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Web 3.0 – The Great Con

davegebler.com

21–30 of 225 posts

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#21
post #10

XMPP, bittorrent, now blockchain. All 3 have the same thing in common that they had high hopes of creating a distributed alternative future for their paradigm. The first 2 fizzled into mostly fringe usage. I guess we'll have to wait and see if blockchain follows the same path, but seems to be going that way

Torrents are still going strong and quite useful if you need (say) a movie or TV show that's legally unobtainable in your country.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#23
post #2

> Blockchain is the greatest technological fraud of the last decade. A fraud so simple, so ridiculous and yet so brilliant, it's taken in even some genuine experts in its thrall of empty hype and false promises. On top of this fraud sits the even greater fraud of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, which are nothing more than unregulated, unlicensed, wild west securities. They are functionally useless as currencies outside…

There's some hyperbole in there - eg. "They are functionally useless as currencies outside the realms of criminal activity" might be more accurate (if less entertaining) rewritten as "Their use as currency is dominated by the criminal sector".

But most of it seems at least arguably in the ballpark. If you really believe it's all "demonstrably objectively false" that should be pretty easy to demonstrate, so feel free to expand. Unless you're mainly aiming to "signal to your tribe"?

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#24
post #10

XMPP, bittorrent, now blockchain. All 3 have the same thing in common that they had high hopes of creating a distributed alternative future for their paradigm. The first 2 fizzled into mostly fringe usage. I guess we'll have to wait and see if blockchain follows the same path, but seems to be going that way

Torrents are still going strong and quite useful if you need (say) a movie or TV show that's legally unobtainable in your country.

Or if I want an Ubuntu iso in less than 3 hours

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#26
post #10

XMPP, bittorrent, now blockchain. All 3 have the same thing in common that they had high hopes of creating a distributed alternative future for their paradigm. The first 2 fizzled into mostly fringe usage. I guess we'll have to wait and see if blockchain follows the same path, but seems to be going that way

Torrents are still going strong and quite useful if you need (say) a movie or TV show that's legally unobtainable in your country.

Not just that, companies like Blizzard save millions in server costs.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#27
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a 401k?

Wait I might be out of the loop here, why's the 401(k) a con?

Well, read up on what existed before the 401k in the US, and how retirement works in Europe for comparison. You're betting on stonks going up and then switching to bonds and safer investments closer to retirement, hoping that the caprices of capitalism won't wipe your savings when you need them. Except: https://nypost.com/2022/06/09/401ks-drop-amid-market-turmoil...

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#29
Something that only received a passing mention in this is that cryptocurrency and related web3 items are sold like a technical panacea to a whole host of other problems with the financial system, governments, corporations, and so on, some of which are real, some are definitely in the realm of fantasy.

From my perspective it's just changing one set of monetary system problems for another set of technical and resource use problems, which IMO is not a step forward.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#30
post #20

> Do you have any problem buying airline tickets now? Do airlines have any problem selling them to you? Of course not; this process is already efficient and optimal. I don’t know about optimal, there are middlemen everywhere.

Where are the middlemen? I buy most tickets directly from the airline website.
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