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Web 3.0 – The Great Con

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Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#101

Post by pshc »

woodruffw wrote: post #34
pshc wrote: 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.

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.

I typically don’t deal with the middlemen directly either (though most people use Booking or Expedia) but they’re underneath it all. Referral fees for search links, payment processors, the ticketing system, security fee, airport improvement fee (which is fine and good), customs fee, immigration fee, animal and plant inspection service, all of these take their cut on the way, and then surveillance ad tech companies mine and sell the data.

And then there’s overbooking.

Some of these are necessary middlemen but I would hardly call this optimal.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#102

Post by sneak »

labrador wrote: post #5
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…

You forgot the second paragraph > That's one paragraph and already I can feel the simmering controversy, the reddening faces, the indignation and the angry accusations that I don't know what I'm talking about. What can I do with Web3 that I can't do or have trouble doing any other way?

Distributed, trustless consensus. This allows for a protocol-issued currency that is censorship resistant without a centralized issuing authority.

Perhaps you aren’t interested in that; that’s okay. It’s the main thing that was made possible by this invention that was not possible before.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#103

Post by maxisrelaxed »

One of the worst facets of the whole web3 movement is the "thought leaders" and community talking very confidently about how blockchain will replace very well established ways of doing business (FTA "airlines selling tickets"). The author takes a very dim view of the whole blockchain space, and uses the worst possible interpretation of parts of it to make their case, but I don't disagree on this point.

Whether web3 becomes a mainstream "thing" is anyone's guess, but if it makes any headway, it won't be large enterprises leading the charge. Exactly like the author states; "Do airlines have any problem selling [tickets] to you? Of course not; this process is already efficient and optimal." Where it potentially could be used is by smaller entities that don't have well established processes, and don't necessarily have the means to build out some of the required systems.

If I want to build any kind of digital asset (an item in a game*, access to a forum, etc) and I want to allow it to be traded, I have to build that trading platform. If I want it to be traded outside of my platform, then I have to deal with endless integrations. If I'm a multi-billion dollar enterprise that's fine, I can do that. If I'm a small company, that may not be feasible. If I use a blockchain to store that asset (or at least to track who owns it) then I only need to integrate to that blockchain, that is, check that a user owns the asset before I allow them to use it in my system. I'm not saying this is simple, or even currently desirable for most people or companies, but what I am saying is that it is something that is feasible and potentially of value to an end user.

Where this will struggle in the short-term is in the end-user experience. Wallets are awful, most people don't want self-custody, and honestly, the space is filled with slimy individuals that don't exactly inspire trust. I could write for hours about all the things that I view as wrong with with web3 (some of them are technical, the majority are about the people), but to outright dismiss it as a scam/only for criminals/the worst thing on Earth is blindly emotive and is (almost) as bad as the fanatics that are just as emotional about promoting it.

* I'm only referring to tracking ownership, not interoperability across different games. That can go in the "unrealistic things web3 people say" basket.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#104

Post by qeternity »

tern wrote: post #92

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 m…

> This is very much in the vein of the infamous Dropbox announcement.

Dropbox was released a year before Bitcoin, and quickly went on to completely change file storage for the average person (alongside its many clones).

Why has Bitcoin not achieved anything similar?

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#105

Post by ddggdd »

we don't know what's the next step to organize our society, I can see a possibility with blockchain. getting older and went a lot places and knew quite a few people from different backgrounds and countries, one thing is clear, nothing is as sound/optimal/firm/truth as it should be, if you have a slightest insight of airline industry or any industry, you'll know current arrangement is only the get-by solution, majority of people did not care, not smart or believe strange things, borderline delusional, that's the human condition. We as humans need a new enlightenment movement, if we are lucky, we will go into a new era of understanding human nature or the reality we can construct, including a blockchain centered society.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#106

Post by woodruffw »

pshc wrote: post #101
woodruffw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I typically don’t deal with the middlemen directly either (though most people use Booking or Expedia) but they’re underneath it all. Referral fees for search links, payment processors, the ticketing system, security fee, airport improvement fee (which is fine and good), customs fee, immigration fee, animal and plant inspection service, all of these take their cut on the way, and then surveillance ad tech companies mi…

Not all of those are middlemen: some are just constituent services you're paying for (the plant maintenance and immigration fees, for example).

Even the payment processor (which really is a middleman) is likely not a source of suboptimal pricing in airline ticketing: the current alternative is cash transactions, which would probably cost the airlines and airports (and us) significantly more in terms of safely moving the money around. Maybe FedNow will improve that.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#107

Post by ThomPete »

CPLX wrote: post #100
ThomPete wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Again we are discussing it right now. You don't see the use, I do.

Whether I will be right time will tell, I am pretty sure I will, and the idea that this is a useless technology is simply a question of vision.

There are plenty of use cases which are theoretically possible with Web2 but not feasible without Blockchain.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#108

Post by coldtea »

pshc wrote: 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.

You can buy almost any air ticket from the airline website.

The only reason to get to a middleman is so that you have a bigger variety of options to chose from, as they can sell from multiple airlines (and also bear some costs and buy in bulk in advance from the airline and sell cheaper).

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#109

Post by maxisrelaxed »

CPLX wrote: post #100
ThomPete wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

This gets repeated a lot, and it's simply not true. It's a telltale sign that there's simply too much emotion in the arguments around blockchain - any post about tor and bittorrent doesn't receive nearly as many (if any) "but it's only for criminals" comments.

Being able to own and trade a digital asset in much the same way a physical asset is traded is potentially a huge use for blockchains. Large players aren't about to model ownership of the digital goods they sell as items on a blockchain, but it's a big opportunity for smaller players.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#110

Post by awinder »

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…

There’s nothing “dumb” with building wealth (to finance retirement or otherwise) with stocks/funds. It’s the primary mechanism the rich use to build and retain wealth.

Pensions have major issues. The government has not made a very good case for “we should manage more retirement funds” with the state of the SSI trust. 401ks are a next move to address downfalls and failures with how other options have played out. But yeah anyone can do dumb shit with money to their detriment; that’s very difficult to overcome.

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