191–200 of 319 posts
Every time I read about decentralization, I remember this episode from NPR Planet Money (one of the best podcasts, btw). It's about Libertarian Summer Camp where they tried to spend a day without fiat money. Gold standard everything. Turned out it's actually pretty hard because you have to get gold, and make sure the gold isn't fake, all by yourself. You bought a hotdog with the gold and now you have to worry about i…
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This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain . But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey. When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then…
At its heart, the strongest claim blockchain technology offers is pretty good data consistency assurances between nodes that don't trust one another. I guess that's kind of interesting as a technical demonstration, but it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that. This has been around and under continuous development since 2008, and still no actual use case. It seems like the space is full of hype-b…
This bothers me: That we could end up with expensive, unnecessary systems that exist not because they offer a tangible benefit but because everyone just kept going along with things, collecting investor money and ignoring criticism until it was too late.
I don’t see that being apocalyptic necessarily, I think Adam Smith’s scythe will mow down any companies that make truly bonkers decisions on this stuff. But it bugs me that we could collectively spend years arguing about this and building blockchains and training a generation of blockchain engineers only for the near totality of blockchain stuff to fail for reasons that were evident from the beginning.
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This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain . But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey. When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then…
At its heart, the strongest claim blockchain technology offers is pretty good data consistency assurances between nodes that don't trust one another. I guess that's kind of interesting as a technical demonstration, but it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that. This has been around and under continuous development since 2008, and still no actual use case. It seems like the space is full of hype-b…
If there is a known fixed list of nodes participating in the system, blockchain again becomes a bad choice.
Not going to lie, I thought and still think that the whole Web 2.0 thing was clever marketing and window dressing on top of fairly pedestrian but useful technologies. It was actually less of seismic shock than mobile first which despite being a bigger shift didn't actually get a number. As far as I'm concerned, Web3 is beyond this. It's what happen when you let Ponzi schemers write the marketing material. I can't for…
That's kind of the whole point. Money without a state and without permission. If you don't believe in that then of course you won't see the value in decentralized finance.
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Riding off a wave of addicts and their enthusiasm for gambling. Meanwhile, Cash App, Apple Pay, and Stripe have done more for fintech in the past month than all other cryptocurrency technologies combined in the last decade.
Bingo. They can't even get their numbering scheme right. This would be "web4" Disregarding the semantic web throws out the history of the tech that sought to build p2p knowledge graphs before the social giants pushed it aside. They care little for these concepts given their blatant disregard.
Both are big ideas that sound very impressive to an outsider but problematic once you get into the details.
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Original author here. Totally. I’m old enough to remember when Web 3 was the semantic web, so I guess I don’t put much stock in the label. And, personally, I’m really interested in crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and some of the stuff the Indie Web community has built. I have no idea if those are, uh, web3 enough for web3.:-) As for the question of casinos, I think @pinboard’s description of Web 3 as “an…
The web3 movement should be be inclusive of IndieWeb and federated ActivityPub ecosystems. Interoperability and open standards paved the way for all of this, and it'd be a shame to toss that out of the window for some pie in the sky vapor. edit: by inclusive , I mean adoption and funding. The wheel does not need to be re-invented, poorly.
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Blockchain isn't even central in Web3, but it surely helps. Web3 = decentralized identity, full data and connection graph ownership by user, reputation transfer, verification via zero knowledge proofs, support for VR/AR and 3D objects. All of this stuff is either in prototype or draft phase, but it's ok. These things need to be built to stop horror stories on HN about "algorithm justice" and "data kingdoms”: - Google…
Sure, but that’s replaced with user’s being in control of their identity (permanently). Lose your keys, you’re out of luck and locked out of who knows how many applications permanently. It might be fine for us, but just think of the less technically inclined folks in your life. Are they going to remember a 32 word phrase or use a password manager for a key? And what happens if they’re hacked? If google detects your a…
But if the last couple years has told us anything it’s that it’s being immediately met with a wave of recentralisation where some ungodly percentage of crypto wallets are all sitting with centralised providers and services, which still require email/password entry.
I fail to see how a non-tecnhical user is going to migrate from where we are now to keeping all their keys by themselves (Sorry I recognise you’re agreeing with these points as well basically but started replying here so might as well finish)
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Can you explain how web3 solves any of your bullets? If you are trying to say that web3 will prevent platform holders from banning you from their platform, then good luck with that. Any platform can and will ban you and have complete control over their platform. Thinking web3 is going to prevent that is naive for many many reasons. If Facebook bans me then web3 isn't going to allow me to post on Facebook still. Same…
This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain . But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey. When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then…