Live data from Hacker News

Is Web3 Bullshit?

maxread.substack.com

361–370 of 383 posts

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#361
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.…

With the added benefit every transaction you do with a "persona" isn't on a blockchain that almost everyone has access to into perpetuity.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#362
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…

Given how Wall Street has turned out, I think many would argue that a lack of finance degrees is a plus, not a negative.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number 1 choice of criminals is still and will always be fiat. It doesn't require any sophisticated tools or knowledge and is accepted everywhere. The 'crypto is for criminals' narrative has been debunked so many times, but if you still need convincing just look how crime infested traditional banking is in comparison: https://youtu.be/f8iPIV9cBAs

Do you think that the ratio of legitimate uses to criminal use is higher or lower for crypto vs fiat?

They're both currencies. The possible uses are the same.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#364
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where the frontend is a compiled SPA This is pretty much just the same thing we do today, but wait... > possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) We can use a filesystem that is extremely slow, and also loses all our files if we stop paying AWS to mirror them in S3! > the backend is a decentralised blockchain And we can use a really slow database where each write costs $100s in gas fees! ... see, much bette…

Decentralisation is hard - never told the contrary. However, transaction "gas" fees with some chains (Polygon, Solana) are less than 1 cent and you probably know that. You can pay as much with DynamoDB if you don't optimise anything (and reads are free with the chains, still costly with DynamoDB). Of course, you can say that AWS is overpriced too... maybe that's just inflation going on.

1 cent per write to a database is insanely expensive, and no, you can't pay that much for DynamoDB. DynamoDB is free tier for 10 writes/read per second.

If you go with AWS's most expensive option for access (DynamoDB on-demand, infrequent access), the pricing is $1.56 per million write request units. That's 0.000156 cents per write. That doesn't include data storage, but that ranges between 10 and 25 cents per month, per GB.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#365

> 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 tha…

> Let me tell you my story of independently "discovering" the concept now being called Web3 Alright, listening... > 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 You are describing dislikes, reviews, stars and similar systems. They exist. They are pretty universally considered bad and when they are not it is not beca…

>You are describing dislikes, reviews, stars and similar systems.

No. Not crowdsource. Remember this is to counter the effects of social media.

I mean that every moment of video is fingerprinted, and it's providence back to creator is noted, and the trustworthiness of that creator is reported. The purpose is to counter fake news and deep fakes. So if NYTimes created the video - good truth. If NYTimes showed a video they found on the internet - less good score. Still good since I'm trusting NYTimes to vet source.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. As soon as I first heard about web3 I thought did I miss web2?

Web 2 was the idea of user generated content and commenting etc - digg/reddit, twitter, youtube etc have no content of their own (c.f. a news website or whatever) but everything there came from the users. Now it seems obvious and not worthy of a label, but at least at the time I guess it kinda captured the imagination and people imagined new/different ways to do things (I think it also coincided with a lot better too…

To me web3 is financializing internet activities all the way down.

Web3 was data. The money/asset/whatever was still going through classical channels.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#367
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Not open to you.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way to create "unbacked" bitcoin. You either have the transaction outputs pointing at your wallet address on the public blockchain, or you do not. Nobody wants or will accept FedBTC.

Celsius offers interest-bearing bitcoin accounts which they use to do margin lending, so this already exists.

Said lending is denominated in stablecoins, not BTC. It's secured with a crypto, but that's not relevant. Unlike fractional reserve (which was the topic under discussion), this does not result in an increase to the money supply. No new BTC is created.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#369
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. This is a constant issue I have with crypto advocates. Most of the use cases can be done with crypto, but also with other techs (sometimes it's as simple as "we need a database for this"). But there's never a serious analysis of why those use cases have not been covered with previous tech, and when you point out that there might be issues other than the…

I love pointing out that if it becomes a serious currency banks would offer bitcoin-denominated loans (causing an increase in money supply); and if there's then a credit crunch the Fed could offer bitcoin-denominated (but unbacked) bonds. It would be like the gold standard all over again.

Would be great to go back to the gold standard.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#370
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why you think this is the case. It's close to impossible (good luck convincing people to devalue their money) to increase the Bitcoin supply other than through minig.

Loans create “virtual money” in a way, which does contribute to inflation (in fact, controlling lending is a primary way the federal reserve controls inflation)

This is why loans, except out of pure charity and nothing expected in return other than the principal, are immoral and cause chaos and destruction as we've seen time and time again. There's a reason Islam prohibits money lending with interest. Same with Judaism and Christianity before they got corrupted.
Post reply on HN