In 2022, Web3 went just great

Ah, the good old “communism would work perfectly but the Soviet Union was doing it all wrong” style argument.

Blind faith in an economic theory against all empirical evidence is a dead end.

I'm kinda happy with the way things turned out. For a moment, my understanding of reality was upside down with how many mediocre and clearly pointless projects were generating so much money.

With every crypto hype cycle, I actually go through the motions and create a smart contract project and become completely disillusioned with the hype. I thought ERC20 tokens were bullshit when I realized it's just updating keys in a hashtable.

I worked in Solana and was surprised to find out that a developer can update a program at will. No one is really talking about this and this seems like a disastrously shaky foundation to put your money in, along with programs being difficult to audit.

There are some NFTs by amazing artists which no one cares about. The ones with the most popularity are modern-day clip art pieces, with copy-paste scripts and marketing strategies.

I think web3/crypto will have mass adoption, but when it does, it will be much more boring and seamless with what we have today, with large companies managing blockchains and governments issuing their own coins.

I read once blackhat and whitehat are just buzz words and most of real hackers (not script kiddies or pentesters) are more like greyhats.

That being said, I uncovered once a security hole (in reality it should be called an open door) in the admin password of the now disappeared bbox2, the official router for the belgian company called Proximus.

How did I discovered it ? I wanted to watch ip addresses going through the router because I knew the owner of the box was up to something about me... But almost immediatelly I discovered the admin password field was like an 'universal lock', meaning any key could open it... in other word word, any string entered in the password field allowed to access admin pages of the box. After a few google searches, I discovered the software (the OS) was the last version, dating a few years back, and the box producer didn't pushed anymore update, not even security update. (Look at synology NAS scandal where Synology dropped software update for one of its older hardware to have an idea of the kind of thing it means for hardware facing internet access).

I immediatly reported the security hole to the federal cybersecurity unit, and after that, kept my mouth shut because there wasn't any way to fix this security issue except replacing the hardware itself. At that time, between 1/6 to 1/4 of routers in belgium were bbox2. I never heard anything from the federal cybersecurity unit (except a mere thank you by mail) or Proximus, but 1 year and a half later, bbox2 where nowhere to be found anymore in belgium. The only thing I have left from that is the mail I sent to the cybersecurity unit with screenshots of the bbox2 admin pages.

Why did I report it and shut my mouth without taking credentials for it (that's the kind of things which can launch a career in security field) ?

Because it's one thing to try to snoop on an accointance browsing activity, it's another to let a security hole of this magnitude in the open, and a far worse thing to disclose it to the public while there is no fix for it. And that's another level to sell it on dark market or to the chinese or russian ambassy (I'm not in the hacking business but I'm pretty sure they would have dropped a big pile of cash for that).

Just to say, Bruxelles is also home of numerous european institutions...

Maybe that's why the european parlement voted for mandotary code review for everything facing the internet in EU ?

> The book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was written in 1841

It feels worth noting that this book, as well as the wider idea of an abstract idea of crowd-induced mania in general it reinforces, is pseudoscientific with little credible evidence to support it.

It's origins lie much more in the political motivations and historical context of the authors: It is no coincidence that this book was written by a wealthy scotsman against the backdrop of the idea was first floated by an aristocrat during the upheavals and riots surrounding the introduction of capitalism, and that the idea was initially proposed by an aristocrat during the french revolution. They were both times where it was extraordinarily convenient to be able to dismiss engaging with the things the crowd was being driven by.

I'd urge against making the same mistake today. To me, it is impossible to separate the web3 mania from the historical context it happened in: Like 2008, it is a time of job insecurity, financial anxiety and distrust in systems with governments doing little to help. They are prime times for wishful thinking and people who want to take advantage of it.

They're not saying it's different, but that people are more desperate to latch onto get rich quick schemes now than they would've been pre-2008. Which is why crypto was huge. If this movement happened in 2005, maybe there wouldn't have been enough desperation for it to hit critical mass and blow up in popularity.