The Web3 Fraud • Hacker News Board

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#141

Post by QuadrupleA » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:17 AM UTC

I once had a lot of excitement about it, but the closer I looked at and used "web3" tech the more I came to the conclusion this is all a big pump and dump scheme.

What's crypto been good for in its 10+ year span? Financing terrorism and ransomware, selling meaningless jpeg certificates of ownership, ICO scams, totally empty and greedy "number go up" speculation consuming the money and attention of potentially creative and productive fellow human beings, and Cryptokitties.

Meanwhile it's already irrevocably wasted, and continues wasting daily, tragic amounts of our world's resources and electricity.

Crypto is a cancer - it thrives because the earlier Ponzi participants are working overtime to hype it to the later ones, with mainly emotional and ideological appeals, plus plenty of technical handwaving. If you get deep enough down the rabbit hole technically and structurally, you discover basically what this article is saying.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#142

Post by vmception » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:18 AM UTC

jjnoakes wrote: post #109

vmception wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If blockchain is more expensive than cloud for you, the person that launched the product, then you architected your project wrong Blockchain products are write once, read free, persist forever for free. Your users pay to interact. Every SaaS funnel person knows that of you get users to pay at all then you have filtered the funnel to larger payments already. Blockchakn projects are that funnel in warp speed.

I disagree. The cost of just deploying my contract might pay for years of self hosting at current transaction rates. It might eventually amortize out to cheaper over many, many years, but that assumes no changes are ever needed. How likely is that?

You could use any other EVM or smart contract platform than Ethereum

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#143

Post by esjeon » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:19 AM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #5

I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot. And let’s keep in mind your reply to this comment will be using a trusted entity. In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user

> I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot.

Trust cannot solve the problem of giving too much power to trustee. The fact that IT giants are collecting people's data to manipulate people's mind is one good example. We should be able to control the level of trust we can provide to other parties.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#144

Post by Nursie » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:19 AM UTC

throwaway_2009 wrote: post #62

toomuchtodo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: The proponents of decentralized systems feel disenfranchised by those who own and govern centralized systems, therefore decentralized systems are their way around what they consider injustice. It is a grasp for control and power where they feel they have none. They don’t feel they have a seat at the table, so they argue for building their own table, which is, naturally, “superior” to the existing table (why…

Nah, it's about censorship-free finance vs censorable finance. If not for AML, KYC and basically the fact you just can't really use cash any more in significant sums for anything we wouldn't have had to bother. I have 200,000 bitcoin, or maybe I have 0.2, no-one knows other than me. Good.

KYC and AML are considered positives by most people, being great ways to cut down on fraud, make banking hard for criminal enterprises etc etc.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#145

Post by plokiju » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:20 AM UTC

sb057 wrote: post #92

Something that I think a lot of Web3 (and metaverse, et al) proponent types don't understand is that you can't plan out a revolutionary technology. By definition, any wide-reaching society-wide overturning of the current order will behave in ways you can't anticipate. For example, HTTP code 402 "Payment Required" was standardized in 1999 when the W3C anticipated that people would be paying for things over the web, bu…

Why do you feel they don’t understand that?

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#146

Post by rvz » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:20 AM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #52

rvz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot So that means HN really loved the .org takeover [0], and the price increases for .io [1] and now the holder of all our beloved trendy top level domains are going into the hands of the great Ethos Capital (again) who are going to do all of the above again. [2] /s Nothing terrible to see here folks, its for your own good! /s [0] https://news.…

Web3 wouldn’t stop that scenario from happening though.

Care to elaborate further as to why?

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#147

Post by miracle2k » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:21 AM UTC

jjnoakes wrote: post #88

miracle2k wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But no one else can use your app with the same guarantees you give to yourself, while also being able to share state with you.

Is that true though? If two people run self hosted apps that can communicate, all you have to verify is the data passing between. What assurances are you missing?

They can communicate, but if they want to agree on shared state between them, they have to solve the same problem that blockchains seek to solve, and the options available to you there are essentially on a spectrum of how many people are going to participate and to what extend you can vet them.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#148

Post by selestify » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #129

selestify wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One man's "venture capital" is another man's "actual websites and functionality." I would appreciate less subjective criticism of web3.

Okay, can you give me an example of some staple Web3 sites that exist today?

- Uniswap and Sushiswap allows you to trade different cryptos for one another. If you want to trade gold for some reason in a decentralized manner, you could do that by making trades between gold-pegged crypto and stablecoins

- Aave allows you to lend and borrow different crypto assets. If you wish to short a crypto, or if you wish to borrow against your portfolio so that you're spending fiat rather than your portfolio (a feature offered by traditional assets as well), this lets you do both of those.

- Tornado cash allows you to anonymize your Ethereum, because unfortunately Ethereum just doesn't have strong built-in privacy guarantees like Monero

- All the gambling websites. If gambling is illegal in your jurisdiction, but you'd like to gamble anyway, it's hard to stop you from doing so. Depending on your political sensibilities, this could be a good or bad thing. Personally, I say let adults do what they want, including making dumb decisions for themselves. (Of course, if you want to hide your tracks well, you'd probably want to use the aforementioned Tornado Cash.)

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#149

Post by bigmattystyles » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:23 AM UTC

v64 wrote: post #13

Many criticisms of blockchain apps, comparing their use cases to conventional technologies (databases, conventional separation of services such as that described in the article, etc) all seem to miss a major point: Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown. Immutability is important because it's guaranteed that no matter how many times you interact with a contract address, y…

One thing I don't get, maybe someone can shed some light; what happens if some trademarked content is added to the blockchain metadata or on something like arweave. If a DMCA comes in - from my reading, blockchains or ipfs stores won't take the item down, but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing. So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS? Sure, the item at the address is immutable, but you might not be able to get it. If that's accurate it's 'mostly' immutable, which is not immutable. Am I way off?

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#150

Post by selestify » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:25 AM UTC

jjnoakes wrote: post #125

selestify wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My self hosted apps run on immutable infrastructure and are replicated and load balanced What? Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country…

> You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. I'm my only user, that's why I'm discussing self-hosted apps here...

Ah, natural language. I'd interpreted you as meaning that you host the apps yourself rather than let someone do it for you (hence "self-hosting"), and you host these apps for others to use.

I mean, yes, but if your use case is only yourself as the sole user, that's quite different from the majority of businesses out there who need to service many users. This is truly like comparing apples and oranges.