[wellokpetejr]

I work in the web3/blockchain world.

And I don’t really care if any of it takes off. I have no interest in crypto or the politics surrounding all of this.

For me, it’s something new and interesting. It’s like the Wild West. It has some energy behind it.

Is most of it a scam? Sure. But will we learn anything from it? Hopefully. I think of it like Product Hunt. 99% of the projects will fail, but 100% of the people probably learned something useful.

[thathndude]

I respect your healthy mentality, but if that’s the most interest you can muster, I think it demonstrates how little attention Web3 should be getting.

The original promise of the Internet and Web 2.0 had clear use cases, where you could understand and appreciate the improvements to every day life. There’s no denying that there were grifters there, and the whole thing got a little hot with dot com bubble. But, on the whole, the potential could be seen.

Just as calculators made lives better in the 70s and 80s, spreadsheet as well, there was a natural and relatable drive to incorporating more technology. I don’t see any of that with the web three.

[f0e4c2f7]

Many people were about as blind to the internet then as they are to crypto now. If you Google news stories from then you get a lot of confused newscasters going "but what is internet?" Or people like Bill Gates trying with little success to explain it.[0]

In those early days where it was pretty much just irc and bbs's it was pretty hard to see any kind of value for most people.

I also remember a time when people would essentially complain about ".com" do you remember this? "Commercials. Billboards. Everybody has a dot com now!" That feels a bit like the complaining about Blockchain now to me and I tend to see it as a pretty good sign.

I don't actually know very much about blockchain / smart contract stuff. I've been digging into it lately because it seems like there could be something interesting there. If there is, I haven't really found it just yet.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk

[tibbar]

It’s depressing, honestly. A few years ago I read a graduate textbook about Bitcoin as well as the original white paper and some papers about ethereum, etc. My main takeaway is that Bitcoin itself (although not all blockchain proposals) is a horrible medium for almost all useful products. The privacy properties are bad, it’s incredibly inefficient, and everyone ends up going to a middleman instead of interacting in a decentralized way as it is. Almost always, a regular database is what you want. The drumbeat of cries ‘let’s build X, but on a blockchain!’ rarely even make sense.

This is compounded by the fact that the people who promote Bitcoin the most in my personal circles are known to be experts in wishful thinking and outlandish claims about the world in general.

Having said that, smart contracts are actually really cool. In practice a bank is probably just as good in the developed world but — darn it, I want to make clever money programs too. Also, there are alt coins that have much better privacy preserving properties and superior (energy efficient) consensus algorithms so there are still reasons to be hyped. It’s just that most of the web3 stuff doesn’t seem to touch the actually interesting possibilities in favor of ‘go blockchain, Bitcoin to the moon!’

[thrwy_918]

>In those early days where it was pretty much just irc and bbs's it was pretty hard to see any kind of value for most people.

I don't agree that it was hard to understand the value of services like electronic mail, forums or text chat. People may have been confused about how these services worked, or how they could personally use such services. But in a world where the best way to contact someone far away was an expensive telephone call, it was easy to spend two minutes talking to someone and have them understand the value of cheap, near-instant text-based communication.

It's really hard to explain the value of "web3" in a two minute conversation because almost everything it lets you do is either i) something most people don't actually want to do, or ii) something people can already do in a much easier and user-friendly way

[ekanes]

I think a case can be made that Ticketmaster will be replaced (or replace itself) with blockchain tech that will eliminate scalpers. Visa and Mastercard will most likely be replaced or dramatically lower fees. Banks will be upended.

[gjulianm]

> I think a case can be made that Ticketmaster will be replaced (or replace itself) with blockchain tech that will eliminate scalpers.

Blockchain does not do too much to eliminate scalpers. One could easily make thousands of wallets, buy the tickets and then resell them. What stops scalpers is tickets tied to personal identity, and blockchain can't really tie wallets to personal identity without a central physical authority.

> Visa and Mastercard will most likely be replaced

Visa and Mastercard won't be replaced as long as cryptocurrencies do not provide fraud protection or chargebacks (that seems a little bit impossible given the irreversibility of crypto transactions) or credit lines that require less than 100% collateral.

[ekanes]

To eliminate scalpers, I don't need to know who's behind a wallet, I just need to look at the wallet and see it's a first-time buyer from me (Ticketmaster) or the performer. Either way, it can go to towards the back of the line. Someone who buys lots of tickets (and I can see they don't re-sell them!) moves to the front of the line. Happy venues, happy fans, happy performers!

For Visa: Smart contracts that hold the money for 30 days and a real-world interface for customer service (new companies will be borth to offer this I bet) will mean lower fees.

[gjulianm]

> Happy venues, happy fans, happy performers

Except for the fans that couldn’t get a ticket because it’s the first time they do and they go to the back of the line, or the ones that sold a ticket because they couldn’t attend and now they can’t buy tickets.

> Smart contracts that hold the money for 30 days and a real-world interface for customer service (new companies will be borth to offer this I bet) will mean lower fees.

Which means a 30-day payment lag for everyone and is far more prone to abuse if the client can unilaterally charge back any transaction. Also doesn’t help when credentials are stolen.

[terryf]

Ticketmaster - could be. Visa? Hell no. I want to get my money back if someone steals my cc data. And I have gotten it back! No such luck with crypto if I lose my private key.

[filleokus]

No method for eliminating scalping is easier/better to implement on the blockchain, compared to a regular old centralized Not-Ticketmaster saas.

The most obvious/safe method is also the most cumbersome: Require name/DOB when buying the tickets, do not allow changing it, and check everyone’s ID at the gate.

Further, it is probably in the interest of both the performer and Ticketmaster to allow “safe” scalping (like Ticketmaster Resale).

(Fixing Ticketmaster with Web3 is like fixing DRM on Steam with NFT’s…)

[ekanes]

> No method for eliminating scalping is easier/better to implement on the blockchain, compared to a regular old centralized Not-Ticketmaster saas.

I guess, except that it's centralized. So one can only build "reputation" with that one saas at a time. If I can show I'm a fan of XYZ band, any ticketing service can see that and treat me differently.

[brandonmenc]

> I think a case can be made that Ticketmaster will be replaced (or replace itself) with blockchain tech that will eliminate scalpers.

Why is this better?

Receipts on the blockchain is just another push toward purchases being "renting access" instead of "owning stuff I can resell anonymously."

I can think of very few transactions that I want permanent and signed and public. The fewer the better imo.

[ekanes]

> I can think of very few transactions that I want permanent and signed and public. The fewer the better imo.

For sure. That's a problem with public blockchains that we'll wrestle with soon enough. They are presented as being more private when in fact they are more public, and certainly once some big exchange is compromised someday.

I think we'll see more from private currencies like Monero, since they're kind of what bitcoin was marketed as. Cheap, private digital currency.

[RestlessMind]

> I think it demonstrates how little attention Web3 should be getting

Let people decide for themselves where to pay attention to? I remember "Internet" receiving a lot of hype in 1998 when most of the people didn't have any clue about what that actually entailed.

> The original promise of the Internet and Web 2.0 had clear use cases, where you could understand and appreciate the improvements to every day life

Hahaha, but no. Where I was in 1998, hardly anyone had any idea what Internet was about and yet there was a lot of hype. In the early days, I remember using it only for porn, random email forwards and chats. The way I use it now (searching for anything and everything, buying majority of the stuff I need, payments of all kinds, investments, ...) was unimagined.

> I don’t see any of that with the web three.

Have you ever considered that you could be wrong and that in a couple of decades, there might be something really interesting out of Crypto / Web3?

[azangru]

> The original promise of the Internet and Web 2.0 had clear use cases, where you could understand and appreciate the improvements to every day life.

How is an international currency (or currencies) allowing direct peer-to-peer transactions without the need of middlemen or central authorities not a clear use case with a potential to improve at least some people's everyday lives? What's more everyday than money?

[wedn3sday]

It would be nice if it didnt have the carbon footprint of Argentina to produce something of no value.

[cslarson]

Researchers and devs have been and continue to work incredibly hard to ensure this stops being the case some time mid year 2022.

[politelemon]

Could you explain or link to what you mean? What's happening in mid 22, and are all crypto currencies involved?

[DennisP]

Ethereum is switching off its mining in favor of another consensus system called "proof-of-stake." Basically the mining hardware and electricity are replaced by the currency itself. There's a consensus protocol that works if people don't cheat in certain ways, it's provable if someone cheats, and the "miners" lock some ETH into the system as a security bond. If someone submits a proof that you cheated then you lose your bond. Energy consumption will drop by an estimated 99.95%.

Most web3 stuff runs on Ethereum, which is the second-biggest energy consumer in crypto. Bitcoin is the biggest and has no plans to move to proof-of-stake, but isn't really involved in web3.

Ethereum's proof-of-stake protocol has been running in parallel for a year with billions of dollars in real ETH deposited, and for the merged system there's a multi-client testnet running.

[the_gastropod]

We’ve been hearing this tune for several years now. Ethereum was originally planned to move to PoS in January 2020. That date was blown and many dates projected since have also been missed. Repeating this “the end is near!” argument in response to very valid concerns about the environmental impact is getting a bit old.

[DennisP]

Yes, I expect to see these "dates have been missed before" comments up to the day it hits production.

There's a big difference between "we have a design worked out and think it will take this long" and "we've been running the new system in production for a year, merging it with the old system is relatively easy, and we've got all the clients running the merge together on a public test network." Historically, anything they've gotten to the point of a multi-client testnet has taken well under a year to go live.

[davidgerard]

> Ethereum was originally planned to move to PoS in January 2020.

2018, it's been 18 months away since 2014.

[paulgb]

Probably referring to Ethereum moving to proof-of-stake, which is set to happen in June https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/ethereum-is-slated-for-anoth...

It's been delayed before, but hopefully it happens this time. I don't own any, but it would be nice for GPU prices to normalize and the environmental cost would go down substantially.

[kristofferR]

Ethereum is moving to proof of stake instead of mining, that will remove all superfluous carbon emissions.

When we're talking about web3, we're generally talking about Ethereum: https://web3js.readthedocs.io

[pavel_lishin]

The promised land has always been six months in the future, for the past few years.

[serverholic]

It’s in testing right now.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

> I work in the web3/blockchain world.

> Is most of it a scam? Sure.

I appreciate your honesty, but HN is not just about tech. We are humans first of all. If a new tech is used mostly to scam people, you can't be surprised most people here won't appreciate it, whether it's fresh or not.

Also, the aspect of novelty fades in time. XML was a novel thing back in the day, too. But scams do have real, negative consequences on people's lives.

[capableweb]

> If a new tech is used mostly to scam people

Is blockchain-related projects actually "mostly" used to scam people though? When the internet first appeared, plenty of people made claims that the internet would just be used for crime and scams, but eventually came to realize the value of it, as the use-cases grew month by month.

[ehnto]

What are the current use-cases that aren't scams? Except for currency, since I don't think that's what Web3 is trying to sell, and I think most are familiar with the value propositions of cryptocurrencies.

[mockingbirdy]

> For me, it’s something new and interesting.

Same for me. I'm programming Web3 and Solidity contract interactions. It's just refreshing to have a new aspect (contracts and money) that you can easily interact with now.

I agree with the comments condemning the resource consumption. I also see big problems with the resulting loss of control over currencies that governments could face. I'm trying to be a part of this development because if it doesn't go away, these systems could be a defining part of the future. But if I'm honest, I'd like crypto in most of its current form to go away - it's very likely that it can damage democracies and we're currently already busy saving our democratic processes from social media, inequality and manipulation. Maybe crypto has a solution to these problems, but currently I'm not convinced. I've talked to founders of the biggest crypto currencies and the vision of most of them is highly anarchistic and idealistic (a DAO as a government replacement, taxes will be paid in a voluntary form or something like that) which makes me deeply sceptical. But maybe that's just me being uncomfortable that a multi-billionaire is explaining to me how he wants to change how the world is governed.

[GrumpyNl]

I don't get this, so you admit its a scam and a wild west, I'm sure you can work on something that's not a scam, has a wild west environment and get a descent pay. Why would you keep working at it?

[tigerBL00D]

This is how web3 succeeds at decentralizing moral responsibility?

[truculent]

What are the most promising use-cases in your experience?

[henvic]

Probably being an early adopter and cashing out before it's too late lol

[wedn3sday]

this is not the kind of comment that makes hackernews a good place to have a conversation.

[cbozeman]

Given the amount of rampant fraud that's occurring in the crypto spaces, I don't see how you can't at least entertain this as a serious notion.

[davidgerard]

It is an accurate and concise summary of the situation, and thus provides value in the discussion.

[sktrdie]

I mean conceptually the idea is "money without intermediaries" which is quite fascinating. But when you stop and think about it for a sec you realize that we need intermediaries or else the richer will become unstoppable kings with control that cannot be deflated.

[mockingbirdy]

> But when you stop and think about it for a sec you realize that we need intermediaries or else the richer will become unstoppable kings with control that cannot be deflated.

I agree. This is something that I'm not sure people who go into crypto fully understand with the resulting consequences. The FED is basically printing money and I can understand people who don't agree with the inflationary mechanism that is built into fiat currencies - this is one of the main criticisms of the fiat system because it's debt-based.

On the other hand, having no means to get taxes (because of anonymous currencies like Monero and anonymous wallets) and having no control over the currency is a safe way to a plutocracy. Some would argue that we're already living in a plutocracy, but currently we have democratic ways to intercept (although we're currently not good at exercising that power). But if it's technologically impossible to intervene, there's not a lot of ways to fix this.

Good article about this [1].

[1]: https://medium.com/@dionyziz/blockchains-are-inherently-plut...

[seibelj]

Why is there no way to get taxes? Taxes were collected throughout history, beginning with the earliest recorded history, when nothing was electronic. Cash still enables tax collecting.

[mockingbirdy]

Because you can't know how much the person really has (edit: and receives) with crypto. Historically, you could simply walk to their properties and look at their wealth and tax accordingly (like serfs getting taxed on their agricultural output based on the land size they worked with). Or you could look at their bank accounts or (like the Panama papers) find their off-shore accounts.

But now, they can hide enormous wealth in an untraceable way on many wallets. It's not entirely new - tax evasion is as old as taxes - but it's easier and accessible now for large wealth that was more difficult to hide in the past. If crypto stays legal, you can't control this aspect.

[tibbar]

In practice crypto isn’t used much as a medium of exchange, though, and when you try to cash in your coins you will get nailed for any evasion or criminal behavior. It’s possible that buying things directly with crypto will become more widespread, but expect this to trigger more laws and reporting requirements so that your transactions can be taxed.

[seibelj]

We don’t tax wealth. When someone wants to use crypto to buy something real - like property - should be able to collect taxes then. Maybe tax authorities transition away from taxing trades and more towards taxing physical stuff.

[ehnto]

> I mean conceptually the idea is "money without intermediaries"

Then what is Web3? Cryptocurrency has been a thing for a little while now, surely Web3 isn't just that but with a new name. I think the idea is that applications can in some way utilize the blockchain to form a new type of application for the web, but I've yet to see any useful application ideas that truly benefit from a blockchain.

[hagbard_c]

> ...else the richer will become unstoppable kings with control that cannot be deflated.

The runners-up can just launch their own $hitcoins and be kings in their own domains.

[RestlessMind]

An asset class similar to Gold - provably limited in supply and valued because everyone else values it. Also, much easier to transfer around the world unlike Gold.