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Web 3.0 – The Great Con

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Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#91

Post by ThomPete »

jiggawatts wrote: post #44
ThomPete wrote: post #37

99% 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.

> Same thing with the first .com bubble. The .com bubble ratio was more like 33% crap, 33% meh, and 33% gold. The "crash" was that people realised that the 33% crap was crap. The equivalent crash for Web3 would wipe it out completely, taking the 1% with it. Also, I don't agree that there is a 1% to begin with. I've never heard of any compelling use-case for Web3.

Just because you haven't heard of one doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

There is plenty of use for it, it's just not the same as for Web2.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#92

Post by tern »

I often read these posts to see if there's any perspective that can convince me I've wasted my time the past few years.

Unfortunately this one didn't add any new information. It's just 'opinion' from someone very unfamiliar with the space.

This is very much in the vein of the infamous Dropbox announcement. Indeed, these technologies in their current form require a leap of imagination to see working at scale.

What's missing from this article is: (1) thoughts on anything specific happening in the space and (2) a sense of wonder about what new things have come from it.

"Crypto" is in one reading a massive flurry of activity to see how cryptography might transform society. Most experiments will probably fail, but it seems untenable to argue that the answer is: it's a fraud. We can approach this with curiosity or with derision. The choice is yours.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#93

Post by Gigachad »

jaimex2 wrote: post #61
Gigachad wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Possibly, it's been a while since I've used it. Companies make weird decisions all the time, like MS killing Skype's p2p system which destroyed the whole app. Quoting mobile as the reason when there was no reason the PC/Mac clients couldn't continue on.

Tbh I can't think of a single commercial p2p product left. Mobile was certainly the driving force, but I think better/cheaper cloud infrastructure contributed. These days all the major content distribution companies have static content positioned inside ISP data centers so its fairly cheap and fast to distribute.

Even laptops probably contributed. A lot of people are going to be using laptops on the go and connected to mobile hotspots. You'd be pissed off if a game client used all of your battery and data cap in the background. Even the p2p of Skype was a pain, you had to carefully coordinate the transfer of large files. You both had to stay online and manually restart them. While now the central server holds it and it’s way more convenient.

Edit: I just remembered that windows lets you opt in to p2p updates but that's the only thing I can think of.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#94

Post by ajross »

jaimex2 wrote: post #46

For a con, blockchain has served me extremely well. Its allowed me to pay when paypal/credit cards/my bank have decided they're going to not allow payment to a service. It's allowed me to get paid cash in hand without having to involve entities who its none of their business why that money has been paid to me. It's allowed me to bypass currency exchange issues and fleecing.

1. Are all crimes, right? Banks will take your consumer money (provider management does get more complicated) for gambling and porn these days. The stuff you can't get past them is almost exclusively criminal. If you don't like the fact that the government made something illegal, why are you blaming money? Also: crimes don't stop being crimes just because you paid in BTC, and those transactions aren't as anonymous as you think.

2. That part is true, largely. You do have to pay a (very large!) fee for the transaction, but it's not to anyone in particular and they don't know any more than the rest of us do about what you're paying for (which, again, is not completely anonymous!).

3. This part is laughably wrong. Even now, post-crash, transaction fees are measured in multiple dollars per. During the boom, it was routine to see entities paying more than $100 to get a transaction to post.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#95

Post by bigyikes »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #45
shadowgovt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If inflation is 10%, then most places you put your money won't hold value over time.

So, in a period where the market is down like 30% and inflation is up 10%.. your argument is putting it in the market is the way to combat inflation? I mean, I get what you mean.. but we have a -40% differential here to prove you utterly wrong at the moment.

-40% over what time period? The current economy is not the norm.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#96

Post by qeternity »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #39
yucatansunshine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contribu…

> While the rich are able to have money in a much more diversified set (real estate, business etc).

For the median household, most wealth is tied up in real estate (their home).

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#97

Post by ThomPete »

bebtrrr wrote: post #54
ThomPete wrote: post #37

99% 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.

> 1% pure gold Exactly which part of Web3 are you referring to here? I've not seen anything that matches your assessment.

This is the thing. You either understand it or you don't. I can get you to see it. I don't have to, in the future it will be just there.

Web3 is a special case of wild wild west in a market with way too much money inflating it all, but the fundamental principles about having an open database accessible to everyone is here to stay.

The stock market is down up to 90% in some cases.

You need to think about this when some of the problems there are today get resolved and new generations start building with this as part of the toolbox.

But each to their own. I've just seen this so many times before and I can personally see the use cases, they are just not what most people think they are.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#98

Post by qeternity »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #89
qeternity wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when you move money from a checking account, it's gone. You might say "ok well just hold the money for a bit" or similar, and congratulations, you've just invented credit.

That doesn't answer the question though.

It absolutely does. I presume you're talking about transaction security, since debit cards have long existed for convenience, and again: once you send money from a checking account, it's gone. If I have a dispute on a transaction, it's far more difficult to reverse.

The very nature of credit makes dispute resolution much easier.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#99

Post by sneak »

aussiesnack wrote: post #23
sneak wrote: 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…

The rewrite in your first paragraph is also objectively false.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#100

Post by CPLX »

ThomPete wrote: post #90
CPLX wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just wildly incorrect. The early internet was spectacularly useful. You could suddenly order rare books, book plane flights, find song lyrics, and all sorts of stuff you had wanted to do but couldn’t. I was there at the time. Every year like 11 new great use cases came along. It’s absolutely nothing like crypto.

Not everyone agreed it was useful. That's the point. People laughed at email, buying online, payment was even illegal in the beginning. I was also there at the time from the very beginning. This is the same thing. Hype, then crash then re-construction then normalized. There is so much use for blockchain especially as infrastructure for society and in 10 years from now we will not even be thinking about it. It's no di…

They really didn’t. The fact that it was really useful was blindingly obvious to everyone pretty quickly. Like nobody was confused thinking it was better to not be able to check your bank transaction history online.

The question at the time was how useful, and how quickly things were going to be transformed and what it was all worth since the hype and valuations got out of control.

And there were of course dumb ideas that got funded (like the cue cat) and good but early ideas that were overfunded and poorly executed (like webvan).

But life was changing irreversibly at a very visible pace as digital solutions took over. Remember when every business district had a travel agent?

There are no real uses of blockchain technology today that aren’t a variation on financial speculation (aka gambling) and illicit activity.

Don’t get me wrong those are great use cases. Gambling and banned transactions are a major sector. But that’s the limit of the whole affair and that’s been obviously the case for a while.

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