Live data from Hacker News

Why Web3?

avc.com

81–90 of 706 posts

Re: Why Web3?

#81
post #29

Global finance will eventually be eclipsed by large-scale economic planning systems. It will probably take a couple decades for finance to go the way of alchemy, but the signs of its irrelevance are there: hilarious schemes like SPACs, DeFi, NFTs. Totally divorced from the underlying economics.

Interesting take. I’m not sure many would agree with you. Care to expand or point us somewhere where your ideas are expanded?

Re: Why Web3?

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which coins have confirmation times that low with the volume of Bitcoin?

The volume has nothing to do with the confirmation time, it's a constant no matter if it's 1 or 10000 transactions. Avalanche, Algorand, Polygon and more fits the bill of very fast transactions, in case you're interested in looking into the matter further.

Nothing can promise constant performance at infinite volume. 10,000 transactions are a tiny number for most modern and popular products these days.

Re: Why Web3?

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain that business model?

One company controls the specification and reference implementation. These gimmicks tend to be "open" so contributions can flow in from anywhere, but the company has full priority and benefits by controlling the pace and final result. Outsider contributions are submitted publicly, while features developed by the company start in secret and can remain secret as long as possible. The company's contributions are rammed…

Except all these things can be trivially forked. If you don't like how the VC one is doing things, just fork it. There are a billion forks of everything in the crypto space, for exactly this reason.

Re: Why Web3?

#84
> Frankly, it is all too much for me.

Same. I've been actively unfollowing people on Twitter every day to clean my feeds of it. I'm not anti-web3 or anti-crypto, but I definitely don't need to read the same rhetoric from 100 people a day.

Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

Re: Why Web3?

#85

> Frankly, it is all too much for me. Same. I've been actively unfollowing people on Twitter every day to clean my feeds of it. I'm not anti-web3 or anti-crypto, but I definitely don't need to read the same rhetoric from 100 people a day. Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

Crypto seems to attract a lot of high minded hot air as far as social media goes.

Re: Why Web3?

#86

I'm not convinced. People talk grand about "permissionless data" but I fail to see any practical applications. NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures. All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain. DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2"…

> NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures

I'm not one to ever defend NFTs, but this is not right. Suppose I bought an extremely trendy natural number k ∈ ℤ and I have a signature σ from its inventor that says "doomrobo owns k". Suppose in a year the trend has passed and I'd like to sell k. How do I transfer ownership to someone else? Clearly sending σ doesn't suffice, since σ is public. Do I need a new signature?

Ok different setup: σ is actually a signature from me and the inventor saying "the non-inventor pubkey that signed of this message is the owner of k". How do I transfer σ now? Do I send my signing secret key? Who makes sure I deleted my copy of the signing key?

Re: Why Web3?

#87
I am looking for anyone interested in the domain Web3.net

I am the founder of OpenDomain- we have contributed domains worth millions to open source and other causes. All for Free.

Re: Why Web3?

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I think we've had enough time to evaluate enough of these technologies "We" (humanity) started working on networking/the foundations of the internet in the 1970s, and it wasn't until late 1990s that it actually became mainstream and started providing a solution to "real" problems we had at that time. What makes you confident we can judge cryptocurrencies in just ~12 years instead of ~20 years it took for t…

The value prop here is the “without a third party” bit I presume? That seems more like a political or ethical preference rather than true value. Email allowed you to instantly and perfectly send a message anywhere at any time, and you could cut down on machine and paper/ink costs. Genuine value. Ironically, the crypto way of doing transactions is more like the fax machine to Venmo’s email. The former is slow and more…

If you compare email to snailmail, the same argument could be made. That it's over the internet is just a preference, why care about email when normal mail works perfectly fine?

"Without a single 3rd party" is a technical feature, one that allows people to transfer money anywhere, for any reason via any device connected to the internet, without having to open up a bank account. According to the last numbers I've read, the number of "unbanked" people is above 1 billion in the world, some in my family is included there. For them, cryptocurrencies gives them the opportunity of sending/receiving currency cross-border much easier than what Venmo/Paypal/Transferwise/WesternUnion ever been able to provide (and trust me, we've tried most platforms).

The Bitcoin way of doing transactions is indeed slow and expensive, but there are many alternatives out there, if you care to look for them.

> Edit: I’d also like to point out you still have a third party in crypto. It’s just that the third party is the entire network rather than a single company.

Yup, that's why my comment includes "single 3rd party", not just "any 3rd party". Everyone who understands blockchain understands that there are 3rd parties involved, not everyone seems to understand the difference between multiple and single 3rd parties though.

Re: Why Web3?

#89
post #3

One thing that is confusing most loud supporters of Web3 are VCs and yet: "It all comes down to the database that sits behind an application. If that database is controlled by a single entity (think company, think big tech), then enormous market power accrues to the owner/administrator of that database. If, on the other hand, the database is an open public database that is not controlled and administered by a single…

In theory, these web3 platforms would still need to function as a business to continue existing. Moving the platform onto a blockchain removes the need for centralized servers, but it necessitates massive amounts of distributed compute power to keep it going. Every blockchain project knows that they need to incentivize their miners somehow. This is usually a combination of fees from users and new tokens minted via bu…

> introducing artificial tokens, quietly giving a huge number of those tokens to founders and early investors (in exchange for actual money, of course), and then hyping the platform to the moon so everyone can cash out their tokens to a new wave of speculators.

In other words a Ponzi-scheme

Re: Why Web3?

#90

> Frankly, it is all too much for me. Same. I've been actively unfollowing people on Twitter every day to clean my feeds of it. I'm not anti-web3 or anti-crypto, but I definitely don't need to read the same rhetoric from 100 people a day. Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

> Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

And the order of operations. Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and market it. The crypto community has been putting the marketing before the building.

It's probably uncontroversial to say although cryptocurrency -could- do great things, right now the bulk of trade in the first world is speculation. Meanwhile there are television ads in the US aimed at football fans telling them how they can trade cryptocurrency. WTF does the average football fan need with cryptocurrency?

Post reply on HN