The Web3 Fraud

Immutability and resistance to shutdown are not features that the vast majority of apps, present and in the future, will ever need. My main dispute with the original article is that the author argues every single use case of a Web3 app can be done with a traditional app, and I argue that's simply not true. The case where that breaks down is precisely when your app requires immutability and resistance to shutdown.

To use an analogy: Most people will never need to own or use an armored car, and if you evaluated an armored car based on its viability as a consumer vehicle, you would say that its fuel requirements and maintenance costs are impractical, because you don't need the assurance of having a bulletproof vehicle in your everyday life. It would be overkill.

Similarly, these Web3 technologies are not being designed to replace YouTube or Facebook. If you're building a service like that, you don't need the armored car. On the other hand, if you're designing an app that performs financial transactions, then the armored car may be something you can use. Or not! But the option is there.

99% of developers will never need to build an app this way. But there are use cases outside of ponzi schemes and fraud that seem to be overlooked and which I think are worth drawing attention to.

The supply of ledger space is limited. When demand for that space not only goes up, but keeps going up, what does economics tell us happens to the price? I keep giving example after example of what people use this ledger space for, but all anyone every says is "Oh, but it's just moving tokens around." I have yet to see anyone say how that's any different from the stock market just moving fiat around. Deflection, deflection, deflection. Who's refusing to engage with the conversation now?

> and purely serves to benefit people who invested first (like MLM)

That is simply not true, and I've given example after example of the use cases that benefit the people using the chain. But after every explanation, you still resort to "Oh but I don't use it, so it must be an MLM." You haven't engaged at all with any of my points, you just keep repeating your own. Who's reframing the conversation now?

> When confronted about the possibility of all of it being a scam, your only response was "caveat emptor".

When confronted about the possibility of any single smart contract being a scam, my only response is "caveat emptor," yes. Because that's the whole point. You can't have censorship resistance without having this phenomenon.

But when it comes to the possibility of the whole thing being a scam, that's clearly ridiculous and as I've said, I've refuted it many times over. The next few sentences of your comment are just more of the same, so I'm not going to bother refuting every individual sentence.

> When people say that's stupid, you resort to "well that's fine, I didn't want your money anyways".

Yes, all people ever do is to call it "stupid" without backing their argument up. You said it yourself.

> This is a textbook scam

And by implication, I'm one of the scammers then, aren't I? And you expect me to respond to such accusations politely and demurely?

> your rhetoric will perpetually be at odds with the rest of the discussion unless you engage them on their own terms.

"On their own terms" meaning that we accept the premise that it's a scam? So you don't want a discussion, you just want me to affirm your pre-existing beliefs.

> I can imagine that you don't see yourself as "losing" these arguments, since you haven't even responded to them in the first place.

I notice you still haven't named any alternative technologies in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588753 . You say "decentralization doesn't need the blockchain," implying that the blockchain doesn't really do much for decentralization. I respond asking for any other alternative that does what crypto does, and gave an example of a major decentralized platform that was only possible because of crypto. Once again, you're backed into a corner, and all you do is refuse to respond, and then deflect and project your own loss onto me. I rest my case.

Yes, that would cut off most of the fiat on/off ramps, but your assets there are still untouched. You could still, if you wanted, go to another country that hasn't banned crypto and exchange it for other assets in those countries. That's far different from the US freezing your US bank account, in which case it doesn't matter which country you go to, your assets are still locked in the US bank.

And even in the US, I'm sure there will still be people on the street willing to exchange cash for crypto, albeit obviously at a markup. Like I said elsewhere, we've been unable to stop the billion dollar drug trade. What makes you think we will be able to completely stop a trillion dollar crypto market from within our borders?

> There's no need to take down every node; I can't see how any of those translate to killer features for this reason.

Because you need to take down every node (or prevent anyone in your country from accessing any node) before the smart contracts stop executing. So long as that's the case, it's a killer feature for anyone who is concerned about traditional financial services shutting them off. You can't see how any of these are killer features because that is presumably not you.

> For PGP, I don't understand why the user isn't encrypting them on their own machine. That seems like an incredible waste to implement encryption in a smart contract.

I didn't mean that PGP would be implemented on the smart contracts, I meant that functionality wouldn't change from under you like they did with the darknet markets. The functionality you see in a smart contract is the functionality you get, and it'll stay that way forever unless you built your smart contract to allow for such change in the future.

> As far as sanctions go, the fact that criminals and ransomware and other fraudsters can't be stopped or sanctioned is an anti-feature if you ask me.

That's fine. It's a feature for others. In other words, it creates value for people who are not you.

> but at that point it's the same niche that Tor fits into.

Well yes, I do strongly believe this is the case. Which is why I make repeated references to Tor. Do you also think that Tor's strong anonymity guarantees protecting pedophiles is an anti-feature too?

Only the compiled contract itself.

Right?