Live data from Hacker News

Is Web3 Bullshit?

maxread.substack.com

311–320 of 383 posts

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#312
post #57
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…

there's middle ground people just choose to ignore it. So many similarities to the dot com bubble. As more time passes I truly feel I would have been one of the people who could spot out Amazon from the webvans and pets.coms. The strength in web3 is bitcoin and ipfs.

Bitcoin isn't really part of Web3 as it's just a currency. You realize this yes? If you really are betting on Web3 then be careful and be prepared for a lot more research.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#313
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings). In reality, non-deflationary cryptocur…

Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters. “If the stock community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary stock, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity?”

Early adopters in stocks are mostly the risk takers who funded or worked on the business to succeed.

That's not the same as forking something to do a pump and dump scheme.

Except DWAC perhaps, but that's already under investigation by the SEC. Which has no alternative in crypto land.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#314
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 hate…

I don't think capitalism is going anywhere. "Web3" might succeed but, absent a political fight, only if it can be assimilated into existing capital and power structures.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#315
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And conveniently they reserve for themselves double digit percentage amounts of future assets by the way of premine. The levels of hypocrisy in crypto are mind boggling.

And not a single one of the cryptocurrency developers in the entire enterprise has a single finance class under their belt. They are naïvely using pragmatic logic when they write their new distributed financial systems, yet finance does not follow pragmatic logic- it follows social and contractual agreements that are often nonpragmatic and nonlogical - as the contract holders intend. This entire concept is so ill for…

The capacity of crypto believers to ignore social and political context is limitless. It has to be, because if you bring that context into your thinking, all their hopes for the technology fall apart.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find have various definitions of what is a pyramid scheme. I agree that etherium is not a classic pyramid scheme, but for me it fits many criteria so I feel like it's a fair simple description accessible to anyone. I don't think etherium is necessarily a bad investment if you have no moral or are not well informed. Many scams can be profitable.

> I agree that etherium is not a classic pyramid scheme, but for me it fits many criteria so I feel like it's a fair simple description accessible to anyone I think you can only say this if you believe that the services provided by the Ethereum network are only valuable to individuals perusing illegitimate activities. Do you really think that there is not any legitimate use for Ethereum? > I don't think etherium is n…

Yes, yes, and yes.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#317
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more point from that article I noticed: in a section talking about taking on multiple projects, the author writes "This is how much of Hollywood works." How can you not think: well, if this is how much of Hollywood works now, isn't that proof that you don't need a blockchain for it?!

Not to mention that "how Hollywood works" is seriously problematic as it is. I'm not sure it should be replicated.

Add to that - it really is talking "how Hollywood works" - on the movie set. It disregards all that happen before and after and outside of movie set.

It also disregards that loads of projects/works are not "how Hollywood works".

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#318

As with a lot of cryptocurrency stuff, web3 is very overhyped yet also genuinely promising and useful. The ecosystem is not yet at a point where it's streamlined enough for mainstream adoption, but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3. Of course that does come at some cost and from a pure surface user experie…

> but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3. Do you have any examples? Because up to this point most web3 projects I've seen fall in one of two categories: "you could do this before" and/or "nobody actually wants this".

Don't forget "solves problem with blockchain that enables one of the first two"

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#319
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dogecoin is a copy+paste of bitcoin with a few config values changed. That's why it shares the inflationary model. The reason bitcoin is often described as deflationary is that many coins are lost, and the inflation is somewhat priced-in.

How is Bitcoin inflationary? Even without coin lossage (a ridiculous concept in any other financial system, short of literally setting your money on fire), the network is programmed to eventually stop minting coins. Fixed supply on increased demand (if it’s the economic substitute we’ve all been promised) is the precondition for deflationary movement. No amount of “pricing in” changes that.

I only meant that coins are still being created for now, so the proportion of coins that a specific person owns vs the total is constantly falling, like in any inflationary currency.

If you measure current ownership as a percentage of final issued coins rather than current issued coins, then you've already priced in the inflation.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#320
post #58

I have the impression that most comments here are either biased against cryptocurrencies or trying to push for them blindly. That's a bit sad considering we should at least be discussing the technology here. web3 is a marketing brand that defines a future version of web apps where the frontend is a compiled SPA possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) and where the backend is a decentralised blockchain (and…

why it has to be SPA?
Post reply on HN