeiture.
What if we think it might succeed and the world would be worse for it?
That's where I'm at. I don't want that vision of commercialization and commodification of everything.
I think there is a possibility that all of that crypto stuff might succeed and I'm terrified of it throwing us into an even worse capitalist dystopia than the one we already live in.
Right? Basically, imagine the post-scarcity Star Trek utopia except that everyone has to input a digital wallet code to use the replicator and everything it makes has a different price.
there's some cool stuff going on in the NFT space, e.g. my favorite band has been selling NFTs that come with access to stuff like concert videos and private events. the idea of NFTs as access to a community i think has merit - hey, if you buy a Porsche, you can go to Porsche owners clubs and stuff. nothing wrong with that.
that being said, the main reason I haven't bought one (i'd love to see the concert) is you have to use ether. that means taking on something like forex risk, plus costs money and time for what feels like the sake of costing money and time. if i could buy one of the things in dollars with a card or paypal, i probably would.
i get (at least some of) the ideas behind using a value token that's endogenous to and therefore in the control of the software ensuring trust, etc., but it seems to me that the cool parts of NFTs are somewhat negated by the cryptocurrency part of the implementation.
> there's some cool stuff going on in the NFT space, e.g. my favorite band has been selling NFTs that come with access to stuff like concert videos and private events.
Why do you need NFTs for that though? Bands have been selling exclusive access to content for ages using regular old currency.
I'd say you owe it to yourself to use some play money to really just play with it for the sake of learning and playing. Worst case you'll continue to think it may not be worth it in which case you've lost some money on some NFT but have gained knowledge in return. I predict something will happen though, and you might find that the space is actually extremely interesting.
It’s basically politicization of blockchain. For many HN users, it represents libertarianism and they oppose it based on political merits. That’s what I’m observing from the sidelines and also not counting all the crypto MLM schemes - just speaking purely about blockchain.
And instead of fixing politics, we are just going to have our own un-governed thing over here. Run away from out problems, lets open another bottle. It will be great then.
I agree, democracies are getting hammered. But it’s not because we are busy with experimental blockchain tech. That said - I found your response deeply unpleasant and imposing. Now I do have a horse to ignore you from telling me what to think and do.
Think deeply about what you just did. “If you’re on the sidelines and not playing the game, you’re an enemy”. That sounds exactly opposite of democracy. It sounds like Authoritarianism.
I honestly cannot make sense of this. I said that it affects you, and you will have to care, whether you want to or not. In what way did I say you were the enemy?
Just curious, are you at a college/university, or fresh out of?
But, this seems more a list of people doing stupid shit with blockchain-y things, and not an argument against it as a whole. That doesn't distinguish blockchain that much from other technologies (e.g. consider WWW during the hype of dot-com bubble).
I pretty much believe its all absolute bullshit, but picking some egregious examples, while amusing, doesn't really show that.
My mouse hovered over the downvote button given your language here, but I understand that web3 has become this insanely emotional issue, so here's a comment instead: for every moronic ponzi scheme in crypto, there's one community that will blow your mind with their creativity and spirit. They're out there. Just consider the possibility that not all of it is crap, and that parts of it will play a significant role in our future. Give it a chance and you might be very positively surprised about what you can find on it.
Could you give some examples? I am skeptical, but am willing to admit I'm wrong if you can really point to a "community that will blow your mind with their creativity and spirit".
There's a funny parallel between conspiracy theorists "do your own research, there answers are out there" and crypto proponents "it's not all nonsense, if you look into it further, there's good stuff out there".
And yet neither group are forthcoming enough to offer up the examples themselves. It feels like an invitation to indoctrinate yourself.
FTR: my opinion that its bullshit is based on an a lack of plausible usecases (other than the original bitcoin as a currency one). At best there are some things you can do with it that you can already do better with other tech. I could of course be wrong, and i would be very happy to be proved wrong. However so far i haven't seen anything to convince me otherwise.
It's not bullshit but it's also not very useful compared to existing alternatives (compare latency, availability, and reliability), and it requires juuust enough technical knowledge to understand why that you can still build a convincing narrative about it for laypeople. Which you are incentivized to do when their buy-in makes you money.
pets.com was just a bit early, so the economy of scale didn't kick in. chewy.com made the same model work 20 years later, with 100x the potential userbase people comfortable shopping online.
This is one of the narrative items I have a major issue with. The critics of cryptocurrencies in general seem to push the concept that only the insane, extremists, or shills would not hate these systems, and that all one has to do to hate it just like them is to read about it!
That's not really borne out in reality. This is one of those "everybody knows" things that's actually a falsehood.
I mean, i would hope people read about it before forming an opinion one way or another.
I have yet to encounter anything yet that has changed my mind. Might i be wrong? Of course. I've been wrong about other technologies, i might be wrong about this one (and i would be happy to be proved wrong. I'd love to have new technology that can do cool new things)
As far as if "everybody knows", sure my opinion is not a universal one, but its not exactly an obscure one either.
That's not how words work. You propose a term, and either it catches on or it doesn't, and this one has caught on.
I don't know what committee of developers "that don't own/trade cryptocurrencies" you imagine exists that has some authority on what marketing terms you can use on twitter, or why a group explicitly disinterested in a topic should be consulted in the creation of those terms...
It’s not so much proposing a word rather than trying to take over a popular one in an effort to shed the negative reputation which years of failure had given your first one. It’s not surprising that people who work on the web don’t want their hard work being coopted to bail the cryptocurrency guys out of a mess they talked themselves into.
Exactly. The crypto community co-opted "Web 3.0" as "requires crypto to use the web" but didnt realize how tonedeaf they were being because of the echo chamber they put themselves in.
The reality is that programming work surrounding payments and/or finance is going to be deeply unappealing to most devs as it is incredibly dry and extremely tedious.
I'm a dev/CTO full-time in Web3, we work on smart contracts and all that, we spend 0 time thinking about payments and finance. You're talking about DeFi, there's a LOT more stuff in web3 now that can only be classified as finance as much as any startup that uses Stripe to collect money can be classified as "finance".
> I'm a dev/CTO full-time in Web3, we work on smart contracts and all that, we spend 0 time thinking about payments and finance. You're talking about DeFi, there's a LOT more stuff in web3 now that can only be classified as finance as much as any startup that uses Stripe to collect money can be classified as "finance".
Apologies, as an outsider I'm sure I have used some conflated terms. To clarify, I was explicitly referring to smart contracts (and the like). These programmed arrangements carry with them the minutiae and stress of what I imagine programming at a bank or large financial institution would be like. Coding a bug in a smart contract or at a bank can have very severe consequences. It should be done with the utmost care by highly skilled persons, not your average web programmer (which is the position you are taking by calling this stuff Web 3 and when, for instance, Ethereum decides to base its smart contract language on JavaScript).
While this is true for some specific segments of the current internet, it is not inherently true. Or rather, as a programmer, I can choose to avoid such fraught tasks.
This literally sounds like the whole "your gay marriage is ruining my marriage, just by existing" argument, but for the web. Like, what are we talking about here?
Something called “web” should use web technologies and culture? This feels like if the Git developers had tried to call it Web 3 — irrespective of the merits of the tool, it’s weird to present your business as the successor to a community you’re not part of.
How are we not part of the web community? Literally everything in web3 is built on the web using web technology and web primitives. Hell, our standards processes are even inspired by W3C/RFC process.
I also challenge the notion web3 is a "sucessor" to the web. I wouldn't call web 2.0 (the social web) a "successor", it didn't replace anything. It's just a descriptor for a different user/product relationship.
Web 1 -> read only
Web 2 -> read/write (comments, primarily user-generated content)
Web 3 -> read/write/own (users "own" the content)
No, the semweb people didn’t make that stick but cryptocurrencies don’t have much to do with the web, either. It’s a different model, tech stack, and culture and that’s what I was referring to.
Given how the primary way you interact with (cryptocurrency) web3 is through web browsers, I think it's pretty silly to say it doesn't have much to do with the web.
I don't think it was a mistake at all, it's just a simple marketing tactic. You just add a version number to a thing and then everyone who was part of the old thing will feel like they're missing out.
Most of cryptocurrency marketing works that way, throwing jargon at you until you feel stupid for not understanding why it is supposedly so revolutionary. And once the thousands of marks who have already been roped into the scheme discover your comment, they'll be all over it to protect their investment and you'll feel very alone.
> The decision to call all of this "web 3.0" without actually consulting any developers (that don't own/trade cryptocurrencies) was such a mistake.
Not sure I understand your point. What developers do you need to consult? Some random developers coined that term, as much as some random developers coined the web 2.0 terms. It's up to people to use it or not.
I agree that it's a shame, but looking back at “web 2.0”, wasn't it kind of the same? I'm absolutely guilty about being excited about it at the time, but in retrospect, a bunch of rounded corners and incremental inclusion of Ajax didn't really warrant a SemVer major version update either.
Edit: actually, maybe the justification of the SemVer bump is that people stopped caring about IE5 support :)
Web 2.0 was a hokey name, but at least it was a new approach to building web apps, built on the techniques and technology that preceded it. Web 3 is ... not that.
There have been plenty of new backend approaches since the term Web 2.0 was minted. The important change was a shifting from one request per view to multiple requests that comprise a view: it was the client/server interaction patterns that were important.
The fact that you build your “web 3” application using Web 2.0 techniques (SPAs, etc) tells me that web 3 is not a thing. It’s another type of backend, and the web is designed to have those appear in perpetuity.
Is there some sort of developer cabal that I'm not aware of that makes naming decisions in the software space? Where exactly do you want developers to be "consulted" for this?
First they took the term 'crypto,' which had always referred to cryptography, and now they have taken the term 'web.' I really hope that next year the hype is not about how cryptocurrency can do something or other for people, and somehow they also take the term 'human.'
I'm not a Web3 shill, but this is so insanely disingenuous it's not even funny. First of all, the argument that web3 is the biggest ecological problem of our time -- when essentially all of Asia is contributing 80% of ocean pollution, and the supply chain contributes to more than 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, is just straight-up delusional.
The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2 (are we just ignoring Log4j, which is a huge deal and happened 2 days ago), including egregious privacy leaks (Cambridge Analytica), and comical wrist-slaps (Equifax anyone?) is just silly. I could make the same argument about technology in general and it would be wrong (you'd still have snake-oil salesmen roaming the streets).
Finally, the idea that rug pulls don't happen in other markets is also just such a jejune interpretation of markets. I take it author is not familiar with SPACs and IPOs? It's just clueless posturing. Look at what happened with Nikola just earlier this year. Is that not a rug pull?
Speaking of disingenuous, since when is log4j “web 2.0”?
> The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2 (are we just ignoring Log4j, which is a huge deal and happened 2 days ago)
That’s also worth thinking less shallowly about for a second reason: if a cryptocurrency service, wallet, etc. you used was hacked due to log4j, you’d lose everything without recourse. This is not true of the mature banking system, and it might be useful to consider how many people would consider that a requirement.
"web 2.0" = centralized web application servers providing usually-json API backends for javascript clientside applications running in a browser. Usually written in Python, Ruby, Java, or PHP. Sometimes written in Perl or Go or Rust. Clicks are not usually full pageloads (that is, SPAs).
Many (maybe even most?) of those web 2.0 applications are written in Java and those that are, almost all of them use log4j.
(web1 was serverside rendering of html, sending down complete html pages for each user interaction.)
I’m quite familiar with web 1 & 2’s meaning having worked on both so while I’d want to fix that definition it’s really distracting from the main point: log4j has nothing to do with either, as evidenced by the many projects which didn’t even use Java.
It’s just a library, and compiling into byte code for some blockchain VM wouldn’t make it a cryptocurrency library, either.
> Speaking of disingenuous, since when is log4j “web 2.0”?
Let's assume Web 2.0 is 2008 to the present day. Every single big corp I worked at during that time was a Java shop (serving via Tomcat/Jetty), and log4j is ubiquitous in every Java shop. Minecraft (a gaming epitome of Web 2.0), basically blew up because of Log4j.
So your definition of “web 2.0” includes every programming language and library used to build web 1 or 2 apps, along with all kinds of other things? That’s quite the stretch — and it’s telling that you’re only using that as a negative to attack things which you don’t have a personal financial stake in. I don’t imagine you’d like it if every vulnerability in some library used by a blockchain-related project was billed as a cryptocurrency problem.
Sorry, but I think you're arguing from such bad faith, not sure if this conversation is redeemable. Imo, Log4j is as part of web2 as technologies like MongoDb or AJAX/XMLHttpRequest. Arguing the opposite is just completely nuts. I mean, Play Framework (a staple of Web 2.0 Java & Scala), uses Log4j implicitly[1]. Have you written any Web2 apps in Java? It doesn't seem like you have.
> The Play logger is built on Log4j. Since most Java libraries use Log4j or a wrapper able to use Log4j as a backend, you can easily configure logging that is well-suited to your application.
> I think you're arguing from such bad faith, not sure if this conversation is redeemable.
Please tell me this is a joke. You compared two unlike things, and now it’s “bad faith” when you can’t support the claim?
> Log4j is as part of web2 as technologies like MongoDb or AJAX/XMLHttpRequest
This is half right. As with log4j you can tell what things are “web 2.0” by asking whether you had to use them or not. People built many, many Web 2.0 sites without Mongo or Java but they had to use XHR because that’s what web browsers supported — until Fetch arrived later, there wasn’t a good alternative. Someone using your site didn’t know what you used server side but they definitely could tell what your client-side code (which is what made it Web 2.0 instead of 1) was doing.
>... Nikola just earlier this year. Is that not a rug pull?
Guy is on $100M bail. It's known who he is. There's a fair chance of him getting done for fraud.
Rug pulls are when you come back to check up on your investment and the restaurant is just an empty parking lot, and a tumbleweed rolls across. A skateboarding kid comes out to greet you as he explains some people came there a few months back and took some pictures, pretending they were opening soon.
The planet doesn't really care about "per capita" though, just total effect. By that logic, a country that has only 1M citizens but is highly industrious and has more pollutant side-effects per capita for that reason should get all the attention even if it's total contribution is less than 1%.
Doesn't make sense to me if your goal is to actually stop climate change, as opposed to just hand wringing.
Per-capita footprint absolutely does matter. Otherwise how can you compare countries with vastly different populations like Iceland and India? And on a per-capita basis the North American lifestyle produces way more carbon than the Southeast Asian one.
The argument from climate/eco concerns is the most insipid, bad faith argument of them all. It both misunderstands how electricity is generated and consumed, and how necessary POW is to any of this. I feel strongly that nobody can make a nuanced, rational, good faith case against crypto on this basis without also condemning a host of frivolities we take for granted (and make life worth living).
Anyone making the "crypto is killing the environment" argument is basically just regurgitating a trope they read in the corporate media. Pretty obvious red flag.
Great. What's the counterargument? Just because it's a trope doesn't mean it's not true. PoW is insanely inefficient compared to traditional database technology, doesn't actually replace "the banking system" (so both have to run at the same time), and in practice only provides theoretical decentralization since most people invest in crypto through intermediaries.
web3/Metamask apps like NFT marketplaces are generally used with a wallet (software or hardware+software) which the end user is custodian of; not a third party.
Much of the crypto space is moving towards Proof of Stake, including Ethereum. These critics also fail to ever mention that.
I'm hearing disturbing reports of all sorts of hacking, thievery, and even trafficking of drugs and people spreading to lawless protocols like DNS, HTTP, TCP. The government must do something to get rid of these dangerous protocols before it's too late.
People will pile in here and argue in all earnestness that stirring the pot and making an earnest, snarky, and (maybe) contentious point out in the open is not an effective manner of brushing up against the “discourse”. But they’re wrong.
In a world where data brokers can (and will) shake out your whoIS info for the right price which can cost you personally, I commend any effort to re-frame the conversation and “speak truth to power” as corny as that sounds.
This type of thing is an actual example of effective altruism. You’re not saving the snow leopard, sure, but it’s important to do what you can as much as possible.
Web 3 is a marketing grift aimed at high-minded idealism with one goal: to turn your lights off in the name of the next “new thing” because god forbid you don’t get in on the first floor.
The defining feature of Web3 is the absence of any central single-point-of-failure, moderation, or coercion in the technical stack - including individuals and businesses. Federated and/or P2P.
Scrolling a bit, I see from the top: NFTs shilled on Twitter, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges getting hacked, things hosted on AWS, Peter Molyneux doing his thing...
I don’t see a single example of Web3. Or even projects or technologies calling themselves such, legitimately or otherwise.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain can play a part in Web3, they don’t constitute or define it. If you coordinate and communicate on Twitter and Discord, host the core platform functionality on AWS and Cloudflare, and send out newsletters via Mailchimp, there’s nothing decentralized or “web3” about what you’re doing.
The OP is like criticizing Web2 because celebrity nudes were leaked via Gmail and this made someone get phished for their credit card believing they could stream more.
Here are some things that I sincerely don't understand about DAO's. That tech stack that you speak of, it needs to become deployed onto a server before the public can interface with it. Who does that?
Will every pull request become an NFT?
Ok, so now you have an NFT and it's a crucial bug fix but what if most people don't want it to become deployed?
What if I own the server and I really don't care what people think nor do I think smart contracts are especially smart and I decide, amma gonna deploy it, so I xcopy it onto the server. Now what are you going to do with your voting rights? Yell and scream?
Will "automate everything by letting the blockchain decide what is the next thing to do" resolve the fact that the server owner can do whatever they feel like, at any point in time?
> That tech stack that you speak of, it needs to become deployed onto a server before the public can interface with it. Who does that?
The whole point of Web3 is that, no, it does not need to be deployed onto a server. Backends and frontends should be decoupled enough that in your given disagreement-scenario, you as the server-owner would be “forked away”. Think of the FreeNode/Libera debacle. The presence of a DAO doesn’t change anything in that sense.
> Will every pull request become an NFT?
I don’t see why any PR would need to be tokenized. There’s no need for transferable ownership (as opposed to authorship) of a PR. Or am I missing why this would be useful? (Aside: Who holds ownership of the PRs I make on GitHub.com on “your” repository today? Me, you, Microsoft, or “the community”? There are valid arguments for all of the above and it feels like a question of little practical use)
> Since when can blockchains own things?
They can’t. But they can keep track of who owns what. And smart contracts, including DAOs, can take programmed actions with the assets or informations it has acquired from others.
These really well built "web3 is dumb" sites seem like peak Streisand Effect, I'm baffled so many people are spending so much time yelling about something they think has "no use-case" and is already doomed to fail...
That's not surprising for a system whose participants won't get their money back unless they can find new people to buy into the system. If you've ever had a relative join an MLM and start posting about the TOTALLY AMAZING products their “business” can sell you, this is very familiar except that you don't even get Target-grade home goods.
I could turn all blockchains off tomorrow and I guarantee nobody would notice the effect on the climate on any graphs that matter.
Oil/gas/energy loves that everyone is for some reason concentrating on crypto as if it's the biggest polluter on the planet, so they get a break in the media.
still, fighting against something can be a sort of induced anti-demand: people will be attracted to the controversy and might just take up arms against you
Conversely, aren't all the 'good news' articles just... that more money was poured into the ecosystem and its "value" went up? I don't really see anything else coming out of this space besides speculative valuations
Web2 was born from the ashes of Web1, which crashed under the weight of expectations, cash, and inexperience.
Web2 is still booming. I don't see that bubble popping anytime soon, unless world governments get super serious about regulation.
That's not to say that a web3 couldn't come into the world while web2 is still going strong, but... it seems less likely that we'll see any real transformation until web2 and the tech oligarchies it gave rise to start to falter. Web3 has expectations, cash, and lots of experienced people behind it, but there's little space in the market to occupy because web2 is still thriving. To take a leap, this casually makes me think of the theory around disenfranchised nobility causing the fall of the roman empire...
Web1 is still alive and doing fine on every web page that doesn't have a comments section and isn't built by some community that a company is hoping to monetize.
Can't wait for the crypto bubble to pop so can stop hearing about it.
No intrinsic value = doomed to fail. Crypto has crashed 80% even when economy was otherwise strong. Imagine what it would have done during the GFC?
It's inevitable the entire leveraged, lending, shitcoin, tokens, whatever will epically collapse. Because at the end of the day they are useless bits on a machine that provide no real world value. When shit hits the fan people will come to this conclusion and sell it first above any other asset.
Every "use case" is just a self referential web of perfectly valid technology obscuring the fact that there is no intrinsic value in the application or tie to the real world.
I'm into webdevelopment since 1999 but I still don't know what web2 is.
As a matter of fact the internet did not change that much as most people think. Ofcourse CSS changed and made things easier, Javascript is making application development more easy but in the end we are still transferring text and media.
Maybe the biggest change came when browser plugins started listening to http traffic. The change to https was one of the fastest on the internet and right now almost all our interactions on the web are 'secure'.
While I think blockchain tech is in some sense a new idea, I don't think it will change the internet very soon. I think it will come as soon as ipv6.
Yep, just like the dot-com era. Were 95% of the funded ideas complete bullshit? Yes. Did a bunch of them make craploads of money and create a world that nobody imagined fifteen years before? Also yes.
I wouldn't be surprised if blockchain/defi/other web3 blah fails at 95% of what people are trying to use it for, and destroys 95% of the wealth that people gamble on it, and still changes the world and makes a bunch of people rich. I also wouldn't be surprised if people find uses for it in the plumbing of the conventional financial world in some invisible-but-consequential way.
The vast majority of the stuff on this timeline are hacks and user mistakes, not sure that constitutes a "grift". The only difference between this and all of other tech sectors is they can't cover up the fact they got hacked.
I think the biggest hurdle to web3 is user responsibility and tech savviness. There was an assumption that younger generations would become better at advanced tech as time went on but that doesn't seem to be playing out. Using an iPhone effectively and avoiding online scams are two different skillsets. The problem is rampant in all tech, not just crypto.
Centralized organizations protect users from the absurdly dumb stuff they do. You can't have decentralized institutions and an adult nanny service at the same time.
All that being said, most of HN seems hypocritically upset at crypto. Its a distributed encrypted database, with some having distributed remote procedures. Nothing more than fancy tech. Are people scamming with it? Sure, but people have scammed with everything under the sun since the beginning of time, nothing has changed about human nature.
I do love where web 3 is going but I wouldn’t want to underestimate the problems that its complete reliance on cryptocurrency also brings.
Cryptocurrencies used to be decentralized but it isn’t the case anymore (if you hate banks prepare to hate large mining farms… until proof of stake allow the top 1% to be in charge),
It’s anonymous (but governments don’t want anonymous money movement… I personally don’t want that either) and public (but if it stops being anonymous then who wants everybody to know they bought a sex toy online?).
Contracts are awesome but still cost a fortune.
All successful cryptos do not inflate which means the incentive to spend it does not exist, you’re better off investing in the currency itself than using it (you want a light inflation of your currency to help your economy by sponsoring real companies)
As a side note, I love the way this was presented. Seeing news in chronological order and well summarized like this really organized in my mind a lot of random pieces of news I'd heard tangentially over the months.
I'm actually more interested in Web3 now actually after reading this lol. Sounds like the Wild West of experimentation in new systems, complete with high drama and lawlessness. Sounds fun.
As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two.
Intermediaries are a huge reason the web is the way it is. If we can eliminate them, the internet looks very different. My biggest prediction is that fundamental protocols like TLS will altered to integrate with blockchain protocols.
Web3 isn't just a scam or waste of resources. It will enable us to do things we already do but much cheaper than we do them now. Lots of smart people are flooding into the space. It will take at least a decade but it's already happening.
> As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two.
A quick look at https://www.escrow.com/fee-calculator shows that fees only reach $20K if you're selling a $2.2 million domain name. At that level, lawyers should be involved on both sides anyway and your $20K fee is better spent on proper legal services to get it done. Escrow.com is notoriously expensive.
ENS domains may allow for smart contract transfers, but the downside of this is that anyone who gets access to your keys can now permanently own your domain name for that same $50 (likely higher) transfer fee. For companies, this means that a single security slip-up or even a single disgruntled employee with the right access can forever destroy your company's internet presence with no recourse. The current domain name system isn't perfect, but there is recourse for hijacked and stolen domain names.
Nothing comparable exists in the blockchain space, specifically because people don't want it to. Sounds great if you're sitting on the sidelines, criticizing other people for their poor OpSec when things go wrong. Doesn't sound great when you're trying to secure a business and realize that loss or theft of the domain keys means irreversible destruction of your domain name.
> At that level, lawyers should be involved on both sides anyway and your $20K fee is better spent on proper legal services to get it done. Escrow.com is notoriously expensive.
Yea so, that's kinda the point of what he's saying. Why is it that a domain transfer for $2M is so much more expensive than one for $2? Intermediaries.
Smart contracts eliminate the intermediary. Whether you are selling for $2 or $2M, it's gunna cost the same small fee (and the fee is going to be negligible within a year).
> this means that a single security slip-up or even a single disgruntled employee with the right access can forever destroy your company's internet presence with no recourse
This is actually extremely easy to avoid, to the point that it's far more secure than DNS (domain names get compromised via social engineering of registrars all the time, btw). With ENS, for example, the "owner" can be divorced from the "controller", so you can "own" it with a multi-signature smart contract wallet, or even lock it into a smart contract and make it non-transferable with a time-lock and require a quorum of signatures to unlock.
Any mechanism you can imagine basically, but you have full control of how it works. Point is, it's entirely possible, and easy even, to make your crypto assets VERY secure from hacks, it's just the current market isn't that interested in it yet (most easy solutions would be too gas expensive atm).
You seem knowledgeable so maybe you can help me with this. So you said:
> Smart contracts eliminate the intermediary. Whether you are selling for $2 or $2M, it's gunna cost the same small fee (and the fee is going to be negligible within a year).
Okay, fair enough intermediaries suck. Let's replace them with smart contracts.
But what happens if there was a bug in the smart contract? What happens when a situation such as death occurs that wasn't considered when the smart contract was written? Who settles such disputes?
Governance tokens & DAOs are helping to bridge the human divide. Not everything can be coded, humans have to make judgement decisions sometimes. The smart contract is just the agreed upon structure of cooperation.
For cases like escrow over digital goods, it should be perfect in a p2p context without human involvement. It already is for any web3 good like tokens or nfts. Bugs happen but these contracts are often simple and used lots of times. We'll settle on more and more common standards to implement simple transactions.
That's entirely fair, but the perspective of those in web3 is that this property exists on a spectrum.
The present day incumbent side of that spectrum is that the DNS registrar could decide one day to just take your domain from you, and there's not much you could do about it. Sure, you could sue, but that takes time and meanwhile your business could be ruined.
A more concrete example of this is social handles. Earlier this week, there was a story about a girl that had the Instagram handle @metaverse, and Facebook decided to just take it from her with no recourse.
Our contention is that shouldn't be possible.
But here's the thing: if you prefer to have a centralized entity control your assets just like today, you have the choice to do that! Everyone that has their assets on Coinbase today is making that choice, and that's totally fine.
The big innovation is, they can decide at any time to take custody of it themselves if they want, or move it to another centralized holder! Just like you have the choice to leave your money in the bank, or you can withdraw it to cash and keep it in a safe in your house. We're just giving users that same choice for digital assets.
Trust me, this will always be possible, "web3" or not. The proper solution here is maybe something federated like Matrix and definitely has to do with encouraging more people to self-host their own services, possible with "web1" tech.
I think it would serve this initiative a lot better if you just completely left the notion of currency, value, and markets _all_ the way out of it.
Focus on IPFS, IPNS, federation, BitTorrent, etc. if you want this to succeed. Leave money out of it. Money is invariably going to be loved by the winners and hated by the losers. It also makes it incredibly challenging to trust incumbents as they have everything-to-gain (and potentially alot-to-lose) by shilling that which increases the value of the coin they hold.
> Intermediaries are a huge reason the web is the way it is. If we can eliminate them, the internet looks very different.
That's what makes me the most skeptical. I don't see a lack of intermediaries in crypto and the crypto intermediaries are far sketchier than their non-crypto counterparts. Just compare Tether to your local bank. Tether could pull the rug on USDT tomorrow and your recourse would be... what? Same with NFTs and the entities hosting the actual art you're paying for. I can have some confidence that Steam will be around 10 years from now; not so sure about boredapeyachtclub.com. The most notable party that's removed from the equation by crypto is the only one I have some small measure of influence on - the government.
From the outside it looks like: "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
Some things are cheaper in web3 than web2 and web3 can do everything web2 can so it's all going to get rebuilt. The same thing happened with mobile phones. Mobile completely changed the internet and the only "invention" there was the form factor and battery. Everyone all of a sudden needs an app and the whole internet was rewritten for IOS & Android.
The promises for how it changes society are pretty weak. It could change nothing or a lot. Web3 is just a better cheaper tool for humans to use so it'll get used. How it changes society is up to the people using it. Just like how the internet didn't usher in a utopia, web3 won't either, but it will change a lot.
Isn't the whole point of escrow though to trust a 3rd party service? Or maybe I'm confused about what purpose escrow.com served here. Was ecrow.com literally just facilitating sending x dollars from person a to person b and b/c it was a high dollar value it charged a high fee?
Escrow is using middlemen to prevent any potential loss or theft. Every transaction has some counterparty risk. Who goes first, the domain transfer or the wire? To be sure you won't get robbed, you deposit the money with the escrow agent and the seller transfer the domain to the escrow agent. If one party falls through, the escrow agent gives their property back. In web3, the smart contract is the escrow agent and 100% automated. So you deposit your money, the seller puts in the ENS name, and now instead of a % basis for the fee (escrow.com is like 0.9%), you get a flat cost of running the smart contract based on the network fees. It's just like how you can transfer $1 of bitcoin or $1B of bitcoin for the same price.
what’s the incentive to sell a domain on ethereum?
> TLS will altered to integrate with blockchain protocols.
you mean the Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic key exchange protocol? what’s the advantage to integrating with a blockchain compared to the way the current protocol works?
> It will take at least a decade
what’s stopping the community from doing it faster? and wouldn’t a decade mean that meta’s metaverse will be long established before this community takes off?
> you mean the Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic key exchange protocol? what’s the advantage to integrating with a blockchain compared to the way the current protocol works?
Sort of lends to be like PGP Web of Trust doesn't it?
If TLS signed the messages with a public key, you put any TLS conversation on-chain immediately. Some web2 apis already implement signed responses that can be used in this way. TLS doesn't though, so you have a provenance problem. You can prove the integrity of the data but not the participants of the conversation. I'm building the piece that works with TLS to add identity verification.
One thing I remember from the dotcom and real estate bubbles was that it took much longer than I expected between something being obviously unsustainable and actually popping. Just as now, there were people talking about how the rules were completely different and you were a fool if you didn’t buy in because someone else was certain to pay even more soon.
They were right about that, until they weren’t.
This feels like a more extreme version of both. There were a lot of dotcoms which could at least have been plausible businesses with better management (pets.com & Kozmo cost to mind) and overpaying for a house at least meant you had somewhere to live but a cryptocurrency has no utility unless you talk it up to a buyer.
I'm not a Web3 hater - but I think VCs lighting the fuel with money is to blame. Now, every wantrepreneur is launching some sort of "decentralized" product and trying to capitalize on the hype. We'll see most of these projects die in the next 18 months as people move on to the next hyped topic.
I think at the end of the day, Web3, like VR, will have certain use cases that will make sense but won't have a huge effect on majority of the population.
I'll call Web3 Web3 when I don't need to keep an active whitelist via uMatrix. When I don't need to use uOrigin and when people actually host it on their own infrastructure rather then selling themselves short on the cloud. I will also call it Web3 when it actually brings people together just as Web1 did. And not Web2 where a platform has two social sides shouting at the same bandwagon.
I think web3 is still a fuzzy concept, but if it's less divisive maybe it would be better to call it a possible evolution of how we share cat pictures.
The boom of cryptocurrencies, and NFTs, and all the jazz, sparked a need for thinking about data differently. We already had much in terms of traditional protocols, and there was already work in the space in terms of IPFS, so we already had some tools for reasoning about the data.
What's important for a decentralized internet, is learning to stop referring to data by location, and instead, refer to it by its contents. This is an interesting shift in thinking about accessing data, the integrity of data, and other things which can yield real benefits in certain areas.
So my bet is, whatever this web3 / possible next step of the way we distribute cats between ourselves is, it will involve a lot of immutable data structures, a lot of hashing, of merkle trees, a lot of consensus building, p2p routing, encryption, the jazz, and I think our infrastructure will become more resilient and scalable for that.
This might be a new internet, this might be a side-thing with web2 still going strong, but there is work being done in the space, there are a lot of traditional data structures and algorithms and it's exciting to reason about data in a new way after all these years.
If you remove every occurence of the notion of payments and/or currency and instead focus on the good parts like IPFS and BitTorrent, maybe it stands a chance.
Like it or not, people will always have love hate relationships with money.
I think that's one reason i dislike it - its basically overly vauge and confusing to evade criticism. Hard to criticize something without a clear definition. The other side can just always say you're defining it wrong and deflect all criticism
I really can’t see much difference between blockchain/coin/nft promoters and the door-to-door JWs and Mormons. They are all pushing their religion in a desperate attempt to keep the faith alive.
I gave my private key to some random person on the internet and he drained my wallet... Why do we need JavaScript to see a simple list of random events anyways?
Why blame web3? Proof of work (Bitcoin specifically) is the entity pouring lighter fluid on the planet. Bitcoin isn't even part of web3.
If we want to realistically reduce CO2 emissions by cryptocurrencies, displacing Bitcoin and other proof-of-work chains is step one. Thankfully this seems to be happening. Check out any chart of BTC-ETH. With power-efficient proof of stake coming next year I'm hoping we can reduce the incentives for anyone who's thinking about starting up a coal power plant.
Proof of stake simply won't work without some sort of proof-of-work coin backing it. I'm sure the Ethereum people would love for you to believe otherwise - but there's a reason they keep punting to "one more year"; they can't do it.
What are the goals behind these people who spend time making sites and long blogposts about the failings of blockchains/web3, etc?
In real life, if I talk to people about crypto they are curious and open to learning about it and most just don't have the time to learn about it.
However, when I go online and see a post about NFTs or crypto, there somehow is always tremendous backlash, generally by people not involved in the space. I'm curious what about this space brings out the critics moreso than other hot-button issues. Especially since crypto adoption doesn't really impact these people's lives the way other issues such as abortion, vaccine/mask mandates, or drug policy does.
When people think something is bad and keep encountering other people saying it is good, they respond. There's no reason why anyone should get "involved in the space" before expressing their opinion.
> There's no reason why anyone should get "involved in the space" before expressing their opinion.
I think this really depends on what you mean by involved in the space. Far too often, someone will start commenting on something based on nothing other than a 2nd hand understanding of the thing, and that commentary is often misleading or naive (or both) as a result.
I’d argue that expressing opinions prematurely is one of the fundamental problems with society today, and one that is amplified by tech.
And even thinking about this in terms of “good” and “bad” seems problematic, when it’s not inherently either, much like the majority of modern technology.
I’m not arguing against the creation of “here are some bad things about x” posts, but there is a subcategory that is not useful.
To add a data point to maybe explain the difference in sentiment between your in-person interactions and online interactions: Whenever I have conversations with colleagues who are bullish on crypto, I typically just smile and nod. Typically, those who are pro-crypto are emotionally and financially invested in it. I don't find it useful to have a candid debate about it in an in-person setting where one party is invested in their position like that. To draw a comparison, if someone was telling me about how they were passionate about their religion. I would rather have a pleasant in-person conversation where they get to share something that they are passionate about than to have a debate that probably won't go to place where either party is elevated from the conversation. Online discussions tend to be more open and useful place to debate the merits/flaws of the ideals and implementations behind web3/crypto.
The topic is divisive because of human nature. People need to believe in the foundations of their life and the decisions they make, there are a lot of people who don’t want to see the change that crypto could bring and fundamentally no one knows if crypto will change the world but if it does it will change everyone’s lives.
I try to reduce the flames by just talking about the technical or logical aspects with these types of topics.
Personally I think education systems gear us up for difficulties later in life through competitiveness - the drive to win, come first, be right. We should be learning that it’s ok not to come first and sometimes everybody is wrong. We can be wrong on our opinion of crypto as well.
> Ask yourself, who is the most affected by these 2 technologies existing?
Speculators?
Seriously though, can you tell us which Web3 technologies, specifically, are disrupting existing technologies in a way that really benefits the end users instead of speculators?
> I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways.
That's not how mining works. Layer 2 networks don't reduce the energy consumption of the Layer 1 network. They still produce 1 block every 10 minutes, and they'll continue mining as long as their costs are lower than the combined block reward and transaction fees.
But your comment is a perfect example of the web3 hype: Proponents are convinced that every current problem is basically solved, we just need to wait for the solution to actually arrive and then everyone will see.
> Seriously though, can you tell us which Web3 technologies, specifically, are disrupting existing technologies in a way that really benefits the end users instead of speculators?
Distributed systems where you own the data and there's no single point of failure.
> That's not how mining works. Layer 2 networks don't reduce the energy consumption of the Layer 1 network. They still produce 1 block every 10 minutes, and they'll continue mining as long as their costs are lower than the combined block reward and transaction fees.
I'm not an expert on the mining mechanics, I might be wrong but not due to the reasons you claim, transaction fees will approach zero as more people move into lightning and block reward will keep getting halved.
> Distributed systems where you own the data and there's no single point of failure.
If I encrypt my 1TB of the data I have at home and put the copies on AWS, GCP, and Azure, there's also no single point of failure and I own the data. Still, blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. I can own data without relying on a worldwide self-settling ledger.
There's the "shutdown test" for the actual immediate utility value of anything worldwide. If we hypothetically manage to shutdown Bitcoin and all the other blockchains, what would be the overall effect to the world? Some big and small speculators losing assets and no actual loss of value (but less carbon emissions, so maybe increase of value?). On the other hand, shutdown stock exchanges, SWIFT systems, electricity, internet in general - big turmoil.
> Distributed systems where you own the data and there's no single point of failure.
That's too abstract, can you be more specific?
> I'm not an expert on the mining mechanics, I might be wrong but not due to the reasons you claim, transaction fees will approach zero as more people move into lightning and block reward will keep getting halved.
Transaction costs could go down but that doesn't change the incentives for the mining itself very much.
SSI uses public key cryptography, are you familiar with it? Adding a blockchain allows creation of a registry, smart chain interactions, notarization, many other features.
the tokenization is the part that exists for speculators
can’t I usen openssl to sign files representing agreements and write programs that only run when an authroized keyholder calls a method without the global supercomputer running at a few thousand TPS? it just seems like the most inefficient approach to utilizing cryptographic signatures
granted, no one else has cracked the UI/UX problem of using these signatures so I’m not a total prohibitionist on blockchains, it just doesn’t feel like the right answer to me
> I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways.
This is wrong. ~98% of the incentive that miners get comes from mining new Bitcoin, not transaction fees. That is unaffected by LN, and if LN is widely adopted, will likely even go up (because it is denominated in Bitcoin and LN adoption may drive the price up).
> most democratic type of currency/money/property in the world, how can you argue against that?
Accepting any currency that's not a stablecoin, gives power (not just purchasing power) over you to those who bought it really cheap without doing as much labour or as much spending as much capital as the late ones. Bitcoin has been more of a security - like a startup's shares - benefiting early investors at the expense of late ones. It's the opposite of "democratic".
The mechanics of buying have very little to do with market dynamics. It doesn't matter if I can acquire bitcoin telepathically if the market is such that early adopters hold all of the power.
So we agree that Bitcoin is more like a stock than a currency. Nobody calls Apple stock "most democratic type of currency/money/property in the world". There's a reason why SEC heavily regulates issues of security which promise future upside - regulations that Bitcoin circumvented.
The reality of market dynamics has nothing to do with whether you should or should not buy Apple stock. The point is that the ease of buying something doesn't necessarily change the fundamental concentration of power, which is still concentrated among earlier adopters. You may still choose to invest regardless, and that may be perfectly acceptable.
Some 25 years ago I've read some funny Windows vs Linux arguments. "Windows is better because there is tons of software (Windows 95) and Windows is better, because it is very stable mature system, with Unix-based kernel (NT)". Somehow people missed they tried to merge two systems into one for the sake of argument. Bitcoin is consuming tons of power for no reason, development is stale. Fluctuations and speculation prevents it from being useful in anyway. Whole premise of any other network and the whole crypto/blockchain is based on a lie about decentralization. Organizations try to sell that lie to unaware people and shift the center of power into their hands. There is no decentralization anywhere, it's not possible and never will be.
Bitcoin is consuming power to secure the integrity of the blockchain, that is the reason. It is not "no reason". If you could suggest another permissionless consensus mechanism, then Bitcoiners are open ears, it has been discussed many times at bitcoin-dev.
Bitcoin survived an attack from its own wealthy proponents, miners tried to increase the blocksize for speed, which resulted in the fork Bitcoin Cash. Possibly the number of validators will always outnumber miners.
Bitcoin is a new thing, new things can exist that didn't exist before, and just because any old terms don't fit it, doesn't stop it from being its own real separate thing.
> Bitcoin is already mature and it's the most democratic type of currency/money/property in the world, how can you argue against that?
Am I able to use Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay for my groceries yet? Or do I have to continue to wait 10+ mins for a single transaction to settle whilst overpaying for the fees to make it go faster?
If that is 'web3', then you might as well use Apple / Google Pay then.
C'mon, don't argue in bad faith, Bitcoin is not web3 just like AJAX is not web2.0. Web3 can and should be built atop bitcoin lightning, but bitcoin can exist separately.
I hope more countries will make this activity illegal. This is a zero sum game. Wasting energy makes it more expensive. If this madness will go on, everyone will have to pay for it.
For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art.
But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host liked more. And I was struck by how they described them. They were leaders. Competent, skilled, and wise men.
This is not the impression I got listening from their rabid fans who were at their worst, at the far end of this (at least on first and worst impressions).
I'd watch some scenes and it was in some respects closer to sci-fi Shakespeare than anything else. And so this gap between reality and impression stuck with me. How could I be so swayed by the worst version of something that never existed?
Years later and the rabid users of cryptocurrency rile me up. There's so much abuse and corruption happening in this space, metered with gambling addictions and delusions.
But the math and incentives are there. It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. There's a wide surface area of financial problems that even fintech hasn't solved yet. And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved by these new mathematical properties embedded into software.
So I'm not too keen on stepping too deeply into the cynicism. I'd like to wait without a final judgement on what it might become.
I don't want to miss out on who Captain Picard might become.