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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

#341

Post by ethbr0 »

hooande wrote: post #141
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).…

It's possible that crypto/web3 are a lot of diverting attention, resources and energy toward ideas that are fundamentally impractical. The fact that so many people have a financial interest in promoting these ideas makes the whole thing suspicious. I'm really waiting for these novel and interesting products based on blockchain. like, waiting every day to see one break into the daily workflow of the average consumer.…

To be fair, if the attention, resources, and energy employed in the crypto/web3 space weren't... a lot of them would be coming up with new financial derivative products.

So, from that perspective, crypto/web3 is bloodletting some of the crazies from the legacy financial system, which probably isn't the worst thing.

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

#342

Post by micromacrofoot »

ravenstine wrote: post #228
micromacrofoot wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's being forced, but it seems many people are being tricked. It's important to inject a considerable amount of skepticism into a conversation that is often dominated by proponents in it only to make money off of speculation.

Those people are probably going to be tricked anyway. Many things in society are tricks. Google is a trick. Self-help is a trick. Fast food is a trick. MLM is a trick. Political ideologies are tricks. Everyone wants to be lied to, or rather everyone wants to believe in something, and they'll throw away their money just to maintain that belief. While aspects of the world of cryptocurrency are tricks, it's hardly uniqu…

This is what I mean... if I were in a thread of horse enthusiasts I would not get a response like this. This is a fairly typical example of crypto gaslighting.

There are massive amounts of time and money spent on getting people to eat less fast food and avoid multi-level marketing scams because they're predatory industries (some more than others). Crypto is a predatory industry too, and defending people from it is completely reasonable.

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

#343

Post by acdha »

ethbr0 wrote: post #339
acdha wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe if the fees are low enough but that’s shaving a percentage point or two off of Western Union, not changing the world. To be clear, I would be quite happy if someone nuked PayPal or Western Union but that needs scalability and cost wins which have not yet been demonstrated.

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

#344

Post by trenchgun »

boringg wrote: post #147

If anything the equity collapse happening in real time and in crypto might allow for the hype to deflate and something valuable to grow. Think of it like the regrowth in a forest. Hopefully all the hucksters will be so burnt that they won't touch the space again allowing space for those projects people deem to be valuable to grow. It sounds naive, but maybe thats the way forward. that's my hopefully take

That's basically also Tim O'reilly's take.

> Keep in mind that it was still early when the dot-com bubble popped. Google Maps hadn’t been invented yet, nor had the iPhone and Android. Online payments were in their infancy. No Twitter or Facebook. No AWS and cloud computing. Most of what we rely on today didn’t yet exist.

> I suspect it will be the same for crypto. So much is yet to be created. Let’s focus on the parts of the Web3 vision that aren’t about easy riches, on solving hard problems in trust, identity, and decentralized finance. And above all, let’s focus on the interface between crypto and the real world that people live in, where, as Matthew Yglesias put it when talking about housing inequality, “a society becomes wealthy over time by accumulating a stock of long-lasting capital goods.” If, as Sal Delle Palme argues, Web3 heralds the birth of a new economic system, let’s make it one that increases true wealth—not just paper wealth for those lucky enough to get in early but actual life-changing goods and services that make life better for everyone.” https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excit...

And I tend to agree.

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

#345

Post by danaris »

capableweb wrote: post #248
romeros wrote: post #53

Earlier 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…

But cryptocurrency has no value or meaning if it's not worth money.

That's not true of those other things.

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

#346

Post by intrasight »

rideontime wrote: post #324
intrasight wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not a crypto thing. It's a blockchain thing.

Blockchain’s been around for a decade. What’s so special about the upcoming year?

Web3 may turn out to be a good application. What's special is only that we may see if in fact something interesting comes of it over the next year. Or another way I'll say it is that if nothing of value emerges over next year then it likely never will.

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

#347

Post by danaris »

intrasight wrote: post #346
rideontime wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain’s been around for a decade. What’s so special about the upcoming year?

Web3 may turn out to be a good application. What's special is only that we may see if in fact something interesting comes of it over the next year. Or another way I'll say it is that if nothing of value emerges over next year then it likely never will.

Though there's been an uptick in its usage recently, people have been talking about "web3" for several years as well, and so far as I can tell, it basically just means "blockchain and cryptocurrency, but we try to build them into a new kind of WWW".

What's so special about the upcoming year?

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

#348

Post by moron4hire »

xtracto wrote: post #329
indymike wrote: post #169

Earlier 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…

It's not goal post moving. All those other criticisms still apply, and as new, terrible ideas are added, critics react with new criticisms.

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

#349

Post by danaris »

ben_w wrote: post #310
techwiz137 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This drug argument is silly. Dollars are still the main culrpit in drug deals. They still account for the majority of drug transactions in the world.

That’s not an effective rebuttal. First: Blockchain transactions are only accepted when they’re added to the blockchain, so participating in the blockchain necessarily directly enables the drug (etc.) transactions in a way which isn’t true for fiat or commodity currencies. (I happen to have the opinion that almost all drugs should be legally available in some form for personal use, but that’s a different argument; pa…

Also worth noting:

Even if you believe that all drugs should be legal for informed personal use, that doesn't change the predatory and destructive nature of drug dealers and cartels in the system as it exists today. If you want to support personal, recreational use of drugs, the ethical, responsible way to do that is through campaigning for reform of our laws, not through enabling and funding violent organized crime groups that profit massively off keeping people so addicted they can't function in society.

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

#350

Post by Duckton »

2fast4you wrote: post #302
Duckton wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it thought? Can’t web3 be, for an example, patient health data in a ledger? Who says it has to be tied to a monetary value?

I do not want my health record to be both public and immutable. Not wanting it to be public should be obvious. Immutable though, what if I need to change my name/gender to match reality? It's not enough to just update the value, because the old value still exists on the blockchain. That's just another method to find my deadname and use it for harassment.

So I am not an expert in blockchain or web3, I've only completed a few courses implementing a blockchain in golang and I work in the digital health industry.

But the points you raise, are exactly the issues I've been thinking could be solved with web3. I am imagining using it to give control to the patient of who has read access(to what and when), who can add data, etc.

I.e. give full transparency and control to the patient. Instead of the current situation where a patients data is on different systems, you don't know what it actually says, besides what a doctor tells you.

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