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Is Web3 Bullshit?

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Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#321

Post by legutierr »

speedgoose wrote: post #316
legutierr wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ah, well, that’s certainly a timeless way to end a conversation, to call your interlocutor a dumb jerk!

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#322

Post by [deleted] »

woodruffw wrote: post #292
lottin wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I hope that I'm not following, because what you just described is both crazy and illegal. Cryptocurrencies are currently considered securities under US law. You can't just pop unrealized securities into existence when a prospective investor asks you for them: it's akin to naked shorting. That's why the stock market has "market makers," i.e. firms that provide low-latency settlement of securities in exchange for a sma…

[deleted]

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#324

Post by [deleted] »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #236
flooow wrote: 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…

Exactly. I would consider a token that follows something like Friedman's k-percent rule ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman's_k-percent_rule ), a legitimate token. A token like this would jettison its pyramidal character. If it took off, it might convince me that there is value beyond scamming late adopters. I haven't seen any gaining much traction however.

[deleted]

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#325

Post by brightstep »

adenozine wrote: post #177

I think a lot of web3 products thus far are bullshit, but I can't deny the sort of eventual absolution of re-federating the internet. Things can't continue to FAANG forever. The ever-marching disappearance of offline-only humans also points towards a higher standard of understanding for the average internet user. Someday everybody might run their cloud or at least be involved in a direct way somehow

A new technology will not kill FAANG. What supports them is not "web2", it is a social and political structure. To defeat them requires working in, or around, those structures.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#326

Post by ianm98 »

mypastself wrote: post #44
_se0c wrote: 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.…

I often feel like I’m missing a key piece of technological or intellectual insight when I read bullish articles like the linked one. I cannot see a single use-case in there that would definitively be improved by the use of blockchain, and in most cases, I’d expect the opposite to happen.

What do you think about cryptocurrency enabled sports betting and prediction markets? There's a pretty clear technical path to these replacing traditional sports betting market makers and I personally cannot wait. Current market makers like DraftKings still put out betting lines with insane spreads, because in the US atleast, their markets are protected by regulatory capture.

This [1] is one of the projects I have my eye on in this space but there is many that are starting to get to work now that a lot of the technical issues around Oracles are being sorted out.

1. https://www.betdex.com/ * No affiliation

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#327

Post by nazgulnarsil »

The crypto ecosystem does have a killer app. Just not one people are eager to talk about. The vast majority who know about it are making money off it. It is a subsidized casino. Casinos are wildly popular even though they take 5% of the betting flow. How popular would a casino that on average pays out 5% be? Where is the 5% coming from? Three sources: money launderers, scammers (tether etc), and longer term speculators, in order of size. Money laundering traditionally takes something like a 30% haircut. Taking only a 5% haircut in crypto is a massive improvement and thus we should expect to see a substantial fraction of all the world's money laundering to move on chain. The other two are self explanatory.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#328

Post by legutierr »

realce wrote: post #196
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #190

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.

> Crypto represents nothing and is backed by nothing other than sunk-cost.

Maybe sometimes. However, if a token is used to pay for blockchain services (such as shared-compute and -data services), the value of the token is at least in part based on the value of those services.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#329

Post by austincheney »

throw0101a wrote: post #303
austincheney wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Earth has multiple governments. Most governments are highly centralized. No oxymoron. But you wouldn't say that the governing of Earth in total is centralized (e.g., the UN (with their black helicopters/s)). Going back to my link: > As its name implies, decentralized systems don’t have one central owner. Instead, they use multiple central owners, each of which usually stores a copy of the resources users can access…

You are confusing terms. Centralization is a noun describing a verb, centralize, which means to come towards a collective center, for example a cult. The verb, the action, has nothing to do with a philosophical concept of a total center.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#330

Post by dbmikus »

JohnFen wrote: post #202
legutierr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data. Previously, you could run your own webserver, your own email server, etc, and you could trust your own data, but other people collaborating with you would need to trust you to manage that data, and trust that you hadn’t man…

> But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data. But that's not a new capability. You can do that with existing tech. At most, it seems to me, what blockchains introduce is convenience, but it comes with a pretty heavy cost in terms of computational resources.

pBFT research existed since the 90s, but I'm not sure if they had good leader election mechanisms or an incentive to participate as a node.
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