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Web3 is going just great

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231–240 of 357 posts

Re: Web3 is going just great

#231

I find it both sad and funny watching folks discard efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems, and turn to a decentralized one and deal with the constant scams that such a system would obviously produce. Irreversible transactions, 90% wash trading, the hilariously bad idea of "smart contracts," and surprisingly inefficient core technology designed to become more wasteful as it scales. Who knows what the fut…

My favorite new thing are these metaverse land sales. Not like there's an infinite amount of land in a virtual world or anything...

Re: Web3 is going just great

#232
post #48

I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web. Consider this: if you are absolutely, 100% convinced that all of this is bogus, is going to go nowhere (despite the high number of talented individuals…

What net-beneficial applications of crypto would you suggest I look at if I wanted to re-evaluate my perspective on crypto? I was a very early crypto fan, loved talking about decentralized trustless networks, legal smart contracts, that kind of thing. But after years and years of just getting burned by the space being taken over by financial people spouting cultist rhetoric, the space has lost it's shimmer to me. Ask…

I guess maybe you didn't check out the site, since there's an article linked which is about exactly what you're describing: https://kotaku.com/ubisofts-nft-announcement-has-been-intens...

Re: Web3 is going just great

#233
post #198
post #48

I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web. Consider this: if you are absolutely, 100% convinced that all of this is bogus, is going to go nowhere (despite the high number of talented individuals…

Why do you thing HN and for example /r/programming communities are united in telling visitors that Web3 is scam, cryptocurrencies is a scam and so on? Maybe it's a time to stop and reflect on their opinion, instead of blindly listening to blatant lies? (before anyone writes indignant answer to me - for example "NFT facilitates decentralized proof of ownership" is a complete and utter lie in our face, "like "black is…

I honestly don't think anyone ever bought an NFT because "NFT facilitates decentralized proof of ownership".

Re: Web3 is going just great

#234
post #36

All the Web3 criticisms remind me of my experiences with Star Trek. For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art. But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host l…

So, that's a good argument for why you shouldn't dismiss a show or a thing in general based only on negative secondhand impressions. The lesson to takeaway is that you should judge a thing by its own quality, not by your negative impression of the fanbase. But from that, there is no way you should conclude that cynicism is wrong in general. You should not overreact to too much cynicism by discarding criticism entirel…

I think the GP is trying to say that there are some people who are so horrified by a few cringeworthy aspects of Star Trek that they want to create a huge blanket stigma against it to ensure that nobody watches it, and anybody who does watch it is buried in ridicule. Likewise, there are some people who react to blockchain scams and BS by trying to create a blanket stigma against anything related to the topic.

I haven't personally looked into blockchain or related ideas enough to get excited (I'm harder to excite now that I'm older, and I have less time) but sometimes I feel like I ought to, just because the flavor of the criticism reminds me of the smug nastiness that got directed towards people who were interested in things like computers and Star Trek when I was young. These nerds think they're onto something cool, and we have to mock them until they can't believe in it anymore. I almost feel like I should start learning the technology out of solidarity with the little kid I used to be who embraced computers despite knowing how hopelessly dorky that made him.

Of course the concept of nerdiness has been socially rehabilitated since the 1980s, and now the stigma is nominally directed towards scams and environmental waste, but the people delivering the stigma have designed the blast radius to work pretty much the same. The entire topic is stigmatized, any interest or optimism is stigmatized. I think the history of computing and the internet shows that it's hopeless to try to disentangle the utopian hope for social transformation from the grifting and greed. Scam artists can smell the hope for progress and transformation like sharks can smell blood; it means a meal for them. It's a crude distortion to argue that either optimism or greed alone properly characterizes "web3" without the other. When we look back twenty years from now they'll both be part of the story, whether these ideas fizzle out or have a transformative impact or something in between.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#235
post #219
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speaking of disingenuous, since when is log4j “web 2.0”? Let's assume Web 2.0 is 2008 to the present day. Every single big corp I worked at during that time was a Java shop (serving via Tomcat/Jetty), and log4j is ubiquitous in every Java shop. Minecraft (a gaming epitome of Web 2.0), basically blew up because of Log4j.

So your definition of “web 2.0” includes every programming language and library used to build web 1 or 2 apps, along with all kinds of other things? That’s quite the stretch — and it’s telling that you’re only using that as a negative to attack things which you don’t have a personal financial stake in. I don’t imagine you’d like it if every vulnerability in some library used by a blockchain-related project was billed…

Sorry, but I think you're arguing from such bad faith, not sure if this conversation is redeemable. Imo, Log4j is as part of web2 as technologies like MongoDb or AJAX/XMLHttpRequest. Arguing the opposite is just completely nuts. I mean, Play Framework (a staple of Web 2.0 Java & Scala), uses Log4j implicitly[1]. Have you written any Web2 apps in Java? It doesn't seem like you have.

> The Play logger is built on Log4j. Since most Java libraries use Log4j or a wrapper able to use Log4j as a backend, you can easily configure logging that is well-suited to your application.

[1] https://www.playframework.com/documentation/1.2.x/logs

Re: Web3 is going just great

#236
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is blockchain is a test to see if humans will set their own home on fire, while they're still living it, for the promise of a quick buck. Promoted by people who think government is a terrible idea, an idea so terrible that literally every large group of people invented it. Of course if I had mined some bitcoin when it was new, I'd be telling you how great it was to ensure my own profits

I wouldn't say large groups of people invent governments. I think they arise from infighting between small groups of people and then a majority of people that didn't really care much about what was being fought about are just "ok with it". I don't know if government is a terrible idea, but if you agree that monopolies are a terrible idea then maybe at least you should give people against the concept of a government s…

There's no large functioning society without government though, it appears to be the natural stable state.

If you want to gather 100,000 of your most random friends and try a new idea though, that's great.

But history suggests you'll invent government.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#237
post #68
post #18

I hate this web3 bs as much as the next guy But, this seems more a list of people doing stupid shit with blockchain-y things, and not an argument against it as a whole. That doesn't distinguish blockchain that much from other technologies (e.g. consider WWW during the hype of dot-com bubble). I pretty much believe its all absolute bullshit, but picking some egregious examples, while amusing, doesn't really show that.

My mouse hovered over the downvote button given your language here, but I understand that web3 has become this insanely emotional issue, so here's a comment instead: for every moronic ponzi scheme in crypto, there's one community that will blow your mind with their creativity and spirit. They're out there. Just consider the possibility that not all of it is crap, and that parts of it will play a significant role in o…

There's a funny parallel between conspiracy theorists "do your own research, there answers are out there" and crypto proponents "it's not all nonsense, if you look into it further, there's good stuff out there".

And yet neither group are forthcoming enough to offer up the examples themselves. It feels like an invitation to indoctrinate yourself.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#238

These really well built "web3 is dumb" sites seem like peak Streisand Effect, I'm baffled so many people are spending so much time yelling about something they think has "no use-case" and is already doomed to fail...

People will keep complaining about web3 until it stops being stuffed down our unwilling throats.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#239
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What net-beneficial applications of crypto would you suggest I look at if I wanted to re-evaluate my perspective on crypto? I was a very early crypto fan, loved talking about decentralized trustless networks, legal smart contracts, that kind of thing. But after years and years of just getting burned by the space being taken over by financial people spouting cultist rhetoric, the space has lost it's shimmer to me. Ask…

Take a look at Loot project by Dom Hof (the creator of vine, but now mostly known for Loot...:) It is exactly how you describe, but so so much more: why limit your Halo / skyrim character to one game world when you could take it into any other format and play with it there? NFT composability is a huge topic and extremely exciting in terms of these optionalities. Again: https://www.lootproject.com/ Also see my comment…

None of that requires anything provided by a blockchain, but does require significant effort by developers to form consensus around formats, representations, and access[0].

[0] one could just decide to ignore the NFT after all, or mint their own NFTs for the same asset.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instrumentalizing a show whose essential message was that living in a post-scarcity society is possible and where people pursue their interests genuinely rather than in the name of economic gain to make a case for crypto is so on brand with the actual post we're commenting on you could put it directly on the website Let's just listen to the man himself for a second, while we're talking about star trek and money: http…

It's even more ironic, because the entire point of NFTs is to create artificial scarcity in an environment without scarcity (the digital world). I guess you could argue that NFTs isn't the main aspect of cryptocurrencies, and I think you'd be right, but I find cryptocurrency projects in general seem to lean heavily into the scarcity aspect, and promise that early adopters will be able to cash in that scarcity later.

> I guess you could argue that NFTs isn't the main aspect of cryptocurrencies

Not even a major aspect. Just like neither are the main aspect(s) of Web3.

Despite what con artists and puppet farms on Reddit and Twitter are pushing.

(The web3 moniker in its current form came years before the first NFT contract)

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