171–180 of 267 posts
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True. I liked the term web3 somehow, but the more I read how people react to it, it might be already burned.
More and more people realize the difference between cefi and defi. I have never seen a defi protocol wrecked during this bear market. Everybody is talking about Tether, but who knows DAI ?
So many short-sighted critiques. Web3 or whatever might not be the answer, but you have to ask yourself a question: what's the internet going to look like in 2030, when the majority of its traffic is non-western, and a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia? Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and creat…
I don't know about Africa, but Asia already has a massive share of all purchasing power.
> Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and create to Google and Apple? Are they going to ransom their digital economies to Apple's 30% tax?
No, they're going to build things like Alibaba and Tencent and hold that control for themselves. Which they did do.
> Betting in favor of the current centralized western oligopolies is betting on the belief that the digital economy won't grow, and that there won't be a regulatory crackdown in countries with stronger technological capabilities.
Crackdown on what? Speech or human rights or ...?
> what's the alternative? Every large country making its own app stores and social networks?
Well, they have largely done that, haven't they? The "X" in Musks's "X app" clearly stands for "Wish it was WeChat" with all of the social media, shopping, commerce, banking, and communication embedded in it.
> Or a decentralized variant that isn't completely controlled by a handful of western corporations?
This is also already happening, isn't it?
It seems like all of your hypothetical questions are already answered, and none of the answers are "Web 3."
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Web2: you stop paying a cloud provider, your data is gone. Web3: you stop paying a network, your data stays online. Either because it's permanent by default (blockchain, blockweave) or because people deem it interesting and pin it (IPFS) Seems like a fundamental improvement to me.
Web2 - stores exabytes of data. Web3 - stores a few text files and rotten hyperlinks to jpgs of (if you're lucky) poorly-drawn apes and (if you're unlucky) rugs, while setting billions of dollars on fire.
So many short-sighted critiques. Web3 or whatever might not be the answer, but you have to ask yourself a question: what's the internet going to look like in 2030, when the majority of its traffic is non-western, and a massive share of all purchasing power resides in Africa and Asia? Do you think by 2030, all global governments and their citizens will voluntarily give away control over what they can consume and creat…
It’s always so interesting to me that we already saw this happen - look no further than China - and they became oligapolized even more than the west. Centralization works. You may not like it and you hope that developing world won’t either, but WhatsApps success sort of invalidates all your points. Countries are fine handing over nearly all their data to whatever platform works best, because who wants less than the b…
India, for instance, had 250M internet users in 2015. That number is now nearly a billion. In nearly 25 years of the commercial internet, India could only bring 250M people online. Then it brought another 750M online in the span of just 7 years.
For the bulk of India's online population, the internet is still a novelty. A prime minister elected in 2014 - who claimed to be "tech savvy" - was 58 when the iPhone was released - not exactly an age where you "get" new technology immediately.
Now fast forward to 2032. A 65 year old prime ministerial candidate would have spent 22 years of his/her life in the smartphone world. The bulk of the population would have a decade's worth of experience of the digital world. Their understanding of the problems, risks, security issues, etc. would be far better.
Already, the Indian government has announced plans to create its own mobile app store after protests by entrepreneurs against Google's app store fees.
This is only going to increase moving forward.
The irony of this post criticizing DeFi and blockchain in the wake of FTX is that those decentralized applications are working just fine in this downturn. Aave and Uniswap aren’t failing, they are thriving.
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1. That's not really an argument. There is literally exabytes of data on Filecoin ( https://stats.filecoin.io/d/z6FtI92Zz/filecoin-chain-stats?o... ) 2. And gone if you stop paying.
> And gone if you stop paying. Are Filecoin nodes all hosting files for free? I can put a terabyte of files on there and it'll never go away?
What's a succinct definition for Web3/3.0/etc that I can tell my mother in law in 20 secs? I don't actually know what it's meant to be.
Web3 based apps where a company like Facebook or Instagram can't delete your content just because it might contain a nipple.
Someone posts child porn. Now everyone hosting that decentralized data is literally distributing child porn, and they can't stop without deleting the service from their device.
Some people are thinking that maintaining a safe haven for child pornographers is a small price to pay for absolute digital freedom. They are the reason that things like this will never work.
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Sorry, but Web3 can't simply adopt whatever definition is convenient for the present arguement (no 'Metaverse' moment for you). IPFS can adopt whatever identity it wants, but simply wanting to usurp HTTP doesn't make it "Web3 tech since it's inception". It sounds like they're doing a great job driving the project into irrelevance, for whatever that's worth. I don't think your definition of Web3 is generally agreeable…
To me it seems that most critics have the impression that web3 is blockchains, and the moment someone says it isn't, they get mad because they arguments break down. I was on web3 conferences and met all the creators of these technologies that consider themselves web3 but aren't considered web3 by critics of web3. What should I make of it?
If the creators of non-cryptocurrency projects don’t like that definition, maybe they should be angry at the crypto grifters and make a clean break from them? But I suppose they’re not going to do that because they also want to get rich from retail investors buying their token one day.
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They really don't. Not every document has to include all things relevant back to the big bang. That bit in particular has been discussed by lots of people for quite a while, including a ton of posts right here, so if you just fell off the turnip truck and are truly unaware of the web3 critiques, a little searching should set you straight. Heck, I'll even give you a place to start: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
Did the failure of Enron mean that the US financial system itself is a scam? If not, then why should a scam on a blockchain be evidence that that blockchain itself is a scam?
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Paying for things ONLINE with a crypto wallet is legitimately a far, far better experience than fumbling around with credit cards. A seamless on-ramp from a bank account to a crypto wallet will really change the way we pay for things online. I believe this on-ramp is coming with CBDCs. Edit: HN is hopelessly anti Wayne Gretzky when it comes to crypto :D Edit 2: I should have mentioned 'online'
> A seamless on-ramp from a bank account to a crypto wallet will really change the way we pay for things online. What? Why? Here in Europe, you can just pay with SEPA direct debit. You don't need credit cards or paper checks to pay for stuff, neither in the meatspace nor online. The only thing services like PayPal are good for is fraud protection (for both sides). So much of what we see in the US financial industry a…
I am fascinated by the ridiculous claims that this somehow makes things hard.