Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not pretty cool that I can send whatever malicious content I want to a wallet and the receiver has no recourse against receiving it. Want to harass someone with dick-picks that empty their wallet when they try to "delete" them? Web3 has got you all day long.
This is not true at all.
Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
331–340 of 433 posts
Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
#332It’s pretty cool that I can send $1M to someone without a bank intervening, not to mention that nobody can stop the transaction from happening. And then they can print that out onto a sheet a paper and put it into a vault. Crypto is really great if you’re a drug dealer or some other kind of criminal.
Most definitely! I miss the pre-crypto days where criminals didn't have any means of having assets and the banks were just stopping any kind of illicit financial activity.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jul/28/hsbc-faces-...
> Insiders who spoke to journalists as part of a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, have suggested that HSBC may not have appropriately shared the information with the monitoring team installed by US regulators in 2012 after HSBC allowed drug cartels in Latin America to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through its accounts.
Maybe someday all these anti-crypto activists will rail against the banks and their fiat financial system too. We gotta stop the druggies! ;)
Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a pretty big difference between “this project is named poorly and isn’t ready for prime time” and “advocates want to force people to use it”. Don’t get me wrong - I share plenty of the same concerns others have shared throughout this thread, and tend to think “web3” is not a good thing to call this, but don’t see the “by force” claim as valid at this point. Plenty of apps/projects brand themselves as the next…
Fair, but I think the name is reflective of a greater attitude. I've never been told I'm NGMI (“not going to make it”) for not adopting Serverless, or that I should “have fun staying poor” if I ignore Kubernetes.
Multiple web3 people have told me to "have fun staying poor" for being skeptical about what they're offering, which kinda gives away the whole game.
Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
#334The 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…
> As others have noted many times over we are very early, it is unlikely that we've yet seen what will be a broadly used solution but there is real product market fit here already illustrating massive demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
"It's still early stage, PoW/Ethereum/NFTs are just the first iteration, there are potential applications in the future" is the perennial crypto investors' motte.
"PoW/Ethereum/NFTs are revolutionary, they're here to stay, you would be so cool if you bought a hexagonal ape profile picture" is their bailey.
Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sp…
> Why are you assuming that just because something doesn't involve money, people wouldn't be interested in it?
Because random hashes are not inherently interesting to most people and the core concept is built around an opinionated finance model. The only value to the blockchain network is in the ability to make transactions, and that's why all of the push around it is very heavy-handed FOMO “buy now or you'll have to pay more later” which is a sharp contrast to previous new technologies which focused on what new things you could do.
Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
#336The 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).…
> The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. It's not really cryptocurrency that is fueling it. It is the absolute silliness around NFTs and the rush to import some "blockchain" to otherwise uninteresting products and companies to make them somehow relevant. This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI. > Thousands of teams are explorin…
Alternate take: How are NFTs not a more decentralized version of digital goods that already exist?
Game companies (Epic, Activision-Blizzard-Microsoft, etc.) have been (a) creating (b) limited number (c) digital goods that (d) can only be acquired / traded on their platforms and according to their terms.
How are NFTs not (a)+(b)+(c), except without the post-sale, first party control of (d)?
Personally, I think NFTs are the least interesting part of the space. But I think it's odd to say "This is unlike anything legitimate that has come before!", when there are billion dollar gaming companies doing exactly that, in a more restrictive way, every day.
Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Uniswap itself is centralized, using GitHub for centralized repository code storage and the app itself is also centralized. The organization is centralized, with employees reporting into a centralized structure as well.
I suppose there's a spectrum of centralization between "totally controlled by one person" and "magically appears out of the collective intelligence of the entire internet." So I can't say that Uniswap is completely decentralized.
But the code on chain can't be changed by anyone, has no admin functions, and doesn't rely on external data feeds. UI for it can be developed and hosted by anyone or skipped entirely by anyone willing to deal directly with the contract using standard tools. So I'd say Uniswap meets your request above for something that doesn't require a centralized entity. The entities you mention could disappear and Uniswap would keep going.
Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing that bugs me is that 25 years in the tech industry and I never heard a single person, engineer or business person, ever use the term "web 3." Then one day a few months ago it seemed like a ton of news outlets dropped articles on the exact same day which started using the term. It smells like a made up buzz word that did not originate organically. Someone coined this termed and released a bunch of press rele…
Maybe it's just me but the only time I see "web 3" is when people/articles on HN are complaining about it.
> the only time I see "web 3" is when people/articles on HN are complaining about it.
Counterexample: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/exclus...
Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI." This is the industry pattern and has been the case going back many decades; the only real change is since the dotcom era, it's spread to consumers playing along, whereas prior to that it was largely just the 'investor class' in the sandbox.
The difference is that all of those had real products early on. The web was changing how people and businesses interacted by the mid-90s, despite computers costing far more and network access being limited and both being terribly slow. Search was a huge deal shortly afterwards, changing how people shopped, researched, etc. ML/AI has had ups and downs but we also live in a world where machines reading text, organizing…
International money transfer?
Re: Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. It's not really cryptocurrency that is fueling it. It is the absolute silliness around NFTs and the rush to import some "blockchain" to otherwise uninteresting products and companies to make them somehow relevant. This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI. > Thousands of teams are explorin…
Nahhh it's anti-crypto moving goalposts. First we saw a lot of anti-BTC posts: PoW criticism, usefulness criticism, transactionality criticism and energy use criticism. Then, we got new technology as ETH, that improved on usefulness, now the criticism was about transactionality, "silliness" of use cases, etc. Then, we got uses like Compound, Aave, Golem, etc. And the criticism about energy use and transactionality. T…
If you ignore the lucrativeness of holding crypto and exchanging labor for fiat currency in crypto companies, what is the use-case that is best served by crypto today?