| Uniswap / automated market makers / decentralized exchanges are already a “killer app” of web3. It’s not a hypothetical, it already has billions in daily volume. It’s true that , for any blockchain app, you could trust a third party who could use traditional database to do it faster and cheaper. What the web3 detractors repeatedly refuse to understand is that not needing to trust a third party is a feature many people care about. By handing trust to a third party over important things like your money and your identity, you hand over a massive amount of power over yourself to them. It’s also true that all this tech is still nascent. Big picture, ~10 years is really not that long. In many ways, technological limitations means a lot of these projects are still “toys” , just like microcomputers and Linux once were. But there is a ton of cryptography research and application that _might_ transform these from toy to the future. And again, with billions in daily volume, calling it a toy is unfair, it’s in between a toy and the future. To clarify “not needing to trust a third party” - it’s better to phrase it as “needing to trust fewer parties and having more choice in who you trust.” I’m amazed people can watch scam after scam from Wall St financiers and struggle to understand why some find axing the middlemen appealing. Anyone can list 100 reasons why it won’t work long term. The question is do you use that list as a reason to write it all off, or a list of problems to solve as an engineer. HN obviously leans towards the former. |
I think this is overblown. Most DeFi is illegal so people are using it because of regulatory arbitrage, not because it's trustless.