Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, completely glossing over the usefulness of digital-native money: instant, verifiable transactions from anywhere in the world, programmable money and low fees. Oh, and how it disrupts the remittances industry, something extremely useful to vulnerable communities with families abroad. I agree that Web3 is mostly a grift, but cryptocurrencies are quite useful already.
It's not instant and the fees aren't always low. I was trying to transfer $10 USD in Bitcoin last May, when the BTC market was going insane, and it was impossible.
Web3 is centralized
141–150 of 497 posts
Re: Web3 is centralized
#142Re: Web3 is centralized
#143Re: Web3 is centralized
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that big corporations and big investment firms are pumping a lot of money into the cryptocurrency space to prevent innovation and to encourage scams in order to discredit the space. They want to buy it up, hype it up, then dump their bags on mom-and-pop investors while attempting a controlled demolition of the space. This might sound far-fetched to outsiders, but not so far-fetched to those who have worked…
Honest question from a total outsider: What is the difference between a "shitcoin" and a "legitimate token"? And who gets to decide that?
Re: Web3 is centralized
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also Aztec Network, and Tornado Cash, and Zcash, and soon Starkware, and... I'm surprised so many people on Hacker News apparently still believe that you can "see all transactions" on every blockchain. It really only takes some surface level research to find working, production blockchains/cryptocurrencies that use one of several types of cryptography to hide that data, plus if you're using a pseudonymous blockch…
Okay but like who cares? Are any of those even in the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market cap? Is anyone speaking about them in the context of Web3 or is it all ETH, XRP and maybe two more? From my blissfully uninformed mind, the only time these cryptocurrencies pop up is precisely this: as a counterargument to the popular ones, where you can see all the transactions. They're fringes even among the fringe that is crypt…
Aztec Network, Tornado Cash, and Starkware all run on top of Ethereum... Aztec and Starkware are currently in the community spotlight because they're rollups or so-called "Layer 2s" that push the state of the art of Ethereum's tech (and the state of the art in zero knowledge cryptography, especially Starkware's CAIRO language and their EVM to zero knowledge proof circuit transpiler). Tornado Cash has over $4B in deposits, and for many is the go-to way to anonymize transactions on Ethereum.
Ernst & Young released Baseline last year, a zero-knowledge cryptography toolkit for operating private data services on the public Ethereum network.
The answer to "who cares" is basically the entire nascent industry, plus a handful of mathematicians and cryptographers - if you are paying attention.
Re: Web3 is centralized
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core. We already have all of that in the existing web infrastructure, and have had it since the very beginning. I can spin up a HTTP server on a raspberry pi running in my basement right now and anyone on the internet can access it for free and without any hinderence. With web3 there is gatekeeping and centr…
> With web3 there is gatekeeping and centralisation as I cannot spin up my own server any more without buying crypto and then paying someone on a centralised database just so that I can do everything I could do before for free on my own. Web3 includes all of the previous web technologies and adds optional layers on top. It is a superset of all web tech. You can totally setup an HTTP server on a Raspberry Pi, that's t…
Aren't most NFT assets hosted on cloud platforms? OpenSea on GCP for example
Re: Web3 is centralized
#147It's fascinating how on hacker news one typically finds detailed, reasoned and thoughtful comments. However on the topic of crypto and web3 the comments reliably degenerate into partisan tit for tat, consisting mainly of poorly researched, unreasoned sound bytes. It's a pity because I'd love to hear quality thought on the space. My personal view is that crypto and Web3 "are a thing" (Mean Girls) and will continue to…
I tend to look closely into projects that are outside of the echo chamber that can provide real world value and better economic models than web2 solutions. My two favorites are: helium where they build IoT global network, I use a helium GPS-alternative tracker for my moto which costs 10 times less than GPS tracker. scPrime (although there are other storage alternatives) which build global S3-compatible storage using…
It essentially operates as a unregistered and unregulated ISP and that isn’t something to be taken lightly. It does that by pushing all legal and regulatory liability to operators. There’s also a lot of scams with operators faking their signal etc.
Running a node also likely violates your ISPs ToS - can you contractually resell bandwidth?, so it has similar concerns as what AirBnB etc for the housing market.
There’s nothing stopping something large ISPs from blocking Helium traffic and/or suspending customers for running a node. Alternatively, if this gets big enough, you’ll see ISPs offer LORA hotspots of their own.
Ultimately, it is a very much VC-funded company running regulatory arbitrage on a global scale by using crypto instead. It’s the same if Uber decided to pay drivers in UberBucks a decade ago - that doesn’t change the offering, it just makes it easier to scale while pushing off any regulatory liabilities (including taxation).
Re: Web3 is centralized
#148It's fascinating how on hacker news one typically finds detailed, reasoned and thoughtful comments. However on the topic of crypto and web3 the comments reliably degenerate into partisan tit for tat, consisting mainly of poorly researched, unreasoned sound bytes. It's a pity because I'd love to hear quality thought on the space. My personal view is that crypto and Web3 "are a thing" (Mean Girls) and will continue to…
This isn't specific to web3 but more crypto but the idea of having an integrated method of collecting royalties on resale of an item indefinitely is pretty exciting. That said, the hype seems a little bit overblown. When people are so focused on "overthrowing Big Tech" as to why web3 will be the next wave, it just seems like hype over substance. I forgot what the name of it was, but I tried to sign up to some web3 so…
Exciting for who though?
The only party who benefits from resale royalties is the creator of the NFT and/or the beneficiaries they designate. But what value do they offer the buyer and seller to earn this? In almost all cases, the creators of the NFTs aren't conveying any rights beyond ownership of the token itself. They're not even selling ownership of or rights to the digital assets (GIF, etc.) their tokens point to.
When you buy and sell an asset, you might very well pay a fee to a party who facilitates the transaction, like a broker. The fee is to compensate the broker for the value they provided in facilitating a deal. These middlemen are often maligned for the fees they charge even when the facilitation they provide seems minimal but that doesn't mean that giving creators of an asset a perpetual royalty every time the asset is resold is any better.
To me NFT resale royalties are actually one of those things that look worse than traditional finance. Imagine if a company sold stock to the public and as part of the deal, stipulated that each time a share was sold, it would receive a royalty of 10% of the new share price. Would buyers and sellers see that as a benefit or predation? And at least in the case of company stock, your share would give you actual ownership of a piece of the company and rights that come along with ownership.
With NFTs, you just get a token with a pointer to a digital asset that isn't yours. And for that, you might get to pay the NFT creator a "royalty". I haven't seen any articulation of why this is a good thing.
Re: Web3 is centralized
#149It's fascinating how on hacker news one typically finds detailed, reasoned and thoughtful comments. However on the topic of crypto and web3 the comments reliably degenerate into partisan tit for tat, consisting mainly of poorly researched, unreasoned sound bytes. It's a pity because I'd love to hear quality thought on the space. My personal view is that crypto and Web3 "are a thing" (Mean Girls) and will continue to…
Re: Web3 is centralized
#150Web3 is a highly ambigious term so there's no point discussing whether it's decentralized - it simply depends on what system you are referring to. For the sake of simplicity we stick to the authors main claim. That Ethereum is centralized. > while anyone can join the Ethereum or Bitcoin network, you can only join if you agree to follow the same protocol In which other protocol is this not the case? Can you communicat…
A node operator serving any copyright content (irrespective of it being served over HTTP or a DLT) is liable. What happens when Disney starts suing node operators? Your ISP still gets a notice right?