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Web3 is going just great

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Re: Web3 is going just great

#331

Post by bradnickel »

stevebmark wrote: post #97

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…

I find it sad and funny watching folks use this tired argument that forget how filled with scams the current financial system is. A good 3/4 of dotcom, penny stocks, boiler rooms, and even highly regarded stocks like Nikola prove that it doesn't matter where it is, money attracts scams and the SEC and others do nothing to prevent it. Try not living in such a naive world longing for a nanny state that doesn't/can't exist at least to protect people before the fact. Try owning responsibility for your financial existence. We'll still be here growing and taking on the financial world that exists to leech upon the naive and empowering people to create their own wealth and comfort.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#332

Post by orange8 »

Yizahi wrote: post #327
orange8 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: passwords The very same way your online bank account facilitates "proof of ownership" of that said bank account.

Lolno. You are completely mistaken about what ownership means. I don't own my bank account (it's complicated), I don't own my HN account. Password is only used to authenticate and authorize me on the digital property owned by someone else - PG or bank corporation.

You do own your hacker news account. If someone hacks into your computer, and makes stupid comments while pretending to be you, you have every right to seek compensation. Because you actually OWN your hacker news account, in the very same way you OWN the house you are renting. Your landlord cannot just rock up to your house tomorrow, walk in and sit in your yard for an hour because they "own" the house. So yes, you are right! Ownership is and can be complicated, and NFT ownership is no different. ;)

Re: Web3 is going just great

#333

Post by orange8 »

hiq wrote: post #322
orange8 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why do you think people buy NFTs?

My guess (because i cannot mind-read all NFT buyers), is its mostly speculation[1] 1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/speculation.asp

Re: Web3 is going just great

#334

Post by acdha »

guntars wrote: post #297
acdha wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don’t forget offline sales, too – the profit margin on one person buying a $60k SUV pays for a ton of ad sales, which is why you see so many ads for big ticket items.

Direct cost efficiency isn’t the only factor: I think site operators value the simplicity of not needing a relationship with each visitor (especially internationally) or needing to ask permission to access content, and visitors like that they don’t have a taxi meter ticking as they browse around.

I’m definitely not saying the system is perfect but any time something is this resistant to change I would assume it’s better at a factor we’re not considering. Ads certainly aren’t perfect and the major publishers would drop Google/Facebook in a heartbeat if they thought they could afford it, so I would look at proposed replacements from that perspective.

A blockchain based system has a few obvious challenges but the biggest one for me is the assumption that enough people don't like ads enough to pay a comparable amount of money & deal with thinking about transactions. That experiment has been tried enough times that I think the failures are an important lesson about revealed consumer preferences.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#335

Post by acdha »

sergiotapia wrote: post #112

Justin Kan of Twitch fame just started a new startup for NFTs, I wonder what drove him into this? I don't get it. It smells and feels like a grift where people are pretending it's not because they have nfts they want to appreciate and then dump.

One thing I remember from the dotcom and real estate bubbles was that it took much longer than I expected between something being obviously unsustainable and actually popping. Just as now, there were people talking about how the rules were completely different and you were a fool if you didn’t buy in because someone else was certain to pay even more soon.

They were right about that, until they weren’t.

This feels like a more extreme version of both. There were a lot of dotcoms which could at least have been plausible businesses with better management (pets.com & Kozmo cost to mind) and overpaying for a house at least meant you had somewhere to live but a cryptocurrency has no utility unless you talk it up to a buyer.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#336

Post by danlugo92 »

haswell wrote: post #108
danlugo92 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please walk me through the steps to buy any US security, say some Apple stock, btw I'm Venezuelan. Here's the steps to buy bitcoin: 1) Create wallet 2) Buy from anyone in the world who wants to sell.

The mechanics of buying have very little to do with market dynamics. It doesn't matter if I can acquire bitcoin telepathically if the market is such that early adopters hold all of the power.

That's like saying don't buy Apple stock because you didn't get in in the 80s lol.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#337

Post by danlugo92 »

jimjimjim wrote: post #93
danlugo92 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10+ mins, overpaying for the fees This is what lightning will fix. > If that is 'web3', C'mon, don't argue in bad faith, Bitcoin is not web3 just like AJAX is not web2.0. Web3 can and should be built atop bitcoin lightning, but bitcoin can exist separately.

> This is what lightning will fix. when?

It's only a layer 2 to the most secure financial system on the planet, it surely should have taken only 3 months to accomplish!

It's still in beta/alpha, it works but it sometimes loses the channels, it doesn't lose your BTC however.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#338

Post by carlosdp »

ShamelessC wrote: post #267
acdha wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not so much proposing a word rather than trying to take over a popular one in an effort to shed the negative reputation which years of failure had given your first one. It’s not surprising that people who work on the web don’t want their hard work being coopted to bail the cryptocurrency guys out of a mess they talked themselves into.

Exactly. The crypto community co-opted "Web 3.0" as "requires crypto to use the web" but didnt realize how tonedeaf they were being because of the echo chamber they put themselves in. The reality is that programming work surrounding payments and/or finance is going to be deeply unappealing to most devs as it is incredibly dry and extremely tedious.

I'm a dev/CTO full-time in Web3, we work on smart contracts and all that, we spend 0 time thinking about payments and finance. You're talking about DeFi, there's a LOT more stuff in web3 now that can only be classified as finance as much as any startup that uses Stripe to collect money can be classified as "finance".

Re: Web3 is going just great

#339

Post by carlosdp »

acdha wrote: post #192
carlosdp wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This literally sounds like the whole "your gay marriage is ruining my marriage, just by existing" argument, but for the web. Like, what are we talking about here?

Something called “web” should use web technologies and culture? This feels like if the Git developers had tried to call it Web 3 — irrespective of the merits of the tool, it’s weird to present your business as the successor to a community you’re not part of.

How are we not part of the web community? Literally everything in web3 is built on the web using web technology and web primitives. Hell, our standards processes are even inspired by W3C/RFC process.

I also challenge the notion web3 is a "sucessor" to the web. I wouldn't call web 2.0 (the social web) a "successor", it didn't replace anything. It's just a descriptor for a different user/product relationship.

Web 1 -> read only Web 2 -> read/write (comments, primarily user-generated content) Web 3 -> read/write/own (users "own" the content)

Re: Web3 is going just great

#340

Post by carlosdp »

ShamelessC wrote: post #274
carlosdp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At that level, lawyers should be involved on both sides anyway and your $20K fee is better spent on proper legal services to get it done. Escrow.com is notoriously expensive. Yea so, that's kinda the point of what he's saying. Why is it that a domain transfer for $2M is so much more expensive than one for $2? Intermediaries. Smart contracts eliminate the intermediary. Whether you are selling for $2 or $2M, it's gun…

You seem knowledgeable so maybe you can help me with this. So you said: > Smart contracts eliminate the intermediary. Whether you are selling for $2 or $2M, it's gunna cost the same small fee (and the fee is going to be negligible within a year). Okay, fair enough intermediaries suck. Let's replace them with smart contracts. But what happens if there was a bug in the smart contract? What happens when a situation such…

That's entirely fair, but the perspective of those in web3 is that this property exists on a spectrum.

The present day incumbent side of that spectrum is that the DNS registrar could decide one day to just take your domain from you, and there's not much you could do about it. Sure, you could sue, but that takes time and meanwhile your business could be ruined.

A more concrete example of this is social handles. Earlier this week, there was a story about a girl that had the Instagram handle @metaverse, and Facebook decided to just take it from her with no recourse.

Our contention is that shouldn't be possible.

But here's the thing: if you prefer to have a centralized entity control your assets just like today, you have the choice to do that! Everyone that has their assets on Coinbase today is making that choice, and that's totally fine.

The big innovation is, they can decide at any time to take custody of it themselves if they want, or move it to another centralized holder! Just like you have the choice to leave your money in the bank, or you can withdraw it to cash and keep it in a safe in your house. We're just giving users that same choice for digital assets.

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