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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#261

Post by shafyy »

jeroenhd wrote: post #146
yashg wrote: post #31

Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity to the early adopters and insiders. I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling. I wrote about it some time ago and and shared here on HN https://yash.info/blog/what-is-web3/

There are some use cases for blockhains, namely cryptocurrencies and their unregulated nature. There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy. Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical…

> Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical if they can even get a contract with any payment provider at all. Furthermore, the USA has a severe problem that stems from companies like Equifax deciding what you can and cannot afford with no way to protest their decisions.

This is not a technology problem, this is a legal problem. To change it, we need to change the laws, not the technology. Sure, they can use crypto now to skirt those regulations, but clearly crypto payments will be regulated exactly as fiat payments very soon. Then, you're back at square one but have burned the planet and enabled ransomware and scammers along the way.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#262

Post by boomlinde »

divs1210 wrote: post #254
smt88 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital licenses and tickets are useless if the central authority doesn't honor them. There's absolutely no benefit to making NFTs out of them. For example, if I buy an NFT ticket to a concert and the venue doesn't let me in, what was the point of the decentralization?

That's not why making an NFT out of the ticket is interesting. It's interesting because I can, for example, resell my Woodstock ticket on an open market.

So ticket scalping. This was never desirable to anyone except the reseller in the first place. Concert goers hate scalpers, arrangers hate scalpers and the reseller adds no value to their service. I don't see how it's the least bit interesting.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#263

Post by dthul »

samoit wrote: post #258

For those who want to know what is a NFT: Imagine you get the hacker news logo (or any other digital asset, like an image,video,song etc). Then I take that image and apply to it a hash funtion to generate an id, a number that later I put into any blockchain (usually ethereum). As the blockchain is ordered the first one who does this process stores in the blockchain the asset... and so its property. Later someone else…

This document describes the smart contract for an NFT: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

The base contract does not contain any info about the asset the NFT applies to and the metadata extension only allows you to store a name and a URI (which hopefully still works and still points to the object in the future). There is no object hash as far as I can tell.

Afaik there can be several NFTs for the same object (URI) and none of them is inherently more legitimate than the other. You'd need some kind of endorsement by tha artist to know which NFT is the "real" one. But I'm not an expert so please correct my if I'm wrong.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#264

Post by shafyy »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #176
jeroenhd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some use cases for blockhains, namely cryptocurrencies and their unregulated nature. There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy. Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical…

Just ban crypto advertising. That way people who actually need crypto for whatever reason can use it, and Matt Damon can't convince your aunt to throw away her inheritance into some shitcoin

At the very least, crypto advertising should be regulated like gambling ads, not like finacial investment ads.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#265

Post by EGreg »

threatripper wrote: post #226
mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Legally owning a house is literally just having your name and the address of your house in a book. EDIT: The actual power does not reside in the book. It resides in the mindshare this specific book has. Anyone can put anything in a book but only some people control the book that people pay attention to. Similar it is with fiat, cryptos and nfts. The power is not in the technology itself but in the mindshare they occu…

Not minshare only. It resides in the arrangements between organizations to enforce whatever rules areon the books regarding property rights. Smart contracts just put those rules into code on a blockchain. What is missing is the “enforcement” element.

But that may be a good thing to libertarians. NFT may be an early attempt to move past more violence-enabled business models for “intellectual property”, including the mode dominated by VCs for startups, and Music and Movie studios for artists

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#266

Post by eru »

divs1210 wrote: post #254
smt88 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital licenses and tickets are useless if the central authority doesn't honor them. There's absolutely no benefit to making NFTs out of them. For example, if I buy an NFT ticket to a concert and the venue doesn't let me in, what was the point of the decentralization?

That's not why making an NFT out of the ticket is interesting. It's interesting because I can, for example, resell my Woodstock ticket on an open market.

Only if the ticket seller wants you to be able to do that.

Remember, it's trivially easy to follow transactions on the block chain. So the ticket seller can see whether an NFT has been resold, and can just refuse to honour it. Or only honour the first wallet it was in, regardless of whether it is still there or not.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#267

Post by shawabawa3 »

dmitriid wrote: post #256
divs1210 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not why making an NFT out of the ticket is interesting. It's interesting because I can, for example, resell my Woodstock ticket on an open market.

"It's interesting because I can hoard tickets and resell at profit". Why is that interesting, exactly? Edit All that is marked as "interesting" in crypto is inevitably "how can I profit/get rich quick off something".

Usually the whole point of NFT tickets is to _stop_ you reselling on an open market (aka StubHub/Ticketmaster) and instead force you to either resell back to the venue, or to resell at face value only

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#268

Post by mtizim »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #245
rablackburn wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the book has a legal authority backing it up saying that its entries are property rights to the listed address. Buying an NFT just to have an NFT is like paying for an entry in a book with no further meaning. You just get to say that’s your entry. Oh and the entry is an http url, so there’s a good chance it’ll 404 eventually (if you even get a status code back)

And where does legal authority come from? Social consensus - it's the same thing. The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.

Sure, most things are 'just' social constructs if you reduce them to that, but notice how the state will literally kill you if you break some laws in some ways. Essentially, legal authority comes from a perceived violence monopoly.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#269

Post by auggierose »

gorgoiler wrote: post #202
auggierose wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if you live in Russia, of course. Or are you saying every Russian is a criminal?

If your jurisdiction has imposed sanctions on Russia but you then help a Russian national bypass sanctions then you are the criminal.

If you are a Russian, and you want to bypass sanctions imposed on you by others, are you then a criminal, too?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#270

Post by eru »

unmole wrote: post #249
vmception wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of them as digital digital picture frames. A market for digital, digital picture frames currently exists and it has high margins. That is the extent of my thought on the what people are buying. They aren't advertised that way though and the transaction receipt of purchasing the digital, digital picture frame can be a valuable asset. Regarding where the images being viewed are stored, many are not following be…

> I think of them as digital digital picture frames. I don't understand this analogy. A digital picture frame lets me look at pictures. What on earth is a digital digital picture frame?

Perhaps it's a digital frame for a digital picture?

(As opposed to a physical frame for a digital picture?)

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