Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web3 – An Arrogant and Treacherous Successor Doomed to Fail

g147.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 267 posts

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

#231

Post by lottin »

web3isgoing wrote: post #226
lottin wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would an application stop working in a downturn?

Isn’t that the point? The protocols are built to resist changes by single entities and continue working as expected, handling user deposits non custodially, regardless of market activity. HN can declare a dozen crypto deaths with each new CEX and Uniswap will just keep filling orders for whoever is sending value through it.

I don't know, you're declaring victory because applications didn't stop working during the downturn, but I don't know that the problem was that applications stopped working during the downturn but rather that various service providers ran into financial trouble.

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

#232

Post by lottin »

rvz wrote: post #225
lottin wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes.

Yes PayPal. 'Please take my funds [0] and fine me $2,500 [1] if I say anything that you don't like'. Also, thank you Stripe. 'For locking my whole account account without any reason' [2] [3] [4] [5]. [0] https://twitter.com/flipper_zero/status/1567194641610465281 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33348913 [2] https://twitter.com/zhovner/status/1384568453844066305 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280857…

So what? Global trade reached a level of $28.5 trillion in 2021, so clearly global payments are working somehow.

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

#233

Post by [deleted] »

nailer wrote: post #42
ugjka wrote: post #3

I seriously do not see and never saw how "Web 3.0" is a follow up from web 1 and 2. The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense.

> The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense. Speculating on 'crypto' can indeed be considered nonsense. Owning your identity (instead of Google) and being able to communicate and send money directly to your peers for almost free (instead of Facebook / Twitter controlling who youcan communicate with, and Visa / Wise.com taking…

[deleted]

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

#234

Post by vkou »

nailer wrote: post #42
ugjka wrote: post #3

I seriously do not see and never saw how "Web 3.0" is a follow up from web 1 and 2. The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense.

> The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense. Speculating on 'crypto' can indeed be considered nonsense. Owning your identity (instead of Google) and being able to communicate and send money directly to your peers for almost free (instead of Facebook / Twitter controlling who youcan communicate with, and Visa / Wise.com taking…

The solution to the first problem already exists (It's called having your own public/private key), and the solution to the second is to live in pretty much anywhere that's not the United States. Neither of which requires you to pay a cent to the early adopters of the token of the week.

The second isn't as much of a killer app as you think to normies, and neither is the first.

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

#235

Post by rvz »

root_axis wrote: post #223
rvz wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality being that it is much harder to cash out funds from crypto into fiat without leaving a single trace. Hardly benefits criminals, scammers, etc.

If you want to make purchases on the darknet cryptocurrency is your only option.

My point is, even if they use it, it is close to impossible to send, convert and cash out the crypto into fiat without leaving a single trace once it hits the exchange.

This is not 2009.

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

#236

Post by rvz »

pwinnski wrote: post #227
rvz wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality being that it is much harder to cash out funds from crypto into fiat without leaving a single trace. Hardly benefits criminals, scammers, etc.

In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, though, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and "According to the University of Technology Sydney, about 46% of criminal activity of each year is connected to Bitcoin.[0]" Other sources, more devoted to "this is good for crypto, actually" say the percentage is tiny-tiny, apparently by counting every transfer between any two addresses, i…

> "According to the University of Technology Sydney, about 46% of criminal activity of each year is connected to Bitcoin.[0]"

Yet in the same source:

> The main problem for drug dealers using crypto is to turn their income into cash. This move remains complicated and insecure. Most cryptocurrency exchanges have instruments to define whether a transaction is coming from a suspicious source like the darknet. The rise of Monero use in the online drug market will hinder such tracking. However, for the reasons listed above, crypto is unlikely to completely replace regular cash in drug sales in the foreseeable future.

This doesn't refute my point of this activity being traceable as soon as it hits the exchange. Even if the cryptocurrency is a privacy coin, many exchanges have delisted such coins, making it extremely difficult and quite terrible for criminals and scammers to cash out into fiat without them leaving a trace and the authorities subsequently identifying and catching them afterwards.

> They seem to also have a pretty high standard for what they count as "illegal activity." Even so, they'll admit it's at least $14 billion of activity in a year.

$14 billion in illicit transaction volume out of $15.6 trillion in overall transaction volume at the time of the report is tiny, but is still a problem, but with most of the transactions being traceable for the authorities / exchanges to catch the criminals and scammers.

I mean, compared with the trillions of illicit funds freely moving around by the banks, it seems criminals and fraudsters still benefitted more from that whilst the banks would rather pay the fines than solving the problem.

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-fil...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-sus...

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

#237

Post by [deleted] »

lakomen wrote: post #228
pwinnski wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? It'll be Baidu and Tencent, but yes. This is already happening, and the internet is becoming more centralized, not less. Global traffic is balkanized, but it's split up among regional centralized controlling interesting, not no controlling interests. > Betting…

Balkanized is an interesting choice of word. It even has a Google definition, to divide countries and make them enemies of each other. Yet another victim of US imperialism. I weep for what was once a free and friendly nation. The kids nowadays are taught to hate their neighbors instead of learning how their parents or grandparents were part of a resistance that fought faschist Germany. That's just an aside. Nothing t…

[deleted]

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

#238

Post by edgyquant »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #220
edgyquant wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a good faith question, Google it

This is not a good faith answer, it is however the type of thing that turns a lot of people off to cryptocurrency. If you google decentralized service in an incognito tab you’ll see why people ask this. The rest of the world gets Wikipedia articles about engineering distributed systems (like database clusters) and distributed consensus (like raft). Since that’s (probably) not what you mean, I submit that as the perso…

I specifically stated that I was not referring to cryptocurrency, I’m certainly not an advocate. Every engineer knows what a decentralized service is and any who doesn’t will Google the term.

You are asking it bad faith hoping I was a cryptobro. It’s an obvious red herring and I’m not feeding the troll.

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

#239

Post by nailer »

vkou wrote: post #234
nailer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense. Speculating on 'crypto' can indeed be considered nonsense. Owning your identity (instead of Google) and being able to communicate and send money directly to your peers for almost free (instead of Facebook / Twitter controlling who youcan communicate with, and Visa / Wise.com taking…

The solution to the first problem already exists (It's called having your own public/private key), and the solution to the second is to live in pretty much anywhere that's not the United States. Neither of which requires you to pay a cent to the early adopters of the token of the week. The second isn't as much of a killer app as you think to normies, and neither is the first.

Yes, wallets are essentially client side keypairs plus other tech. They’re way easier to use though as I’m sure anyone with experience in client side keypairs will tell you.

I don’t live in the US and I assure you Visa is still a very big part of daily life in all of Europe, Asia and Australia.

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

#240

Post by nailer »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #70
nailer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a zero balance, identity. Identity is simply connecting to a wallet and reading a signed DID - the wallet could have zero balance and it still works. Boom you just signed into something without Google / Facebook / Apple. With close to a zero balance (but not quite zero) to pay transaction fees, you can do peer to peer encrypted messaging without central arbiters. With close to a zero balance (but not quite zero)…

wallets are a crtptocurrency concept. you can do the same thing with a client certificate, boom, you are who the cert says you are.

> wallets are a cryptocurrency concept

yes, agreed. But they do a lot more than let you speculate on cryptocurrencies. Right now I'm working on wallet for people who have zero interest in speculating on cryptocurrencies.

> you can do the same thing with a client certificate

yes agreed. You can think of web3 as a better PKI. I do.

Post reply on HN