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Is Web3 Bullshit?

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Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#221

Post by p2p_astroturf »

mattlondon wrote: post #7

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.

Ironically, the worst part of web3 is that everything that calls itself that, such as web3.js and metamask, are web based.

> The web is decentralized

I know you just want to throw in the invalid "look at me I'm an old school hacker" definition that can't be argued with, but it isn't. To serve content, it has to be hosted somewhere, and that place must be a single entity, and it must have infinite money to replicate the content for infinite users. On freenet or torrent, this isn't the case. Then there are also the other 700 ways the web is centralized...

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#222

Post by skeeter2020 »

lottin wrote: post #135
flooow wrote: 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…

Tokens are neither deflationary nor inflationary. The idea that an asset is deflationary or inflationary implies that the supply of the asset determines its price. This is incorrect from a theoretical standpoint, as well as from what empirical evidence tells us. It's a misapplication of the Quantity Theory of Money. QTM is a theory of money, it doesn't apply to stocks, tokens, assets in general, or in situations wher…

If you were to take an introductory economics course the first day would prove you wrong. Resouce scarcity combined with increasing demand means prices go up. It most certainly applies when all currencies are designed to operate in the same way because they then move in concert and there is no alternative to counter this.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#223

Post by ctvo »

archibaldJ wrote: post #206

Web3 makes great sense when energy is abundant [1] and we're more concerned with the "ownership problem" and who should become wealthy and who not and its socio-economic (and political) justifcation, which was largely what we had occupied ourselves in the past 100 years, but in a different lingo: eg communism/socialism vs capitalism. [1]: when we reach Type 1 as a civilization with eg large-scale application of fusio…

> It'll never be a perfect system. But overall we shouldn't under-estimate the impacts of the wealth transfer [2] created by BTC, ETH, etc, to the hands of young and tech-believed optimists.

The wealth transfer is through ponzi schemes, shit coin pumping, and luck. There's no new merit here--instead of lucking out and making a fortune because you majored in finance, you lucked out and majored / are interested in computer science at an opportune time and place. The systemic issues still exist, and the same class of people are still benefiting.

Framing this as the money is going to tech bros instead of finance bros, like that was a quality we wanted in the system, is hilarious. Please recognize your own bias.

(Not you directly, but the people who are justifying this after the fact)

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#224

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #150
flooow wrote: 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…

Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters. “If the stock community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary stock, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity?”

Although some stocks have pyramidal like behaviors, these are generally considered fraudulent and collapse in the long run.

Legitimate stocks are expected to be backed by the efficient creation of valuable products or services the company can sell at a profit. These profits are distributed to stock holders as dividends or reinvested in growing the profit potential. The value of a stock crucially stems from the rights to the future profits they give their holders. Legitimate stocks are not just about giving the money of late buyers of stocks to early buyers of stock.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#225

Post by tata71 »

ethanbond wrote: post #174
pas wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's value is exactly determined by supply-and-demand. It's just as much a "foreign currency" as let's say Vatican Angelbucks. (We know that only a fixed amount of angelbucks will ever exist. So it's deflatory, and it has no earthly uses. But you can send it to your pals via PrayWire, so you can buy coffee with, and so on.) And if you look at the price graphs it's not always going up. It's a synthetic currency with n…

Sorry, let me clarify. Stop acting like it’s a viable currency/infrastructure. I get that you can arbitrarily label anything as these.

Right, because I should wait days for banking wire transfers to get rescued out of the slush pile underneath a fax machine somewhere if I want to pay someone with a different bank.

Literal tens of billions of dollars are using these systems to great success. The numbers are refuting your arguments, and will continue to.

When we are all carrying counterfactual wallets, able to hold any number of cryptocurrency, or NFT ownership tokens (of the deed or lease to your house, social club entry etc), with social recovery from your closest family/friends when you smash your iPhone, then what will your argument against technology be, I wonder?

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#226

Post by paulryanrogers »

pornel wrote: post #84
_vufv wrote: post #33

One aspect that I strongly dislike about "web3" is that it poisons the discourse with its incentives. I don't believe that every person on Twitter with $BTC in their profile understands or can knowledgeably argue the benefits of Web3, but their crypto holdings make them a hard-lined crypto zealot in the hopes of multiplying few hundred dollars they've put in. It's fairly widely known how laughable it is to look for u…

The thing that cryptocurrencies have really successfully decentralized and democratized is becoming a shareholder — of cryptocurrency schemes. Anyone can buy a share of a coin, and make a profit as long as the amount of fiat currency put into the chain keeps growing. Every new user convinced it's going "to the moon" pays dividends to existing holders. This automatically creates a financial incentive to become an astr…

Sounds like MLMs with a lower barrier of entry.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#227

Post by woodruffw »

lottin wrote: post #199
woodruffw wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m missing something obvious here, but it’s not clear why (1) any bank would offer a Bitcoin denominated account, or (2) how it even makes sense to perform fractional banking against Bitcoin. You can’t change the underlying amount in the ledger and the ledger is the value source, unlike physical Federal Reserve Notes.

Well, crypto-exchanges already offer deposit accounts backed with reserves. If at any point the reserve ratio falls below 1 (we don't know if this has already happened), the quantity of bitcoins in circulation will increase as a result of that.

I know of some cryptocurrency exchanges that offer stablecoins, which are a dollar-denominated asset that’s (theoretically) backed by cash in the bank. We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the largest stablecoin players are actually fraudsters.

I don’t know of any exchange that offers a deposit account that’s dollar-denominated but backed by cryptocurrency. I can think of lots of reasons for that, FDIC regulations being the least of them. But again, even that wouldn’t make the number of bitcoins in circulation increase: it would be an unstable (and illegal) financial fiction.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#228

Post by bitwize »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #148
fifilura wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My sadness comes from the fact people perceive X N as better than X N-1 Terminator 3 Home Alone 3 Jurassic Park 3 Police academy 3 Alien 3 The list is long...

GPL 3 Gnome 3 All these third iterations…

Half-Life, er, wait a minute...

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#229

Post by p2p_astroturf »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #160
GDC7 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In reality, non-deflationary cryptocurrencies have been tried on various occasions. Surprise! None of them have taken off because "number doesn't go up". I am curious to see what will happen when the everything bubble pops If people don’t react in an angry way that’s the clear signal from society that it wants a certain % of ponzi and scams to be allowed and tolerated Much like it tolerates gambling , lottery and g…

> I am curious to see what will happen when the everything bubble pops … the market is flooded with cheap video cards and we finally have a feast. Unless I die waiting, which is what will probably happen. Please, God, Jesus, Allah, Rama, whoever; I've been waiting far too long already.

The video game industry is literally 10x more scummy than the cryptocoin industry.

edit: keep downvoting me morons. what is microtransactions? literally the same bullshit you bitch about like NFTs and IPOs.

and the video game industry is not just scum for that, but for the terrible code they write and how they drag down the entire computing industry with pervasive poor engineering

what is steam? origin? epic store? literally webshit like a cryptocurrency wallet + vendor lock in + a bunch of mutually incompatible software deliberately made that way in the interests of the vendors instead of using open standards

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#230

Post by skeeter2020 »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #150
flooow wrote: 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…

Show me a stock anyone is interested in that isn’t expected to go up and reward early adopters. “If the stock community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary stock, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity?”

The price of the stock reflects the underlying value though, out of a increasing pool of resources. Companies transmute inputs into outputs of greater future value. Every stock is not a GameStop competing to extract a bigger share of a limited pool of tullip investors.
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