Live data from Hacker News

Is Web3 Bullshit?

maxread.substack.com

281–290 of 383 posts

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#281
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…

I think the problem is that some people seem to know the future.

Either they are sure crypto is a scam or fad and will soon go to 0. Or they know for sure banks and fiat will go out of business.

I see this mentality more on the anti-crypto side.

My opinion is that there is a small chance that web3 can be huge. So I'm on the pro-crypto side. But a lot of people seem to have a hard time with this "SMALL chance it can be HUGE".

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#282
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does this preoccupation with payments come from all of a sudden? Personally I don't want "payments" implemented in my web browser, and I seriously doubt that that would be in anyone's interest.

Micro payments may prove to be a compelling alternative to. Or at least that is the hope.

Alternative to what? I think you forgot a word there

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#283
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one was interested in it. :) I don’t see why stocks have tangible value and tokens used to interact with a network don’t. A stock is a vacuous unverifiable virtual piece of paper. At least if you have a Bitcoin or Ether you can prove what you have and know how many there are. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-17/dole-f... Most stocks don’t even have dividends any more so what else is a stock for o…

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, not the amount of fools available to sell to.

A company might be destined to make twice their profits, yet if nobody believes they could, nobody will buy their stocks, leaving stock price the same. One might think, the stock price would certainly increase when the company realizes the profits, but it’s not the case either. The market could think that it was a one off event and the company wouldn’t continue growing. Therefore, nobody buys the stock.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#284
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…

> I'm surprised that there is no middle ground - there are either fervent advocates or fervent opposition, and with very few exceptions The middle ground would be people who aren't invested in crypto, but have tried a few dApps and think they can be neat sometimes but maybe are rough around the edges and might be better in a few years. These people don't exist because web3 technologies have nothing appealing to end u…

Sorry if this seems a bit ranty.

I'm kind of a middle ground person, perhaps leaning slightly 'against' rather than 'for', over predominantly environmental concerns. I've distanced myself from crypto since I learned what the chinese were up to, and since china is putting a stop to that now (allegedly?), and the rest of crypto seems to be quietly moving in a PoS direction, recently reintroduced myself.

Most of the objections I have, other than the climate concern involve valuation, stability vs. valuation, etc.

Because I have some experience in the open source virtual worlds arena, and because 15m square plot of decentraland just sold for over 2 million $US, I decided to make a personal investigation of decentraland and it's relationship to ethereum. I went into this quite optimistic and hopeful, because I enjoy such things. What I found, however, was no cause for joy.

Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic. In any case, as I said before elsewhere, they have fallen victim to the touch of Midas: Their various holdings became extremely overvalued in a very short period of time, to that extent where no one else can afford them.

When I posed this issue to them directly, the general attitude was 'well, Walmart and Nike can afford us, so...', but zero acknowledgement that their entire value to those corporations is based on the number of product consuming users they can bring to the table.

Their self-governance machine, the DAO, is a thing of beauty, in that it could be employed to actually produce an autonomous, self governing organization that embraced everyone on equal terms and let everyone involved behave as the peers they should be in an ideal community; instead, they have pretty well implemented everything bad about today's governments, arriving at a functional oligarchy made up of those with the most land and currency, which they call 'voting power' - and the so called officers of the various supporting and ideally moderating concerns (their foundation, their DAO, and, due to the concept of voting power, their property holders), are all the same people.

They do a steady job right now in their discord channel of gaslighting these concerns where ever they are indicated, to the extent that they tossed me out this morning for calling them out on it; I haven't troubled myself to see if they just tossed me out or banned me, because I really don't much care.

I do know that their behavior in every respect will alienate users not just to virtual worlds and cryptocurrency, but to the whole endeavor they are labeling 'web3'.

DAO or not, this is not The Way.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#285
post #2

Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for decades (persistent identity, multiple persistent identities) or things you could do anyway ("right now, people can only go to facebook or Google. With Web3, everyone can have their own space!!") because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.…

The way I see it this scarcity thing is exactly the point, and I'll go a bit deeper.

Capitalism can only work with scarcity to monetize. With scarcity nearing an end, there's now two camps:

* those that are excited for the post-scarcity future where we can freely share data and culture

* those who are deeply bought into capitalist ideology and who are terrified of capitalism ending with scarcity.

The first group hates all the crypto stuff because it's a technological attempt to put the genie back in the bottle and undo the progress we've made in eliminating scarcity. The second group hails crypto as their savior and thinks it will revolutionize everything by reintroducing scarcity everywhere, giving capitalism a life line. I think that's the core disconnect.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#286
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of mentioned it already, but apart from payments or other transfer of digital ownership, there shouldn't be much need for on-chain transactions. In some years when, hopefully, L2 technologies have matured and grown to live up to their promise, those won't have to either (there is always the initial on-boarding of course, but credit cards and mobile payments have those too) As for "who's going to run the nodes"…

If by L2 you are referring to proof-of-stake, I don't think that technology can ever be made to work without needing to exist alongside a proof-of-work coin due to the "nothing at stake" issue.

No, I am not talking about PoS. One example of "Layer 2" is Lightning Network for Bitcoin. You "lock up" an amount of BTC in a channel that you can then use over the p2p onion-routed liquidity network. Payments are practically instant and fees are low (and can be made 0 if you open a direct channel with the counter-party).

It's orhogonal to consensus so works equally well on PoW/PoS.

There are a couple of competing and complimentary solutions for L2 on Ethereum. I'm quite sure it will converge at some point.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#287
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Okay. In what world would any retail consumer accept a Bitcoin-denominated account based on marginal Bitcoin reserves? Exchanges would be forced to purchase on the open market to meet their withdrawals during demand, which would cause another deflationary spiral. It’s a nightmare scenario with no conceivable upside compared to actual currency. And again, this is before we get to the problem of “the government lets yo…

I don't think you're following me. This isn't some hypothetical scenario. It's common for people who own bitcoin to have their bitcoins deposited at some exchange. Since exchange customers are unlikely to withdraw all their bitcoins simultaneously, exchanges don't have to keep 100% reserves. For instance, they can lend out some of the reserves, or they can use them for whatever purposes they want. When this happens the quantity of bitcoins in circulation goes up. To all effects and purposes, new bitcoins have been created and put in circulation.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you're living under an oppressive regime, they can freeze turning your crypto into state-approved currency at a whim, and you have the same problem.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#289
I don’t like how web3 supporters divide sentiment towards web3 into “you’re either a cool crypto-aware person or just a normie loser”. It comes off as a pressure tactic, like they’re trying desperately to sell something. This is a tactic used by charlatans, not by engineers.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choice is not a principle concept of decentralization. In decentralization the only quality that matters is degree of autonomy. If I need your common access point to send/receive content the system is highly centralized as autonomy is fully vested in the third party content host. The presence of choice only means there are multiple centralized systems not interconnecting. This is why the web is highly centralized des…

> In decentralization the only quality that matters is degree of autonomy. If I need your common access point to send/receive content the system is highly centralized as autonomy is fully vested in the third party content host. Things exist on a spectrum. I have autonomy to choose where to (e.g.) host my family photos, and even self-host on a VPS or even perhaps at home (either with a static IP or dynamic DNS). While…

Earth has multiple governments. Most governments are highly centralized. No oxymoron.

Autonomy is the ease with which people are free to move between those governments.

I suspect people view the web as decentralized because they cannot divorce their thinking from concepts like content is king and a client/server model.

Post reply on HN