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Web 3.0 – The Great Con

davegebler.com

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Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#201

Post by only_human »

zeroclip wrote: post #178
dwgebler wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, author here. So the first thing is as something meant to be an engaging (though casual) read and one which is targeted at an audience who might not all be tech buffs, of course there's some simplification, glossing over some things and yes, a bit of hyperbole here and there for dramatic effect. The opening paragraph, for example, obviously lays out a strong and provocative position to immediately engage the reade…

Why don't you write an article about Web3 technology instead of Bitcoin or vacuous crypto-influencer statements? If all of Web3 is a con, then you should have no trouble dismantling the usefulness of ENS, Aave, DAI, and Uniswap. Spending time talking about Bitcoin, Proof of Work, Bitconnect, and other unrelated issues detracts from your essay.

Those defi projects don't require much to dismantle. The entire point of them is to accumulate more crypto. That's it. And since crypto is useless, they also serve no useful purpose.

The only exception you mentioned is ENS, but there isn't anything special about that. It's just a DNS system but centralized into a smart contract instead, and because it's on ethereum you have to pay gas fees in addition to the registrar fess. No actual benefit to using it versus real DNS.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#202

Post by only_human »

illiac786 wrote: post #163
bertman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cryptocurrencies are not "useless except for criminals"... Blockchain is also not useless. You say this, and yet fail to mention a legitimate use case, which is exactly what a big part of the article is about.

I thought that was obvious, apologies: anonymous payments. Do you also require an example of why anonymous payments are useful to non-criminals?

>I thought that was obvious, apologies: anonymous payments.

That isn't a legitimate use case. Cash is still largely superior at anonymous transactions, and it always will be because every crypto transaction inherently leaves a rather large paper trail. This can be obfuscated with cryptography techniques but can't be totally eliminated, traditional network tracking still goes a long way.

>Do you also require an example of why anonymous payments are useful to non-criminals?

No because they largely aren't. Any activist use case you think you have is disproportionately benefiting criminals. The larger the sum of money they're trying to launder, the more they gain from this. The problem with your line of thinking is that "anonymous payments" isn't actually a feature, it's the default state of things. Big corporations and shady governments would absolutely love to not tell anybody anything about what they're spending money on unless they can put a marketing spin on it. The transparency, accounting and reporting requirements are things that society built because we acknowledge that those who have large amounts of money have more power and therefore deserve more scrutiny.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#203

Post by only_human »

dwgebler wrote: post #172
illiac786 wrote: post #157

I agree with the bottom line, but the form, why does the author have to exaggerate like this? Cryptocurrencies are not "useless except for criminals"... Blockchain is also not useless. It's just much less useful than the hype makes it out to be. Making absolute statements like this isn't helpful, it makes it easy to demolish the argument for the actual scammers.

Hi, author here. So the first thing is as something meant to be an engaging (though casual) read and one which is targeted at an audience who might not all be tech buffs, of course there's some simplification, glossing over some things and yes, a bit of hyperbole here and there for dramatic effect. The opening paragraph, for example, obviously lays out a strong and provocative position to immediately engage the reade…

I disagree with the comment you're responding to. Please be more aggressive about dismissing crypto and blockchains as a fraud. It's actually shameful how reluctant some engineers are to do this. This isn't just about using them as a currency. They're bad at literally everything else too. There are no actual niche use cases. More software engineers need to be honest and up front about this before the scams continue. The irrational levels of hype must end. Crypto and blockchains are actually just completely useless. It's been 13 years and still every single person I've ever seen who says they're useful can't name a single actual use case that you can't do better with just a normal database. Even you're getting sucked into this trap.

Like, I get people's reluctance to seem biased, but how long are we going to let this charade continue? How long before we can say enough is enough? "Enterprise blockchain" is a marketing buzzword. Nobody actually wants them except to tick a box on a checklist. They never gained any real traction, because they're useless. They have to be managed by a centralized admin anyway, so what's the point? There just isn't one. Part of this is intentional confusion on the part of promoters, people labeling anything that uses paxos or merkle trees as "blockchain" for marketing reasons, but I hope people also start pushing back against that for what they are: obvious attempts to cash in on the crypto hype by using the word blockchain.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#204

Post by osigurdson »

only_human wrote: post #200
osigurdson wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one lend out more Bitcoin / Ethereum than they currently have?

You can just mint your own token and then lie to people about how much bitcoin/dollars/euros/pesos/whatever is backing it, or not disclose it at all, which is exactly what they already do. At least central banks require lenders to have minimum reserves and you can know that regulated banks aren't going below that limit. No such thing exists in crypto, it's the wild west.

One could also create their own gravel pebble based token and state that it is backed by something valuable. I don’t see how the existence of crypto changes much in this regard.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#205

Post by only_human »

osigurdson wrote: post #204
only_human wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just mint your own token and then lie to people about how much bitcoin/dollars/euros/pesos/whatever is backing it, or not disclose it at all, which is exactly what they already do. At least central banks require lenders to have minimum reserves and you can know that regulated banks aren't going below that limit. No such thing exists in crypto, it's the wild west.

One could also create their own gravel pebble based token and state that it is backed by something valuable. I don’t see how the existence of crypto changes much in this regard.

Yes, that's my point. Crypto doesn't change anything. It's just more of the same.

And FYI there is nothing wrong with fractional reserve banking when it's done in the right way with some mechanism (like regulation) to stop the banks from lending out too much and becoming insolvent or causing runaway inflation. It is not a big scam for the banks to take your money. Central banks all over the world are using it successfully to finance their economies. It actually works and occurs naturally in any banking system, including those in crypto. Except in crypto there is no central bank to cover for bank failures, the only option crypto lenders have in the case of a bank run is to just halt withdrawals or go bankrupt like old times. Which has happened extremely often in crypto to every prominent crypto company I can think of, like the one that just caused the crash earlier this year.

In my experience, people loudly saying on social media that fractional reserve banking doesn't work are trying to sell you a narrative of conspiracy theories, likely to promote their alternative "investments" that often seem to include, surprise surprise, selling you crypto.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#206

Post by only_human »

john_snowden wrote: post #175

Ledgers, blockchain, distributed systems, etc prexisted, long before web 3.0 and cryptocurrencies. Those are not disruptive technologies and they don't offer anything new, neither they solve any new problems. Bitcoin on the other hand, as it was presented by Satoshi Nakamoto whitepaper, is the disruptive technology. Took existing technologies and combine them in a way making something unique. It is not a currency, it…

>which is peer-to-peer, permissionless, censorship resistant, borderless, neutral and open

All of this is false. Every word of it. If that's what you heard from an MIT course then what that professor is doing is shameful. Here, let's go through it.

- Bitcoin isn't peer-to-peer or permissionless and it never has been. The network is de-facto run by mining pools who have exclusive permission to determines who gets to write to the blockchain. In order for two users to send payments to each other they must go through the miners and must pay them fees to gain permission. Peer-to-peer would be if the two users directly sent messages to each other to exchange funds, but that isn't how Bitcoin works. The core design of it intentionally has middlemen and gatekeeping built in.

- Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant or borderless. Have some articles:

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/eu-issues-bitcoin-crypto-ban...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/08/politics/fbi-north-korea-hack...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-seizes-1-billion-bi...

- Bitcoin isn't neutral. The political leanings of bitcoin have been known for a very long time. Satoshi intentionally put political statements in the whitepaper and the genesis block. The early adoption by wikileaks and silk road wasn't a coincidence, they had a very specific goal they had in mind.

- Bitcoin isn't open. The code itself is available on github but only a small number of people have commit access. A random person can't just go in and start modifying the bitcoin code at will. The best you can do is try to fork the network and launch your own token, which has happened a lot of times but none succeeded at causing the system to actually become open.

>The rest of the applications that are built on this idea may be "useless" as the author believes, maybe not. I don't know that and I don't think anyone can be sure.

I can say for sure that it's useless because every single positive claim I've ever seen about it has been completely false.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#207

Post by osigurdson »

only_human wrote: post #205
osigurdson wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could also create their own gravel pebble based token and state that it is backed by something valuable. I don’t see how the existence of crypto changes much in this regard.

Yes, that's my point. Crypto doesn't change anything. It's just more of the same. And FYI there is nothing wrong with fractional reserve banking when it's done in the right way with some mechanism (like regulation) to stop the banks from lending out too much and becoming insolvent or causing runaway inflation. It is not a big scam for the banks to take your money. Central banks all over the world are using it success…

It would be quite incredible to be able to lend out and charge interest on $1000 when only having $100. On the surface, that's pretty dumb and it's history has entirely fraudulent roots. However, it ultimately provides the needed entropy in the system to appropriately incentivize participants in the economy to produce goods and services at the lowest possible cost (in other words, optimize quality of life - or at least starvation avoidance).

It isn't at all clear to me however that the current system is optimal as it favours participants closer to the money printing source yet these participants are not providing any goods or services - just measures of value. The size of the financial services sector of an economy is likely a reasonable proxy for how suboptimal the system is.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#208

Post by only_human »

osigurdson wrote: post #207
only_human wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's my point. Crypto doesn't change anything. It's just more of the same. And FYI there is nothing wrong with fractional reserve banking when it's done in the right way with some mechanism (like regulation) to stop the banks from lending out too much and becoming insolvent or causing runaway inflation. It is not a big scam for the banks to take your money. Central banks all over the world are using it success…

It would be quite incredible to be able to lend out and charge interest on $1000 when only having $100. On the surface, that's pretty dumb and it's history has entirely fraudulent roots. However, it ultimately provides the needed entropy in the system to appropriately incentivize participants in the economy to produce goods and services at the lowest possible cost (in other words, optimize quality of life - or at lea…

>On the surface, that's pretty dumb and it's history has entirely fraudulent roots.

This is again a conspiracy theory typically promoted by adherents of the long discredited pseudoscience known as Austrian Economics. Don't fall for this. The fact that it's working at the set interest rates is proof that the system is not a fraud, because the bank should absolutely be able to make more good loans when it knows it can. It's only a fraud if it there are no regulations or safety nets and the banks become insolvent and everybody loses their money. Which right now is mostly a problem that crypto has. Central banks have become increasingly good at preventing it from happening with their own currencies.

>it favours participants closer to the money printing source yet these participants are not providing any goods or services - just measures of value

Well this isn't true. Providing liquidity and assuming risks are actual valuable financial services that the current system gives. The demand for these services won't go away if you change how the banks work. And the alternative is even worse anyway, where banks wouldn't be able to make money from loans at all, and they would just charge everyone mandatory increasing deposit/withdrawal fees. Hey this is starting to sound a lot like crypto.

The "rich get richer by doing nothing" effect is just a common feature of capitalism. In that aspect crypto is again, even worse. It provides no goods or services either, the entire thing is a waste, built on a technological fraud and propped up by "whales" who don't want to lose their investment.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#209

Post by only_human »

afiori wrote: post #168
hrbf wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when you remove the human greed part So they are theoretically a good idea with no practical application in the real world.

The problem with good applications of NFTs is that we still do not know what an NFT is. In particular there are a lot of variables around reselling restrictions, profit sharing, meaningful ownership, copyright, etc.

If you figured out all those variables, they would have to be legally enforced by a legal authority -- meaning there wouldn't be a purpose to use an NFT as a "blockchain authority" anymore. They're fundamentally useless.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#210

Post by jokerru66 »

I also think cryptocurrency is hyped & bubble. But the author is also wrong here by calling "only for criminals".

Cryptocurrency were supposed to mimic decentralized cash but there are still some problem that needs fixing.

> Imagine, for example, a world where you're out at a restaurant, or something, and you accidentally drop your keys. Someone else picks them up off the floor, only instead of handing them back to you, they now legally own your house and car. You call the police, but they say they have no power to insist this person gives you back your property. It's their property now, because possession is ownership, access is authorization.

Cryptocurrency should mimic cash, they don't have any intrinsic value just like cash. So correct example would be if you drop cash in restaurant not keys of your car. Just like cash whoever picks it up is there new owner & police can't do anything about it except for locking him in jail.

> In October 2017, JP Morgan's CEO Jamie Dimon called the idea a fraud and said he would fire any employee trading Bitcoin for being "stupid".

Ofcourse he will say that, JP Morgan creates money out of thin air by using fractional reserve, just like cryptocurrency. So basically bitcoin is taking away there business.

Author also misses important use like voting where we want record to be public, accountable & certifiable.

And about the criminal part. For criminals, CASH IS STILL THE KING.

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