This is increasingly important because I've observed the "pull back" in hype has allowed a new breed of charlatans to pretend there is ever more legitimacy to this whole scam. Notably, Big 4 consulting firms have been embracing various Web3 stuff obviously without understanding it, but smelling that there is money to be made. So now legitimate businesses somehow get caught up on this scam based on some business translator misunderstanding of what it is, and have to double down on pretending it's legit. The whole thing needs a big bucket of cold water thrown on it
Web 3.0 – The Great Con
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Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con
#32XMPP, 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
I don't XMPP was meant to be "distributed," at least not in the way that the BitTorrent network is (and blockchains nominally are). XMPP assumes a relatively normal client-server architecture, but with no authoritative index server. That makes it decentralized in the way that IRC and SMTP are, but doesn't imply anything about consensus or peer coordination.
(More stridently: even as "failures," both XMPP and BitTorrent have probably been significantly better for the world, on net, than blockchain projects have been.)
Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
If inflation is 10%, then most places you put your money won't hold value over time.
Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con
#34> 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.
What middleman do you deal with when buying an airline ticket? I buy mine directly from the airline; when I search, the search engines I use directly link me to the airline for the sale.
Airline ticketing itself is suboptimal for historic reasons (complicated fare class coding), but middlemen are no longer a major factor in that. Travel agents no longer dominate booking.
Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do they still use torrents though? I was under the impression that virtually all companies using torrents had discontinued it as disruption to users internet quality and possibly data usage caps meant it was easier to just pay the cost of distribution.
Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con
#36XMPP, 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
I find this comment surprising because I don’t know what I’d do without BitTorrent - what are the alternatives? Edonkey, gnutella, etc are all dead. Just yesterday I downloaded an entire series in a matter of minutes thanks to BitTorrent. That would’ve taken ages over emule.
Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con
#3799% of Web3 is crap.
1% pure gold.
Same thing with the first .com bubble. AI have been through this too and is now having a revival.
Blockchain and Web 3 is not going anywhere it will just not be championed by the current generation. The coming will use this as it was the most normal in the world.
Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con
#38This is increasingly important because I've observed the "pull back" in hype has allowed a new breed of charlatans to pretend there is ever more legitimacy to this whole scam. Notably, Big 4 consulting firms have been embracing various Web3 stuff obviously without understanding it, but smelling that there is money to be made. So now legitimate businesses somehow get caught up on this scam based on some business trans…
An example of this is Azure jumping on board the Distributed Identity (DID) bandwagon.
The only reason DID exists is to push crypto. Nobody wants their identity to be put on a public ledger. That's has identity theft built-in as a "feature"!
Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like a 401k?
Wait I might be out of the loop here, why's the 401(k) a con?
Because the entire concept is basically designed to just make the rich even richer and puts way more risk on the individual.
Instead of say, social security being significantly higher by people paying more into taxes.. we have convinced people to put money into a 401k.. which is first entirely dependent on "the market", something which is well out of peoples control. The design is that people are 'forced' to contribute this way, which will drive market prices up so the people who actually have substantial money make way more on the market going up than the little guy.
Then on the flip side, when the market does tank it hurts the little guy way more because it's basically ALL of their assets at risk on something they can't control. While the rich are able to have money in a much more diversified set (real estate, business etc).
People also get f'd if they happen to want to retire close to a big market crash and all that. Again, things completely out of their control.
Before anyone starts arguing "I would rather have control on my 401k than the government!!", if the US government couldn't pay social security you would be way more fucked in the market in that situation. We have a stable government- that stable government should be providing security for people in old age.
"Retirement" being linked to the market is so beyond dumb. It's one giant scam to pump up the market and shift risk to individuals.
Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con
#40> 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…
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