Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Web3 Bullshit?

maxread.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 383 posts

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#351

Post by wodenokoto »

kevinak wrote: post #170
anchpop wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loans create “virtual money” in a way, which does contribute to inflation (in fact, controlling lending is a primary way the federal reserve controls inflation)

Yes, in the current fiat system that is the case, but there is no way for someone (a bank or government) to inflate the supply in world where Bitcoin is the currency everyone uses.

No, you increase the amount of IOU's. I own 1 bitcoin, and everybody knows I'm good for my bitcoin (e.g., that is what a bank is. An institution everybody trusts to have money and they pay their dues.)

I know write you an IOU for 1 bitcoin, and you buy a car with that IOU, because anyone who owns that IOU can come to me and get their bitcoin, and everybody knows that I am good for my money, because that is the whole condition of this thought experiment.

I now write another IOU and give to my uncle, who buys a house with it, because everybody knows I'm good for it.

Now the money supply has increased, without minting new bitcoins, and this is exactly what happened to gold (which, as you know as well as anybody, you can't just print)

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#353

Post by AussieWog93 »

danaris wrote: post #244
AussieWog93 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has been fantastic for my small business. The fees aren't too crippling (around 15% of revenue) and FBA is an absolute Godsend for anyone based outside of the US trying to crack into that market (similar for Europe). I could not thank Mr. Bezos more for the opportunities Amazon has given my family. The income from FBA was a major factor in my decision to quit my job back in 2020, and because of that my daughte…

The problem with Amazon is that a) for every story like yours, there are 5 that say the opposite, and b) it's all enabled by abusive labour practices.

I don't disagree with b, but I'd suspect there are many, many more people like me in the silent majority.

You just don't hear about it much because it's a boring news story.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#354

Post by pas »

rtpg wrote: post #173
pas wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's digital gold. Is gold a Ponzi scheme? No. It's the same as putting money into NASDAQ100 or SP500 and waiting for it to go up only. Is that a Ponzi scheme? No. It's a volatile synthetic hedge against assets with real fundamentals.

Are speculative gold markets good though?

Not really. But the markets are not bad either. The bad things are all in the context. For these chains it's the insane energy inefficiency. (Storing the same thing over and over by itself makes little sense.)

And the whole "cryptobro culture" (which is the r/wallstreetbet culture, which is a nice essence of how fundamentally small markets are more about the humans who gamble/participate than about the economic properties of the products/stocks/currencies) is not simply bad/good either.

Modern monetary systems are not zero-sum. The central banks (and to a lesser degree the legislatures) can very effectively interact with the financial markets to achieve almost any desired outcome. Furthermore legislatures can and do tax whoever they want thanks to people with money having bank accounts.

The fact that now a lot of money is/was dumped into various blockchains doesn't mean much. It's just sitting here instead of sitting in a money market fund and doing nothing. Or instead of sitting in the central bank as required reserve.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#355

Post by hashtones »

In case anyone missed this point too, blockchain technology enables the notion of robotic singularity. Not saying that's what it is, but when your robot (or car) is connected to an immutable ledger, it has access to everything every other robot (or car) senses, so for instance robots connected to a blockchain can synchronize their orchestration (so, for instance, making it more possible to produce self driving cars).

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#356

Post by hbbio »

swiftcoder wrote: post #247
hbbio wrote: post #58

I have the impression that most comments here are either biased against cryptocurrencies or trying to push for them blindly. That's a bit sad considering we should at least be discussing the technology here. web3 is a marketing brand that defines a future version of web apps where the frontend is a compiled SPA possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) and where the backend is a decentralised blockchain (and…

> where the frontend is a compiled SPA This is pretty much just the same thing we do today, but wait... > possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) We can use a filesystem that is extremely slow, and also loses all our files if we stop paying AWS to mirror them in S3! > the backend is a decentralised blockchain And we can use a really slow database where each write costs $100s in gas fees! ... see, much bette…

Decentralisation is hard - never told the contrary.

However, transaction "gas" fees with some chains (Polygon, Solana) are less than 1 cent and you probably know that.

You can pay as much with DynamoDB if you don't optimise anything (and reads are free with the chains, still costly with DynamoDB). Of course, you can say that AWS is overpriced too... maybe that's just inflation going on.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#357

Post by mycall »

aunty_helen wrote: post #276
helen___keller wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised that there is no middle ground - there are either fervent advocates or fervent opposition, and with very few exceptions The middle ground would be people who aren't invested in crypto, but have tried a few dApps and think they can be neat sometimes but maybe are rough around the edges and might be better in a few years. These people don't exist because web3 technologies have nothing appealing to end u…

Non-invested middle ground web3 fanboy here. There’s definitely a lot of potential. Judging a technology based on what the first few applications to materialize is extremely short sighted and has never been a good estimate of its future usage. Personally I dislike full blown crypto zealots and also I dislike the Perl clutching tech crowd. Just remember distributed tech has never been the most efficient way to get som…

One dApp (or whatever blockchain application) I would love to see some traction is liquid democracy, from a government POV. The votecoin or adhocracy4 experiments exist but were not even in the right ballpark for a federal voting system that bypasses or changes Congress and constitution at its roots. I can see this huge someday, as zero trust is great and all, but it is a huge effort nobody has really started.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#358

Post by ianm98 »

mypastself wrote: post #341
ianm98 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about cryptocurrency enabled sports betting and prediction markets? There's a pretty clear technical path to these replacing traditional sports betting market makers and I personally cannot wait. Current market makers like DraftKings still put out betting lines with insane spreads, because in the US atleast, their markets are protected by regulatory capture. This [1] is one of the projects I have my…

Since the use of an oracle introduces a source of information external to the blockchain, we’re left with centralization issues again. I feel like this removes the unique advantage of using the technology in the first place. I suppose there are ways to gamble exclusively using the blockchain, but I don’t think sports betting is among them.

Suppose they use a fully centralized oracles, isn't there still a huge benefit in having much lower fees and tighter spreads, even if it's not decentralized? For the end user, having settlement, custody, and market making decentralized while having centralized oracles is still a huge advantage.

Then consider that people are tackling the issue of decentralized oracles. The most common platform for that is Chainlink [1]. In this space specifically, Augur [2] is among those who has attempted to make decentralized sports reporting Oracles. I'm not sure if their solution is fully fleshed out, but regardless it doesn't seem to be an insurmountable technical issue for something that is as easy to verify as outcome of a game.

If your willing to accept that the Oracle problem will be solved, I'm not sure how you would say this doesn't create value for consumers.

1.https://chain.link/education/blockchain-oracles 2. https://augur.net/

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#359

Post by astrange »

Karunamon wrote: post #207
wisty wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love pointing out that if it becomes a serious currency banks would offer bitcoin-denominated loans (causing an increase in money supply); and if there's then a credit crunch the Fed could offer bitcoin-denominated (but unbacked) bonds. It would be like the gold standard all over again.

There's no way to create "unbacked" bitcoin. You either have the transaction outputs pointing at your wallet address on the public blockchain, or you do not. Nobody wants or will accept FedBTC.

Celsius offers interest-bearing bitcoin accounts which they use to do margin lending, so this already exists.

Re: Is Web3 Bullshit?

#360

Post by porknubbins »

lottin wrote: post #343
porknubbins wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it pretty eye opening to be able to make payments freely and (practically) pseudonomously, in contrast to which all other digital payments systems are heavily permissioned. Crypto UI may not be great but try sending a wire internationally in the banking system and you are presented with 2-3 massively leaky abstractions (why should I the consumer have to research the difference in ACH, electronic wire) with va…

I make international payments pretty often and have never been presented with a leaky abstraction, suffered from "censorship" or anything like that. "Permissioned" is simply a consequence of that fact that most countries establish barriers to the free movement of people, goods and capitals in and out of their territory. You're not going to solve that with technology, because it's not a technological problem. It's not…

I’m sure many people haven’t experienced that kind of censorship but lots of people have. I used to play online poker which was made illegal in the US through payment channel crackdowns(for reasons at best paternalistic but realistically just physical casino lobbying). Given that the internet facilitates pretty much any kind of information transfer I have to ask mysef is it more likely the future will be a future where I can only transfer value by requesting 20th C institutions to proxy for me or is it more likely I will be able to freely transfer value in my own right.
Post reply on HN