Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, yes, and yes.
Ah, well, that’s certainly a timeless way to end a conversation, to call your interlocutor a dumb jerk!
I'm sorry that my rhetoric and eloquence skills were not up to your expectations.
Is Web3 Bullshit?
331–340 of 383 posts
Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
What were you able to do in the 90s that you cannot do now on the web? I do not subscribe to this mumbo jumbo about gatekeepers, data stealing, centralised internet etc. While true, you are literally free to use any service you like, nobody is forcing you to spend your dollar here or there. Good products are usually driven by commercial entities. I would love to use something else besides Android or iOS that is not b…
You can’t run a mailserver from your home without significant issues.
Oh yes you can, without much technical difficulties, easier than you would in the 90s actually [1][2]. Does it work as you would expect? Probably not because gmail and other ones are blocking/ghosting you (I suspect this to be the issue right?). Nobody is forcing people towards gmail though. I am one that is scared of being locked out by giants like Google and I switched everything (website logins + mail) to something else (my domain email, managed by protonmail). The transition was seamless and I control my mail with my domain right now. I can migrate at will any time I want.
Mailservers not running from your house is not really all that bad...for the rest of us. Imagine all the spammy software that your friends and relatives install on their computer being able to spin one and blast campaigns.
[1] https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver [2] https://mailu.io/1.8/
Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, well, that’s certainly a timeless way to end a conversation, to call your interlocutor a dumb jerk!
I'm sorry that my rhetoric and eloquence skills were not up to your expectations.
Don’t get me wrong. I only disagree with everything you are saying, nothing more.
Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The thing is , that side of things in practice, isn't really decentralized. Where do you buy and sell those "shares"... exchanges (e.g. binance, coinbase, bitfinex etc), which essentially just replace the centralized stock exchanges and banks of traditional finance. Whilst it's possible to avoid those, I'd guess it's beyond many participants to do technically, so the exchanges become defacto centralization, and inste…
Have you really not heard of decentralized exchanges?
Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way I see it this scarcity thing is exactly the point, and I'll go a bit deeper. Capitalism can only work with scarcity to monetize. With scarcity nearing an end, there's now two camps: * those that are excited for the post-scarcity future where we can freely share data and culture * those who are deeply bought into capitalist ideology and who are terrified of capitalism ending with scarcity. The first group hate…
I don't think capitalism is going anywhere. "Web3" might succeed but, absent a political fight, only if it can be assimilated into existing capital and power structures.
I'm not sure you fully got the point I was trying to make.
Despite all the claims from crypto advocates about crypto freeing us from existing power structures, I think the truth is actually the opposite.
Crypto entrenches existing power structures, where capital = power. You can see that formalized in various decentralized organizations where votes are allocated by token count, or in other words, more capital means more power.
Crypto is an effort to preserve the status quo, not to change it. If the "web3" were to succeed, moneyed interests would still be controlling everything, with the only change being that some early crypto adopters would also rise to their level. Crypto advocacy comes down to an attempt to rise to the ruling class by serving it, not to topple it.
Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Bitcoin inflationary? Even without coin lossage (a ridiculous concept in any other financial system, short of literally setting your money on fire), the network is programmed to eventually stop minting coins. Fixed supply on increased demand (if it’s the economic substitute we’ve all been promised) is the precondition for deflationary movement. No amount of “pricing in” changes that.
I only meant that coins are still being created for now, so the proportion of coins that a specific person owns vs the total is constantly falling, like in any inflationary currency. If you measure current ownership as a percentage of final issued coins rather than current issued coins, then you've already priced in the inflation.
That's an internal inflation effect, one that appears to have been amply priced into the current value of Bitcoin. Which is perfectly reasonable, since everybody can see that the future quantity of Bitcoin is fixed and/or diminishing, thanks to lossage.
In other words: like the US economy, Bitcoin can have both inflationary and deflationary forces internally. But the overall economic picture of Bitcoin is intrinsically deflationary.
Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> it must have infinite money to replicate the content for infinite users what?
imagine you make a website
imagine it blows up in popularity
do you get the problem now?
Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can be crazy, in your opinion, but the fact is fractional reserve banking has been a standard practice in banking since the invention of banking. I don't know of any country where it's illegal. Whether it would be legal for crypto-exchanges, which typically don't have a banking license, to engage in fractional reserve banking I don't know. Even if it was illegal in the US, it could be legal in Cayman Islands, or e…
Fractional reserve banking isn't the crazy or illegal part. It's not crazy or illegal because it makes sense in the context of currency, where the purpose is denominational value and facilitating value transfers. The crazy and illegal part is the idea of "fractional reserves" in the context of a fixed-supply security. There's no such thing. I used the US as an example; what you're describing is illegal on every singl…
Yeah, well that's your opinion. I don't think that you know what you're talking about. At any rate, my point isn't about whether crypto-currency deposits backed by fractional reserves are legal or illegal. My point is that the idea that there is a fixed supply of bitcoins is a lie, a marketing narrative to fool gullible idiots into thinking that the price of bitcoin can only go up. And my answer to that is to say that is 1) it's not true that a limited supply ensures that the price can only go up, and 2) it's not true that the supply of bitcoin is fixed, because financial institutions can create additional bitcoins via fractional reserves, and because as a consequence of international trade the supply of bitcoins in different economic areas would fluctuate (sometimes wildly) creating periods of inflation and deflation, just like it happened during the gold standard.
Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?
#339Earlier 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…
> 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…
Monero is inflationary, but it has some other features (untraceability) that drive demand. It hasn't experienced the same swings that the gold-like cryptos have, though.
Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a question that isn't answered and that's why would users care about those details of the backend. In the end, a solution can be as technologically elegant as you want, but the thing it really needs to do is improve from the users' point of view. And I don't think it does. For most people, a decentralized platform will usually be worse (speed, latency), and only very rarely better, than a centralized server.…
Crypto is not binary. The vast majority Og people will likely use a custodian for their crypto. For them it will feel like banking feels now. Just like coinbase provide a visa card with collateral i your crypto. So essentially these questions really are answered -- it is not an all or nothing. We will keep, eg. Visa to facilitate retailer transactions with collateral in, eg., bitcoin. Bow you can dispute and everythi…
The parent is talking about using blockchain not just for payments, but as a building block for the web providing both identity and payments.
Also, why would we want bitcoin or any crypto if most people will just use Visa? How does that achieve decentralization? I doubt the goal of cryptocoins is just "replace the financial backend that big companies use".