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Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

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Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#181

Post by perfecthjrjth »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #136

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…

Massive purchasing power of Africa, Asia? I don't believe so. USA is the major importer of illegal drugs, why? Because Americans have the purchasing power. Every country on the earth wants to export their stuff to the US. China doesn't want to depend on the West anymore--only way to do is to build their own domestic economy.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#182

Post by k__ »

ceejayoz wrote: post #170
k__ wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously it didn't start as one, but projects can transition, right? Seemingly, the Internet Archive and Protocol Labs are bros. https://blog.archive.org/2021/04/01/filecoin-foundation-gran...

Have they used that Filecoin for anything beyond the press release?

They got this donation after they already build decentralized infra for years. It's all in the article.

But yeah, I know, no true Scotsman.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#184

Post by lottin »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #119
galdosdi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto's been around for over a decade dude. How many decades do you want? Why would I ever build a business around an Ethereum smart contract when I could just write a normal contract, and then I know the courts will enforce it even if one of my business associates tries to pull a fast one? If it's about the precise coding of constraints and all that, you can easily write a legal contract that specifies that the pie…

Crypto has been around for decades but most of the tech we now call "Web3" is very nascent. The ERC-721 standard used by most NFTs was first proposed in 2018, and didn't even reach technical maturity until 2019. And yes, you can write normal contracts and get the courts to enforce it. But what if your customers are in India or Vietnam or Tibet? Under which jurisdiction will you attempt to enforce the contract? The en…

A so-called 'smart contract' is not a replacement for a contract. Just because you call something a contract doesn't mean it is. The same applies to 'decentralised finance'. It's not finance unless it can do financing, and defi can't.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#185

Post by lottin »

k__ wrote: post #183
DebtDeflation wrote: post #108

If you want to charge people to do things on your website, you can do that today and it doesn't require the use of blockchain or the creation of new tokens for payment.

Regardless of the country you're from?

Yes.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#186

Post by piva00 »

david_shi wrote: post #152
abiro wrote: post #127

Web3 refers to the emerging shift in internet value chains from permissioned, centralized databases to permissionless, decentralized databases where users own their data. The driving force behind Web3 is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a permissionless, decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial). For an even more limited set of applications, we can also enforc…

This is a great summary. Many of the critiques I've read here criticize the early users of the technology, which is like blaming cars when the blame should be on bad drivers.

No post body was provided.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#187

Post by spaceman_2020 »

phphphphp wrote: post #166
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #136

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…

centralisation is human: it’s far more plausible that there’ll be multiple centralised systems separated by cultural boundaries — examples already exist, like China — than humans doing some sort radical cross-cultural shift from centralisation to decentralisation (which is itself a strange western-libertarian obsession).

This is precisely why I care about this "decentralized" web. I don't want to live in a China-like walled garden. In the absence of decentralized alternatives, enforcing such walled gardens just becomes easier.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#188

Post by lottin »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #91
sys_64738 wrote: post #38

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.

Owning your digital identity instead of renting it.

That doesn't mean anything.

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#189

Post by zenen »

pessimizer wrote: post #101
zenen wrote: post #28

Dang, this sucks. Not the post, I respect & understand the opinion. It sucks that the initiative of creating a deflationary currency started this massive wave of people thinking that they're smarter than whoever invented Bitcoin in the first place. Everybody bought in to the hype but nobody wants to invest the time into understanding how the actual technology works. "In fact the entire Blockchain arena is filled with…

> It sucks that the initiative of creating a deflationary currency started this massive wave of people thinking that they're smarter than whoever invented Bitcoin in the first place. I'm sure there are thousands of people who have spent far more time working on and thinking about bitcoin than the person who invented it.

collectively, yes. I would say that the type of thought is different, however. The creative thought of building a foundation with the foresight of how it might be extended or implemented is different than building on top of that foundation.

I'm more saying that people like Buterin saw it gain popularity and imagined that they could do better instead of standing behind it as a unified front. Maybe I'm biased, though

Re: Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

#190

Post by spaceman_2020 »

mlsu wrote: post #156
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #136

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…

What makes internet commerce any different from any other commerce? I will absolutely make this bet. We already see it. Countries who don't like to play by the rules of US trade -- those who resist signing trade agreements and using our currency develop or attempt to develop alternatives, and if they lack the capability to do so, they turn to other powers (basically: China). Economic activity gets silo'd into blocs,…

> No country at all runs their internet economy on some cryptocurrency or cryptocomputation stack. And they never will, no matter how "decentralized" it is.

Yep. They won't. They will centralize control even more and things that are not as conducive for the ruling power will likely get delisted and deplatformed.

Which is precisely why building out the decentralized web matters. At the very least, there should be an alternative available to citizens. Even if its hard to access. The penalty for not building it out is walled gardens everywhere.

If it ends up being adopted by governments and companies, great. If it's just used by a bunch of nerds to send messages or money to friends outside the walled garden, then, too, it is worth building.

Surely, a reader of HackerNews would agree.

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