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Web 3.0 – The Great Con

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Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#131

Post by maxisrelaxed »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #123
maxisrelaxed wrote: post #103

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 b…

Somebody else could build a centralized trading platform, and if you use that, it will be cheaper for all parties. Whether web3 becomes a thing is not anybody's guess. Anybody who thinks about it clearly can easily conclude that it will never be a thing except among scammers and their marks.

> Somebody else could build a centralized trading platform, and if you use that, it will be cheaper for all parties.

Oh absolutely, a centralized digital assets trading platform for general digital goods would be better in almost every (at least technical) way compared to a blockchain/decentralized platform. The challenge isn't technical, it's getting parties to trust you and your platform, and to use it. That's maybe the one (if not the only) upshot to using a blockchain; I don't necessarily have to trust the platform.

That said, Visa and Mastercard basically have a duopoly on digital payments, so it's not unrealistic to think someone could do the same but with trading/tracking ownership of digital assets.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#132

Post by trinovantes »

jeroenhd wrote: post #43
labrador wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One thing cryptography solves in web3 that I haven't seen any recent alternatives for is decentralised identity. You don't need blockchains and other such cruft for a simple signature system, but there's nothing on the web that actually makes use of such a system except for some government systems or intranets. Currently, every website asks for an email address and a username, but for most people that email address c…

Didn't know PGP created in the 90s was part of web3 even though web2 wasn't coined till the 2000s. Nobody uses PGP because it's a pain in the ass - was back then and still is today. Decentralization is a solution looking for a problem.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#133

Post by ajross »

vikinghckr wrote: post #126
ajross wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just because something is "illegal" doesn't mean it's good to have this banned No, but it means that the question has nothing to do with money . Using BTC to launder or evade tracking for a transaction that is illegal is simply committing another crime. If you want to be free of prosecution, talk to your government, don't just cheat and figure it's OK because it's crypto. That's how you end up in jail.

First of all, the fact that you completely ignored the first point about perfectly legal "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" behavior being enough to get you banned from PayPal/banks means you accept that there are valid LEGAL use cases of crypto. As for your suggestion to "talk to your government", yeah I'm sure that will go down well with the Iranian regime trying to crack down on anti-hijab protestors.

Can you maybe cite the folks who are using crypto out of necessity instead of banking with money? Someone getting PayPal miffed at them isn't remotely the same thing as "can't use money", and I think you know that.

What you're doing is extrapolating from "some people sometimes have trouble with a bank" (true) to "the only way to evade oppressive banking censorship is crypto" (bananas).

Or rather, the second frame is true, for a certain subset of transactions that happen to be illegal.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#134

Post by jiggawatts »

ThomPete wrote: post #91
jiggawatts wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Feel free to list even one successful Web3 site. Not as in "could be useful in the future", but useful now, and used by a significant number of people for activities that are not directly crypto-related.

Keep in mind that "web 1.0" was immediately useful, to many people, at a large scale. The original web wasn't restricted to web developers doing web development things. It was used by industry, government, and academia at scale almost immediately.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#135

Post by jiggawatts »

djbusby wrote: post #79
jiggawatts wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"!

DID is for global-object-identity not identification of individual natural human persons.

I feel like you're talking about something totally unrelated with the same acronym.

DID is absolutely, first-and-foremost, about individual personal identity. One of the use-cases listed is that it could be used as a replacement for ID cards such as drivers licenses, passports, etc...

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#136

Post by vikinghckr »

ajross wrote: post #133
vikinghckr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, the fact that you completely ignored the first point about perfectly legal "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" behavior being enough to get you banned from PayPal/banks means you accept that there are valid LEGAL use cases of crypto. As for your suggestion to "talk to your government", yeah I'm sure that will go down well with the Iranian regime trying to crack down on anti-hijab protestors.

Can you maybe cite the folks who are using crypto out of necessity instead of banking with money? Someone getting PayPal miffed at them isn't remotely the same thing as "can't use money", and I think you know that. What you're doing is extrapolating from "some people sometimes have trouble with a bank" (true) to "the only way to evade oppressive banking censorship is crypto" (bananas). Or rather, the second frame is…

I don't have examples of people getting banned by banks/PayPal for legal activities using crypto, no. But that doesn't mean crypto-based solutions can't fill that void in the future. Note that I never claimed crypto is the "only way" to solve this issue. But, it's a promising alternative. Any centralized solution for these use-cases are tricky because they're niche and don't probably have the necessary scale. Not to mention, any centralized solution is always carries censorship risks. If you have a decentralized, usable, non-crypto alternatives for these cases, I'm open ears.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#137

Post by djbusby »

jiggawatts wrote: post #135
djbusby wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DID is for global-object-identity not identification of individual natural human persons.

I feel like you're talking about something totally unrelated with the same acronym. DID is absolutely, first-and-foremost, about individual personal identity. One of the use-cases listed is that it could be used as a replacement for ID cards such as drivers licenses, passports, etc...

I'm talking about https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

"A DID refers to any subject (e.g., a person, organization, thing, data model, abstract entity, etc.) as determined by the controller of the DID."

So, is for anything (where persons are in the set of anything)

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#138

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#139

Post by lern_too_spel »

maxisrelaxed wrote: post #131
lern_too_spel wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody else could build a centralized trading platform, and if you use that, it will be cheaper for all parties. Whether web3 becomes a thing is not anybody's guess. Anybody who thinks about it clearly can easily conclude that it will never be a thing except among scammers and their marks.

> Somebody else could build a centralized trading platform, and if you use that, it will be cheaper for all parties. Oh absolutely, a centralized digital assets trading platform for general digital goods would be better in almost every (at least technical) way compared to a blockchain/decentralized platform. The challenge isn't technical, it's getting parties to trust you and your platform, and to use it. That's mayb…

Game developers already trust services companies with leaderboards and other game services. It's not much harder for them to trust someone who provides a transferable digital asset service.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#140

Post by ThomPete »

jiggawatts wrote: post #134
ThomPete wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Feel free to list even one successful Web3 site. Not as in "could be useful in the future", but useful now , and used by a significant number of people for activities that are not directly crypto-related. Keep in mind that "web 1.0" was immediately useful, to many people, at a large scale. The original web wasn't restricted to web developers doing web development things. It was used by industry, government, and acade…

If you don't see the value of what is fundamentally a public ledger database, then I am not sure what to tell you.

It's being used by many people today. It's not for everyone. It will evolve and at one point we won't even know we are using it.

The thing about blockchain isn't that it isn't that you couldn't build it with "web2" the thing is it would be unfeasible to do so and still maintaining the trust.

By separating the "owners" of the database from what it gets used to verify, things that are a kind of wicked problem or at least a chicken and egg problem become possible.

Here are a couple of examples from my perspective of what is technically doable but practically unfeasible with a proprietary.

https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1465382119811784708 https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/1463539727202754563

I am pretty convinced that the government will be using this sooner or later too, for things that require transparency, but they are not going to be early adopters (in contrast with the internet where they were)

But I am fine with you not seeing this or agreeing. Time will tell, I put my money were my mouth is :)

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