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Web3 is going just great

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Re: Web3 is going just great

#291

Post by ShamelessC »

guntars wrote: post #277
ShamelessC wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, that's the whole problem with the approach though. Paywalls are shitty. Nobody wanted that to happen except for the money-men. It's for this very reason that if an article gets linked here and has a pay-wall, a few volunteers will go hunt down a free version of the article and post it on archive.org for everyone else to view. You may see this as flawed - but I see it as beautiful. The way the "good parts" of the…

So you'd rather choose privacy invading ads just because it's technically not a paywall? I'll take microtransactions every time. In fact, I'll argue that the current state of the internet can be directly attributed to content producer's inability to directly monetize their work so they have had to find an indirect way to get paid. Information can be copied almost for free, but it still takes a fixed amount of work to…

Those are decent points. I'll admit to some dormroom philosophizing in my original comment.

Moving on:

> So you'd rather choose privacy invading ads just because it's technically not a paywall? I'll take microtransactions every time.

Surely there is some middle ground there? I find _both_ ends of that spectrum deplorable. At least with the freemium model I can bring my own ad blocker. But no, I don't "choose privacy invading ads". I accept that the current internet has flaws. You understand that cryptocurrency is going to get co-opted by mainstream elites and the top 1% though, right? Sometimes I feel like I'm watching history repeat itself.

> the current state of the internet can be directly attributed to content producer's inability to directly monetize their work so they have had to find an indirect way to get paid.

I agree and I think the causation is actually reversed; the internet has enabled cheap copying of 0's and 1's since its inception. This has of course caused all sorts of issues and I agree that content creators should have a more direct way to monetize their work.

What I don't see is how NFT's enable that. Yes, they enable a content creator to collect currency from a one-time transaction, or perhaps a smart contract setup to provide a commission. But; the file contents are not actually encrypted anywhere. So ad-based websites can still easily steal content and profit from it. Further, even if they were; it would be ad-based networks buying the best content as they can afford to.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#293

Post by adam_arthur »

Can't wait for the crypto bubble to pop so can stop hearing about it.

No intrinsic value = doomed to fail. Crypto has crashed 80% even when economy was otherwise strong. Imagine what it would have done during the GFC?

It's inevitable the entire leveraged, lending, shitcoin, tokens, whatever will epically collapse. Because at the end of the day they are useless bits on a machine that provide no real world value. When shit hits the fan people will come to this conclusion and sell it first above any other asset.

Every "use case" is just a self referential web of perfectly valid technology obscuring the fact that there is no intrinsic value in the application or tie to the real world.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#294

Post by dwaite »

pcwalton wrote: post #54
DantesKite wrote: post #13

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…

> It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. It's easy for me to make that case. Ransomware aside, there's no underlying value in cryptocurrency, unlike currencies which have the full faith and credit of governments. This is a fundamental problem that I see no way around.

Thats the rub - a currency which you can't actually spend is more of a speculative investment. A currency which you can only exchange for other more stable currencies even more so.

When you try to take a digital currency and exchange it for digital items and digital ownership, you do so in a realm where "information wants to be free" - ownership of data is not often as interesting a concept as you want.

Finally, when you try to exchange digital currency for physical goods, you start to realize ownership itself only means anything as part of the existing legal constructs - a distributed ledger "title" will only be valid when the government says it is, and a successfully executed smart contract can be effectively overturned by a judge's order.

The parties/exchanges that don't acknowledge any of this and push the decentralized, out-of-government-control messaging seem like they are tending to be the ones who are structured corporately to be highly resistant to being taken to court over false claims by their customers/victims.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#296

Post by Kronosfear »

fab1an wrote: post #68
bawolff wrote: 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…

If such a community existed, you would have linked it as an example here.

inb4 "Do your own research"

Re: Web3 is going just great

#297

Post by guntars »

acdha wrote: post #284
guntars wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the proponents of the "efficient, regulated, centralized financial systems" I want to ask - why can't I pay $0.10 to a random paywalled site to access a single article?

Because an advertiser will pay more and most people don't want to pay anything? There's a technical problem of handling micropayments but those are a lot smaller than the social/business problems: think about what the experience would be like clicking around with “Please deposit $0.25 to continue” prompts, and whether sites would bother with that when Google will give them a check every month for less work. Google ha…

Why pays the advertiser? More often than not it's me and you when we buy something online, even if we never click on ads. Advertisement is just another cost of doing business and it's built into the price. I can't imagine paying for content via all these middlemen would be more efficient than paying for it directly. That said, what's different is who's doing the paying and I suspect that a small minority of users are paying for everyone.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#298

Post by dontreact »

ipaddr wrote: post #215
dontreact wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's going to happen when people start trying to retire by selling crypto? Many people will be selling at the same time, and suddenly the subjective value for everyone will be lower because it will be easier and easier to buy it. My sense is that there is a cap on the demand for purchasing crypto, but the supply is very low because mining decreases over time, and generally people holding lots of crypto are younger…

The value of whatever coin you have may go down. Planning a retirement around a lottery ticket is fun but you still stuff your retirement fund. Bitcoin slows down ensuring it's value continues to increase with fewer buyers. Proper retirement planning means moving from 100% risky in your 20s to 50/50 in your 40s to 10/90 in your 60s.

What happens when people start generally moving away from crypto towards less risky assets as they age? This hasn’t started yet but it will

Re: Web3 is going just great

#299

Post by artursapek »

AlexandrB wrote: post #251
artursapek wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone making the "crypto is killing the environment" argument is basically just regurgitating a trope they read in the corporate media. Pretty obvious red flag.

Great. What's the counterargument? Just because it's a trope doesn't mean it's not true. PoW is insanely inefficient compared to traditional database technology, doesn't actually replace "the banking system" (so both have to run at the same time), and in practice only provides theoretical decentralization since most people invest in crypto through intermediaries.

web3/Metamask apps like NFT marketplaces are generally used with a wallet (software or hardware+software) which the end user is custodian of; not a third party.

Much of the crypto space is moving towards Proof of Stake, including Ethereum. These critics also fail to ever mention that.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#300

Post by fastball »

pbourke wrote: post #253
fastball wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is web3 not a new approach to building web apps? You might disagree with the approach, but using blockchain as the backend for an app is very different from previous iterations of the web.

There have been plenty of new backend approaches since the term Web 2.0 was minted. The important change was a shifting from one request per view to multiple requests that comprise a view: it was the client/server interaction patterns that were important. The fact that you build your “web 3” application using Web 2.0 techniques (SPAs, etc) tells me that web 3 is not a thing. It’s another type of backend, and the web…

So if you specifically craft a definition to exclude web3 from being a new paradigm for the web, it (surprisingly) is not a new paradigm for the web.

Interesting and constructive.

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