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Why Web3?

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Re: Why Web3?

#361

Post by threeseed »

shazzdeeds wrote: post #353
threeseed wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is easier to launder money through the legacy financial system than through cryptocurrency I work for a bank and this is a flat out lie. We have a significant number of controls (regulated by government agencies) for managing money laundering risk. We try to identify source/destinations who hide behind shell companies through beneficial ownership methods. We enforce domestic and international sanctions. We ident…

And yet the vast majority of money laundering still happens through traditional banking channels. If crypto was such a panacea for laundering all the traffic would have switched over by now.

a) At some point you have to re-enter the traditional banking system. People after all want to do things with their laundered money like buy yachts, cars, companies, football teams etc. And so if you are sophisticated at money laundering then crypto is largely unnecessary.

b) Traditional financial system is 1000s of times bigger than crypto so of course you will see proportionally more money laundering happening there.

Re: Why Web3?

#362

Post by m_ke »

jrsj wrote: post #360
inopinatus wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe so, but they’re not in this thread. Criticising the whole shebang as a bunch of charletans pitching snake oil to the gullible isn’t “progressive”, it’s common sense.

Everyone loves to say their politics are just common sense but characterizing all of crypto as “rich libertarians who see crypto as a way to protect their assets from the government” is an inherently political narrative and it simply isn’t true. There’s also a big difference between valuable emerging technologies that have a lot of speculative investments & charlatans selling snake oil vs “the whole shebang”.

The post I was replying to was asking why some VCs are pumping so much money into crypto. I'm not characterizing all crypto supporters as libertarians, just the VCs who pretend that they're investing in it because they want decentralization and open democratized platforms that are owned by the users.

Re: Why Web3?

#363

Post by numbsafari »

corobo wrote: post #233
numbsafari wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With web3, there is no deplatforming, no moderation, no accountability. There is no responsibility. That’s what they really want. They want a system that, in their minds, won’t be subject to regulation or social pressure. They are still mad that Reddit blocked certain groups. That parler got banned from public clouds. Those are the things that made them “wake up” to the need for web3. Deleting data and social account…

> With web3, there is no deplatforming, no moderation, no accountability A collection of NFTs got deplatformed, moderated, and even accepted accountability yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714296

That only works because of the “web2” aspects of the current NFT implementation. The actual content is simply hosted on a traditional web2 service. Once the data moves to a distributed store, it becomes a much more intractable problem that depends on a lot of traditional “centralized” parties. Random network participants will become liable in lawsuits for storing/replicating blocks of data, which will lead to all sorts of compliance issues, which will result in what we have today: centralized services operated by experts on behalf of the lay customer.

So, either nothing changes, or something changes. You can’t have it both ways.

Re: Why Web3?

#364

Post by jrsj »

m_ke wrote: post #362
jrsj wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone loves to say their politics are just common sense but characterizing all of crypto as “rich libertarians who see crypto as a way to protect their assets from the government” is an inherently political narrative and it simply isn’t true. There’s also a big difference between valuable emerging technologies that have a lot of speculative investments & charlatans selling snake oil vs “the whole shebang”.

The post I was replying to was asking why some VCs are pumping so much money into crypto. I'm not characterizing all crypto supporters as libertarians, just the VCs who pretend that they're investing in it because they want decentralization and open democratized platforms that are owned by the users.

Ahh yeah I misread that a bit. Still I don’t necessarily think that’s accurate even regarding the VCs. Their investments and goals sort of run counter to the libertarian types in the crypto community who tend to be focused more on monetary policy or privacy concerns. If anything what the VCs are doing imo is subverting cryptos ability to meet any of the goals of libertarians by focusing most of the development effort in crypto on centralized platforms that look a lot more like traditional tech companies.

Re: Why Web3?

#365

Post by everfree »

jaredsohn wrote: post #292
nfw2 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do digital signatures really make the blockchain obsolete if they fill the same niche? Even if blockchain are technically equivalent to digital signatures, it seems like it has some real advantages from a business perspective: - it is capturing the market of people who want to buy "official" digital assets and is becoming the de facto way to do so - the market is one that should have strong network effects - gaining…

>But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, People for the most part don't get rich off of stamps. Is more of a hobby than an investment.

For many people, NFTs are also a hobby not an investment. You just hear about the investors because they are the loudest.

Re: Why Web3?

#366

Post by everfree »

root_axis wrote: post #68

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"…

> "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization"

Some popular types of Layer 2s, namely zk rollups, have on-chain data and on-chain transaction verification, so I believe you are wrong on this count.

Re: Why Web3?

#367

Post by Karrot_Kream »

andybak wrote: post #337
jaredsohn wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, People for the most part don't get rich off of stamps. Is more of a hobby than an investment.

I know people who made a decent living from sneaker trading though.

Yeah I grew up in the hood and some of the more successful people from my area started their financial life by sneaker trading.

Re: Why Web3?

#369

Post by LegionMammal978 »

jakear wrote: post #345
discardedrefuse wrote: post #330

I've been noticing this web3 buzzword picking up steam on here for months now. And it all feels very manufactured (much how metaverse has been co-opted and tainted by Facebook). I suspect this web3 push is just cryptobros shoehorning their schemes into relevance. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=web3 On the other hand, if you're paying attention, you might have noticed a push back to web1 and even older tec…

What a nice use-case for my recent web1* project, google trends for hackernews! Here's a comparison of "metaverse" vs "web3" over the past several months: https://jacksonkearl.github.io/HackerTrends/?query=%22web3%2... * Not technically web1. It uses `fetch`, but it's a single 100 line HTML file. Web 1.5?

For me (Firefox 95 on Ubuntu 20.04), the bars appear to be hanging down from the top of the chart, instead of rising from the bottom; is that intentional?

Re: Why Web3?

#370

Post by sascha_sl »

riffic wrote: post #35

Matt Baer, developer / owner of Write.as, has a competing and differing vision of web3 (perhaps better labeled "web 3.0"): https://write.as/matt/what-would-a-real-web3-look-like It'd be preferable for users and developers to gravitate towards a web built on community standards, rather than one built on an exploitative ecosystem. Dave Winer notes "web3 is venture capital wanting a new bubble to inflate so they can get…

The problem with this "web 3.0" proposal is that the tech is web 2.0. RSS, diaspora, pump.io and friendica have all been around for ages.

The real problem is a lack of incentives for those in power (generally those with large marketing departments) to adopt or support them. We see this every time a major service slowly kills off their API. Data portability and interoperability are nice for gaining adoption, but the first thing you kill when it outlives its usefulness to the centralized entity.

And the average user doesn't care about this, and probably also doesn't want to do the research to understand decentralized federation. People already unlearned that gmail is distrinct from email, and here we ask them to yet again anchor their trust in even smaller entities than your average email provider to curate their social feed and keep their instance up.

It is a much better vision of the future of the internet than web3 - even through web3 sells the blockchain as the magic silver bullet to these issues. But it will fail for the same reason.

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