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Is Web3 Bullshit?

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111–120 of 383 posts

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#111
Yes it is bullshit. Any of you positive activists have any financial literacy? I've not met a single person who is positive about cryptocurrencies that also has a finance degree, that is not also a conman selling crap securities. Every respectable financially knowledgeable person I know calls them a fraud.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#112

It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics. Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.

> the web has been decentralised

maybe the web per se, but in practical terms it depends on the DNS which is decidedly not decentralized.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#113
I dedicated the last 3 years of my life to build "web3". In my case it means building a new democratic Internet (whatever that means) on top of ENS+IPFS. I a few projects in this direction, the current one is Esteroids.

Is this a good idea? dunno yet. Is this BS? I hope not, my intentions are surely good, no BS in them. Are there plenty of BS web3 projects? Yes, of course, same as in any other area of IT. But I really don't think the web3 idea is inherently BS, there's really plenty of value to be found in it.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#114

It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics. Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.

I agree that cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme, but the web is incredibly centralized. The whole point of DNS is to normalize an easy to remember name to an address so that everyone can access that same address easily. That is almost the purest essence of centralization. In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud pro…

> The confusion here is most people confuse the web for the internet. The internet is a big decentralized network thanks to BGP. The web is an application riding that network thanks to HTTP.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but aren’t you making exactly that error above? DNS both predates and exposes networking infrastructure that isn’t the web.

And for what it’s worth, I would consider DNS decentralized: it’s a system of different servers that coordinate to share information. No one party owns the DNS network.

Confusing the fact that DNS’s information is authoritative for centralization would presumably ensnare every blockchain as well, since they entire point of a distributed ledger is to be authoritative.

But I figure that’s the least of blockchain’s problems, given that the underlying network topology of even the largest distributed ledgers tends to be around a dozen “big fish.” Not very decentralized in practice.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#115
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that posters need to be careful about undefined acronyms, but, pro-tip, you can always check Wikipedia for overloaded terms to narrow down to the right one. Here it will give you a section for the meanings in the context of computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPA Edit: also, I suspect you’re being cheeky there, because when I Google “SPA”, the top results are local spas (even in private mode), and thus n…

There's more than one technical meaning. One is web-related and another is cryptography-related. All possibly relevant.

Yes, the other one is a small stub article about a proprietary Microsoft protocol for authenticating email logins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Password_Authentication

I guess that’s what led you to “keep googling” the same term over and over?

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#116
post #106
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that Dogecoin? (although inflation rate itself is deflationary - dropping from 5% pa about now to 2% in about 20 years)

Dogecoin is a copy+paste of bitcoin with a few config values changed. That's why it shares the inflationary model. The reason bitcoin is often described as deflationary is that many coins are lost, and the inflation is somewhat priced-in.

How is Bitcoin inflationary? Even without coin lossage (a ridiculous concept in any other financial system, short of literally setting your money on fire), the network is programmed to eventually stop minting coins. Fixed supply on increased demand (if it’s the economic substitute we’ve all been promised) is the precondition for deflationary movement. No amount of “pricing in” changes that.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#117
post #88
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings). In reality, non-deflationary cryptocur…

Isn't that Dogecoin? (although inflation rate itself is deflationary - dropping from 5% pa about now to 2% in about 20 years)

Yes, sort-of, the supply grows by a fixed absolute quantity every year. I don't really consider it to be a serious attempt at a useful cryptocurrency though.

I suspect any coin attempting price-stability (minimum requirement for a useful currency) would need some kind of central bank to control and guarantee the supply. (We have that already too! It's called Tether and it ain't great.)

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#118
post #2

Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for decades (persistent identity, multiple persistent identities) or things you could do anyway ("right now, people can only go to facebook or Google. With Web3, everyone can have their own space!!") because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server.…

> because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data. Previously, you could run your own webserver, your own email server, etc, and you could trust your own data, but other people collaborating with you would need to trust you to manage that data, and trust that you hadn’t man…

> A robust and abstracted data layer allows application developers to spend more time thinking about application logic and less time thinking about data.

I don't think you can fully replicate a general database in blockchain, at least not to any decent performance/size level. And interacting with the blockchain will always be more complex than interacting with your own database. A blockchain app will always take more developer resources than a non-blockchain app.

Also, another problem with federated services is money. In a centralized app, one party controls the app and can exploit it for money and use that money to pay developers. They can even run at a loss the first years to create a good product until they start making money. With federated apps, it's harder to invest and blockchain doesn't change the fact that people don't like to pay for services they have gotten for free previously. Crowdfunding existed before too and not too many projects got enough to even start.

The third point is... people just don't care about decentralized/centralized. So insisting on going blockchain is a technology choice that's probably not going to bring you too many users (other than fans of the tech) and it's going to cost you more developer time. It doesn't make too much sense.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#119

As with a lot of cryptocurrency stuff, web3 is very overhyped yet also genuinely promising and useful. The ecosystem is not yet at a point where it's streamlined enough for mainstream adoption, but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3. Of course that does come at some cost and from a pure surface user experie…

> but it's possible to build working MVPs for very interesting services with privacy and decentralization guarantees that just weren't feasible pre-web3.

Do you have any examples? Because up to this point most web3 projects I've seen fall in one of two categories: "you could do this before" and/or "nobody actually wants this".

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#120
post #78

Crypto fans are always hurling accusations of FOMO on those of us who just "don't get it". But web3 strikes me as those very same people experiencing FOMO because they missed out printing a bunch of money for themselves in the early days of the web by actually providing novel value - which in hindsight now all looks like really obvious low-hanging fruit, hence the FOMO - so they're hoping to "get in on the ground flo…

And conveniently they reserve for themselves double digit percentage amounts of future assets by the way of premine. The levels of hypocrisy in crypto are mind boggling.

And not a single one of the cryptocurrency developers in the entire enterprise has a single finance class under their belt. They are naïvely using pragmatic logic when they write their new distributed financial systems, yet finance does not follow pragmatic logic- it follows social and contractual agreements that are often nonpragmatic and nonlogical - as the contract holders intend. This entire concept is so ill formed it should be a Money Python skit with silly voices.
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