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Why Web3?

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481–490 of 706 posts

Re: Why Web3?

#481

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"…

I have to say your statement is quite accurate. But the last sentence just reflects the eventual success of the Web3. It is all about making money, aka being greedy.

Re: Why Web3?

#482

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"…

One correctiong. NFTs is just a tool. I believe what you mean is that Digital Arts market based on NFTs is a bubble.

Re: Why Web3?

#483
We already have Web 3.0.

It consists of walled gardens of pushed content where acquiring a user means capturing a user by making it as impractical as possible to leave.

But no one shouts about this. The 'new' web should be about optimism, growth, right? That's what justifies future 'value'.

Web 2.0 peaked a little more than a decade. An era of 'pulling', actual recommendations from people, of bigenoughtopaybills for heavy content but sufficiently decentralised to have competition.

It is easier than ever to do something and that's what petrifies incumbents into closing their gates as tightly as they can. For you are the treasure they hoard.

Re: Why Web3?

#484
post #409
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gate keepers are preventing me from building the kind of apps I want. Just the other day people here reminisced about the days when Twitter used to have an open API and how bad it is that they shut it down. I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.

> I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down. I'm still not clear how this would work. In a web 3 twitter clone that prevents one from ever being "restricted, limited or shut down", where does the crypto-tweet live? Where is it stored? How well does this scale? What does it take to crypto-tweet (do you have to pay some crypto currency to have it be out there)? What…

To start you Tweet off chain, and you only verify on chain. Most of the skeptics here seem to take pride in their shallow understanding of blockchain - most of these questions are posed with some idea that people want to post a million tweets a day on the Bitcoin blockchain. People smart enough to answer your questions don't actually hang out here - I would know, because I hang out with them where they are welcome.

And yes, those people also make a distinction between themselves and the average grifter - something HN fails miserably at.

Re: Why Web3?

#485
post #313
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gate keepers are preventing me from building the kind of apps I want. Just the other day people here reminisced about the days when Twitter used to have an open API and how bad it is that they shut it down. I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.

This isn't what users want in general, and you don't need crypto to get it. What you're asking for exists with things like mastodon. No one advocating how/why they think crypto will succeed when things like mastodon failed. Hell, RSS failed. The average user wants easy to use, easy to connect, free, and fast services. Crypto fails at all of these.

The narrative driving Web3 is that people don't want to be treated like cattle. Or in your parlance, "the average user." Just because people are slow to wake with the contracts they made with centralized platforms doesn't mean they are so dull as to not care when they finally figure it out.

Re: Why Web3?

#486
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.

Beanie Babies, Baseball Cards, Comic Books all had period of rampant speculation whos markets were destroyed once people who "invested" tried to turn their assets back into cash. Hobbyists just suffer through these periods.

Anecdote time, I was at an Xmas party and people were talking about what crypto they were investing in. I said I speculated a bit, then got spooked and got my money out of Crypto.com. (which wasn't easy). This got everyone interested, they had no idea how to turn their Crypto back to dollars. The market is going up, because there's a one way flow of money.

Re: Why Web3?

#487
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NFTs are also a hobby not an investment. You just hear about the investors because they are the loudest. Or the only voice, because no one else is interested in looking at a hash for fun. The real artwork is easily digitally duplicated and so if your hobby was to look at the art, you do not need to purchase the NFT.

Spending a few dollars on NFT "ownership" is worth it to me to have my name next to something, just like spending $10 on a League of Legends skin is worth it to some people to have their name next to a piece of artwork in a video game. I am literally interested in looking at a hash for fun, since it shows up online in NFT viewers with a little picture of it in my account. $10 is such a small amount of money to me, if…

You can also spend money and get a star named after you. I suppose you could assign an NFT to the stellar coordinates and sell the stars as well.

Re: Why Web3?

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you can make a decent living in all kinds of nonsense if you can either find a way to predict collective mood swings or just get lucky. with millions of people scheming at blockchain stuff there will be thousands getting lucky over and over thinking they are smart

People made good money selling Beanie Babies, Baseball Cards and other fads... at the beginning of those.

Re: Why Web3?

#489
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gate keepers are preventing me from building the kind of apps I want. Just the other day people here reminisced about the days when Twitter used to have an open API and how bad it is that they shut it down. I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.

I was thinking about this, not sure if entirely the same. For example the YT dislikes going away. What if you got people to install a chrome extension where it tracked urls with upvotes/downvotes (game system). The database is shared between installed apps no central db... would it work? I could be far off with the intent of the application but another example is mesh networking where it is nice to not have a central…

This is the kind of thing that inspires true Web3 people (not the grifters selling their OpenSea NFTs). If you dig into the problems that arise when implementing those systems you talk about and what happens when data of value can be contributed, you start naturally running into the solutions that Blockchain developers have been working on for years.

Re: Why Web3?

#490
post #409
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gate keepers are preventing me from building the kind of apps I want. Just the other day people here reminisced about the days when Twitter used to have an open API and how bad it is that they shut it down. I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down.

> I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being restricted, limited or shut down. I'm still not clear how this would work. In a web 3 twitter clone that prevents one from ever being "restricted, limited or shut down", where does the crypto-tweet live? Where is it stored? How well does this scale? What does it take to crypto-tweet (do you have to pay some crypto currency to have it be out there)? What…

Let's assume that Ethereum gets properly sharded, and web3 solves all these technical challenges somehow, because that's supposedly where Ethereum is headed.

Why would I as a user prefer Twitter or prefer web3 decentralized microblogging?

With Twitter, even with minimal gate keeping, I still get a spam/scam message only once every month or so.

But minimal gatekeeping is soooooo much better than email, where I get so much spam email that it has made the service worthless without spam filtering, which has an error rate for finding spam.I literally only read my personal email messages once every week or so because it's such a chore to get through all the craft spam, much of it from places where I once bought a single item.

So as a programmer and creator, sure, you prefer the ability to not be locked out. But as a user of Twitter, I vastly prefer all those programmers being locked from access. It's the only thing that keeps it sane and almost-useful.

One application I recently heard of that might be relevant: using wallets as crypto for the average person, finally allowing more secure and better website login. If everybody has wallet, it might finally solve the problem of scattered passwords everywhere for every site, with many users reusing site password.

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