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?
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.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
You can build a pyramid scheme on facebook too, but facebook is not a pyramid scheme.
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.
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.
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.
But they ARE financially incentivized to bring more people into the ecosystem, which makes for a very loud and persistent hype machine.
I find the negativity here refreshing, to be honest. The proponents of the tech are so organized but the skeptics have the choice to just ignore it.
Plenty of its advocates very clearly WANT to force people to partake though. Anything to keep that number going up.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/el-salvad...
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'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.
So, from that perspective, crypto/web3 is bloodletting some of the crazies from the legacy financial system, which probably isn't the worst thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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
This is a low point for humanity, for tech. Thanks for your concern but we're going to keep going on about it.
I find it amusing how most of the interesting things in crypto are centralized.
https://twitter.com/mcm_ct/status/1485295498806403077
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.
Like I wasn't forced to participate in the resolution and the fallout of the housing crash?
And yet we are here, 20 years later.
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.
If the selling point of your product isn't the product, it seems like you're focusing on the wrong thing
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.
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)
Indifference is just fine as indifference is biologically possible.
There does not have to be a debate; agency cannot be forced.
Hacker News does not have to make you feel warm and fuzzy about every technology.
K8s and Kilo or Linux and Wireguard; boom federated
Web3 is an alternative option for machine state but it’s not the only one. It does not need to win or be debated.
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 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.
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.
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.
Most of the articles are fairly detailed, people put in effort.
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.
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.
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.
Right. And there's a 100% certainty that most of the products that already exist are vehicles for scams at worst, and gambling at best.
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.
And yet... In this case I find myself guiltily agreeing.
Unregulated casino with eco-friendly tech is quite nice actually. No government should be able to forbid me to gamble imho.
As a tech enthusiast, that's just sad to hear.
Web3 consequently is also bound by this. If people are still interested in Web3 when crypto goes down 10% YoY forever then maybe there’s some inherent value there.
however, the fact that too many people seem to think that there is in fact a connection between web3 and cryptocurrency just adds to the smell.
If the entire crypto/defi/nft/gamefi/play2earn etc marketcap was 0 then nobody would even bother with interacting/developing with web3.
In-fact, nobody would even be interested in blockchain tech.
One thing we know for sure is that it ain't gold since it moves with the market rather than against it.
The stock price can drop to 0, and it would be ok. There's no stores to close due to unpaid rents, no workers to furlough, etc. In a weird way it's immortal.
Currently it’s unknown if crypto has intrinsic value. It certainly has extrinsic value, though.
- Oligopoly of the hyperscalers -> rent server from small provider like ovh/hetzner/netcup (there is plenty).
The reason AWS, Azure and GCP are so popular is because people don't care.
- Privavy intrusions -> Adblocker/DNS Blocker/Turn off JS/Use browser settings
This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist because there is a demand.
So what is being fixed?
It smells like a made up buzz word that did not originate organically. Someone coined this termed and released a bunch of press releases to get it to catch on. I don't even know why people are giving it the time of day. It's someone's marketing speak and it smells awful.
And furthermore, decentralization is not new nor is it unique to the web, nor does this "web 3" garbage have anything to do with the web either. Web 2.0 was also buzzwordish but at least it was referring to a genuine paradigm shift in the way that websites work. The inclusion of the XHR request API in browsers and the birth of publicly available RESTful APIs that web-sites could consume which helped lead to the split between frontend and backend development as specialties that we see today (whether that's a good thing or not is another discussion).
"web 3" is just marketing PR garbage for "crypto is the next big thing ... somehow."
It's not fixing anything.
It's only adding a way to force people to pay ETH gas fees to like posts and add comments. It's probably most useful for early crypto adopters to keep growing their pyramid with a captive audience and for criminals who want to hide more identities, launder money, and obscure illegal transactions from law enforcement.
"But it can run without crypto," sure and why would anyone want that? You still need the Internet. Now you want to make it slower and burn more of the worlds energy so that we can independently audit who "liked" which post? So that you can "hypothetically" own your profile pic? Give me a break. I'm tired of the centralized services as anyone but there are ways we can solve this without the foregone conclusion that blockchains are the only viable way. They're not technologically sufficient, they're terrible for privacy, etc, etc.
If you want to fundamentally improve the Internet you're going to have a better time improving things that already exist. Find more energy efficient transport layer protocols for modern usage patterns. Make it more secure. Improve privacy. There's a huge demand for this really unsexy, unhyped work that needs to be done.
Heck, if you're interested in improving payment systems in the US there's a fair bit of catching up to do to reach par with some of the international systems.
1. Ownership by default. NFTs are kinda a silly example, but since your wallet ("You") own your the token that represent your assets being able to transfer them around with you whenever you go somewhere new is cool.
2. Authentication with your wallet makes things much better. SSO for the whole web.
3. Alignment of incentives for users + service providers. (DAOs, traditional corps, etc.).
So with a concrete example.
In Web2 social network, the social graph is closed off along with all your account info. If you want to move to a different social media website, you have to reenter all your info and re-friend everyone etc. The corporation chose to ban people, and the only way you can in theory get a vote is through owning a share.
In (the ideal) Web3 social network, the social graph is open b/c all your friends are attached to your wallet. If you want to move websites you can take them with you, or even have you be on multiple front ends. Even better you might get tokens to vote for certain proposals in the DAO, for example such as banning people off the site etc.
Decentralization is valuable b/c it allows the above to happen, not because it's valuable in it of itself. Without a decentralized network there wouldn't be enough trust in the network for anyone to use it (long term).
After all blockchains are basically one giant shared database, if someone thought you can modify it, it loses all value (Similar to fiat money in a way ;) )
Please explain how adding a crypto wallet or blockchain into this mix changes anything meaningful.
There's another big issue, what if your friends don't want to exist on that front end? Either events/posts are private, or they're on the public ledger and distributed. There's no way to keep interactions private.
In the end, if we think of having these messages sent to clients directly and stored locally, have the clients being able to subscribe to groups, have the clients maintain the friend list, and people being able to post to sets within that list. We have this already. Its called email.
SSO for the whole web means if you do something deemed "bad" you can be blacklisted from every service at the same time. How is this good?
Web3 is less centralized in that the user data is exposed and freely available to be composed upon. For example, when someone makes a deposit (say of ERC20 USDC to earn interest, around 3.0% currently) on https://compound.finance, that data is freely available and the "receipt" becomes another token (the ERC20 USDC cToken). [1]
This token can now be used for other things, on any other protocol, without the involvement of compound itself. For example, there is a "compound" pool on https://curve.fi that allows users to deposit cTokens so that they can earn interest on their stablecoins while also providing liquidity for stablecoin swaps and earning swap fees as well on top. [2] In fact, with this pool, the user can deposit/withdrawal just pure ERC20 USDC instead and curve will deposit/withdrawal that into/from compound on behalf of the user, again, with no involvement of compound at all. (other than interacting with its "immutable" smart contract)
This deposit then gives the user back another ERC20 token "cCrv" that can then be used in other DeFi protocols without the involvement or authorization of curve.
In contrast, in traditional web2, companies gatekeep this information so hard that there are 10B+ companies such as plaid that mostly just scrape user bank account data. Just recently AA is suing The Points Guy for scraping their website. [3] I recall there's even a comment in this thread about someone getting their own scraper banned because they were trying to scrape their own data.
> rent server from small provider
If everyone rents a server and we make these servers talk to each other, that is what I would call decentralization. If you rely on a server operated and rented by someone else, you are subject to their whims: arbitrary bans, censorship, bait & switch, security issues, downtime, etcetra.
I don't believe web3 fixes this but in I don't think decentralization is in principle a useless concept.. It's just hard to do right and harder than that to get enough people on board. And now with cryptocurrency, it's harder than ever to get people on board who aren't just looking to profit off of their buttcoin investment.
Maybe all these things will fade into obscurity and come back one day and "fulfill their true purpose". If all goes well, barely any of us will care about the underlying technology of the problems they solve.
However, using AWS for some things and pinning stuff to IPFS and blockchain for others does prove convenient (I don't have to worry about egress costs w/ IPFS for example)
IPFS isn’t magic: you have to pay for hosting somewhere - you can use it like a CDN to pick cheaper networks but that’s maintenance optimization.
In some cases you can align incentives differently than with traditional solutions. For example with DEXs you can spread the profit and work (such as providing liquidity) to participants rather than a central operator.
It's also easier to prove what mechanism of the operation can and cannot be changed as the code is right there and if you are trading you only have to trust them for just the one function call rather than for holding your funds in their hands longer like with traditional exchanges.
Prove might be too strong a word to use in this instance.
Saying it is this way because this is the way people want it strikes me as a bit fatalist. Is it this way because it's what "people" want or because there is no viable alternative?
Nothing is being "fixed" per se, an alternative vision of how things could be is being experimented with. Key tenets of this are trying to better align user and creator / provider incentives.
You want to organize the worlds information and build a search engine. Okay, you create a google coin. You issue 21 Million coins.
As soon as you announce it people are going to buy in and you will in a period of a few months become a billionaire. With no product. Just an idea.
And then you get to dump your shares on the "investors" and you get to be a billionaire.
There is no incentive to further develop your idea.
Look at what happened to ICP. The VCs got in at 3 cents a coin. Each coin shot up to $750 per coin. Then the VCs dumped it on the retail noobs making a lot of money with absolutely no working product.
A global blockchain enables millions of people to access banking services -- globally -- that they are currently shut out of.
Also there is already multiple platforms with little to no regulation/'censorship' (namely onion service, telegram, kiwi farms, the chan boards, gab, parler...) and we all know how that worked out
(It's an extremely well presented video, but still!)
No one wants "currency" that just up and loses half it's value.
Or what about the VTI (total u.s. stock market index) which has also declined 15%?
The truth is crypto currencies such as BTC and ETH are maturing with institutional investment. Their value relative to USD tends to correlate more with the markets and especially tech now.
My personal (admittedly Don Quixotesque) stance on the matter is that I will never ever accept to be paid in crypto currency for products, services or whatever: their value over here is less than zero.
Crypto is really great if you’re a drug dealer or some other kind of criminal.
> Insiders who spoke to journalists as part of a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, have suggested that HSBC may not have appropriately shared the information with the monitoring team installed by US regulators in 2012 after HSBC allowed drug cartels in Latin America to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through its accounts.
Maybe someday all these anti-crypto activists will rail against the banks and their fiat financial system too. We gotta stop the druggies! ;)
Encryption is really great if you’re a terrorist or some kind of pervert.
Email used to do that, I guess, but now if GMail doesn't like you there may be problems.
If these are problems that don’t exist for you, consider yourself lucky and remind yourself of the opportunities for many that you’re advocating against.
Me too.
It's been posted on HN, without much uptake, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041948
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30036937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30027175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30032406
It's one of those articles that you don't plan to watch through, because it's extremely long, but watch all of anyway, because it's extremely and consistently good.
I feel that I'm going to watch all 2h18 more than once before I'm done with it.
Does it matter?
It feels like most web3 discussion is just discussion and none of the core parts exist at all…. and some folks just threw nfts and crypto currency into the bucket to have something concrete to point to.
I don’t have a problem with discussion about meta discussion but I’m also skeptical that it matters/ that this is just meta about meta …. with nobody doing any of this web3 stuff.
I guess the reason it pops up on HN so often is that Y Combinator has some money in web3 related projects: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?query=blockchain
A lot of those investments strike me indeed as unlikely to have any ROI worth reporting on. But they did get lucky with Coinbase. So, a few of those achieving some level of success is not completely unthinkable.
A truly decentralized, unregulated network will therefore lead to more power being seized by fewer. That is, a decentralized financial network will tend to lead towards the centralization of the value represented within that network. Without the ability for democracy to step in and regulate that network.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are an inherently anti-government project, through placing all governments in a single authoritarian perspective and insisting that they must be decentralized; "crypto" is fundamentally anti-democratic. Throwing the baby out with the bath water.
It not only covers the technical limitations, but also the ideological flaws.
that's my hopefully take
> Keep in mind that it was still early when the dot-com bubble popped. Google Maps hadn’t been invented yet, nor had the iPhone and Android. Online payments were in their infancy. No Twitter or Facebook. No AWS and cloud computing. Most of what we rely on today didn’t yet exist.
> I suspect it will be the same for crypto. So much is yet to be created. Let’s focus on the parts of the Web3 vision that aren’t about easy riches, on solving hard problems in trust, identity, and decentralized finance. And above all, let’s focus on the interface between crypto and the real world that people live in, where, as Matthew Yglesias put it when talking about housing inequality, “a society becomes wealthy over time by accumulating a stock of long-lasting capital goods.” If, as Sal Delle Palme argues, Web3 heralds the birth of a new economic system, let’s make it one that increases true wealth—not just paper wealth for those lucky enough to get in early but actual life-changing goods and services that make life better for everyone.” https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excit...
And I tend to agree.
Actual web3 users, if they exist, have to convert IRL money to coin to power a dApp. Thus, the price of coin rising against IRL money represents inflation in the cost of using the dApp.
In this fashion, web3 is similar to housing. The enthusiasts want it to be a great investment, but to be best for fulfilling human needs it should be a poor investment. The only difference is you can’t opt out of needing shelter.
>>Even with the increased amplification of skepticism, the crypto and Web3 space continue to grow rapidly. Only time will tell if we will have a new decentralized blockchain-based utopia or if the skeptics were correct all along.
So basically, this is now just falling off the "Peak Of Inflated Expectations" into the "Trough of Disillusionment" on the Gartner Technology Hype Cycle graph[0][1].
Perhaps notable that it is going through the cycle so quickly. I expected a more substantive analysis, but it seems to be merely pointing to the name-calling ("a solution in search of a problem". "con job") of a few skeptics.
Actually I now recall lasers being called "a solution in search of a problem" for several decades, but now they are ubiquitous, although it does mean that the initial laser manufacturers were not necessarily the big winners.
[0] https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/research/image...
[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...
I don't actually see why people are skeptical of this, people who don't care about "data ownership", "distributed web", etc have incentive by some "free" money, decent amount of political incentive for some people to move to less "centralized" authorities of discussion and online socializing, and a growing political incentive for "privacy and ownership of your own data".
Whether you care or agree that it's a problem, or if it's solving any of the issues and arguments has very little bearing on actual adoption of this stuff when being able to get "paid" (even in shitcoins) for seeing ads/seeding assets/doing computations when AFK, is alluring and marketable to a lot of people and I think there are enough smart folks that want to figure out a way to get a more distributed web along with a profit model that I don't know if i'm as bearish on this iteration of "web3" as the comments on HN tend to portray.
> [...] as crypto becomes more mainstream and people experience its downsides, critics' warnings are starting to be heard.
I'm not sure that public sentiment is actually being measured or is shown to be changing, or at least there's no evidence presented here.
The biggest thing happening right now is the selloff, and I think that's happening due to the economic headwinds that face all asset classes. Look at the stock market - it's not doing any better.
It looks like we're in for an extremely rough 2022, and people are selling off their crypto (and everything they can) to prepare for the storm. 7% inflation on cash is nothing compared to the loss in equity valuations. Now is the time to hold cash.
(I'm a crypto skeptic, so don't take this as a defense of crypto.)
Really? As of writing, the S&P500 is down ~10% from its all-time-high. Bitcoin is currently down over 50% of its ATH. Other cryptocurrencies are faring even worse. The stock market is doing significantly better.
This is an oft frustrating topic in the world of cryptocurrency enthusiasm. The contemporary American banking and finance system is awful. It's worthy of a great many of criticisms. But crypto solves none of them, and removes the few, feeble protections that are in place to protect average everyday people.
I don't find this to be an ethically OK way to act.
Saying that you cannot participate is reaching the same level of saying that you cannot participate in the use of the internet. In ten years or so, you'll likely be having to use Bitcoin whether you stand against it now or not. Just as someone that said the internet was a scam or a fad back in 1999-2003 era of the web.
People who are anti-cryptocurrency often like to conflate Bitcoin with all these other scam coins. It's true that all of them are a scam besides bitcoin and that none of them have security or decentralization. There is only Bitcoin. It does not matter what is agreed upon, only the truth matters. Only the math matters. Only code matters.
If they are a foreigner in Tunisia, they might also need to provide a passport, valid visa, etc., as well as deal with someone in a foreign language.
I'd prefer my money to go to my phone and not have to deal with anyone in person or give up my personal information, especially over small amounts like $1000.
ETH is L1. There are alternative L2 blockchains that cost pennies to send funds.
We need to understand the current fiat system, how is fiat money is made? How exactly is the USD brought into the world?
Many of you might be quite shocked on how the current system works, all based on debt, or just arbitrary printed to suite the needs of big government. Its quite interesting. Did you know 40% of all USD in existence was create last year based on nothing for instance?
Fiat, and crypto have their merits, and failures. Some obvious issues, others underlying, and needing to be addressed.
I dont disagree there are a number of less than scrupulous people floating around selling worthless tokens, BUT to solely focus on them is to ignore a real core of interesting computer science advances.
What's motivating this is people with deeply vested interest (a16z investors, in no small part) in crypto tokens (e.g. ETH) increasing in price.
The goal is to give people control of their online experience again (like in web1) without throwing out the benefits that came along with web2 (simplicity for the end user and the ability to execute online commerce). In the goal-oriented mindset, blockchain is one of many solutions that could work, but predicting it will be the one is would have been like predicting that PayPal, Google, and Amazon were going to happen at the beginning of the dot-com boom.
Too much focus on the technology increases the likelihood that nothing will happen. Remember, "web3" had already been used previously to refer to online assistants like Alexa and Siri before this blockchain craze; predicting the socioeconomic future by scrying technology is a fraught game.
I’d argue the opposite-the benefits of decentralization are too abstract for most people to appreciate.
The DNS was a pretty big deal. There are some people who think that web3 is a pretty big deal as well.
Take the united states... people are basically free to sneak in, without becoming residents, without "downloading the American OS into their brains" aka citizenship.
Now, what if all countries allowed this? Or, what if a "decrentralized country" offered citizenship with no actual geographic location?
Does American citizenship offer people benefits overseas? For example hostage situations? What if there was a better, decentralized country, that would come to your aid?
Decentralized ideologies are what's being practiced right now; and in fact, it's part of the USA's geopolitical strategy of pushing democracy onto countries, whether subtle or otherwise.
And in any case, any individual should be focused on empowering other individuals to the point they can at least vote with their own wallets and migrate to another country or group should the need arise.
What is a religion, if not an extension of citizenship overlayed onto existing governments? It's basically additional rules you follow, with some benefits of membership.NFTs - yes you can right click and save as. No they haven't figured out at scale how to attach the image / work to the ledger. Yes hype and pyramiding is a fucking disaster and people would go to prison trying those antics in any other industry. But digital art, music, & culture has a real deficit in ownership, provenance, etc.
Cryptocurrency - Yes there is pyramiding and wash trading galore. Maybe tether has inflated the entire market by a million percent. Yes proof of work uses too much energy. But gov't money printing, censorship, property rights, transfer complexity etc has left a vaccum for something that even resembles a currency that serves the individual.
As others have noted many times over we are very early, it is unlikely that we've yet seen what will be a broadly used solution but there is real product market fit here already illustrating massive demand.
On HN in particular how do you build something to serve to that end?
There are several NFT "thought leaders" who have casually floated the idea of eliminating "right-click save-as" functionality for NFT'd images. So it seems to be slowly evolving in the direction of a DRM scheme.
The problems we have (long, inefficient transactions for example) are there because it's hard to do regulation right. You're not helping anyone by creating something impossible to regulate. It's like trying to solve misjudgements by completely getting rid of law, or trying to do law by public opinion (the consensus problem).
Also there's always been a lot of new companies that serve customers with new financial tools. How you do banking did not stay the same in the last 20 years right? Yes it's slow but, as I said, it's hard to do innovation when you are playing with people's life savings.
But suddenly a ponzi scheme comes and all sense is out of the window.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
"It's still early stage, PoW/Ethereum/NFTs are just the first iteration, there are potential applications in the future" is the perennial crypto investors' motte.
"PoW/Ethereum/NFTs are revolutionary, they're here to stay, you would be so cool if you bought a hexagonal ape profile picture" is their bailey.
In practice it results in one of the biggest retail markets. That's good for everyone involved.
Fascinating. How much interest have you had?
Blockchain NFTs do about $800k/day in sales, mostly on the Ethereum book, which is worth about $23B.
How many NFTs are being add to your book per day? How much is the total value of that book worth?
If your book and the value of the ownership that it annotates is larger than Ethereum, then you've really got something special going on, and all these crypto bros should probably give up and join your project.
Now you might be thinking "that's not fair, this is a growth project! we just started!". Ok, maybe you've not displaced Ethereum yet, but you will soon.
Are you experiencing hypergrowth? Are investors clammoring for a share of your book? If so, I'd like to learn more about what they find interesting and how I might invest. If not, it sounds like your project might not be a good investment opportunity.
You guys don't see how solving byzantines general problem is ground breaking? You guys don't see any potential in decentralised networks resistant to sybil attacks? No value in being able to "own" things in the digital world? You guys couldn't imagine any uses for something like Zero Knowledge Proofs?
Its just stupid. Most of you guys are over payed dorks who lack any sort of vision or imagination..
You don't need to be genius to see that we are in a euphoric bubble when jpegs of apes as selling for millions and its pretty cool to point out/warn people of the scammers and charlatans in this space.. but to dismiss the cambrian explosion of innovation happening here..
I mean.. I'm baffled.. tech people? I know this sounds harsh but the sheer stupidity in a phrase like "blockhains are a solution in search of a problem"...