The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Skepticism is healthy, but criticism without being constructive is not.
There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space, even if you think the state of the community today is not healthy. Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs). Most of them will fail and be forgotten, but there is a chance that _some_ of them will create genuinely novel and interesting products. Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?
One of the criticisms against web3 and crypto is that it’s ultimately a high tech pyramid scheme, solving few problems that it didn’t create on it’s own. If that’s the case, then we should want and expect to see rising criticism and pushback. Crypto doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and if unscrutinized, can have unintended harms across technology and society in general
> is that it’s ultimately a high tech pyramid scheme, solving few problems that it didn’t create on it’s own
While you are correct in that most things borne of the blockchain space are scams, it's important to understand that it's not much different from the "technology" of the FAANGs, in terms of the harm principle.
We like to denigrate NFTs and Tether, and slag on the enormous climate and social costs of BTC speculation, while we turn a blind eye to the fact that social media and adtech are fundamentally parasitic and socially destructive technologies that are far worse for the climate, our mental health, and our privacy than an exit scam or an overpriced NFT could ever be
It's fine to criticize this space, but it's particularly funny when this criticism comes from people fully invested in GOOG, FB, NFLX, and SNAP, or who are actively writing code to enable our modern Panopticon.
one thing that's been a good development in my view is central banks taking more seriously retailer and digital concerns, even if the impetus is one of regulation. Trying to stay neutral on the inherent politics of it all...but the Fed's recently released paper [1] for comment on developing a centrally backed digital currency recognizes some very real challenges and opportunities that the current US banking system has not well solved for.
As long as it's centered around the value of BTC, this is false. BTC has totally failed as a currency and is completely dependent on speculators pushing its valuation up to keep the miners profitable. I'll be willing to concede this point to you if eventually all proof-of-work coins disappear and the BTC maxis go away, and the incentives change to move away from mining and towards providing real services, but I doubt this will ever happen given this was the whole reason the crypto bubble happened in the first place.
Perhaps you want to define web3 in a more vague way like "any web business that uses a merkle tree publicly in some fashion". You can do that but either you're still left with BTC maxis leading the charge on that, or you have to expand it in such a way that the term becomes meaningless because it applies to a lot of unrelated things. Was google a web3 business before anyone knew what that was because they used a merkle tree in google drive, and google drive was public? How about github with their public git repositories? See what I mean here?
I'm sorry but you don't know me, I've seen lots of BTC/ETH maxis who adopted the term early and continue to use the term to describe their efforts (and it's really not hard to find them doing this on HN and Twitter either) so if you disagree with their assertions and think they're misinformed I suggest you take that up with them and not me.
Why do you choose to use this term in its definition by some “btc maxis” instead of what an actual and huge community of developers mean by it? Some cognitive bias at play here my friend?
Upon observation, that huge community of developers appears to still be mostly building apps and altcoins on top of ETH and cashing out on BTC exchanges because that's what everyone uses and it's how you make the most money. These coins have not diminished in popularity, the huge community has only increased their popularity. If you take issue with cognitive bias then take it up with them. Like I said, I will concede this point when that changes and all the proof-of-work coins are gone, and the BTC maxis go away and stop having so much influence, but that has not happened and I am very skeptical that it ever will without also taking everything else you'd describe as "web3" with it.
I used to be very interested in defi but I can't anymore when it's evident that the same market forces and consolidation and network effects keeping traditional banking afloat are also keeping BTC afloat because too many people are invested in keeping it the dominant coin. I really hope I'm wrong and BTC is not "too big to fail" but if I am then I expect you'll see these fancy web3 startups pivot back to making "boring" web 2.0 banking systems because there is no big money in defi anymore.
I have read countless research papers and press releases and blogs and open source code relating to web3 over the past few years, so if I'm ill informed then it sounds like you're suggesting that pretty much everyone else is also. If there is some secret I'm missing, now is your chance to say it. Please try to make more substantial comments. Thanks.
> The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring.
It's not really cryptocurrency that is fueling it. It is the absolute silliness around NFTs and the rush to import some "blockchain" to otherwise uninteresting products and companies to make them somehow relevant. This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI.
> Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs).
Skepticism is what happens when the thousands of failures start failing. There are sure to be some winners, but the space is overheated, and the silliness that has ensued over NFTs is the kind of thing that happens when a space gets overheated.
> Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?
Yes, but part of that is realizing that maybe your time is served better by hacking on something else where there are not thousands of failures happening. I don't see this as unhealthy community, it feels like maybe the market is maturing and you are going to get that signal earlier here than you will in the general market. Why? Because a lot of technology elites are here.
Alternate take: How are NFTs not a more decentralized version of digital goods that already exist?
Game companies (Epic, Activision-Blizzard-Microsoft, etc.) have been (a) creating (b) limited number (c) digital goods that (d) can only be acquired / traded on their platforms and according to their terms.
How are NFTs not (a)+(b)+(c), except without the post-sale, first party control of (d)?
Personally, I think NFTs are the least interesting part of the space. But I think it's odd to say "This is unlike anything legitimate that has come before!", when there are billion dollar gaming companies doing exactly that, in a more restrictive way, every day.
>How are NFTs not a more decentralized version of digital goods that already exist?
I don't think they are. In practice they also suffer from (d) because the large majority of NFTs appear to be traded exclusively on Opensea. I don't expect this to change at all because any system like this requires some kind of centralized authority to enforce initial ownership of the art before it's placed on the chain, otherwise you get people selling stolen art. Put another way: there is no value to anyone in having alternate trading platforms for these goods, all value is derived from being verified by a particular platform and baked into that platform. It's the same for video game goods, e.g. there is no value in trading a Fortnite dance outside of Fortnite.
Ownership attestation is a pretty common service. Law companies do the same thing for home titles during real estate purchases, and there's definitely more than one provider of that service!
> there is no value to anyone in having alternate trading platforms for these goods, all value is derived from being verified by a particular platform and baked into that platform
Some value is derived from being verified. People sell stolen merchandise and art all the time, albeit at a discount to actual price. And there's nothing intrinsic to that verification that requires Opensea.
If there were an equally trustworthy provider, or even a provider that offered better title insurance, why would people still use Opensea?
> there is no value in trading a Fortnite dance outside of Fortnite
And here's where I think the slightly interesting component is. Isn't there?
If Epic says "ownership of this digital thing gives you this other thing in game", imagine there are two ways to trade that digital thing: (1) within Epic's internal platform, or (2) on an open Blockchain.
Doesn't it stand to reason that (2) is a clearer ownership claim, with less control, and therefore more valuable? And if it's more valuable, then isn't Epic incentivized to sell their digital goods on Blockchain (and get better prices for them) than their internal platform?
>Ownership attestation is a pretty common service. Law companies do the same thing for home titles during real estate purchases, and there's definitely more than one provider of that service!
Sure, but now we're back to talking about properties of the good old common law legal system, which in some ways is already decentralized. It's not benefiting from anything provided by blockchains and crypto.
>If there were an equally trustworthy provider, or even a provider that offered better title insurance, why would people still use Opensea?
To me, it's the same reason everyone still uses Amazon. Blockchains don't change this dynamic.
>If Epic says "ownership of this digital thing gives you this other thing in game", imagine there are two ways to trade that digital thing: (1) within Epic's internal platform, or (2) on an open Blockchain.
Public blockchains do not provide any additional value here. The only important part is if there is consensus between the two parties to agree that the digital thing should mean something in both places. A public "trustless" blockchain is just noise as far as this goes. The whole thing doesn't work if there is no trust between the two parties to agree that token A should correspond to both item B and item C.
>Doesn't it stand to reason that (2) is a clearer ownership claim, with less control, and therefore more valuable? And if it's more valuable, then isn't Epic incentivized to sell their digital goods on Blockchain (and get better prices for them) than their internal platform?
I don't see how this is the case. If I'm not mistaken, you're talking about transferring an item from an Epic game to another game. That means Epic gets the initial payout for the item and the company making the other game gets nothing but still has to expend time and money supporting items that Epic got paid for. I can't see why they would agree to that.
The ownership claim also isn't clearer, both companies could still just decide to shut down their games simultaneously or retire those items and now you're left with nothing.
"This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI." This is the industry pattern and has been the case going back many decades; the only real change is since the dotcom era, it's spread to consumers playing along, whereas prior to that it was largely just the 'investor class' in the sandbox.
The difference is that all of those had real products early on. The web was changing how people and businesses interacted by the mid-90s, despite computers costing far more and network access being limited and both being terribly slow. Search was a huge deal shortly afterwards, changing how people shopped, researched, etc. ML/AI has had ups and downs but we also live in a world where machines reading text, organizing your photos, responding to natural language queries, etc. are routine.
In contrast, the blockchain world has consistently failed to produce anything which many people want to buy. The lure of high returns on speculation has attracted more people than any of the products, but there's no durable business hook the way there was for, say, going back to buying plane tickets over the phone.
Maybe if the fees are low enough but that’s shaving a percentage point or two off of Western Union, not changing the world. To be clear, I would be quite happy if someone nuked PayPal or Western Union but that needs scalability and cost wins which have not yet been demonstrated.
First we saw a lot of anti-BTC posts: PoW criticism, usefulness criticism, transactionality criticism and energy use criticism.
Then, we got new technology as ETH, that improved on usefulness, now the criticism was about transactionality, "silliness" of use cases, etc.
Then, we got uses like Compound, Aave, Golem, etc. And the criticism about energy use and transactionality.
Then we got PoS and L2s like Polygon, Lightning, etc... and additional criticism came in
Then we got low-fee or no-fee solutions (XLM, NANO), and Web3 is the next criticism.
I've learned to ignore the destructive criticism in HackerNews. I understand that it has "grown" to be what SlashDot was in my hayday (late 1990s and early 2000): Suddenly all those "young and innovative" dudes that grew up using Walkmans, DiscMans, Commodores, BSDs, Linux PCs, Usenet and HTTP, became too old to understand iPods, Web2, and SaaS. The same thing is happening to people in this news.ycombinator forum: Blockchain technology is disrupting a lot of our preconceived notions (I'm 40... i've gone 3 times through this), and a lot of people are just finding it hard to understand.
Not calling you out directly as you're not responding to me, but it's really condescending to always get told how I don't understand because I levied some criticism. I first read the bitcoin paper in 2009. I've seen all the twists and turns the whole space has gone through. It didn't impress me back then and it doesn't impress me now. If I had received one good faith explanation for every time someone said "you just don't understand" then we'd all be a whole lot smarter for it and maybe I wouldn't have had to spend so much time reading these papers and getting disappointed.
I'm 42 and I have the same feeling. It seems this community is filled with conservative people that can't or won't see potential. Critics, not dreamers.
Lately I'm enjoying the indiehackers community, which is way more constructive.
If you ignore the lucrativeness of holding crypto and exchanging labor for fiat currency in crypto companies, what is the use-case that is best served by crypto today?
BTC is not web3. It has no role to play beyond being a slightly upscale dog coin for day traders to lose money on. in fact, it can't play a role as it is technically not possible and its core constituency refuses to make any changes.
Not sure why people downvote this comment. Web3 is essentially a bunch of tech related to decentralized apps and bitcoin is not a protocol to do that, at that point it’s just sometimes an intermediary step to move your capital into the systems that support it (like eth and others).
I have no skin in the game, I don’t hold much crypto and wasn’t building related stuff in years. So it saddens me to see people here who are generally very smart, being ruled by their prejudices,
I just did a catch-up research after missing out for 3 years and there’s literally a ton of super exciting stuff happening. DAOs blowing up, social products starting to pop up, blockchains themselves becoming much more scalable.
It saddens me to see my fellow folks here having such a biased and outdated perspective and aggressively evangelizing it.
Not just advocates. Investors! a16z is practically building up a media agency around crypto because they've sunk such a heavy amount of capital into the space.
Except most of the large properties moved to online-only, loot-box infested monetization scheme. So yes, you aren't being "forced", but comparable alternatives don't really exist anymore.
> Plenty of its advocates very clearly WANT to force people to partake though
Advocates evangelize heavily, sure, but will you provide some examples of this? I keep track of the headlines in this space, but I'm not familiar with / haven't experienced what you're describing.
I mean, it's in the name itself - web3 makes it sound like it's the next evolution of the web that we'll all be using in a few years.
I think that's part of why there's so much backlash from the tech community -- it feels like a small group of people (who largely haven't built much on the web besides React apps) have decided that they get to call what they're working on the new web, even though it's currently mostly vaporware and bad art.
There’s a pretty big difference between “this project is named poorly and isn’t ready for prime time” and “advocates want to force people to use it”.
Don’t get me wrong - I share plenty of the same concerns others have shared throughout this thread, and tend to think “web3” is not a good thing to call this, but don’t see the “by force” claim as valid at this point.
Plenty of apps/projects brand themselves as the next coming/generation/evolution/whatever. Only adoption will tell us if they’re right.
Fair, but I think the name is reflective of a greater attitude. I've never been told I'm NGMI (“not going to make it”) for not adopting Serverless, or that I should “have fun staying poor” if I ignore Kubernetes.
No they don't want to force anyone and there's no evidence of this. Just because there are a lot of evangelists doesn't mean anyone is forced to do anything
There's plenty of evidence of this; there are proposals to move house deeds, drivers' licenses, elections, etc. onto the blockchain. These wouldn't be "oh, you can just not participate" sorts of scenarios.
Do you understand how a venn diagram works? I can give you plenty of examples of blockchains that are unrelated to cryptocurrency, any corporate run block chain. And examples of blockchains unrelated to web3, bitcoin is a well known example of this.
I'm not asking about that. I'm asking about the converse. If corporations want to waste their money on an internal blockchain, that's fine; it doesn't affect me. But we're talking about people evangelizing this technology to precipitate large-scale societal change, which is focused on the intersection of cryptocurrencies, blockchain and "web3".
Well, until there's a better way to have some kind of token or currency, blockchains will be part of web3. Lack of incentives is why the first wave of open protocol design fizzled out, which is why they're so important this time around.
The way it's shaping up, improper or overzealous incentives will be the undoing of the second wave, but that movie has yet to play out.
"no evidence of this" is too strong of a claim. The folks who argue that fiat currency is dead, or should be dead, are implying they want a world where fiat currency disappears and then cryptocurrency emerges as the replacement. In that scenario, it is correct to say that some people are trying to force crypto on the rest of the world.
Your comment only makes sense if the telegram was run by a government monopoly, since fiat currency is a government monopoly, and then if people were advocating for the government to close its telegram monopoly, then yes, those people could be said to be forcing telephones on people.
Crypto people aren't neutral observers simply predicting it will replace fiat, though. They are actively working to make that true. This is not an inevitable future for our society; if it happens, it will be because of activism from powerful people who stand to benefit.
It's possible that crypto/web3 are a lot of diverting attention, resources and energy toward ideas that are fundamentally impractical. The fact that so many people have a financial interest in promoting these ideas makes the whole thing suspicious.
I'm really waiting for these novel and interesting products based on blockchain. like, waiting every day to see one break into the daily workflow of the average consumer. Until then I'm going to treat this technology trend with the great skepticism that it deserves.
To be fair, if the attention, resources, and energy employed in the crypto/web3 space weren't... a lot of them would be coming up with new financial derivative products.
So, from that perspective, crypto/web3 is bloodletting some of the crazies from the legacy financial system, which probably isn't the worst thing.
It's disingenuous to describe it as just a new technology, though. Adherents promote crypto and web3 as a specific set of transformations to our society. That is what people are so stridently against.
The very explicit goal of NFT folks, for example, is to commodify everything. I can't just not use the technology, because if they get their way it will greatly affect me. So I'm forced to stake out a position.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology.
And yet we're all being impacted by the externalities such as higher energy costs in some jurisdictions, poor GPU availability, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. There's also a growing risk that when the music stops parts of crypto will be deemed "too big to fail" and the public will be stuck bailing out large crypto speculators.
The criticism isn’t unconstructive just because it’s inconvenient for sales and marketing purposes. Most of it is detailed point by point lists of problems the community would need to address to be successful — but trying to pretend it’s ignorable all but ensures that those advances won’t happen. If someone is working on a novel idea, the grifters using them as a blind not only aren’t helping but in fact will be competing for resources and attention.
It’s true that nobody is being forced to use cryptocurrency but we have to live on the planet blockchain proponents are polluting, and we know that many people will lose money speculating on systems which do not work. Even if you don’t care about them, that causes economic disruption and diverts resources away from better business ideas.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology
Absolutely, completely wrong.
Bitcoin is using HALF A PERCENT of the electricity on the ENTIRE PLANET. That affects every single person living on this planet. It will affect people living here into the future. It is an absolute catastrophe that is hurting everyone. We don't get to "not partake" in that.
Bitcoin is the one single thing that has enabled the ransomware epidemic by making it possible for ransomware to be massively profitable. Critical infrastructure and hospitals get shut down by this. This affects millions of people, putting some at deadly risk. We don't get to "not partake" in that.
And once we get to smaller, less dramatic negative effects of cryptocurrency, the list just goes on and on. We are affected by this. We don't get to opt out.
Ban cryptocurrencies NOW, before they do any more harm to us and our planet. They are worthless and damaging.
By that logic, we're all participating in the remaining 99% of electricity usage. But this isn't even close to being the case. Are northeastern American states being forced to participate in air conditioning because the southwestern states use so much of it? I don't see the reason in that.
No one's being forced, but it seems many people are being tricked. It's important to inject a considerable amount of skepticism into a conversation that is often dominated by proponents in it only to make money off of speculation.
Those people are probably going to be tricked anyway. Many things in society are tricks. Google is a trick. Self-help is a trick. Fast food is a trick. MLM is a trick. Political ideologies are tricks. Everyone wants to be lied to, or rather everyone wants to believe in something, and they'll throw away their money just to maintain that belief. While aspects of the world of cryptocurrency are tricks, it's hardly unique to it or the responsibility of others to prevent people from being tricked.
This is what I mean... if I were in a thread of horse enthusiasts I would not get a response like this. This is a fairly typical example of crypto gaslighting.
There are massive amounts of time and money spent on getting people to eat less fast food and avoid multi-level marketing scams because they're predatory industries (some more than others). Crypto is a predatory industry too, and defending people from it is completely reasonable.
I don't know what you're trying to say here. Fast food is a trick? Does it not prevent me from starving?
It seems like you're saying something like "stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons." What are those reasons? If I see someone trying to scam others, why shouldn't I warn those people?
Fast food is a trick because it is highly marked up and designed to be addictive moreso than most healthful meals. Yes, there is trickery in fast food and snack foods in general, and if you don't believe that, there's plenty of material on how the food industry and really the system in general have used the institution of fast food to keep people poor and sick. This isn't to say that everyone in fast food, even those in its upper echelons, are acutely aware of this, but discounting the involvement of conscious thought, it is a manifestation of modernity that developed to trick minds.
> stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons
No, that's not what I'm saying, at least in your brutal interpretation.
Should society allow anyone to be scammed? My answer to that question is a clear no, especially when it comes to fraud. Society functions orders of magnitude better with a level of self-control than it would otherwise.
Does this mean that society should protect people from themselves? Or rather, if someone believes they are going to get rich putting their life savings into cryptocurrencies because they lack foresight or technical aptitude, should we do what we can to prevent people from being this foolish despite the existing level of trickery that we are willing to tolerate? If people need to be saved from cryptocurrency, then why aren't we saving them from payday loans, or guzzling HFCs in sodas, or wasting time smoking weed, or gambling at casinos? All of those are examples of tricks (yes, they are tricks) designed to extract wealth and lifeforce. Hell, our monetary system itself is a trick. At times we may point them out as evils, but we don't take them so seriously because life can't be so safe. Unless something radically changes in our societies, for all intents and purposes, we are allowing some of us to hang ourselves by our own rope.
Yet somehow crypto bears more fault for some? To me, that doesn't follow. If I create an NFT for my soul, put it up for sale for $1000, and someone actually buys it, are they being scammed? If I fork Bitcoin into a new cryptocurrency, publish a bunch of poppycock about how it will be the next big thing because I got rid of its limits, and I sell those coins and run off with the money, is it of no fault of the customer that they believed such a specious lie?
No and no, in my opinion, because it's not reasonable for society to protect people to such an extent as it would neither be sustainable nor good for every business to be scrutinized to the degree necessary to provide said protection.
Well put. Not everything is bad about crypto, some ideas may turn into the "next thing". One use I find interesting and look forward to see if it grows into something truly useful is DAOs. I know is a naive thought but I do see decentralized governance as a way of fixing the broken democracy we currently have. I also believe crypto has the potential to fix banking and insurance. We'll see.
There are indeed and they are probably not even technological but conceptual. In practice blockchains/DLTs etc. might not solve many real world issues (any?) but the associated experimentation has surfaced some interesting ideas, e.g.,:
(i) ability to split governance layers more, i.e., what was once thought of as one monolith could be run along many dimensions
(ii) things like AMMs in DeFi might point the way towards making market making more investable in general
(iii) The possibility for creation of new asset classes/creation of new volatility. This might not be crypto/not only crypto, but (also) markets in entirely different things
Its easy for me to forget that the majority of people working in tech are employed by companies offering centralized services. The majority of these companies have little to gain from traction of cryptocurrency and many have no plan in place to benefit from web3. Not surprising to me that people shun the hand that does not feed them.
It continues to appear to be a fad designed to make a select few extraordinarily rich for being first in, to further facilitate criminals, all while layering approximately zero for standard users, all chuffing away atop a technology that has literally recommissioned coal power stations. This, off the back of the collective insanity that is NFTs.
This is a low point for humanity, for tech. Thanks for your concern but we're going to keep going on about it.
What’s a single idea in the crypto space that requires no centralized entity involved and can sustain indefinite price drops of the underlying cryptocurrency?
I find it amusing how most of the interesting things in crypto are centralized.
Uniswap, a decentralized exchange. The smart contracts have no centralized administration at all, anyone can set up a GUI for them, and it doesn't break just because the price of ETH falls. This is one of the most successful projects on Ethereum, with trading volume comparable to Coinbase.
Uniswap itself is centralized, using GitHub for centralized repository code storage and the app itself is also centralized. The organization is centralized, with employees reporting into a centralized structure as well.
I suppose there's a spectrum of centralization between "totally controlled by one person" and "magically appears out of the collective intelligence of the entire internet." So I can't say that Uniswap is completely decentralized.
But the code on chain can't be changed by anyone, has no admin functions, and doesn't rely on external data feeds. UI for it can be developed and hosted by anyone or skipped entirely by anyone willing to deal directly with the contract using standard tools. So I'd say Uniswap meets your request above for something that doesn't require a centralized entity. The entities you mention could disappear and Uniswap would keep going.
Unfortunately Michael Saylor is the rule rather than the exception. Crypto marketing is extremely coercive, with slogans like "have fun staying poor!", intended to maximize shame and peer pressure to encourage the vulnerable and ignorant to become "believers". This is explicitly bullying behaviour.
I really hated Web2 when it started, and when the term started to get coined. I hated these "javascript heavy" pages that prevented accessibility. I hated the huge increase in load times and the concentration of everything in HTTP. I was happy using FTP/SFTP, NNTP, SMTP, IRC, among other protocols.
The fundamental problem of something like web3 is that is totally unrealistic. Imagine someone "posting" something that should be kept private. Can you go back and delete it? No, because the blockchain is immutable, you can try to hide it but it will still be there. Think of porn revenge videos, it would be a nightmare.
Another example: I recall a videogame on blockchain that had tons of issues patching it self, again because blockchain is immutable.
Also, web3 would really bring democracy to authoritarian states? A country like China with 1.3 billions of people 100% would not improve its democracy situation. That's a lot of people.
Last but not least, almost nobody really cares how web is implemented as far they can browse to their favourite porn site or facebook page or blog or something else.
Imo the crypto is an overemphasized implementation detail. If a genuinely novel product is going to happen, it's a product that would do just fine without the crypto.
If the selling point of your product isn't the product, it seems like you're focusing on the wrong thing
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology.
For now. That won’t remain the case if we don’t continue to push back. And we all breathe the air that the crypto miners pollute, we all suffer from the GPU shortages, whether we participate or not.
And that is a stupid argument anyway. Nobody is forcing anybody to smoke, use heroin, gamble, drink excessive amounts of alcohol, etc, that does not mean you can criticize the practice without having to "offer constructive criticism", sometimes, "Just dont do it" is enough.
Imagine if nicotine, which may or may not have beneficial effects on your mental & physical health, was hyped up as much as web3. why not simply discuss the studies of these effects instead of opinions thereof?
Why is criticism without being constructive unhealthy? Isn't it possible to know that something is bad without having a clear answer of what to do instead other than simply stop?
>There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space
Depending on what you mean here, I don't agree. Every novel idea I've seen coming out of cryptocurrency/defi can be generally applied to distributed computing and is useful in other fields or with other forms of finance. The ideas that are explicitly dependent on cryptocurrency appear almost exclusively to be the really terrible ideas. (NFTs, smart contracts, DAOs, etc)
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology.
Today. Advocates insist that cryptocurrencies will replace state currencies, that NFTs will replace other forms of ownership like deeds and manage your participation in all communities, and that DAOs will replace corporations and other governance systems.
Many of us think that this world is a worse world, with more opportunities for capitalists and corporations to exert control over our lives and buy and sell every component of our being.
People buying and selling bored apes doesn't affect me. But the reason people buy and sell bored apes is because they believe and advocate for a world where everything functions like bored apes.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology.
Nobody is forcing anyone to burn fossil fuels, either, but we all breathe and thus can't opt out of its negative externalities. This argument only works when externalities are acceptable or nonexistent.
It’s not just HN. It’s all over the web. There are some novel and interesting products being developed (reading about the theory behind Uniswap liquidity pools blew my mind) that people totally ignore because it’s easier to hate on the latest meme coin.
If (hypothetically) I’m anti-crypto, why should I care about defi, which, as I understand it, is all about trading crypto for crypto?
e: This isn’t meant to be a rhetorical question. Ever since Mark Cuban tweeted something about some loans that defi enables I’ve been wondering why I should care.
Web3 is not above criticism. Advocates want it to dominate the internet, monetary systems and ultimately our lives. It should be criticised within an inch of its life, and if it's all that you say it is then it should rise above it.
However much these various blogs and such are right, which they seem to be, the continuing, constant, vitriol that at this point can only be for the chorus already singing it, starts to look like something in itself, something beyond just trying to "warn" people.
I can't help but feel it is, at least in part, coming from (perhaps unconscious) shame. We are at the sunset of a Californian Ideology where VC could save the world, Twitter could facilitate democracy, YouTube could democratize entertainment, culture. We are in a situation where any possible tech-minded business models can only promise to become so monolothic that they become de facto libertarian states, or be so fractured and specific that they inevitably prey on specific mental ticks of their users, or otherwise contrive value through subscriptions.
Everything has led to this, whether you all can accept that or not, whether you should feel "responsible" or not (you shouldn't). This almost comically absurd force of computers and money and energy now comes forward, with an army of infrastructure and knowledge and VC funding ready to greet it. You can see all our sins wrapped up into it, along with some newer things as well.
I think people are so angry because they see that, they see a likeness, even if distorted, in the macro structures of crypto, and in that they feel shame. It's as if there was quick a shortcut taken to the worst possible evolution of everything everyone was already working on in this space, big or small. And there is shame in realizing that this is what we were working towards, a secretly terrible teleology realized.
And so, to attempt to atone, you write a blog post about how evil it all is, as if it was something that literally came ex nihilo to threaten all our good work from before, denying that, in fact, it is merely a secret, forbidden wish granted. The logical culmination of this wild ride of capitalism and technology we have been riding. We are all guilty.
That's what really bums me out. Both pro-crypto and anti-crypto have become such cults that even as a curious person it's hard to make sense of anything anymore. No matter what side you're on, there's little room for reason or middle-ground.
Yeah, there's problems with cryptocurrency remaining to be solved. Yes, there's shenanigans and scams. Yes, it's not great for the environment (and I cannot wait for a smartass to reply with the word "understatement").
But the technologies surrounding cryptocurrencies can solve problems. It's just that crypto primarily solves trust issues. If you can trust your currency, trust your banks, and trust your payment processors, cryptocurrencies don't do that much for you. Mainline digital banking does a better job than cryptocurrencies currently do. Yet I'm glad that Bitcoin and other coins exist; in an increasingly authoritarian world, such things can be a last resort for those who become "depersoned", and I suspect that one day I'll be depersoned. And if there comes a point where cryptocurrency becomes so perfect that the banks can't compete, then what's there to complain about?
Unfortunately, countless hordes looking to get rich quick have latched on to these things because they're so accessible to anyone with too much time on their hands. The tired word "blockchain" is so abused that upon hearing it I have sadness in me. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about blockchains. A blockchain without a consensus algorithm won't amount to much, but you can have consensus algorithms without necessarily having a blockchain. But blockchain sounds more mysterious to the average person, thus it's the buzzword of favor. You don't even need to know what a blockchain actually is. Just say the word blockchain and you'll be one of the cool people!
A lot of people on the other side of the coin (yuk yuk) don't even have the faintest clue of how cryptocurrencies work or how even traditional fiat currencies work. One guy I was talking to recently said that "if people didn't think they could make money off of Bitcoin, it would be worth absolutely nothing." Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception. He didn't understand that there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, and that it wouldn't be easy to change that number without a majority of the nodes agreeing, and that there are practical reasons why some would want to use Bitcoin over fiat. If anything, fiat currency better fits his mental model. This is not uncommon, in my experience. Very few people actually read anything.
Oh my f---- ----... is every USB power bank a f---- piece of s---??? ARGGG. Sorry, side tangent.
"if people didn't think they could make money off of Bitcoin, it would be worth absolutely nothing." Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception.
The value of pretty much everything is defined by how much people are willing to pay for it. Bitcoin is just some numbers in a database that a lot of people have convinced each other are worth something. US$ is some pieces of paper and some numbers in a database that a much larger number of people have convinced each other are worth something. Your labor is worth some amount because that is what you have been able to get people to pay for it. So is mine. A sandwich is worth some amount, so is the labor of the people who made it.
>That's what really bums me out. Both pro-crypto and anti-crypto have become such cults that even as a curious person it's hard to make sense of anything anymore. No matter what side you're on, there's little room for reason or middle-ground.
Not every topic has middle-ground though. Things can be overwhelmingly negative or positive. I've been following BTC passively since 2011 and I've seen the messaging change from "It's going to revolutionize transactions" to "Its a great store of value!". It's no closer to reaching widespread adoption as a currency than it was in 2011 because it doesn't function well as a currency. If its not a currency then what is it and why should people want it?
>Yet I'm glad that Bitcoin and other coins exist; in an increasingly authoritarian world, such things can be a last resort for those who become "depersoned", and I suspect that one day I'll be depersoned. And if there comes a point where cryptocurrency becomes so perfect that the banks can't compete, then what's there to complain about?
It would be very very very bad for your average person for the government to not have control of the monetary supply. The actual risk of the government "deperson"-ing someone is nearly zero, why would they? I feel like this is a classic crypto argument though. Crypto is good because it might solve some abstract problem that doesn't actually exist.
>Unfortunately, countless hordes looking to get rich quick have latched on to these things because they're so accessible to anyone with too much time on their hands. The tired word "blockchain" is so abused that upon hearing it I have sadness in me. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about blockchains. A blockchain without a consensus algorithm won't amount to much, but you can have consensus algorithms without necessarily having a blockchain. But blockchain sounds more mysterious to the average person, thus it's the buzzword of favor. You don't even need to know what a blockchain actually is. Just say the word blockchain and you'll be one of the cool people!
This has been crypto since I started watching it. I'm not sure when you started counting but crypto has always had 'get-rich-quick' boosters pumping it up and selling wild fantasies about how crypto is going to change the world with blockchain/trust/decentralization. This pumping is the core of any other pyramid scheme.
>A lot of people on the other side of the coin (yuk yuk) don't even have the faintest clue of how cryptocurrencies work or how even traditional fiat currencies work.
Lots of people into crypto also don't understand how it works or how fiat currencies work.
>Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception. He didn't understand that there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, and that it wouldn't be easy to change that number without a majority of the nodes agreeing, and that there are practical reasons why some would want to use Bitcoin over fiat. If anything, fiat currency better fits his mental model. This is not uncommon, in my experience. Very few people actually read anything.
It IS entirely in peoples perception. Something being scarce doesn't give it inherent value. There is only a finite amount of my dirty underwear but I somehow don't see my used underwear becoming valuable.
I don't support robocall spammers, even if their tech stacks might contain interesting nuggets.
At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud. I don't care that it might contain cool tech.
The same goes for e.g. ransomware. It might be innovative. It's still a huge blight on humanity.
Please don't post shallow-indignant flamewar comments, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It makes for dumbed-down, tedious internet threads, and we'd prefer to avoid those.
I think if you're going to support anything - crypto or otherwise, you should start with some level of skepticism, if it can overcome that initial skepticism then maybe it is worth believing in, otherwise remain skeptical imo.
It's not mean, it's just very skewed in one way without acknowledging different perspectives. Take this sentence:
> At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud
Obviously the "at best" part is still a negative, just like the "at worst". That's no way of starting a curious conversation and frankly, it makes for boring reading no matter if you're for/against cryptocurrencies as a whole.
Unfortunately, I kinda feel the same way. I'm a blockchain apologist for the most part, whenever I hear people complaining about how the blockchain is some kind of automated discrimination process I cringe a little bit and try my hardest to explain to them that the technology itself is neither good nor evil, just implemented pretty poorly. With that being said, I generally cannot stand cryptocurrency. I have yet to meet a single starry-eyed crypto fanatic who wasn't either woefully uninformed or completely jaded by their investment. I'm not sure if I'd go as far as calling it a "huge blight on humanity" (any more than I'd call Denmark a huge blight on humanity for existing and consuming electricity/food), but digital money is indeed a sucker's game these days.
There is crypto ecosystems that do not use PoW (proof-of-work, ala Bitcoin) but other consensus schemes (most notably proof-of-stake, e.g. Cosmos) that do not destroy the planet.
Unregulated casino with eco-friendly tech is quite nice actually. No government should be able to forbid me to gamble imho.
Bitcoin and crypto might seem unnecessary in a democracy with a stable currency and it's easy to focus on the scams. But in countries with deeply unstable economies and authoritarian politics, it is a lifeline. Bitcoin has been used by dissidents and activists in places like Cuba, Nigeria, and Belarus. In Russia, the country’s most prominent opposition politician and Putin critic, Alexei Navaly, has raised millions in Bitcoin. Putin can do a lot of things, but he can't freeze a bitcoin account. If you want to understand what crypto is really about, ask Venezuelans if they’d rather own bolívar or Bitcoin. And with creeping authoritarianism in the West, and the USD inflating and at risk of losing global reserve currency status (petrodollar), I wouldn't be so confident it'll never happen here.
I still don't understand this argument. You have to convert bitcoin into some kind of national fiat currency to actually buy things with it. At that point the government that controls that currency can impose whatever restrictions they want.
ie, in the US, I can't sell bitcoin and withdraw US dollars using coinbase without providing identification documents. The US government will have a record of the transaction that enables them to tax or seize the funds. This seems like it's the case with any government and coin wallet.
Unless Navaly can buy ads or pay staff in bitcoin, what good does the money do him? Given the current volatility of the BTC price at the moment, it seems even less valuable for doing anything practical. He'll have lost 20% of his millions raised just this week.
Can the average Venezuelan buy groceries or pay rent with bitcoin? Don't they need to convert to bolivars at some point to take part in the normal economy? Maybe I just don't understand this and someone can explain it.
BTW they're about to impose (almost) total ban on crypto in Russia exactly b/c of FSB complaints that it's being used to fund the opposition, such as Navalny's followers
>> But in countries with deeply unstable economies and authoritarian politics, it is a lifeline.
Or a crutch. It may be allowing some countries to stagger along with support of a grey/black market rather than collapse, wipe out debts, and install new leadership. And it may be the worst type of crutch: one that you trust to hold you up but will one day snap and injure you worse than before.
Don’t forget to ask them again after they learn how helpful Bitcoin is to the police. Once it’s big enough to care about, leaving a signed confession is not a good idea.
Yeah but under an authoritarian regime they can just squeeze you until you run out of operating cash since it would likely be a long game. I recognize that there are benefits to having some assets - I still don't believe this to be a strong enough argument.
Also - in that case you are just talking about hiding assets from the government. While the use case for dissidents is good - to me I would wager the amount of people who are using it for fraud is far greater.
I don't think it is moral to outlaw a new technology just because some criminals are using it. There is nothing inherently criminal with the technology. Similar to nuclear, guns, computers, cars, anything. Someone is always going to sharpen a stick and use it for murder. Should we assume that everyone who collects sticks is a murderer, and therefore we should outlaw stick collecting (enforced by "good" stick wielders)?
If you object became more criminals are using it, then we simply need to promote its use among B2B and B2C. A trustless and decentralised electronic currency is surely a freedom-enabling idea and should be promoted. It has long been the dream of cryptopunks and cryptographers.
Lots of crime is facilited by, and done in the name of fiat currency too. BTC can limit that. It's just a currency and one consciously designed to avoid the inherent flaws of fait.
I'm not saying that -- I am saying that isn't a sufficient reason to support crypto. The costs are greater than the gains if that was the sole function.
I agree it wouldn't be a sufficient reason, but I think it is a step in the right direction and an illustration of how it enables freedom.
Your wallet is a ten word phrase/a private key. This is something we haven't seen before, money can move just like that. All one needs is internet access.
So yes, totalitarians will have a stranglehold under the current system, but it certainly loosens their grip when we wrest the money supply from their hands.
Even if he can't freeze it, he has access to the public ledger and with some effort can figure out who sent money to whom. Either of those two parties could then get a visit and politely invited to reveal the other.
If you want (more?) anonymous you need Monero or Zerocoin.
... and Putin has lots of thugs happy to wield USD$5 (RUB 388) wrenches to obtain those private keys, and the globally known precedent of the year-long torture & murder of Sergi Magnitsky to let the key-holders know that there's no way out.
I am Venezuelan, I will tell you what 99% of Venezuelans would tell you. They will prefer.... USD. Bitcoin had its heyday when the country was in that horrible time of hyperinflation and strict foreign currency control, and, since stupidity seems to have a limit the government relaxed a bit the controls and people also got smarter regarding the use of USD. Now, people pay using USD bills, you can have USD accounts in Venezuela (risky but possible) and a sizable part of the population have an US bank account so they pay within Venezuela with Zelle transfers. Bitcoin is still used but by far people will default to the convenience and security of the green beast.
There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space, even if you think the state of the community today is not healthy. Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs). Most of them will fail and be forgotten, but there is a chance that _some_ of them will create genuinely novel and interesting products. Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?