The big pitch was that you could have non-copyable items which you could move between virtual worlds. The Second Life / Open Simulator ecosystem already has that problem. People looked into NFTs as a way to solve it, and concluded it would not help.
You can download content and upload it as new content, perhaps with a minor mod, creating a new object. This is called "copybotting" in Second Life and Open Simulator. As with any copyright violation, you can file DMCA takedown requests if you find a copy of your stuff.
Would NFTs stop copybotting? No. They just protect the object's ID, not its content. You can still copy the content. If you want to copy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT image and make a poster of it, the NFT system does nothing to stop you. It's not even clear that's a copyright violation in the US, since BAYC images are computer-generated.
Many NFTs don't even have an on-chain cryptographic hash of the content, only a URL for some server. Nor do most NFTs have their NFT ID watermarked into the actual content. So the NFT doesn't even give you a verifiable proof of ownership independent of the creator's server. There isn't info that would allow a server to tell if a new image upload is a copy of an existing item. An image search might help, but that doesn't need NFTs. Decentraland's solution to this problem is to charge a $500 "curation fee" to get an object onto their platform, which cuts down content to the point that they can check for duplicates.
NFTs are thus useless for their claimed purpose.
The whole "moving objects between virtual worlds" thing is one of the most ridiculous concepts I see pushed by the crypto/NFT/web3 community.
As you've outlined there is a potential for this functionality in non-game/metaverse environments - even if NFTs fail to do it properly.
However, when this gets applied to video games at large, I really start to roll my eyes. Even if you could magically hand-wave away all the technical issues that go along with trying to implement something like this - why would developers even bother? Game economies have to be tightly controlled to combat things like RMT, botting, and unsanctioned item trading. Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible.
Stupid. Ponzi. Crap.
Except in Diablo 3. Where all that killed the game.
This is missing the forest for the trees. Of course it wouldn't be a carte blanche, but it would be trivial to let people transfer in cosmetic items (think stickers, color schemes, etc.) based on another ecosystem/game/achievement/etc.
Cosmetic digital items (e.g. non-gameplay-impacting) are like a hundred-million-dollar+ industry.
So it may not have been the pitch, but NFT's are definitely Web 3. You're just moving the goal posts.
it's just a brand name that's being used to trick crypto people into thinking that, in a couple decades, they'll invent the future of gaming
and the bullet list is always stuff we've had for decades
This is very similar to how DRM works (protects the ID, not the content, hence we need DMCAs if someone tries to illegally stream a movie on YouTube or whatever) and it seems to be doing a pretty good job. In spite of everyone hating it, we have the luxury of Spotify, Netflix, Apple+, etc. because of DRM. NFTs definitely have a use case in gaming and digital collectibles; they also happen to be consumer-friendly (unlike the current status quo of digital collectibles). I wish I could sell my thousands of items in WoW for real money, or my Fornite skins for real money, or my unneeded Magic Arena cards for real money, but I'm locked in their ecosystem.
The tokenomnics aspect of Web3 is mainly speculation, which imo also has a use case, but it most likely will be impacted by some much-needed regulation.
That's exactly it: you may wish it, but the reason it won't happen isn't that NFTs weren't invented yet, it's that companies making these products really don't want you to. One simple reason is that it might make someone else play less if they could all those items by just paying a little money.
The other reason why selling in-game items for real money will never be permitted (again) is all the gigantic legal crap that it brings along. If the items are worth real money, you can sue Blizzard or other players for events which unfairly make you lose an item, or affect the value of the items you hold.
NFT does not perform an equivalent function. Be infinitely more useful if it did.
I doubt this. All of these services have one thing in common: it's easier to just subscribe than it is to torrent the content. It's not particularly difficult to find original-quality torrents of Netflix content, for example.
What they're asking for is Digital Rights Management. The promise of NFT is DRM.
Seriously.
What these hucksters call Web3 is the digital equivalent of essential oils. Blockchain apps have no real productive use beyond selling them to each other. Calling the whole thing Web3 was a fairly transparent grasp at trying to legitimize the whole charade.
Also, does that mean that you going to finally stop using Signal for not only having mobile wallet [3] for payments, but also facilitating in using cryptocurrencies for donations? [4]
[3] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
Web 2.0 gave us legitimate added productivity and functionality of being able to do stuff online for the first time. Web 3.0 does nothing but give us a trustless system that nobody asked for. Zero new functionality in any of those apps.
If you trust banks and FAANG companies, as most people do, Web 3.0 has exactly zero value.
ens.domains is a privately owned and managed DNS provider. It's litterally the exact opposite of what web3 claims to be. Having a "constitution" is just re-wording "Terms of Service". I love how it sells hard covers versions of it's Terms of Service for fiat at Blurb.com. And no, Blurb does not accept cryptocurrency payments even, lol.
Signal.org existed well before they added crypto, and quite frankly, yes I did just about completely stop using it - and so did many others. The introduction of cryptocurrency in that app litterally chased away users rather than improve adoption.
Gawd, could go on forever here.
Re: Skiff, it looks like a very cool product but I'm skeptical they can make enough money. The primary path to monetization for a product like this would be enterprise SaaS licensing but I simply don't see how you can sell to enterprises without centralizing the product. Auditability, compliance, SSO, etc. would all seem to be difficult if not impossible with the product as specced.
to which i reply: "shaka, when the moon lambo fell"
Apparently "the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community". Mathematics sure have increased in scope since I left uni.
If there's a productive use, it escapes me.
Start here: https://www.amazon.com/Trick-Treatment-Undeniable-Alternativ...
When you get beyond the immediate family, relying on altruism as the organizing principle starts to break down.
Societies that provide incentives for delivering value to other citizens - going to work, doing a job, becoming wealthy if you drastically improve society - will win long term over those that provide disincentives to hard work and providing value.
Web3 and crypto provide artificial scarcity to digital goods. This is an experiment in economics. I believe providing economic incentives, when properly aligned with the tasks desired, can result in a more efficient and successful internet. Relying solely on volunteers in any group has very rarely worked - even the largest non-profits have highly paid directors and legions of paid employees. This is not some revolutionary idea, other than the fact that digital goods can have artificial scarcity.
We've learned this lesson over and over again. If you apply an incentives layer to anything, people will attempt to game it. Watch what happens at any company that starts rewarding developers for number-of-issues-closed or lines-of-codes-written.
The only responsible way to work with incentives is to constantly monitor and re-balance them. I use Duolingo a lot and I find it really interesting watching how they tweak the various gamification models over time as people's behaviour alters. They need to balance their models such that people who game them will also learn the language most effectively.
The token model - represented by things like DAOs - generally requires this incentive design to be perfect up front. It assumes that people can design a perfect incentive system from day one - which obviously they cannot.
This goes right back to the beginning of smart contracts: Vitalik was famously inspired to create Ethereum after his World of Warcraft character got nerfed. But nerfing is essential to how game design works! If you don't constantly rebalance things your game ends up being broken.
Imposing artificial scarcity on the internet is like imposing the caste system on a modern society. It's a way to differentiate people by status in a world that has no need for that distinction any more. Literally putting a rotten economic system on a domain that could be free of it and practically limitless, like people driving cars with the break pulled so others can feel faster.
What we really need to do is get the ideology out of people's heads that burning energy so you can get a hexagonal twitter avatar to set yourself apart from all the round avatar people is a way to organize society.
On the concept of creating artificial scarcity, this is a philosophical debate and we will not agree.
what is scarce about tokens? the hash? why are they desired, for speculative investing?
This.
Money has finally entered software for good.
Is there "regular" immutable events database like this that I don't have to host myself, has a super easy-to-use API, and costs less than $5/mo, but keeps my data around after I stop paying for it?
Yes I know, the API endpoint is silly and mutable and it actually links to my Airtable API lol, but this helps me track "when/where" that I don't want to track on a regular DB.
To date the entire thing's cost less than $10, and I have maybe 30-40 posts. Definitely not production yet though
And have!
Not all things crypto are about speculation and number go up. Many projects have added tokens for utility. THOSE projects are eventually going to be far better than their Web2 counterparts. By the people, not just for the people
IPFS team released Filecoin to let you store files in more than one “cloud” company like AWS or GCP or Azure.
MaidSAFE goes way further. They are building the ultimate in decentralized, uncensorable networks.
Jack Dorsey’s Web5 is using really good technologies like Microsoft’s ION (sidetree protovol) for identity, etc.
Okay and now for the part that will get me downvotes… I started two companies in 2010 and 2017 respectively, to build open source software and give it away on GitHub. I built them for Web2 ans Web3 to decentralize social networks, payment systems, voting, governance and more. Because communities need to run their own open source software, rather than relying on states and corporations. Otherwise our communications and transactions will be taking place on privately owned and centrally planned platforms.
If you want to know the details… click here:
https://intercoin.org/applications
PS: before downvoting me, actually look at this. It is not shilling any tokens. It is actually BUILT open source solutions, on github, that you can take and use today. If you don’t like something, at least comment and use your words before downvoting.
Which again looks like the problem being solved is just financializing something you could already do just fine without the "coin" to begin with.
Jpeg NFTs are dumb, cos the record is public. But a singular record that can out of band handle authorizations? Neat.
Firstly, we have that on the web today with OAuth. It is centralised in the hands of a few companies but that's because people trust those companies. There simply is no consumer demand to allow other options but it's easy enough to do.
Secondly, the problem with the NFT approach you described is that it coerces people to use a single wallet for everything. Which goes against the best practice for crypto at the moment which is to have multiple wallets due to the many, many NFT scams that can steal your wallet. So in effect your approach trades off centralisation in one area for another. With the end user not really being in a fundamentally better position.
You trust them. I don't. Now what? Are you saying I'm forced to trust them, because you do?
For every story of crypto projects going awry we can find a story of Google shutting down someone's account without any recourse, Apple abusing their App Store position to ban reasonable content (commentary on sweat shops or even mildly adult content), or Facebook accidentally toppling an entire democracy.
The reality is that these centralized systems aren't some panacea and you are frankly naive to be so happy about using them for the rest of your life.
How is this different from setting up a website and requiring a password to access it?
Rather than maintain and protect a local set of usernames and hashes, you let anyone in who can present signature and address. Then server side you check that address has some NFT. Done. No hashes or usernames or anything.
"What is the value of cryptocurrency/blockchain/web3? Why should anyone care?
Here is my opinion (as a developer who studied and built blockchains):
It allows digital information (value) to be open/free (as in not under the control or in the power of another) and virtually permanent.
That's basically it.
If you want digital money, we already got that (Cash app, Venmo, online/mobile banking, etc.).
You want digital collectibles, that's been around forever in games, etc.
But I think we all know most people see value purely in the speculation. Be careful not to confuse all the "innovation" and hype as real substance, because most of the time someone is trying to PUMP and DUMP, which can make a lot of money. Just look at any of the thousands of blockchains/coins that are no longer used or traded, but were supposed to change the world."
You may be ok with companies messing with your life because they can, many of us are not. Especially non US citizens where we face a lot more financial discrimination.
> tear up the greenery we could have played on
Can hardly believe HN is earnestly arguing that walled gardens controlled by Google / Facebook / et al are a preferable future for the internet. There's some serious cognitive dissonance on this site when it comes to blockchain tech.
Why not elaborate on what the walls, fences and guard towers are for us non-paranoid people?
Real-world use cases could replace parts of PayPal, Patreon, Bandcamp or Kickstarter with a crypto-native solution to decentralize some parts of payments, user accounts, and ownership. Where is the killer Web3 app? It's only been a ~year or so since Web3 has entered mainstream consciousness, and the few-years-old tech is still far from a usable state. Crypto has a long way yet to go: Proof of Stake, rollups, zk privacy preservation, light clients, and a host of other solutions need to be first solved for it to be widely usable. In the meantime, most current Web3 apps are best to view as high-risk "beta" experiments.
> The Web was about making information accessible to all, Web 3 is trying to provide value to a few, where everything is done for the benefit of the few rather than benefit of all.
This is a gross misunderstanding of web3. Take a look at NFT art world, almost all the media and information is freely accessible, to the point that it is regularly ridiculed with "Right Click Save" by the out-crowd. This is distinctly different than Patreon and Bandcamp models, where artists might put digital media behind a paywall, making the information only accessible to a limited few. See more here[1]
[1] https://mirror.xyz/herndondryhurst.eth/S-W2ZXRbrcy8bVGrKwMXS...
Literally everyday there's an article that is posted that completely misunderstands cryptocurrencies and the related ecosystem. The most common critique I see on HN of this is that NFTs are garbage and rug pulls suck.
Thats like saying the modern web sucks because a couple of shitty websites are live and you got your CC stolen by phishing e-mails. It just makes no sense as an argument.
Crypto has a long, long, very long way to go but if folks truly do not believe that transferring something that we believe to have some value (i.e bitcoin, or USD, or whatever) without the need for a middleman, while also keeping your funds truly safe from external control (i.e banks, governments, and the like) then cryptocurrency is simply not for you, full stop thank you for considering it.
In the first world, the full value of such decentralization and trustlessness will never be understood until they get burned like Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Cyprus, and other countries with massive hyperinflation and complete loss of wealth (temporary or not). The daily fluctuations of BTC are literally nothing next to the hyperinflation of the Turkish Lira, the Lebanese pound, the Zimbabwean dollar, and so on.
As a side note, its getting kinda tiring to see these boring, lame takes on crypto which seem as half assed as they are uninsightful posted on HN. Lets get some moderation done on this front IMO.
None of that applies to Bitcoin or any other digital currency. There is always a middle man (and fees), disintermediation is a myth (and don't get me started on decentralization).
What problem does Web3 solve? It helps us better manage nonsense. As we face fuel shortages, potential food shortages, a recession and stagflation I wouldn't want to be in the business of solving make-believe problems. If you're not doing work for a business that's providing tangible value to their customers then you're likely to be out of a job soon. All it takes is another rate hike of 25 basis points and we're in a whole new ballgame - and unlike 2008, which was fueled by financial nonsense that had been going on the preceding 10 years, we're going to have bona fide supply shortages to contend with as well.
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-innovators-dilemma-...
Take something as simple as identity. In the Web3 world that's basically a wallet. lose your access to an account on a website currently and you can reset it. Lose your Web3 ID key? Well, you need a "smart" contract for recovery. I've seen variations on this such as nominating some other wallets who can give a consensus for what is essentially a takeover to recover your account.
These are really just more attack vectors created on the altar of automation and blockchain.
Look at the amount of threads on HN of people pleading about how google banned them and they can't get through to a human to get their data back. Is that the future you want everywhere? You think having to talk to your parents + friends to recover your data is worse than that?
For example: crowdfunding platforms. I can write a smart contract that reasonably and securely associates unique IDs to Ethereum wallets, keeps track of wallets that donate to a specific ID and refunds donators or rewards the wallets associated with the IDs according to explicitly set rules (ie. minimum currency threshold). I can then create a website for it, deploy it as "givemeyourmoney.xyz" and still be considered (and verified) trustworthy and safe just because everyone can read the contract's behavior.
Without a smart contract, everyone would understandably think the site is a scam and wouldn't use it - even if it was totally legitimate. That's obviously an extreme example, but that basic attribute has a lot of other implications.
The problems with smart contracts begin once you have to codify a rule that isn't so easy to translate into code (ie. it turns out that a crowdfunded project was a scam). Now people are creating DAOs to deal with situations like that, with at best mixed results.
But what if you need to verify that a condition has been met that isn't based on the blockchain, like checking if someone actually did deliver the pizza that someone else ordered? Then you're completely screwed.
You could say that these problems are eventually solve-able if the right hardware/software infrastructure was created to address them, but if so then it's at least a decade away from being verifiable and therefore useful.
Anyways, regardless of what could be possible it looks like web3 people are more interested in scamming each other because non-technical users can't read smart contracts and few people do any proper auditing.
How many people—even very technically skilled ones—read smart contracts in their entirety? Launching a crowdfunding platform backed by a smart contract should give it zero credibility by itself. Unfortunately, we popularized the idea that a smart contract equals zero trust equals you can actually trust it. None of which is true.
We moved even further away from that with upgradable contracts. Where is zero trust there? Yesterday’s Solend disgrace is a very clear proof of that.
1. The most beautiful and innovative things being done in the Web3 space are much more beautiful and innovative than anything you will do in your life.
2. The most dastardly things being done in the Web3 space are much more dastardly than anything you will do in your life.
Now for the two broad camps of people I see here:
a. People who think 2. is not relevant to pursuing 1.
b. People who think 2. can never justify pursuing 1. – or even finding out about it.
Look at the kids: the day is better spent curious.
If you mean that both of these are achievable on an individual level, then I fail to see how coding an idea has any more potential to achieve these extremes than using a paintbrush.
Look at the kids: they get far more excited by video games than DeFi.
Wikipedia and Google pre-date Web 2.0. Facebook is arguable.
Can I roll a private/public key pair and use it to authenticate everywhere as the user BabyFarkMcgeeZax? Can I authorize Spotify to BabyFarkMcgeeZax/playlist?
In theory, I can use an OAuth provider for this kind of stuff, but then who owns what? Why can't I host my own content wherever I want and allow different permissions to it? Why can't I delegate certain things to some provider and revoke it when I want? How does anyone get paid for being such a service provider, especially with the idea that the data is host proof in some cases and thus can't be monetized?
Blockchains / tokens are trying to answer this question. Most are data that doesn't fit on a blockchain or are issuing tokens with arbitrary monetary policies and following them up with bad fiscal policy.
Thus far most of Web3 just requires some algebra to see a database that doesn't solve these problems.
Blockchain just one potential category of technologies or set of implementations. Web 2.0 was not defined by its technologies or implementations, it was defined by its value proposition. So, forget blockchain... at a higher level, Web3 is going to be about ownership.
Billions of people gave Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. value by creating the content that made those products useful. Web3 still has a lot to workout, and as much as blockchain is trying to co-opt web3, it may not be a part of it in the end -- but the people who create the content will get paid this time around. That is what will define Web3.
A decentralized system where users don’t have to view ads etc. will necessarily be more expensive for everyone - because you have to fund infrastructure, because you have to penalize spammers, and just because if posters are getting paid it has to come from somewhere.
Money is inherently a liability of the issuer. No one is liable to accept bitcoin (for example) as payment, therefore it is not money.
However, if you can build a currency that represents real world assets, liabilities, and/or collateral, then it potentially becomes money, and can solve real problems such as liquidity in markets.
IMO It's likely there will be an iteration of protocols and storage mechanisms that will be more useful in the future
I also think "Web3" is probably the dumbest imaginable branding
in the least it’d be inaccurate to say that web3 has not provided something of a paradigm-shifting mechanism for artists to get paid
web3 is also kinda new & if not web3 then what evolve / direction / next level for the www ?
the internet never made any promises about being an equalizer?
