[pcthrowaway]

I'm reminded of this bit from Bill Gates on David Letterman's show, ~1995

“Late Show with David Letterman” clip courtesy of David Letterman

“What the hell is [the internet] exactly?” Letterman asks Gates.

“A place where people can publish information. They can have their own homepage, companies are there, the latest information,” Gates says.

“It’s wild what’s going on.”

Letterman wasn’t sold.

“I heard you could watch a live baseball game on the internet and I was like, does radio ring a bell?” Letterman says.*

Gates said unlike with radio, the internet would allow users to watch a baseball game whenever they wanted instead of live.

″[Do] tape recorders ring a bell?” Letterman asks.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I see what you're saying, but really the problem there is that Gates didn't even really get the internet (Microsoft was famously late to the party) and was a poor evangelist for it as a result. He wasn't good at explaining its benefits and Letterman was rightly skeptical. I'd have asked the same questions and I had used the internet in 1995!

There are a lot of people promoting Web3 who can't explain why it is any good in such a way that anyone can see the potential. That's on them, not the skeptics. If there is actually some real value to the concept, then someone out there should be able to explain it. And if that's impossible but the benefits are real, then who cares? It'll eventually make its value clear just like the internet eventually did and why care about that now? Oh right... because the scam doesn't work without the FOMO part.

[exdsq]

I was skeptical when someone explained Ethereum to me in 2015, and a friend told me to invest in crypto in 2014 when Bitcoin dropped from $1,000 to $300. I looked at it again in 2017 and found cross-border payments an attractive proposition and started paying more attention to the space. Started working full time on blockchain projects on 2019. I’m still skeptical of a lot of projects that come out but there is something there. Programmable money is really interesting. Random things I’d like to do, such as buying a gamertag for my Xbox account that’s already taken from a stranger, suddenly have viable solutions. Atomic transactions allow pretty interesting things too - imagine payments like SQL transactions where your own custom logic has to be met for the transaction to occur. The issue is it’s still a really new, complicated, and fast evolving domain. It is really hard to convey years and years of skepticism turned understanding to someone in a comment on the internet.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I admit it is possible I'm just unable to see the value of these things, but I also have a lot of company in that with people who are way smarter than me.

> Programmable money is really interesting.

Why would I want to "program" money? What does that actually do for me?

> Random things I’d like to do, such as buying a gamertag for my Xbox account that’s already taken from a stranger, suddenly have viable solutions.

Yeah, see, I can't see much reason to want to do this other than to use it as part of a scam. I don't have a gamertag, but nearest I can figure it's just an online identity. Why would you want to buy someone else's identity? I suppose they might have some kind of vanity username that's being squatted? So what are we promoting here? Just a useful tool for black markets? Sure, that has some utility, but it is hardly what I would call exciting new world changing technology.

> Atomic transactions allow pretty interesting things too - imagine payments like SQL transactions where your own custom logic has to be met for the transaction to occur.

I'm imagining that, and I can't see what it does that I can't already do today in the real world without having to know any over-complicated technology.

> The issue is it’s still a really new, complicated, and fast evolving domain.

The complexity is part of the reason I don't have any trust in it. When people are trying to sell me something by saying "it's complicated, but trust me it's great!" I am immediately suspicious. They call it 'confidence' artistry for a reason.

And christ, whenever people talk about this stuff it is always about money. Does it have any uses not related to financial trickfuckery? Theoretically this is supposed to enable decentralized youtube and the like, but nobody talks about that. This makes the whole space very untrustworthy.

[pcthrowaway]

> I admit it is possible I'm just unable to see the value of these things, but I also have a lot of company in that with people who are way smarter than me.

I feel like there has to be a name for the fallacy here. If you looked at the cryptocurrency space, especially the blockchain builders, you'd likely find a lot of people who you'd be willing to accept are smarter than you working on it. Silvio Micali and Vitalik Buterin are 2 big names that come to mind (I don't hold/use algorand FWIW, but Silvio seems like one of the brightest minds in the field solely based on accomplishments).

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Sure, but equally there are plenty of smarter-than-me people who think it's all a giant scam, so I'm inclined to trust my instincts. After all, just because they're smarter than me doesn't mean they aren't trying to scam me or haven't got caught up in some bullshit fantasy.

Besides, if the technology is actually valuable in some way I cannot yet perceive but that will become obvious over time, then I can just wait until it becomes ubiquitous and reap the benefits without risking anything.

[pcthrowaway]

Absolutely, and the tokens don't need to have multi-trillion dollar market caps for this to happen either.

The tokenization of everything is a mixed bag. On one hand it leads to perverse incentives that result in an incredibly low signal-to-noise ration. On the other hand it enables types of consensus that don't exist when there's not a penalty for misbehaviour (specifically for proof-of-stake and staking, the token makes it possible to reward network participants, while making the cost of attacking the network higher than the market cap of the network).

[immibis]

> Why would I want to "program" money? What does that actually do for me?

If you are outside of the financial industry, you probably don't. Maybe you can do some amateur high-frequency trading on the side. It's not "programmable money" in the sense of "please send $30 to the gas company every month".

As I see it, the main application is financial derivative products i.e. investment products. You can make any kind of "ownable thing" based upon other ownable things on the blockchain. Remember the mortgage-backed securities that caused the 2008 crash? Now anyone can create their own variety with some coding effort and a $100 fee. And if you pay another $100 fee, they will automatically become tradeable on major exchanges.

It's peak capitalism, basically. From a purely technological point of view, I think this is pretty damn cool. From an economic point of view, it's going to be our downfall.

[Zanfa]

This is what puzzles me. Taking your Xbox gamertag on the blockchain as an example. It doesn't provide any decentralization, Microsoft is the central entity that gives the gamertag it's value. There's 0 incentive for Sony or any other competitor to honor the ownership, because why would they. It's more beneficial for them to let you register an account (with a potentially duplicate name). Since your NFT is in reality tied to a central entity, I'm having a hard time understanding why you need the blockchain in the first place, at the end of the day it's MS that calls the shots. The reason why Xbox & Sony don't interop isn't a technical problem, but a political one and blockchain does nothing to address the issue.

And from the looks of it, everything crypto is centralizing extremely fast, see Binance/Coinbase for exchanges, Opensea for NFTs. So at the end of the day you're still at the whims of large entities.