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Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

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Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#241

Post by boopboopbadoop »

spamizbad wrote: post #166
aresant wrote: post #130

The part I don't understand about the crypto fear-uncertainty-doubt crowd is how binary they think the outcomes are going to be NFTs - yes you can right click and save as. No they haven't figured out at scale how to attach the image / work to the ledger. Yes hype and pyramiding is a fucking disaster and people would go to prison trying those antics in any other industry. But digital art, music, & culture has a real d…

> NFTs - yes you can right click and save as. No they haven't figured out at scale how to attach the image / work to the ledger. Yes hype and pyramiding is a fucking disaster and people would go to prison trying those antics in any other industry. But digital art, music, & culture has a real deficit in ownership, provenance, etc. There are several NFT "thought leaders" who have casually floated the idea of eliminatin…

Their solution is to change browser functionality? Good luck.

Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#242

Post by shadowgovt »

hunterb123 wrote: post #61
shadowgovt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the benefits of decentralization are worth weighing against the costs of decentralization. There's a reason that the process of going from web1 to web2 involved quite a bit of centralization. If web3 cannot meet its goals in a way that either maintains those benefits or creates a new benefit that substantively offsets the cost of losing them, people won't care. And if people don't care, this web3 will be as…

Web2 will still exist if it's so great. I guess we'll see who is right in the end. I for one just like the progression and the technology, and the empowerment it gives users vs operators. I guess that's lost here.

Does taking advantage of the benefits of web3 require users to become operators? Much of the transition off of small self-maintained websites occurred because new users were not interested in being operators, and existing operators were more interested in putting content out than in taking on the perpetual responsibility of being involved in the cat and mouse game against every malicious user on the planet that being an operator entails.

I don't think web3 is dead in the water... I wouldn't even discuss it if I thought it was. But the challenges of creating a new paradigm that displaces the old one aren't technological alone... They're how to solve real problems real people have. What I have seen of the blockchain based solutions suggests to me that they aren't doing much to simplify using the blockchain itself, and I don't think we're going to boil the ocean of converting most web users to even neophyte cryptographers to get them on board with the trust model necessary for the blockchain to help with web3.

Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#243

Post by ravenstine »

user-the-name wrote: post #175
axg11 wrote: post #60

The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Skepticism is healthy, but criticism without being constructive is not. There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space, even if you think the state of the community today is not healthy. Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs).…

> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology Absolutely, completely wrong. Bitcoin is using HALF A PERCENT of the electricity on the ENTIRE PLANET. That affects every single person living on this planet. It will affect people living here into the future. It is an absolute catastrophe that is hurting everyone. We don't get to "not partake" in that. Bitcoin is the one single thing that has enabled the r…

By that logic, we're all participating in the remaining 99% of electricity usage. But this isn't even close to being the case. Are northeastern American states being forced to participate in air conditioning because the southwestern states use so much of it? I don't see the reason in that.

Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#244

Post by nefitty »

netcan wrote: post #64
nefitty wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sentiment in online chatter correlates with price movement. It becomes a feedback loop. Maybe the criticism is finally overwhelming people's risk functions.

Or the reverse... price drops make people more open to "crypto is bullshit" arguments.

My mistake for the lack of clarity. That's what I mean to imply.

Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#245

Post by cableshaft »

the_gastropod wrote: post #137
smrtinsert wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immutable websites aren't an interesting idea?

No. And, frankly, I'd think anyone with a half-a-brain and 30 seconds to think through the ramifications of such a terrible idea would be able to figure out why.

Well one thing it helps combat is link/data rot (assuming that blockchain stays up of course). Meanwhile on our current web, data is disappearing all the time. Like this recent study on the links on NYT articles:

"Predictably, it found that, as time went on, links were more likely to be dead: 6 percent of links in 2018 articles were inaccessible, while a whopping 72 percent of links from 1998 were dead."

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22447690/link-rot-researc...

Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#246

Post by danschumann »

oreally wrote: post #188
danschumann wrote: post #73

Is it possible to have a decentralized country? Take the united states... people are basically free to sneak in, without becoming residents, without "downloading the American OS into their brains" aka citizenship. Now, what if all countries allowed this? Or, what if a "decrentralized country" offered citizenship with no actual geographic location? Does American citizenship offer people benefits overseas? For example…

You underestimate things quite a bit. Decentralized ideologies are what's being practiced right now; and in fact, it's part of the USA's geopolitical strategy of pushing democracy onto countries, whether subtle or otherwise. And in any case, any individual should be focused on empowering other individuals to the point they can at least vote with their own wallets and migrate to another country or group should the nee…

Right, but if they empowered to move, they have only a limited list of countries to select from. Those countries could be puppet states, corrupted, etc.... So what if one of those countries were to be formed on decentralized, open source principles?

I guess what I'm saying is we should start a new country that will be constitutionally immune to some of the new challenges of modern times.

Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#247

Post by matheusmoreira »

apples_oranges wrote: post #70

I like crypto, at least it's interesting. But what still annoys me is that I have to pay so much for sending money. It's hilarious, SEPA and other methods are cheaper. I bet Western Union is cheaper, and they have airport prices...

This is why BNB got huge. It's ETH but more centralized and with less fees. Made it easier to play with smart contracts. Made it easier to scam people too.

Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#248

Post by capableweb »

romeros wrote: post #53
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in theory, web3 has nothing to do with cryptocurrency per se, and only relies on some blockchain technology, which is itself not bound to the value of the currency it is used by. however, the fact that too many people seem to think that there is in fact a connection between web3 and crypto currency just adds to the smell.

In practice, everything is indirectly tied to making more money 100x your "investment" in a blink of an eye. If the entire crypto/defi/nft/gamefi/play2earn etc marketcap was 0 then nobody would even bother with interacting/developing with web3. In-fact, nobody would even be interested in blockchain tech.

Why are you assuming that just because something doesn't involve money, people wouldn't be interested in it?

Music creation is for most people just a hobby, with zero financial incentives to engage in, yet countless amount of people make music as a hobby and release it for free via various channels. Same goes for software with free/open source software.

Not to talk about BitTorrent (or it's predecessors in the P2P space) where people had the opinion of "sharing is caring" and shared data with each other, again with zero financial incentives.

How do you reconcile these facts with your outlook?

Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#249

Post by agentultra »

schleck8 wrote: post #10

Serious question: What problem does web3 or decentralization fix? - Oligopoly of the hyperscalers -> rent server from small provider like ovh/hetzner/netcup (there is plenty). The reason AWS, Azure and GCP are so popular is because people don't care. - Privavy intrusions -> Adblocker/DNS Blocker/Turn off JS/Use browser settings This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist…

Nothing. The entire infrastructure this system runs on is... the Internet. It doesn't work without TCP/IP, TLS/SSL, HTTP, etc.

It's not fixing anything.

It's only adding a way to force people to pay ETH gas fees to like posts and add comments. It's probably most useful for early crypto adopters to keep growing their pyramid with a captive audience and for criminals who want to hide more identities, launder money, and obscure illegal transactions from law enforcement.

"But it can run without crypto," sure and why would anyone want that? You still need the Internet. Now you want to make it slower and burn more of the worlds energy so that we can independently audit who "liked" which post? So that you can "hypothetically" own your profile pic? Give me a break. I'm tired of the centralized services as anyone but there are ways we can solve this without the foregone conclusion that blockchains are the only viable way. They're not technologically sufficient, they're terrible for privacy, etc, etc.

If you want to fundamentally improve the Internet you're going to have a better time improving things that already exist. Find more energy efficient transport layer protocols for modern usage patterns. Make it more secure. Improve privacy. There's a huge demand for this really unsexy, unhyped work that needs to be done.

Heck, if you're interested in improving payment systems in the US there's a fair bit of catching up to do to reach par with some of the international systems.

Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen

#250

Post by DennisP »

endisneigh wrote: post #114
axg11 wrote: post #60

The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Skepticism is healthy, but criticism without being constructive is not. There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space, even if you think the state of the community today is not healthy. Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs).…

What’s a single idea in the crypto space that requires no centralized entity involved and can sustain indefinite price drops of the underlying cryptocurrency? I find it amusing how most of the interesting things in crypto are centralized.

Uniswap, a decentralized exchange. The smart contracts have no centralized administration at all, anyone can set up a GUI for them, and it doesn't break just because the price of ETH falls. This is one of the most successful projects on Ethereum, with trading volume comparable to Coinbase.
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