Personally, I think “Web3” will never come. It’s got as much usability issues as the Linux desktop with no obvious draw for as to why most people should care or work on it. It’s a nebulous term that encompasses a bunch of stuff nobody wanted without the blockchain, and I’m not sure why anyone would want it with the blockchain.
Of course this could be a Hacker News Dropbox comment moment. And there’s always that quote “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” Still, I don’t think the “metaverse” or non fungible tokens will have any long term relevance simply because nobody was asking for this crap to begin with. Like many crypto schemes, the majority of players are now in it to cash out, not because they believe in it.
Without the pressure of the frankly outstanding Linux desktop, Microsoft and Apple would be renting your computer to you by the minute or some other coporate nightmare. So beyond even its true day to day usefulness, it's importance to your quality of life is likely immeasurable.
Maybe, dunno. I am a passionate Linux desktop user. I have the SwayWM configs to prove it. However, unless Apple and Microsoft really did decide to do that, I don’t see a huge likelihood that someone is gonna swoop in and start putting serious resources into fixing stuff. Stuff like Cairo being virtually unmaintained or Qt… well, being Qt and having about 5000 bugs. (Don’t kill me, I like Qt too, but it’s damn buggy.)
The point was that the year of the Linux desktop never comes, and it probably never will. If it’s good enough to act as a counterbalance against dystopian outcomes, then fine. I don’t really see it, because I suspect most people don’t really have that much of a choice, for practical reasons, about the computing environments they’re beholden to.
Linux desktop works well enough for the types of things "normal" people are allowed to do on corporate networks. Like, the ways it can break are no worse then the numerous utterly broken Windows things which Microsoft ships out of the box these days.
The Linux desktop suffers from the reality that businesses don't care about their Windows licensing costs, AD admins are a dime a dozen, but an absolute ton of very specialized - different - pieces of enterprise software work on Windows but nowhere else.
Of course this my slight bias from being a Cinnamon user, which delivers a quality useful experience - I'm bit more pessimistic the times I've had to deal with Gnome 3 default, which tries to innovate (and shouldn't - we don't need an "innovative" desktop - we need a rock-solid experience that says "what you know without ads or drama").
I say this also as a cinnamon user. It's really not there. Mint cinnamon breaks on a few basic common tasks like connecting Bluetooth headphones (and recognizing mics on even wired headphones) and connecting to business wifi networks with a preregistered username and password. Just those 2 things is enough to disregard using it entirely.
So what do you mean by 'Year of the Linux Desktop'? Because functionality-wise, the Linux desktop has been superior to all competitors since the early days of KDE3.
Even with all its problems, KDE3 kicked ass. Future KDE versions? Little bit more dubious. It’s gotten better, but I find it to be rather buggy at times.
Not a huge fan of GNOME either. It has gotten better and worse in my opinion.
Year of the Linux Desktop is when the average person can buy a Linux laptop and have a good experience out of the box doing similar things to what they could on macOS or Windows as casual users without breaking the system. When Linux is seen as another viable alternative to Windows the way macOS is. Unless you count ChromeOS or Android, which is obviously Linux based but not the same desktop we’re talking about, that’s not happened. I know someone who was a fairly technical user who got their first Linux laptop with System76 very recently and it went… OK. I definitely had to help on some stuff.
The Linus Tech Tips videos on trying Linux as a daily driver is a pretty good showcase of a lot of the problems.
OK, so for example Dell sells Linux desktop machines. And Linux laptops. They'll have a good experience out of the box. Thats pretty average. You can argue that the users lack of knowledge of the OS will mean they don't have a good experience, as you seem to be, but isnt that the same for Windows users who change to Macs? Or vice versa? Software across those two OSes is not ubiquitous either. The only difference is marketing budget, if you ask me.
As for Linus Sebastian, he threw his credibility in the dumpster with that whole clown show.
Linus Sebastian showed the world what it would look like if the average non-programmer would experience if they tried to use Desktop Linux. Love it or hate it, I’ve experienced the same shit first-hand.
Is there hope for Linux as a viable desktop for everyday users? I think so, but probably not any time soon if it continues on the same trajectory. The average person is just not going to have time to digest why screenshare doesn’t work on Zoom unless they log in via “X11 Session” instead of “Wayland Session.” Is some of the problem on Zoom? Kind of yes, kind of no. The practical result, however, is completely undetermined by who is at fault for any given issue.
I mean, I’ve been using Linux since I was 12, and I can debug my way around some ALSA driver issues, recompile kernels, tweak the pulseaudio config, set up Samba, etc. and all of those things are not necessarily great things if you wind up needing to do them to accomplish something the average user would consider “easy.”
Common, he behaved like a overly confident idiot with a chip on his shoulder and then when his ego was challenged, he tried to hide behind the veil of being a 'regular user'. It wasnt a display of anything but how a narcissist with a reputation to protect acts.
>Of course this could be a Hacker News Dropbox comment moment.
It's not. Cryptocurrency has been around for over a decade at this point, suffice to say that it doesn't work. And why should it? The stated purpose of it is to be another form of unregulated private money, which we already knew was a bad idea hundreds of years ago. Wrapping it up in layers and layers of confusing (and pointless) technology doesn't make it any less of a bad idea.
I’m with you. Of the folks I know who mess with crypto stuff in any capacity, none of them seem to actually think it’s a good idea. It’s just a way to make money. I don’t think VC-funded companies see it any differently.
Maybe referencing the Dropbox comment is unfair. I know it gets widely over-referenced to begin with. I mostly just mean, I could always be wrong.
I really can't blame them for doing it, when everyone around you appears to be in a mad gold rush then it makes sense to start selling shovels. At least if you get stuck with a bunch of shovels you can't sell, you can start a landscaping business or a farm. With crypto not so much.
The purpose of crypto is to build a trusted, decentralized ledger that allows for the implementation of "smart contracts" defined by code. That could have plenty of applicability as a basic layer for all sorts of things. "Currency" might be one of them but not exclusively.
That's revisionist history, smart contracts did not come until way later. And smart contracts are also not anything remarkable, nor are they trusted or or even desirable. They are the equivalent to stored procedures in any other database, except bugs in them allow people to steal money straight out of your bank account with no recourse.
This is why these discussions of blockchains are so frustrating to me. Do you think your bank couldn't allow you to upload random code into their internal database? On a purely technical level of course they could, it wouldn't even be that hard. But there are many, many reasons why they shouldn't and they don't.
> Do you think your bank couldn't allow you to upload random code into their internal database? But there are many, many reasons why they shouldn't and they don't.
Yes I would like that ability please. What are the reasons they don't?
Also, you are seemingly making the mistake of getting lost in technological minutiae; yes, you can call it a stored procedure. In the end, it is all just zeros and ones being shifted around anyway. The financial network created on Ethereum is in key ways, in its /outcome/, fundamentally different from the existing bank network. It is one where an Iranian teenager can design a financial protocol on equal terms to Goldman Sachs. This is a desirable feature.
This design brings with it other consequences. Transfers are hard to reverse; you can consider that a benefit or a flaw, or either at different times. It is simply part of the the nature of the thing.
>Smart Contracts were mentioned by Nick Szabo in 1997
And the term and concept were not popularized until Ethereum in 2014. I never heard anyone commonly refer to bitcoin scripting as smart contracts.
>Yes I would like that ability please. What are the reasons they don't?
There are some already mentioned in other comments here so I won't repeat them. If you want a full response, you should ask them. But if you must know, a lot of existing trading platforms and payment systems do already give you this ability in some form, no blockchains are required at all.
>in its /outcome/, fundamentally different from the existing bank network. It is one where an Iranian teenager can design a financial protocol on equal terms to Goldman Sachs. This is a desirable feature.
I'm sorry but no, this also doesn't make any sense and there are no desirable features or different outcomes here. From a starting position the main difference between the teenager and Goldman Sachs is the teenager doesn't have billions of dollars in capital. Everything else is technical minutiae. If the suggestion here is that the teenager can somehow take out an unsecured billion dollar loan in ETH, that's not a desirable or even functional financial system at all.
I mean seriously here. If you want to make real investments in businesses run by teenagers and other young entrepreneurs I think that's great. You don't need to blockchains to do that. They provide no useful features. I could go into extreme detail here as to why this is the case.
>This design brings with it other consequences. It is simply part of the the nature of the thing.
No it does not and no it is not, this is more terribly wrong mythical thinking that I hear people repeating. The design is not set in stone and there is no "nature" to it. Like any money system, it is designed by humans to further a certain goal and it absolutely does not have to have any particular consequences. It doesn't have to make fraud as easy as it does, but it was purposely designed to be that way because the goal is explicitly to avoid regulations.
> From a starting position the main difference between the teenager and Goldman Sachs is the teenager doesn't have billions of dollars in capital.
We are not talking about capital; we are talking about access. It is undeniably true that access to the legacy financial network is permissioned. But your Ethereum transactions and your smart contracts are no less privileged than those of Goldman Sachs. And if you can create a protocol that generates interest on your users capital, they just might entrust your smart contracts with a billion dollars worth of assets.
This is not speculative; it's the reality today. The reason why you keep hearing about all those DeFi hacks is because random people are building financial infrastructure (interacting with financial protocols built by other random people) without having to ask for anyone's consent or approval, and anyone in the world can use these products.
You can say that this is a terrible idea, but to say that it isn't something new that blockchain has enabled is simply denial.
(Crazy but true: under the EU's "Open Banking" API initiative, you are not even able to access your own account data in read-only mode, without going through a third party provider; it's only "open" to regulated entities.)
> No it does not and no it is not, this is more terribly wrong mythical thinking that I hear people repeating. The design is not set in stone and there is no
"nature" to it.
The claim is not that there is no design space; the claim is that you are bounded by what we simply might call physical reality. You can design your messenger with end to end encryption, or without it, and that decision may be influenced by your value system. However, the decision might impose restrictions on how you can approach the problem of making multiple devices work, or a chat history, or interoperability.
If you want to make it impossible for regulators to censors the financial protocols written by random teenagers (the design requirement), but you also want certain actors to be able to revert transactions, then you may find that those two goals are in tension with each other.
>We are not talking about capital; we are talking about access
They are the same thing. It's true of any proof-of-work system and proof-of-stake only makes it worse.
>without having to ask for anyone's consent or approval
No. This is absolutely and completely wrong. Realistically you need consent of several intermediaries if you're doing business on a blockchain. The bare minimum you need is consent from the miners or stakeholders to accept your transactions. It's the same as any other financial system. What you are describing is so far from reality that it's baffling to me.
>You can say that this is a terrible idea, but to say that it isn't something new that blockchain has enabled is simply denial.
No I'm sorry but there's no denial. Unregulated finance isn't new. Blockchain didn't invent it at all. It is actually the default state of any finance without the proper infrastructure around it. It's extremely frustrating that anyone tries to present this as some kind of technological advance. It's not.
>you are not even able to access your own account data in read-only mode, without going through a third party provider
Which is exactly the same as blockchains, you need to go through a large third party network of mining pools and exchanges to access your funds.
>If you want to make it impossible for regulators to censors the financial protocols written by random teenagers (the design requirement)
I don't want that. That's a terrible design requirement. There is no explanation for why that is a design requirement. I'm sorry but I don't want to make it impossible to censor random teenagers (or anybody of any age) who is engaging in fraud. And no cryptocurrency can do that anyway because none of them are immune to regulation.
>but you also want certain actors to be able to revert transactions, then you may find that those two goals are in tension with each other.
No they are not. You seem to be suggesting that from the point of view of a financial system, all teenagers are indistinguishable from scammers. I don't know where this idea comes from. It's complete and utter nonsense.
I am happy for the bank to control the code which determines how my money moves, because bugs are a thing, all code has bugs, and if the code that moves my money has bugs, the bank is responsible and I get my money back.
I’m happy for my bank to control the interface, because fraud is a thing and the interfaces they offer are sufficient for my needs. Besides, my real money management is in financial planning, and I have spreadsheets under my own control for that.
I’m happy for the bank to enact restrictions (imposed by my government) on where I send my money because global politics are a thing and monetary sanctions are a powerful alternative to war.
In short, the benefits of centralized control have far outweighed the negatives.
Because that is the entire point of keeping your money in a bank. Those things are all there to prevent other people from defrauding you. In a sense that's also why banks allow you to store money there "for free". This is the service you paid for.
And even if you disagree with that premise, the solution is still not smart contracts because you also don't control those. This is more of the same frustrating conversation. You've named a problem and the solution is assumed to be blockchains but the dots don't connect at all. Don't think that finance companies can't get caught up in a market mania, because we know by now that they're often the worst victims.
I do control which smart contracts I interact with, based on my own tolerance to risk. I'm not allowed to do that with traditional traditional banking, but sure - if you want that product (and don't want the control), I can see why DeFi doesn't have a place in your life.
>I do control which smart contracts I interact with
No, you don't. This is egregiously wrong and is a blatant misunderstanding of distributed systems. In a typical cryptocurrency blockchain, it's the miners that have control over which smart contracts you interact with.
>if you want that product (and don't want the control)
This is also a bad assumption. I actually do want this product and the control. However cryptocurrency and defi can never actually provide it because the entire concept and marketing of it is flawed from the beginning. Yes, it's that bad. That's why it's so disappointing to me to see finance people get caught up with it. There is a comment below about "people are trying to figure out what works" when the reality is that it will never work. You fundamentally can't do these things with a distributed system built this way.
> No, you don't. This is egregiously wrong and is a blatant misunderstanding of distributed systems. In a typical cryptocurrency blockchain, it's the miners that have control over which smart contracts you interact with.
The match your rhetoric, this is a best an outrageous slight of hand playing with semantics, at worst you are the one not understanding how they work.
/I/ have control which smart contracts I interact with - no one else.
Number one, the miners cannot force me to interact with anything. It is a common source of confusion - miners cannot force invalid transactions, not even if 100% of them work together. The users of the chain (and their delegates, i.e. exchanges) make the rules, not the miners.
The miners have a single job, for which they get paid: to order transactions. And with that job comes the the power to /not/ pick a transaction. Miners could possible /prevent/ me from interacting with a smart contract.
A large point of blockchain design is to ensure that this will not happen in practice, i.e. the censoring miners are in the minority.
>this is a best an outrageous slight of hand playing with semantics, at worst you are the one not understanding how they work.
It's neither. Sorry. This is literally how a distributed system works. There are always other people along the line that hold responsibility to keep the system running. That's the whole point of it being distributed. Nothing about this changes if you decide you want to run code on that system or use it to manage your finances. I don't want to talk about semantics either, this is usually the point where someone starts nit picking about the meaning of "distributed" versus "decentralized" or something like that. I don't care what term it is, use whichever you want. The limits are still the same.
>/I/ have control which smart contracts I interact with - no one else.
No, you don't. Again this is absurdly wrong. The blockchain controls which smart contracts you interact with, and the blockchain is controlled by its miners and its whales.
>Number one, the miners cannot force me to interact with anything
>miners cannot force invalid transactions, not even if 100% of them work together
Actually they can, by blackmailing you and threatening to remove your transactions from the blockchain. You don't seem to understand what the point here is. If bad actors are intent on doing this they won't care if you lose other money in the process or if you have to destroy your keys to stop them. In some ways this type of distributed system is actually more vulnerable to these attacks than other systems. And of course there is always the classic $5 wrench attack, which no amount of blockchain engineering can stop: https://xkcd.com/538/
You're making the same mistake that a lot of system designers make. If you look at the system in a vacuum then yes those claims are true. In practice, they aren't true at all.
>A large point of blockchain design is to ensure that this will not happen in practice
No it isn't. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this would continue to be the case, any more than you would expect a bank to do the same. The answer always comes back to the same thing.
Yes, the more I learn the more I learn I don't know. However, I've worked in infrastructure, security and finance (institutional & retail banking, funds and insurance) for the majority of career. I'm also currently doing a doctoral thesis focussed on smart contract security, so I do know a bit about this.
The whole premise of blockchain is execution of intent, in an untrusted environment. The threat you are concerned about is collusion, and the best control against this is further decentralization and scale. Proof-of-Stake (and many DAO's), do provide more assurance against malicious actors by validators risking their own stake if they try malicious activity.
Ultimately, I am confident that the "dark forest" will give us much more security and transparency than the current closed/centralised system.
You seem quite entrenched in your view, but I'd like to ask. What would it take to change your view? If the answer is nothing, can you really claim to be thinking about this critically?
>I'm also currently doing a doctoral thesis focussed on smart contract security, so I do know a bit about this.
That to me is another really awful thing about blockchains. They're like candy for academics. It's very easy to get sucked into the illusion as well because if you take it at face value there are a lot of things to study and write about, the algorithms seem complicated and interesting. And they are, if you ignore the rest of the effects. I'm sure you could write 100 doctoral theses on smart contracts. I'm sure companies would pay you to do a lot of things with them. They are still an extremely bad and broken concept.
Edit: I'm at the point where academics have sent me so many papers on blockchains. I would go as far as to say the entire point of the "defi industry" is not to produce useful products, but to produce research papers. But I don't even know if I could say that because a lot of the papers aren't even good! It's so common for a blockchain paper to launch into a lot of math and algorithms without even trying to make a problem statement or explain what purpose it actually has. Please don't let your thesis be like this. If all you're writing about is how existing users of smart contracts are avoiding getting hacked then you've been dragged into the same trap.
>The whole premise of blockchain is execution of intent, in an untrusted environment.
The issue here is that this is a completely nonsense premise. There is no such thing as finance in an "untrusted environment". If you aren't planning to live alone in a bunker, then somewhere along the line you need to have trusted intermediaries. Decentralization does not and cannot ever fulfill this premise, it actually increases the amount of trusted intermediaries you need to deal with.
>The threat you are concerned about is collusion, and the best control against this is further decentralization and scale.
No, this is also incredibly wrong. When it comes to market manipulation, further decentralization does nothing to reduce collusion. It is already hard enough to track the source of bad behavior in the market without people intentionally designing algorithms to do that, we don't need to make it even harder.
>Proof-of-Stake (and many DAO's), do provide more assurance against malicious actors by validators risking their own stake if they try malicious activity
This conversation again is veering into territory where it has nothing to do with blockchains or smart contracts at all. You can rephrase this as "people are less likely to engage in bad behavior when they are invested and hold stake in something".
>Ultimately, I am confident that the "dark forest" will give us much more security and transparency than the current closed/centralised system.
As someone who has been doing open source for the last 20 years, I am not. Much like the Linux desktop mentioned in a parent comment, pretty much every blockchain is just a random open source project that is accountable to nobody. People remain interested as long as there is profit and hype in it, when that dries up they will disappear and any illusion of security and transparency will fade away. This doesn't change because it was applied to finance instead of OS kernels or whatever.
>What would it take to change your view? If the answer is nothing, can you really claim to be thinking about this critically?
Actually my view is the result of thinking about this critically for the last 10 years. I was like you at one point and I would have made the exact same comments that you're making now. But sometimes a spade is just a spade and we gain nothing from pretending it's not. If you want to change my view, it would help to think about how to bring smart contracts into traditional banking systems. Look at all the reasons why it won't work. Then go forwards from there instead of working backwards from blockchains and "decentralization" because those are held as some kind of panacea.
A big problem is that if you can run arbitrary code on your transactions, other people can too. This creates the financialization of everything at best. At worst, your access to basic systems is based on your past behavior.
Yes, but the problem is those are actually well established and useful so none of these VCs caught up in this crypto stuff want to talk about them. It's not even a new idea nor does it require blockchains. It's made strictly worse by blockchains, the only thing that does is add another unnecessary layer of middlemen.
> Still, I don’t think the “metaverse” or non fungible tokens will have any long term relevance simply because nobody was asking for this crap to begin with.
I listened to the podcast between Lex Friedman and Mark Zuckerberg the other day and I remember Mark describing the metaverse and one comment got me, he said how you would no longer have to go to a concert or gathering to be there, you and all your friends could join up and go see it in the metaverse.
And I thought to myself "Mark, this is not why people go to concerts". Yes people go to concerts to hear the music, but that's only part of the draw. It's the vibration in the floor, the screaming fans, the whole environment that makes you want to go, not just the music.
I think that Facebook is making a grand miscalculation with the metaverse. They assume people will "Do X in the metaverse" versus "Doing X in real life", missing the point that people don't necessarily go do X for X itself, they do it for all the other small reasons including X.
I would have agreed with you back when I only watched concerts that cost $20 bucks and the seats were General admission. But lately most acts I see are $100+ and you're assigned a seat and eventually everyone stands. Examples include Foo Fighters, TSO, Dream Theater, Book of Mormon (no standing), and Doobie Brothers. All were at different venues and all were enforced assigned seats with no energy allowed. I'm not sure VR is there yet, but I bet in less than a decades time there will be economical virtual options that achieve parity of experience for some people.
I'm not claiming it's the same for everyone. I'm not claiming concerts are going to go away. I do however see a valid business opportunity in creating a new class of seat.
Remote workers could go together, long distance relationships could make it a date. Rural Polish fans of Japanese metal could see a more immersive set than just a YouTube video.
The issue I see is that FB doesn't have a moat for this type of experience. Anything in the metaverse can be replicated by MS (discord + Xbox), Sony (hardware experience + Playstation), or maybe a partnership between Valve, ticketmaster, and Twitter.
In short, virtual concerts, probably. FB being saved by them, probably not. But hey, I've been wrong about Facebook since their IPO.
And Windows is supposed to be usable? I had to use Windows 10 recently (after 12 years on Linux). My compilation was very slow. I discovered antivirus is using 80% of CPU during my task. I disabled it, but somehow it re-enabled itself. Eventually I gave up and used Windows 7 on offline WM.
I have no idea how difficult it would be to use Windows as daily driver. Dig into registry every day to disable all spyware and crapware. Browse shady forums to find "hack of the week" to make Windows usable again after recent update.
Normal web and financial system has the same quirks. Right now the most convenient way to send money from EU to Russia is crypto.
I'm still forming my opinions on this, but I think I agree. There will be a web3 in terms of the next era of the internet, but it won't match this blockchain/NFT/metaverse vision that it currently describes.
This would also makes sense since it's near impossible to accurately describe a future that hasn't arrived yet. Few of us will predict it, but it'll all make sense in retrospect.
Every time I listen to web3 proponents explain how attaching smart contracts to things like music would work it just sounds like an exhausting nightmare.
Trading songs on the blockchain sounds like a reasonable idea until you realize any MP3 player that would enforce ownership needs DRM now, which it must either enforce by downloading the blockchain periodically, or periodically talking to some untrustworthy music-industry server that purports to interpret the blockchain but could shut down instead.
Music and the arts are where I get worried, because I've seen a lot of good people get involved in NFTs.
The regime we had beforehand wasn't working. Spotify royalties were pathetic. The interest in Web3, among artists, comes more from fear for the future than techie opportunism.
Spotify royalties are pathetic because people don’t want to pay very much for music.
Even without all the shitty middlemen taking huge slices of the pie, I’m paying less than $4 (family account) to play thousands of songs from hundreds of artists
The only thing that really seems to be true about all of this is Blockchain indeed is a huge innovation simply because of its ability to create decentralized trust. Full stop. Web3/crypto tech is currently going through the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" of the Gartner Hype Cycle, and once things settle down and get a little bit more boring, Blockchain applications will find their niche and prove their value in ways we didn't necessarily expect.
My general take has been that Blockchain is a genuine innovation, but one that is inferior to existing technologies in nearly every respect. It's going to be similar to the Wankel engine or the Tesla turbine historically. Yes it technically *works* but the disadvantages outweigh the benefits of adoption at commercial scale.
This trust is still partial trust in the system. There are a lot more aspects of the system that need to be trusted with your money. The coders who maintain bitcoin, that the miners won't collude, that your wallet won't be drained by hackers and so on...
I'd rather trust my money to an FDIC account. It far more likely I'll lose my Bitcoin through some crack in the system that the United States governement collapses and is unable to give me my money, and at that point, Bitcoin wouldn't help me either.
No shit. The whole thing is basically about improving the security of the current totalitarian nightmare (i.e. economic system based on a central currency model). Real change will require a rethink of our assumptions. This is something I spend every waking moment on and I am getting close to being able to explain how we get out of this mess but give me time.
I agree that there the seeds of dystopia there, in the guise of progress.
Eg is decentralisation a universally good thing?
You can also interpret it as a means for big corporations to shift the burden onto the devices of the people who use their services, thereby decreasing their costs at the cost of the consumer. Making you and your hardware a node in their network.
I’m pretty critical of “web3” but some of these points are pretty weak:
“ Decentralization Impossible to achieve, as shown by current crypto projects centering around certain (usually large) actors;
Trust in code, not companies: the belief that a community’s smart contracts encode and enforce its rules We should all trust unknown developers why, exactly?
Always using open and transparent code Doesn't stop monopolies forming, and relies on a small pool of people capable of assessing code;”
Decentralization, hand waved to impossible. Maybe, but this seems especially worth trying.
Unknown developers aren’t trustworthy but inexplicably known developers just are despite plenty of evidence indicating nobody is worthy of actual trust.
Open source can only ever rely on a few people to review code whereas somehow enterprise code should just be blindly trusted even though it’s opaque and managed by still just a relative few people.
The ideas in Web 3 are very diverse, and are frequently mixed with already established ways of thinking and doing business. People are trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. It's basically a melting pot of ideas. The best of what works will win.
Note: I'm the founder of TradeCast. I'm mixing the crypto trading part with automated trading, but in a way that is transparent and gives users control: https://tradecast.one.
I'm not 100% disagreement, but I'd love to see a little more evidence (or at least reasoning) for "The best of what works will win".
To start, here's my counter-argument: We're almost exactly 6 years from the release of bitcoin, and it's still dominant by market cap. We either nailed it the first time or the best has not (yet?) won. We're 50 years into computing and the dominant operating systems are from the same companies that dominated ~40 years ago. Did we top out on ideas then?
Web 3 is far bigger than Bitcoin alone. VC money is pouring into Web 3 companies, so I'd say we haven't seen too much of what's coming just yet.
It's actually really interesting that you make a comparison to operating systems. I helped get ReactOS started in the late 90s, because Windows was so dominant and there was a tremendous lock-in effect because of the software and drivers that were Windows only. However I still think a clone was not the best direction (I left the project ages ago), and that interfaces to other OSs such as Linux are better. Although I didn't come to this conclusion immediately, mainly because driver APIs seemed difficult to abstract to another OS.
That said, Linux has made tremendous strides and WINE has helped it along. With Web 3 you don't have that lock-in effect, so the ideas are flowing more freely. That's why I think Web 3 is different to the OS analogy.
You certainly don't miss an opportunity to make a meaningless, no substance comment just so that you can spam a link to some "project" of yours, do you?
> Decentralization Impossible to achieve, as shown by current crypto projects centering around certain (usually large) actors;
Comparing cryptocurrency with content in this way doesn't translate.
Cryptocurrency regardless of wallet/identity is fungible. Content isn't. So this point seems to be making the assumption that all the content is pooled and controlled by one voting pool, which I wouldn't take as a given.
Web3 feels like a Google AMP caliber event; lots of excitement around it that, in hindsight, was created excitement to justify a technology that would be beneficial to the few at the expense of the many. Am I wrong here?
Web3 requires whole new mindset analogous to 100% electric cars.
You can't find value in Tesla, if your mindset is still in 90' and there are no electric charges available.
Web3 value proposition is more obvious for people outside west world (eg. Nigeria) and people from countires like USA will have hard time to figure out value, but it doesnt mean Web3 is a scam.There are many ppl calling electric cars a scam.
It will take decades to realize on a mass world wide market value of Web3 for a common West/US citizen.
Of course this could be a Hacker News Dropbox comment moment. And there’s always that quote “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” Still, I don’t think the “metaverse” or non fungible tokens will have any long term relevance simply because nobody was asking for this crap to begin with. Like many crypto schemes, the majority of players are now in it to cash out, not because they believe in it.