Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Web3 Bullshit?

maxread.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 383 posts

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#251

Post by ClumsyPilot »

pornel wrote: post #84
_vufv wrote: post #33

One aspect that I strongly dislike about "web3" is that it poisons the discourse with its incentives. I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in. It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for u…

The thing that cryptocurrencies have really successfully decentralized and democratized is becoming a shareholder — of cryptocurrency schemes. Anyone can buy a share of a coin, and make a profit as long as the amount of fiat currency put into the chain keeps growing. Every new user convinced it's going "to the moon" pays dividends to existing holders. This automatically creates a financial incentive to become an astr…

Sounds like the housing market

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#252

Post by k__ »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #203
k__ wrote: post #183

I think, web3 has potential. Is it full with grifters? Sure, but I wouldn't call the stuff that happened in the last 20 years on the internet as sound, even if it was often law abiding. Web3 is full of ponzi schemes and, at least to me, the rich people web2 "created" tell there is something wrong too. Decentralization is an opportunity, and I know this doesn't require blockchains, but I had the impression that OSS, a…

I keep wondering where all those millions invested in NFTs (fairly insanely, it seems to me) are actually coming from , and one plausible potential answer is "all those rich people web2 'created'" who now have more money than they know what to do with. I don't think they are somehow separate things in that or other ways, as if "web3" is like some new counter-power to "web2".

Yes.

I think so too.

In the best case it will be some kind of redistribution of value.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#253

Post by ethanbond »

tata71 wrote: post #225
ethanbond wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, let me clarify. Stop acting like it’s a viable currency/infrastructure. I get that you can arbitrarily label anything as these.

Right, because I should wait days for banking wire transfers to get rescued out of the slush pile underneath a fax machine somewhere if I want to pay someone with a different bank. Literal tens of billions of dollars are using these systems to great success. The numbers are refuting your arguments, and will continue to. When we are all carrying counterfactual wallets, able to hold any number of cryptocurrency, or NFT…

There was plenty of money working successfully in Enron, Madoff Investment Securities, and Evergrande, too.

The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) per day. These generally settle in a few minutes.

P.S. Transparently resorting to straw men like “if you doubt crypto then you just don’t like technology” is the sort of stuff that prevents people from taking this movement seriously.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#254

Post by intrasight »

> Something that has frustrated me so far about the debate over web3 is the extent to which it's articulated in the latter terms — those of a prediction market

> ... all discourse is subconsciously understood to be people taking speculative positions on various topics

> ... can I at least just get slowly tanked on free booze and annoy people with a reminder that the house always wins?

So clearly the author thinks that "Web3" is just a rebranding of crypto. I didn't see anywhere in the article an explanation of Web3 or any examples.

Let me premise my take by saying that I am not a crypto zealot. If I hear a financial/investing podcast talk about crypto, I will fast forward. I think the vast majority of investors should steer clear. What about Web3?

Let me tell you my story of independently "discovering" the concept now being called Web3 - as I'm sure thousands of others have done in the last few years. In July I was out on my walk and an idea popped into my head. It was interesting enough that I took out my phone and recorded as I thought it though out loud.

Here it is in a nutshell: Distributed smart contracts can empower information consumers.

And here's the specific form that my idea took, and why, when I got home from my walk, I bought some ETH, having never owned any cryptocurrency before. My screens are going to be "Web3 clients". This client will have a new feature that my current TV does not. It will have available an overlay like Amazon X-ray. It will display info about what is on my screen, and most importantly a "truth meter". While I couldn't work out the details of how this would work, I did decide that a) it's a feature that I think will arrive, and b) Ethereum is likely to play a role.

Here's another idea: Discuss Web3 without even mentioning cryptocurrencies. Instead, just give your idea as I did, and explain how blockchain smart contracts will play a role in the implementation, and perhaps at the very end of presenting your idea, mention that it may be considered a form of Web3.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#255

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

pornel wrote: post #84
_vufv wrote: post #33

One aspect that I strongly dislike about "web3" is that it poisons the discourse with its incentives. I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in. It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for u…

The thing that cryptocurrencies have really successfully decentralized and democratized is becoming a shareholder — of cryptocurrency schemes. Anyone can buy a share of a coin, and make a profit as long as the amount of fiat currency put into the chain keeps growing. Every new user convinced it's going "to the moon" pays dividends to existing holders. This automatically creates a financial incentive to become an astr…

How does any of that differ from the current US stock market?

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#256

Post by aptidude187 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #235
p2p_astroturf wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A BTC wallet is infinitely more user friendly than a banking website that only works in chrome xor firefox and constantly locks you out for reasons they don't want you to know about and severely limits your transfer sizes. If you do EFT and wait between 3 and 10 days each time, even bitcoin is better than this. Centralized web is horrible and dead. Literally _anything_ is a better alternative. The user can be convinc…

> A BTC wallet is infinitely more user friendly than a banking website... Until there is fraud, a dispute, or an innocent mistake.

Same for traditional banking + if you happen to be a journalist ( or whatever ) living under an oppressive regime, they can freeze your assets on a whim, because you criticised the wrong people. If someone still prefers trusting a central authority, for whatever reason, they can still use something like coinbase.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#257

Post by [deleted] »

kennu wrote: post #134

"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you." Recently it feels like the general sentiment toward Web3 has been moving from the ridicule phase to the attack phase. Then finally comes the acceptance. In my view, the entire Web3 movement (not just the speculative virtual currencies and NFTs) is so big and covers so many new areas that it's here to stay forever. It's going to fundamentally c…

[deleted]

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#258

Post by lottin »

woodruffw wrote: post #227
lottin wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, crypto-exchanges already offer deposit accounts backed with reserves. If at any point the reserve ratio falls below 1 (we don't know if this has already happened), the quantity of bitcoins in circulation will increase as a result of that.

I know of some cryptocurrency exchanges that offer stablecoins , which are a dollar-denominated asset that’s (theoretically) backed by cash in the bank. We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the largest stablecoin players are actually fraudsters. I don’t know of any exchange that offers a deposit account that’s dollar-denominated but backed by cryptocurrency. I can think of lots of reasons for that, FDIC regulations bei…

I'm talking about bitcoin-denominated accounts backed with bitcoins. These are the standard exchange accounts that most people have.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#259

Post by fivea »

throwaway6977 wrote: post #216
realce wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A stock represents ownership in a company that makes things. The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company, not the amount of fools available to sell to. Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.

"The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company" This is one of the big lies.

> "The value of the stock is relative to the performance of the company"

That's true if companies are evaluated on their fundamentals.

If you start to deal with stocks as if they were meme coins, with no concern of cash flows or business models or profitability, and you add a decade of quantitative easing, then you get stocks like Tesla, and a stock market that's driven by the need to park free cash no matter how risky and absurd the investment is.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#260

Post by diveanon »

Incerto wrote: post #175

I remember people saying WEB 2.0 / AJAX was bullshit too. It's easy to lampoon the buzzwords / early failures of a new paradigm. People will be tinkering to learn new ways to working. Personally I believe Web3 has a huge future.

Most of these people will be working on and investing in web3 backed projects within 5 years.

There is a lot of effort being made to discredit web3 because existing players are aware that it means a loss of control.

Post reply on HN