Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rewma 1721 days ago
> We will work the kinks out of this protocol, as well.

It's not a protocol problem, it's a purposefulness problem.

You can have the most perfectly oiled and flawless Rube Goldberg machine, but that doesn't mean it manages to become useful because all the kinks are ironed out. At the end of the day, it's still a convoluted way to do stuff no one cares about.

1 comments

Hard disagree - actually the usefulness is numerous, it’s the protocol(s) I think that either doom it or fracture it’s use.

The big fundamental is it allows for platforms to share equity with their users. It also has a bunch of marginal features downstream of “I can code my treasury/board” and anonymity, but the big one is it allows for platforms to share the upside with early adopters. And if that’s the only benefit, it’s a huge one.

The problem is it has no single protocol. Browsers and http somehow unified on similar standards. I don’t know if that was a miracle, but I don’t see it happening in crypto. There’s a fractal of competition, and that’s actually bad for adoption. It has no correlate, though it’s possible bridges over bridges and a lot of hammering on the UX will eventually paper things out.

But contracts that guarantee revenue share or other types of equity share with users is a significant benefit and a new world.

Regulation May kill it as well.

> Hard disagree - actually the usefulness is numerous, it’s the protocol(s) I think that either doom it or fracture it’s use.

Ok I'll bite: in your opinion what is the absolute best application you associate with the web3 keyword, and is a clear unquestionable selling point?

> The big fundamental is it allows for platforms to share equity with their users.

What leads you to believe that equity sharing is not possible right now without resorting to web3 buzzwords? I mean, the only reason that stops platforms from sharing equity with anyone at all is the fact that platform owners do not want that. That is a business model consequence, not a technology limitation.

> The problem is it has no single protocol.

I don't know if you even noticed that you haven't described a single problem at all, at least one that people care about. You only talked about crypto as a solution to a problem than no one has.

And the reason why no one shares equity is quite simple: no one wants to, because the ones that do never felt blocked at all.

> Ok I'll bite: in your opinion what is the absolute best application you associate with the web3 keyword, and is a clear unquestionable selling point?

Anything with user generated content. The takes on web3 are significantly smaller and you can argue why but the fact is people get to choose their platform based on public contracts. Trust is the feature, the platforms can do anything web 2 does just with better more solid terms.

> What leads you to believe that equity sharing is not possible right now without resorting to web3 buzzwords?

Because modifying the cap table is hard and controlled by a single entity, so even if they somehow jumped through all the regulatory hoops they wouldn’t have the trust.

You’re also arguing against reality. Name companies that do it without crypto, because every crypto company does.

> you haven't described a single problem at all

I guess you think Twitter, YouTube and Facebook don’t have trust problems.

> the reason why no one shares equity is quite simple

Crypto has proven this wrong already.

> Anything with user generated content.

I'm sorry but that is meaningless. I was hoping for a concrete, tangible example, but this sounds an awful lot like handwaving and question marks preceding the inexplicable "profit" stage.

> (...) but the fact is people get to choose their platform based on public contracts.

What exactly leads you to believe that's something anyone cares about or is even a problem that people need fixing? Right now it's more than enough to just point to a resource as a reference.

> Because modifying the cap table is hard (...)

No one even know what a "cap table" is, let alone cares about it.

I was hoping to hear about real world problems that the web3 buzzword promises to fix, but at best that's just a contrived way to shoehorn crypto as a solution to a problem that does not exist at all.

> I guess you think Twitter, YouTube and Facebook don’t have trust problems.

To the eyes of virtually everyone, no it does not. Content is posted by users, and to most checking who posted it is more than enough.

More importantly, even if people cared about that, you're trying to pass off the web3 buzzword as the only possible way to address the problem, while at most it's just a contrived way to propose one alternative approach to the issue.

> Crypto has proven this wrong already.

I'm sorry but your statement is plainly absurd. Crypto does not nor ever addressed the issue of equity at all.

If that's the very best argument you can muster to sell the web3 buzzword on it's perceived merits then I'm sorry but you've only inadvertently demonstrated once again that at best web3 is a convoluted solution to a problem that does not exist.

What? Your asserting against things that are plainly true today. Like I understand not believing that sharing equity is a good incentive, but literally denying the current day reality is just weird. Maybe some dissonance going on.

A lot of people definitely are not happy with existing platforms, and they very much understand getting paid for their contribution vs not. All your replies are essentially “sorry that’s ridiculous” so there’s not much for me to reply to here.

Argue why trust isn’t worthwhile or isn’t plausible, don’t argue that it doesn’t exist or somehow isn’t understandable especially without reasoning. Any boomer can understand a smart contract that’s not changeable without heavy majority vote ensuring they make 90% earnings on their, say CryptoTube channel and why it’d be better than 30% at Googles whim.

> What? Your asserting against things that are plainly true today. Like I understand not believing that sharing equity is a good incentive, but literally denying the current day reality is just weird. Maybe some dissonance going on.

I made no assertion at all. I asked you to present what you feel is the best value proposition behind the web3 buzzword, the best examples you could come up with were "equity sharing" and "trust", and I pointed out the fact that in the eyes of virtually everyone in the world none of those examples register even remotely as issues, and in fact they are seen as solved problems.

That is exactly the core problem with the web3 buzzword: at best, it is nothing more than a solution searching for a problem to fix, and so far the best that the hand-full of web3 buzzword supporters could come up with are irrelevant things that no one really cares about but require major technical overhauls to address?

The whole story is totally absurd, and we're talking about the absolute best examples you could come up with.

> Like I understand not believing that sharing equity is a good incentive, but literally denying the current day reality is just weird.

You're unwittingly demonstrating another problem linked with web3 enthusiasts: you handwave an awful lot to try to fill in all the holes in your arguments.

Here you are trying to use the term "reality" to try to deflect the fact that no one cares about web3's convoluted value proposition for "equity sharing" and "trust", two solved problems in the eye of the world that are only orthogonally related to web3.

If your arguments had any substance or merit to them, you could simply support your claims that people are willing to migrate to an entirely new infrastructure to benefit from the value proposition you've presented, but instead you fell back to handwaving and personal attacks.

> A lot of people definitely are not happy with existing platforms, and they very much understand getting paid for their contribution vs not.

Don't you understand that neither of those arguments comes close to make a case for web3?

At most, web3 proposes a specific proposal that is convoluted and demands a complete overhaul of the current infrastructure, but it is at best orthogonally related.

You could, right now, implement platforms where users get paid. There are a million of those already. Why do you feel the need to ignore reality to be able to even start proposing web3 as one of all alternstive solutions to a solved problem?

This whole discussion is tiring, specially as your absolute best usecases for web3 even fail to register any relevance or usefulness. frankly, you make it all sound like a convoluted but thinly veiled and desperate attempt to pump crypto. As handwaving and personal attacks don't help anyone make any case, I don't see a point in continuing the discussion.