In 2022, Web3 went just great • Hacker News Board

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#61

Post by sharkbot » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

timdaub wrote: post #47

ranger207 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

posters in this thread also believe that there are bad people in western financial institutions but that 1) the laws and regulations in place ensure that the system is at least usable by normal people to do useful work, as evidenced by the bajillions of dollars of money made by selling products and services that are not stolen from their bank accounts; and 2) that western financial institutions will not in general re…

we'll see how this "don't repeat prior mistakes' thing will play out with maxed out inflation, raging corruption in western democracies, moral wars in Ukraine, rising distrust in media and a laissez-faire approach to white collar crime after the financial crisis in 2008.

I won’t comment about your other topics, but I’ll point out that current inflation is far from “maxed out”, at least in mature Western democracies with their own central bank and currency. ~9% is high historically, but inflation has run hotter in the not-so-distant past.

2% inflation is not a natural state of affairs, it’s a target that’s considered the “appropriate” amount of inflation.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#62

Post by xattt » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

SinParadise wrote: post #36

Eisenstein wrote: post #13

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going…

I'd ask them "you rich yet" at this point.

That doesn’t help the needless hostility.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#63

Post by SQueeeeeL » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:36 PM UTC

oytis wrote: post #42

Eisenstein wrote: post #13

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going…

There was a drop indeed, but the price for both Bitcoin and Ethereum is still pretty high. And these are not the only things that dropped this year, you could tell the same to people investing in stocks. I must say though that I don't and didn't own any crypto assets, and am not really well-versed in the web3.0 world, which might be why I am confused by your comment.

Bro, you literally just did the pool thing the comment above was talking about

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#64

Post by gizmo385 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:36 PM UTC

timdaub wrote: post #50

satellites wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a blatant straw man fallacy. No one here is insinuating that financial institutions are pure and innocent. If anything, crypto news over the past year has proven one thing: that the crypto space is just as corrupt as “traditional finance,” but with none of the guardrails that make it harder to commit blatant scams. Society developed immune responses to financial fraud in the form of regulations. They are insuf…

The difference between traditional finance and DeFi is that DeFi is so transparent that a single person (Molly) can run a blog to aggregate all things that went wrong. They can arise at a single number of error that the industry has created. This is an achievement of radical transparency; something that should be celebrated.

DeFi is orders of magnitude smaller, which makes aggregation much simpler.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#65

Post by helf » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

Eisenstein wrote: post #13

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going…

Same. I’m one of those lucky few who had futzed with BTC in 2011 when it was almost brand new and then forgot about it till 2019 when it started spiking.

I spent two weeks digging through boxes and imaging hard drives before miraculously finding my wallet.dat from 2011 that I luckily hadn’t encrypted or even passworded lol.

Had 3.25btc in it (I remembered the .25. The extra 3 were a shock.). I ended up paying for my home down payment with it.

You shoulda seen my broker’s face when I showed up with almost entirely crypto to fund the mortgage. It took them several weeks to find a company who would be OK with crypto being fronted. I ended up having to come up with a way to prove it was mine which was fun. Had to back track through the blockchain tracking the history of the transactions, wallet address creation. Show I had the private keys etc. they finally accepted it as after a month of back and forth.

Then I didn’t cash out entirely when it spiked to $60k and now I am regretting that lol.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#66

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

RetpolineDrama wrote: post #38

Eisenstein wrote: post #13

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going…

>I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' Not everyone that lost money did this to you though, seems unfair to judge most people who are just trying to get by because of a few assholes on the internet

[deleted]

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#67

Post by riffraff » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:48 PM UTC

macNchz wrote: post #56

Lendal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to look at this from the perspective of a society and ask ourselves what else we could have done. Obviously there are a whole lot of people in society completely lacking in common sense and critical thinking skills, while at the same time mass rudeness seems normalized too. Is this a failure of education, or parenting? Or has it always been this way, and the only difference is the way we communicate w…

There’s obviously a super complex web of things involved, but I personally think that the nature of the post-2008 economic recovery (in the US) has had an impact on this at a societal level. I think people perceive that the opportunity to have a comfortable life doing a “regular job” is slipping away in favor of an upper middle class of professionals who enjoy stability, and an enlarged sub-middle class who are findi…

But people were gambling and making bad financial decisions before the 2008 crisis too.

The crypto schemes are very often rehashing of old scams and mistakes, they are not qualitatively different from penny stocks pump and dumps, pyramids and MLM schemes, ponzi schemes, tulip/cabbage patch/whatever mania, etc.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#68

Post by SinParadise » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:48 PM UTC

xattt wrote: post #62

SinParadise wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd ask them "you rich yet" at this point.

That doesn’t help the needless hostility.

Hostility is the point.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#69

Post by rcoder » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:49 PM UTC

onebot wrote: post #52

The problem I have with articles like these is that my definition of Web3 is quite a bit different. I tend to lump "crypto" more with NFTs, wild speculation, scams, heavily VC backed "decentralized" tokens, etc. But on the other hand, I want social networks not owned by businesses, I want other major utilities also not owned by major companies (I think gmail is used for 8bn addresses). I think the fediverse is nice s…

What you're describing sounds like the (now unfashionably old and un-hyped as a category) `dWeb` ecosystem. As far as I've seen, 'web3' has meant "websites that use crypto wallets for login and store data in a blockchain and/or IPFS."

The difference between the two isn't necessarily technical; rather it's the requirement that you "join the crypto economy" and start buying up whatever shitcoin -- or CDS-style derivative of multiple coins -- is being used for that one website...and somehow that means "SSO is easy now!" and "anyone can make micropayments anywhere!" etc., etc.

The latter only makes sense in a world of free money from VCs that lets people spend tens of millions of dollars building a *login form* that they charge other websites to use. Their business model seemingly ignores the fact that no serious enterprise[^1] is going to run their internal authN/Z and IdM on a global blockchain.

[^1]: actually, I'm sure several companies have/will tried this, and equally certain the net result was a flaky service that was effectively just querying a Postgres table that cached the on-chain identity for a user and checking their presented token against that. I.e., yet another Postgres instance masquerading as "web3 infrastructure".

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#70

Post by danaris » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 4:49 PM UTC

onebot wrote: post #52

The problem I have with articles like these is that my definition of Web3 is quite a bit different. I tend to lump "crypto" more with NFTs, wild speculation, scams, heavily VC backed "decentralized" tokens, etc. But on the other hand, I want social networks not owned by businesses, I want other major utilities also not owned by major companies (I think gmail is used for 8bn addresses). I think the fediverse is nice s…

I really, really hope that we can "reclaim" that definition of web3 (which, from what I can tell, was the original one, hijacked by cryptocurrency proponents as the scams mounted and the value of Bitcoin rose in the last few years) as the cryptocurrency sphere collapses in on itself, because I'm right there with you on the desperate need for genuine decentralized internet and societal infrastructure. (I'm deeply, deeply skeptical that blockchain is going to be any meaningful help in this, but the basic problem and the general outline of the solution, I agree with.)

It's extremely useful to have a term like "Web3" to use as a unifying force within such an effort, as well as a way to describe it to people outside, and I don't see a better one for such a decentralization right now.