Web3? I have my DAOts

Right now, the consensus seems to be that Web 3 is decentralized/blockchain stuff - but I also hear the Metaverse concept increasingly referred to as "Web 3"

I suppose my point is that the web doesn't develop along a linear, one dimensional scale, but rather a branching and recombining tree.

I think it's incorrect to the of crypto-currencies/etc as heading towards some sort of equilibrium.

>>"Check out meme stocks a few years later. Remember, all this stuff is zero-sum. For every winner, there has to be a loser."

I think this is similar to the mistake of the last 4 decades' monetary/macroeconomic theory and practice. Expecting that inflation/default would ultimately balance/equilibrate rising public debt. Well... debt rose for decades while inflation remained much lower than it had in earlier periods.

Same here. Sure, the equilibrium price for bitcoin may be zero. In that case, for every winner there is a loser.

Just like ~2008-2012, ~1999-2002, ~1994-1996, ~1982-1986, etc.

On the technology side: distributed Byzantine consensus is an open problem with some promising prototypes. It would have very cool use cases: remittance is huge, ENS is fucking cool, Brave/BAT is cool, NFTs for e.g. concert tickets or restaurant reservations or whatever would be cool, IPFS is cool.

The technology isn’t there yet. POW doesn’t scale. Ouroboros Praus/Genesis needs a clock oracle (see: Spanner), Tendermint/Algorand/PBFT are too slow (global 3-phase. commit, right). Solana/ICON/etc. are expensive cloud databases. L2 rollups/Lightning/sharding are “kick-the-can” exercises. But it took time to go from the Paxos paper to Chubby as well, maybe someone solves it.

Yeah, it’s mostly scams today. But it’s always been mostly scams. Microsoft bundling IE was a scam. Pets.com was a scam. Path was a scam. Uber and AirBnB were (are?) illegal as hell. Third-party cookies powering Google and FB is a scam.

When the dust settles some amount of this stuff will have been worked out technically, legally, and financially, and the rest will be “lol do you remember when…”.

This time some people will be rich who neither had rich parents nor knew Bay Area royalty, but YC wasn’t always part of the machine either. I’m sure Goldman and YC will eventually embrace those people with open arms.

I for one look forward to us collectively getting our knickers untwisted about it so we can go back to rewriting every calculator app on earth in Rust (I kid! Don’t hit me! Doofy Haskell is better than no Haskell!).

;)

But that's not the case we're running into here. The crypto case is that you're reading reviews from people on the car, but turns out that a lot of people own Ford stock and therefore will probably have a positive bias (conscious or unconscious) for that car. It's not a reason against the technology, but it's a reason to be extra skeptical of the use cases and motivations of people who speak positively about it.

> I only hope this place learns to talk in generalities about technology, protocols and economics

There's quite a lot of talk about the technology, protocols and economics of crypto tech in HN. The issue is that when you poke around, people haven't actually thought about the use cases they present. Even the simple question "could this be done before and, if so, why isn't it done already?" already takes down a lot of crypto use cases and discussions I see around here. Game resales, multi-game items, digital art, defi loans, federated networks, global identity, consumer-backed media... A lot of people will say crypto can solve those problems without noticing that the problem wasn't the tech.

In the end, crypto just adds "distributed and trustless" to databases. Unless the problem being attacked is about centralization and trust (and for most big consumer markets, it almost never is) crypto can't change the situation.

> cool, contrarian thing to do on HackerNews (stay poor lmao)

See, this is the problem we're having. We can't really trust we're going to have a productive technical discussion with someone that sees crypto as a vessel to "get rich quick" and says things like that.