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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

#381

Post by vernon99 »

ironyholder wrote: post #297
pirate787 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the people of El Salvador are being forced to partake as their country is buying BTC reserves. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/el-salvad...

BTC is not web3. It has no role to play beyond being a slightly upscale dog coin for day traders to lose money on. in fact, it can't play a role as it is technically not possible and its core constituency refuses to make any changes.

Not sure why people downvote this comment. Web3 is essentially a bunch of tech related to decentralized apps and bitcoin is not a protocol to do that, at that point it’s just sometimes an intermediary step to move your capital into the systems that support it (like eth and others).

I have no skin in the game, I don’t hold much crypto and wasn’t building related stuff in years. So it saddens me to see people here who are generally very smart, being ruled by their prejudices,

I just did a catch-up research after missing out for 3 years and there’s literally a ton of super exciting stuff happening. DAOs blowing up, social products starting to pop up, blockchains themselves becoming much more scalable.

It saddens me to see my fellow folks here having such a biased and outdated perspective and aggressively evangelizing it.

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

#382

Post by vernon99 »

throwawaysysd wrote: post #379
kyruzic wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are so misinformed about web3 that you think BTC is in anyway related to web3.

I'm sorry but you don't know me, I've seen lots of BTC/ETH maxis who adopted the term early and continue to use the term to describe their efforts (and it's really not hard to find them doing this on HN and Twitter either) so if you disagree with their assertions and think they're misinformed I suggest you take that up with them and not me.

Why do you choose to use this term in its definition by some “btc maxis” instead of what an actual and huge community of developers mean by it? Some cognitive bias at play here my friend?

Edit: typos

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

#383

Post by throwawaysysd »

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…

Not calling you out directly as you're not responding to me, but it's really condescending to always get told how I don't understand because I levied some criticism. I first read the bitcoin paper in 2009. I've seen all the twists and turns the whole space has gone through. It didn't impress me back then and it doesn't impress me now. If I had received one good faith explanation for every time someone said "you just don't understand" then we'd all be a whole lot smarter for it and maybe I wouldn't have had to spend so much time reading these papers and getting disappointed.

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

#384

Post by withinboredom »

acdha wrote: post #282
withinboredom wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one pays for bits moving around on the internet, for the most part. See “peering internet.” Big companies just charge you for it to prevent it from being abused.

You might want to learn a bit more about how peering works. It's definitely not free even if the major players have reciprocal agreements — just ask Netflix how free that was when Comcast wanted to double-charge them.

My (poorly made) point was that at normal (not-unicorn) scale, bandwidth is practically free, or should be.

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

#385

Post by phyalow »

acdha wrote: post #303
phyalow wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Examples? See: Whisper [1] and Swarm [2] [1] https://eth.wiki/concepts/whisper/whisper-overview [2] https://www.ethswarm.org/

How do those innovate beyond the decades of prior art in both cases? Proof of work means Whisper will be expensive so it must have a compelling advantage which helps the applications be correspondingly more capable to compensate for that. Similarly, storage using smart contracts does not seem like a game changer compared to similar projects' weak market demand.

Im not going to bother filling in the blanks for you.

Tangently if you want to start a journey to understanding why the movement away from centralised infrastructure is important (and arguably unavoidable) from a fundamental perspective, go and read one of the primary sources for crypto libertarinism - https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transi... this book was published in 1997 it describes cryptocurrencies and their terminal implications on prevailing powerstructures and so much more. The Author was a member of the House of Lords in the UK and his son is now the current Leader of the House of Commons.

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

#386

Post by acdha »

phyalow wrote: post #385
acdha wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do those innovate beyond the decades of prior art in both cases? Proof of work means Whisper will be expensive so it must have a compelling advantage which helps the applications be correspondingly more capable to compensate for that. Similarly, storage using smart contracts does not seem like a game changer compared to similar projects' weak market demand.

Im not going to bother filling in the blanks for you. Tangently if you want to start a journey to understanding why the movement away from centralised infrastructure is important (and arguably unavoidable) from a fundamental perspective, go and read one of the primary sources for crypto libertarinism - https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Individual-Mastering-Transi... this book was published in 1997 it describes cryptoc…

> Im not going to bother filling in the blanks for you.

This seems suspiciously like you are unable to. Note how unusual that is for true innovation — HN is full of posts where people can say they switched to something because it was faster, better, cheaper, etc. If all you have is a book from the previous century which predates those systems existing, that does not speak well for their merits.

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

#387

Post by throwawaysysd »

vernon99 wrote: post #382
throwawaysysd wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but you don't know me, I've seen lots of BTC/ETH maxis who adopted the term early and continue to use the term to describe their efforts (and it's really not hard to find them doing this on HN and Twitter either) so if you disagree with their assertions and think they're misinformed I suggest you take that up with them and not me.

Why do you choose to use this term in its definition by some “btc maxis” instead of what an actual and huge community of developers mean by it? Some cognitive bias at play here my friend? Edit: typos

Upon observation, that huge community of developers appears to still be mostly building apps and altcoins on top of ETH and cashing out on BTC exchanges because that's what everyone uses and it's how you make the most money. These coins have not diminished in popularity, the huge community has only increased their popularity. If you take issue with cognitive bias then take it up with them. Like I said, I will concede this point when that changes and all the proof-of-work coins are gone, and the BTC maxis go away and stop having so much influence, but that has not happened and I am very skeptical that it ever will without also taking everything else you'd describe as "web3" with it.

I used to be very interested in defi but I can't anymore when it's evident that the same market forces and consolidation and network effects keeping traditional banking afloat are also keeping BTC afloat because too many people are invested in keeping it the dominant coin. I really hope I'm wrong and BTC is not "too big to fail" but if I am then I expect you'll see these fancy web3 startups pivot back to making "boring" web 2.0 banking systems because there is no big money in defi anymore.

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

#388

Post by the_gastropod »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #210
the_gastropod wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. And, frankly, I'd think anyone with a half-a-brain and 30 seconds to think through the ramifications of such a terrible idea would be able to figure out why.

Then web.archive.org wouldn't exist.

I promise you archive.org deletes things. Child porn, copyright infringements, government secrets, etc. certainly aren't "immutably" stored.

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

#389

Post by the_gastropod »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #140
the_gastropod wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not doing any better Really? As of writing, the S&P500 is down ~10% from its all-time-high. Bitcoin is currently down over 50% of its ATH. Other cryptocurrencies are faring even worse. The stock market is doing significantly better. This is an oft frustrating topic in the world of cryptocurrency enthusiasm. The contemporary American banking and finance system is awful . It's worthy of a great many of criticism…

As of Friday, 42% of NASDAQ stocks were down over 50% from their highs.

In other words, 58% of NASDAQ stocks weren't?

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

#390

Post by intrasight »

danaris wrote: post #347
intrasight wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"if nothing of value emerges over next year then it likely never will"
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