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by roywiggins 1679 days ago
> That's just off the top of my head.

And all of that hard stuff could be done entirely without blockchain, and would indeed not be made any easier by blockchain, because it's all just tricky gamedev work. Once you've got all that stuff done, you could just use an API or a normal database to transfer "digital assets" between games, and skip the blockchain stuff.

Oh, is making an interoperable API too hard? Well, it's not going to be any easier on the blockchain...
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bccdee 1679 days ago
Exactly! This is my big critique about Web 3 — what can it actually do that we couldn't do already?

The new things people propose as Web 3 use cases, e.g. interoperable game items, simply aren't practical. That's why they don't exist already — not because they require blockchain to build.

I've heard people argue that big tech social media silos will be replaced by decentralized Web 3 social media, but why would they be? We already have decentralized social media. The reason Mastodon can't compete with Twitter isn't because it needs blockchain; it's because Twitter has all the users and all the money, and that's because centralization is just more profitable. It boils down to economics, not technology.

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roywiggins 1679 days ago
And we briefly had interoperable text chat with XMPP until the big players dropped support for it. The protocol already existed, it worked for a while, and then companies decided it wasn't in their interests to stick with it and the interoperable textaverse collapsed back into silos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Non-native_deployments

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