181–190 of 497 posts
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For most people, crypto is about money, not tech. Easy money, quick money. Therefore the spam level of any crypto discussion is so huge that the opinion gets drowned out by the propaganda.
It smells like the .com boom/bust all over again. Like you say, money drives the discussion, not tech. Which is indeed unfortunate.
Crypto market is really sad. It's a novel technical solution. But it can't find a problem where it fits as a good alternative. It's not a good alternative to banks, art collections or web hosting. But Bitcoin is still worth billions, NFT are all the rage and Web3 went from new concept to "trend" in the span of what feels like a week. But even with all the success they don't seem to be convincing many they have any in…
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.
https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/fintech/digital-payment...
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Probably, but everyone has a Discord account, so if you want actual users you essentially have to use Discord (yay centralization).
It feels like switching from Discord to Matrix is an easier proposition than switching from whatever currency people are using to cryptocoins.
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This is not true for Monero, that hides the sender, receiver and amount for all transactions by default.
And also Secret Network, which hides smart contract variables, which therefore includes token and wrapped token amounts, along with the current owner. Monero has a trustless-enough bridge over to there.
What does crypto add to "web3"?
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Agree completely. There is a ton to criticize about crypto and "Web3" (I hate the term, tbh). It's rife with scams and unearned wealth. Even the things that aren't outright scams are mostly people selling hype. But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. A thing that nobody could do before this stuff. And if that has utility, then the infrastructure for tradi…
> Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing But what really are the "scarce assets" that Web3 is enabling self-custody for? A token on a blockchain that has metadata pointing to a digital file that anyone can view and reproduce? By definition, every NFT is scarce in that each one is non-fungible. But this scarcity doesn't mean there's any meaningful value. An NFT alone doesn't inherently give you ownership…
There’s a “mind-virus” doing the rounds on the crypto space, the idea that scarce = valuable.
It'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…
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> But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. ... It gives you a receipt. A digital receipt. That points to a URL that may or may not exist in 10 years?
That sounds terrible, from hearing about NFTs I expected they would be a hash of the file, not a link to a file. Not like a hash would be much better, as changing one pixel would give you a different hash, but at least it would represent a specific version of an image, a URL could change to anything tomorrow.
It'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…
Agree completely. There is a ton to criticize about crypto and "Web3" (I hate the term, tbh). It's rife with scams and unearned wealth. Even the things that aren't outright scams are mostly people selling hype. But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. A thing that nobody could do before this stuff. And if that has utility, then the infrastructure for tradi…
How so?
This is how "web1" operated all the time: People have a cool idea and fire up a webserver to host it. Self-Custody in its purest form.
Sure, others could copy it, but they can also do that with whatever someone generates an NFT for "digital assets" (the certificate cannot be copied, the thing it certifies ownership for can).
As for "scarcity": Digital assets are either shared or scarce, there is no in-between. Distributed Ledgers allowing NFTs make the certificate of ownership scarce, not the asset itself.
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> 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…
Using certificate identities for logging in has been a thing since the 90s. It was (and is) still way better than passwords. The problem is that someone loses the cert and getting new ones is a usability disaster. Websites intentionally switched to passwords because it was easier for users to understand. Web3 offers no breakthroughs here.
An Ethereum wallet linked with an ENS domain name is: 1) human readable 2) has an on-chain history that is verifiable and reviewable (important for establishing reputation in social applications) 3) benefits from UX improvements in Ethereum wallets, such as Argent's social recovery feature (https://www.argent.xyz/blog/argent-secure-decentralised-ethe...) as well as secure hardware wallets (which address the concern about losing a cert) 4) builds on the network effects of EVM-compatible wallets which makes the experience more familiar to more users 5) can integrate other features such as ENS-linked profile pictures, NFT verification, payments, crypto-based crowdfunding and donations seamlessly 6) user-owned
Can also drop the ENS altogether and embrace anonymity if the user or application desires. Still benefits from most of the above.