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In 2022, Web3 went just great

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Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#141

Post by AlexandrB »

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.

Wake me up when we get some transparency on what's backing all those Tethers or whether Binance is solvent or not. It's one thing to document scams after the fact, it's another to have mechanisms to identify them before they grow out of hand.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#142

Post by RestlessMind »

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…

> in favor of an upper middle class of professionals who enjoy stability, and an enlarged sub-middle class

I cannot remember where I read it but the gist essentially was that you are either mastering the software or the software is mastering you. It jives with what you are saying.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#143

Post by RestlessMind »

helf wrote: post #65
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…

So you actually did get benefits of HODLing BTC, no? When it comes to crypto, I see people conflating 3 distinct buckets - a hard asset like BTC, legitimate projects like ETH and scams. Scams outnumber the first 2 buckets, but the first 2 buckets will provide more growth than stocks or bonds over the next 10 years.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#144

Post by RestlessMind »

coldpie wrote: post #110
dayvid wrote: post #74

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 i…

> 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. But, that's no different from a really power-inefficient database. Whatever could be done with centralized crypto can equally be done with a Postgres server for 1/100,000 the cost. Why do you think this wil…

Agreed, centralized crypto should just die or be treated like any other web2 project.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#145

Post by BlueTemplar »

pornel wrote: post #99

> Topping the charts is the March 29 hack of the bridge used by the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity — a hack that saw $625 million taken and funneled to the North Korean Lazarus cybercrime group. If it was a movie, I'd think the plot is just too stupid: a dictatorship funded their nuclear missile program by hacking an angry-birds-styled JRPG game. An yet here were are. This demonstrates that playing with cryptocurren…

It does sound similar (and less sophisticated) to a real book plot :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State (2007)

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#146

Post by qvrjuec »

hanniabu wrote: post #126
dayvid wrote: post #74

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 i…

> I worked in Solana and was surprised to find out that a developer can update a program at will Because it's not a real blockchain. Most chains are centralized. You should really focus your time on Ethereum. It's the only chain researching and innovating and is focused on longevity.

Absolutely not true. Program maintainers can create immutable programs, most just choose not to. It's a user issue more so than a protocol issue.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#147

Post by bitcoin_anon »

When sentiment is low, I remind myself that for the price to remain where its been for the past three months or so, people have been purchasing the 900 Bitcoins mined a day, paying $16,000 each, or $14 million a day. This is the best use for these dollars that these people can come up with: swapping them for digital property, a slice of 21 million.

Thankfully (for us all), it seems that this story is not over! Our ancestors will look back on this absurd period of soft money and wonder what we were thinking entrusting something as critical as money, the lifeblood of civilization, to politicians. May it be brief!

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#148

Post by chihuahua »

TedShiller wrote: post #112
qbasic_forever wrote: post #45

"The collector who dropped $2.9 million on an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet found himself in a bind in April, when he tried to resell the NFT and wound up with a top bid of… $280." Hahaha, wow. You couldn't even take a 2.899 million dollar write off loss on your taxes too! Just straight vaporizing nearly 3 million bucks.

The most shocking part for me was that someone was willing to pay $280

The buyer is planning on hodling it until it inevitably rebounds to $2.9 million.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#149

Post by hurril »

RestlessMind wrote: post #143
helf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So you actually did get benefits of HODLing BTC, no? When it comes to crypto, I see people conflating 3 distinct buckets - a hard asset like BTC, legitimate projects like ETH and scams. Scams outnumber the first 2 buckets, but the first 2 buckets will provide more growth than stocks or bonds over the next 10 years.

Growth is a little bit of a weasel word here though and you'll be well advised to research the difference between multiple expansion and underlying growth.

In the world of stock, we don't like multiple expansion as it's a sign that prices go up on grounds that are hard to reason about. Things going up without reason tend to come down for the same reasons.

Crypto has _zero_ growth. Crypto companies, however, that's a different story.

But sure, I'm sure you'll be right about what you perceive to be growth. There are still millions of gullible and half smart people waiting to get on board.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#150

Post by swalsh »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #27
seanw444 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could spend less money on an ad campaign to explain what crypto actually is, and what it's good use cases are, and what it's not good for. Rather than, you know, binding it up in vague and obnoxious legalese.

The "not good for" list is "practically everything." The "good use cases" effectively don't exist. Every crypto solution falls into one or more of these buckets... - Has substantial centralized elements, could be done vastly more efficiently with a DB - "Decentralized" but still requires some central authority to provide critical features (particularly any form of conflict resolution) - Depends on one or more smart c…

"The "not good for" list is "practically everything."

This line of debate is quite tiredsome. You don't see the advantages of crypto because you live a privlidged life with good banking, and thus don't see the use cases personally. But they do in fact exist.

"Has substantial centralized elements, could be done vastly more efficiently with a DB"

Second, this idea that anything you can do in crypto you can do "more effeciently" in a typical db is just plain discouting the benefits of decentralization. For example, when we centralized our supply chain in China, it was more efficient, but boy did it hurt when the pandemic hit. Now i'm never going to argue about putting everything in the blockchain, but there are substantial benefits to putting the important stuff in it.

"Depends on one or more smart contracts to effectively be perfect code with no bugs or unintended behaviors"

The Airplane you fly in needs to be engineered near perfect, or people die. Crypto development can't be "move fast and break things", it means slow and methodical development.

"Primarily used for illicit goods and services"

Because the regulatory framework is undefined, legitimate people don't want to risk going to jail because they accidently created a security. It's not because the technology is ONLY good for lillicit things.

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