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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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381–390 of 769 posts

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#381
post #31

Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity to the early adopters and insiders. I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling. I wrote about it some time ago and and shared here on HN https://yash.info/blog/what-is-web3/

Here are just some of the use cases 1. 100x cheaper, faster cross-border transfers 2. Immutable, digital, accessible, secure ownership of music, video, real-estate, cars, gaming assets, health data 3. Instant access to nearly all possible financial products (loans, lending, startup investments etc.) without a middle man There are many, many more use cases. Crypto drastically increases accountability, transparency, ac…

1) would be just as expensive if taxed properly, so not cheaper just illegal

2) immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets, also its a pretty negative turn of society to go and try and make fungible products like music listening into private non fungible ownable assets

3) The middle man is usually there for a number of reasons. Same way exchanges showed up almost immidietly after crypto, you would also have crypto banks to handle loans etc. Add the financial constraints the goverment needs, for lawful contracts to be enforceable and now you just have a more expensive, volatile and environmentally destructive banking system.

Like it seems most of the ideas of things "crypto works for" is just what banks used to do before regulation was added. And the regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered. For every notary you pay to get a deed in a house or doctor to check your health data, some will or some medical anomaly gets corrected. For every fee you pay in a loan someone elses gets secured and has no extortionate shark loan fees.

With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end. Its an extremely silly proposition and I am not surprised it is being peddled by the likes of Jordan Belfort because he seems to like to do old medieval scams on new targets.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they’re digital receipts. Because the thing that it’s representing could still disappear or go away. Maybe that has heaps of value, maybe once the server ther points to the thing you’re meant to own goes down or the asset at the url changes it becomes worth 2 parts of sweet f all

> Because the thing that it’s representing could still disappear or go away. Not if you, the owner, or someone else, stores a copy. Even if the URL associated with the URL is broken, it doesn't change the fact that it still represents the thing people want it to represent. NFTs are not a backup system for your data.

And how do you want to prove that the copy you made had the same content that was stored behind the URL? What if the host changes the content behind that URL to something completely different. No one can prove that it's actually the thing you copied that was behind this NFT. It's really worthless in my eyes.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they sold higher priced tickets, more bands would have incentive to tour. This would make live music more accessible, not less. Right now they're not accessible to everyone, they're accessible to rich people and a lottery of poor people.

How would higher priced tickets be more accessible to poor people?

Pricing is the way in which information about supply and demand is conveyed in a decentralized manner in a free market.

When prices of a good or service goes up, it incentivises other manufacturers or service providers to produce more of that good or service, which increases supply and puts downward pressure on prices.

So to answer your question, higher priced tickets increases supply, which causes lower priced tickets, which benefits poor people.

Eventually prices reach a level where supply and demand match and (for example) concerts are as cheap as they can be given their cost and the demand in the market for them (including the demand from poor people).

This EconTalk episode on price gouging during a natural disaster was very interesting, and somewhat related to this topic: https://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-price-gouging/

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#384
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical if they can even get a contract with any payment provider at all. Furthermore, the USA has a severe problem that stems from companies like Equifax deciding what you can and cannot afford with no way to protest their decisions. This is not a technology problem, th…

It's hardly a legal problem, there are plenty of countries and US states where many kinds of sex work are perfectly legal, and having your life ruled by credit agencies is far from universal. I understand that with decent regulation illegal goods can't just fly under the radar anymore, I'm just saying that in the current ecosystem there is a use case for this fake money where real money simply cannot be exchanged rel…

> It's hardly a legal problem, there are plenty of countries and US states where many kinds of sex work are perfectly legal

How is it not a legal problem, when it's apparently possible to solve it entirely by having a different legislation?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not cards, they don't store any meaningful data unless you could make the resource immutable. They are more like "Digital trading links-to-assets-you-have-no-control-over"?

Your mistake is thinking that it matters where the data is stored. But storing your trading card image file in the Github Arctic Code Vault just makes it more permanent, it does not change the nature of your NFT at all; neither does storing it on the blockchain.

The thing is, that the NFT is just worthless data as long as you don't know what's behind it. And if the people that currently do no longer believe in NFTs the nodes will disappear and your data stored on the blockchain is gone as well. In the end the blockchain is just a decentralised transactional database, I really don't get the fuzz about it. With proof of stake it even looses a big chunk of that decentralisation.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#386
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. NFTs are digital trading cards. I don't know why people can't wrap their heads around the simple concept.

That's what they want you to believe. The truth is, to keep the influx of money into the crypto-sphere flowing, you need more people to invest money. This gets harder though, because most people who really care about crypto already invested. There are only so many monkeys you can attract. NFT is a solution to this problem: You promise a high return of investment for additional monkeys to invest. This keeps on going u…

Thanks for calling me a monkey. Also thanks for calling me smart of taking profits (I can't lose in crypto anymore).

I used some of my profits to send Ukraine some ETH, so did many other people I see.

So monkeys invest in crypto. What do you call those that keep fiat? Fiat like the Turkish lira or Ruble.

What about a Russian who bought some stablecoins right before the war, is that also a monkey?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#387
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if the ticket seller wants you to be able to do that. Remember, it's trivially easy to follow transactions on the block chain. So the ticket seller can see whether an NFT has been resold, and can just refuse to honour it. Or only honour the first wallet it was in, regardless of whether it is still there or not.

I think the idea may be to resell it as memorabilia - which might work for some rare or legendary performance, but, I think, in the typical case will be meaningless.

And even that works way better in physical form. For concerts I still order hardcopy tickets, because I collect them to go through them and remember what bands I have seen live and relive that memory. A digital NFT wouldn't give this justice enough for me.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#388
I think the way I've started to think about Blockchain/Bitcoin is that it's just pure regulatory arbitrage. First Bitcoin was about being able to conduct illegal transactions, now it's about being able to scam people and conduct market manipulation. So that's a bearish sign right? I don't think so, if you look at the history of silicon valley companies that pursue regulatory arbitrage models like Uber initially grow because it allows them to outcompete the incumbent, but as the regulations catch up, they are now the incumbent already and so the re-imposition of regulations doesn't destroy them, it just holds them in place, having already got to a strong position. Uber isn't worthless, but it's worth about as much as if you'd just added up all the taxi businesses they had replaced.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#390
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And you need a blockchain for this, to give it the credible neutrality needed for it to be considered something equivalent to real ownership; you can't have it be at the mercy of a single entity. No, you don't, and yes, you can. And in fact, you yourself say that this is still the case just a few paragraphs earlier: > People coalesce around this believe, because the edition was released by whoever owns the actual c…

You are right, you can, and people have, for example: seditionart.com I certainly encourage you to buy NFTs on on those centralized websites. Nevertheless, paying for ledger entries representing art didn't really gain popularity before blockchains, so there is that.

It hasn't "gained popularity", it's a bullshit hype fuelled entirely by scams.

NFTs have zero value and are yet another non-example for the usefulness of blockchains.

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