[danShumway]

Do you see any sense of irony here when looking at some of the crypto-proponents on this page arguing that the entire history of currency is bunk and can be discarded without knock-on effects?

> On a complex topic with an enormous scope, you claim to have an absolute and extreme answer, and present it as factual. That's pretty much impossible on any topic of high complexity.

This, on its own, is a pretty good reason not to trust a community that regularly messes up pegging stablecoins. I do not buy that purposefully making something complex is the same thing as making it robust. If anything, it's the opposite, complex systems are more likely to have fundamental flaws and are more likely to fall down and blow up than simple systems.

But if we are looking at complexity, current fiat currencies are already unbelievably complicated and multi-faceted. The way that inflation works, the way that currencies get issued, how trust in currencies grows, how countries coordinate and handle currency exchanges and debt, you could get multiple doctorates in every one of those areas. So if you're saying that GP is telling on themselves by dismissing cryptocurrencies out of hand because the math being hard means that quick dismissal of the social impact isn't allowed, how do you not immediately get really large red flags when you look at crypto-communities talking about how those economists are all just obviously wrong and crypto prices aren't tied to overall market effects, or that inflationary assets are just bad design, or that everyone's energy criticisms are just overstated, or that digital artists that hate NFTs just don't understand them, or that stock markets are exactly the same as cryptocurrency speculation, and so on and so on?

The idea of cryptocurrency proponents saying, "wait a second, this system is complex, we can't just dismiss it out of hand" just seems like it's missing a tiny bit of self awareness. Cryptocurrency by and large is a dismissal of complex systems and was primarily made and popularized by people who looked at economic/currency theory and thought, "yeah, I can do that, how hard could it possibly be?"

[fleddr]

I'm not talking about the technical complexity of crypto. I'm talking about statements that cannot possibly have a binary answer, as any reasonable answer lies on a spectrum.

You can apply that to any complex divisive topic. Even harmless ones...

"JavaScript sucks"

Position 1: JS is pure evil, it should be eliminated or even banned. Position 2: Everything should be built in JS, no matter the problem.

Both positions are absolute and extreme. They should both be distrusted as absolute statements tend to be false by default. In the rare case where they are true, extraordinary evidence needs to be presented and the commenter needs to be extremely knowledgeable and experienced on the topic at hand.

Applied to crypto, a statement like "web3 is a scam" should be translated to:

"I don't know anything about web3. I've never read any whitepapers. I've never used any of its products. I've never engaged with the community. I don't stay on top of news. Yet I did hear it is bad so I'll just parrot that and present it as fact."

I mean, look at the original article: "keep the web free".

...which incorrectly assesses how "free" the current web actually is, but aside from that: what part of web3 is taking away the current free web? Does the author think that web3 will uninstall the HTTP protocol? There is no threat, it's entirely imagined.

[danShumway]

> "JavaScript sucks"

This risks falling into a tautology. The reason why it's naive to completely dismiss Javascript or to use it for everything is the same reason why it's a complicated topic -- because there are a lot of obviously useful applications, a lot of obvious flaws, because it managed to win marketshare over alternatives in a practical (not just speculative) way that led to genuine improvements to a lot of products that we use. Not to mention that a lot of incredibly smart people have ended up with nuanced takes that go in both directions.

If what you mean by "complicated" is "this is inherently nuanced", then saying "complicated things are inherently nuanced" isn't really saying anything. It's just saying that nuanced things are nuanced, it isn't proof or evidence of anything about Web3.

If you're not talking about the tech and systemic complication, then the question is whether or not Web3 really is actually complicated in the specific way you are using the word -- ie, is it actually a nuanced topic, or is it mostly a buzzword that companies like Facebook have latched onto?

And it is important to ask that question. Most things are useless, Javascript is the exception. If somebody comes up to you and tries to get you to learn a new language, you want to be immediately asking, "who else uses this? What evidence do you have that this isn't a scam?" And if that's not your default reaction, you'll end up buying into a lot of questionable technologies and frameworks that are error prone or that have bugs.

> as absolute statements tend to be false by default

This is also a little bit over-literal. Absolutes tend to be rare, yes, but that does not mean everything is always in the middle of two extremes. Sometimes it's off to the side, sometimes something is mostly useless but has one or two small ideas.

Even something like Theranos, there are lessons you can take away from that company about marketing, there's some degree of nuance there -- but it was still very definitely a scam and still very definitely did more harm than good. Crypto does not need to be entirely useless across the board or have no good ideas at all in order for Web3 to be a scam.

And again, going to the above point, if you go into every opportunity or proposal that someone makes online as if it's probably got a roughly equal number of good points and bad points, then you are going to get taken in by a lot of scams. If you demand extraordinary evidence in order to not trust someone, then you are ripe picking for Internet scams.

Is it OK for people to point at technologies like Google AMP or DRM and say that they should be rejected or that they're bad for the Internet?

> what part of web3 is taking away the current free web?

Web3's lack of threat to the open web is largely predicated on the fact that it's mostly useless and that it won't take off in a serious way. But if a lot of Web3's applications (NFTs, crypto-based voting, code-as-law, etc, etc) did take off, the negatives would outweigh the positives that did exist.

I don't think that's an absolute statement either, I'm not saying there's literally nothing good about Web3, just that the negatives very solidly outweigh the positives and the concept of universal commodification of all digital representation, IP, and content is mostly the opposite of what most open web proponents want.

This is not just cherry-picking examples either, I'm not saying that because one or two specific Web3 games are bad that the entire ecosystem is bad. I'm saying that the actual underlying ideas are bad. As you so correctly mention there are very few absolutes but in general the commodification of individual actions in a game is toxic design and should be avoided -- it shouldn't be the standard that we build a market on. In general, taking fungible game assets and making them non-fungible and limited makes games worse. There are some very rare exceptions, but they don't justify remaking the market to accommodate them.

Likewise, when we look at company plans around the Web3 metaverse, many of those plans are by design purposefully turning away from a lot of the things that would make a metaverse interesting in the first place -- they're prposing strict control of IP, scarce assets for things like land. It would be toxic and negative if those ideas took hold, and the only reason why they might not be dangerous is because it is unlikely that Web3 is going to play out the way that those people want.

> There is no threat, it's entirely imagined.

Again, do you see any irony in saying this after you just complained about people making absolute statements? When a significant chunk of proponents for the open web are saying that Web3 is toxic to the open web's ideals, does that give you hesitation, or are you saying you've read more books and spent more time researching software freedom than these people?

[fleddr]

"It's just saying that nuanced things are nuanced, it isn't proof or evidence of anything about Web3."

Web3 deserves this nuance for its enormous scope and rapid pace of changes. There's hundreds if not thousands of projects, so it's pretty much impossible to make any absolute statements about it. Even more so when the typical commenter has never even interacted with any of it.

You could fairly easily prove that 90% of crypto projects fail, but so do > 90% of startups. Do startups suck altogether now? Another nuance is failure versus scams. Whereas 90% may fail, that doesn't mean 90% are a scam. There's lots of scams, but also just really bad ideas. A scam and a bad idea are not the same thing.

I think you take the JS example a bit too literal, or maybe it was a poor example. My point was that anything of significant complexity tends to not have absolute binary answers. You can apply to JS, political ideas, almost anything.

As for the open web, in a way it's dead as it is. All attention and monetization lies in the hands of a handful of companies. I don't see how any web3 project would threaten the current status quo.

If NFTs become mainstream...so what? You're not forced to buy one. Same for crypto gaming. If it doesn't make sense and make games crappier, it will be widely rejected.

[danShumway]

> You could fairly easily prove that 90% of crypto projects fail, but so do > 90% of startups. Do startups suck altogether now?

90% of them fail, and you should be very cautious about investing into them or relying on them. You should be altering your behavior in a market where the majority of "products" fail. You should be approaching everyone who comes to you with their startup idea at least initially as if their startup idea is probably either bad or a grift -- and you should dismiss them unless they come up with evidence that makes them worth paying attention to. You should not accept complexity as an argument to invest in a company.

> My point was that anything of significant complexity tends to not have absolute binary answers.

I think my problem here is that it feels like you're equating "there's not an absolute binary answer" with "you can't dismiss it". And I don't think that's true. There are lots and lots of proposals and ideas people have that are not uniformly 100% bad that still should be dismissed out-of-hand absent some kind of tangible evidence that they're good.

This is a skill that people should practice because nuanced things often fall apart horribly. Remember that nuance is a continuum, the only two options aren't "binary good/bad" or "impossible to tell". Sometimes (often) things are mostly bad in obvious ways, and usually things that are worth paying attention to have at least a few obviously good qualities. Learning how to say, "okay sure, maybe there are one or two interesting things here, but it doesn't look like they matter" can save people from a lot of headaches -- particularly in the tech sector where people are inundated with frameworks, and products, and profit models, and "revolutions."

> As for the open web, in a way it's dead as it is.

Once again, I'm really glad we're being nuanced about things.

I don't agree that the open web is dead, and I do think that's a pretty un-nuanced take, but I do think that the open web has a lot of problems and that they are important to solve. The thing is though that the core ideas behind NFTs/crypto-gaming/identity-management/etc exasperate the same (real) problems you're looking at with the modern tech/web landscape. It's not just that they aren't good solutions, they are a more concentrated version of the web's current problems.

The biggest corporate proponents of Web3/metaverse products are envisioning a world that (despite being placed on the blockchain) is still effectively more centralized and more commoditized than the current world, and where the majority of funding, consumption, and creation happens under the supervision of people who bought in early to a set of scarce deprecating resources. That's bad for everyone if it does happen.

Luckily, it's probably not going to happen, because it turns out that NFTs are not really a great tool to build that dystopian world either, and a lot of the people trying to corporatize the Internet are (in my opinion) probably going to eventually figure out that there are easier ways to do that than with NFTs and smart contracts.

But that's kind of the optimistic take. If the articles and think-pieces from companies and investors with actual money and products in this space are indicative of their plans, then their plans are bad and shouldn't be realized. To say that no one will force you onto to Web3/NFT platforms if they do succeed is naive; these people are pretty straightforward about the fact that they want people to be forced onto the platforms and they want their platforms to be the dominant way that people interact with digital "assets". Scarce digital assets are a great way to encourage the exact same consolidation that we see today.

Many of the most interesting proposals in the Web3 space don't work unless they become dominant platforms in their respective industries. Certainly once we get to the societal applications that get proposed in these spaces, stuff like voting on a blockchain doesn't work unless it's the only way to vote. Thankfully, the optimistic take is that it's very likely never going to get there because the majority of the crypto market is about speculative investing, not changing the world.

----

And just to restate one more time, if it bothers you to hear someone say that the majority of cryptocurrency right now is a speculative bubble and the majority of it isn't fulfilling any real purpose -- it should also make you really nervous that crytocurrency itself was built out of a belief that the dominant expert narratives about monetary policy and asset management were just straight-up wrong.

If I take your complexity theory at face value and if I really buy into that model for how to think about complexity, then there really isn't a lot of reason to believe that a bunch of VCs, Internet hackers, hobby investors, and Anarchists know more about monetary policy than the Fed. Monetary policy is enormously complicated and constantly moving. Part of the reason why it's hard to take "it's complex so don't dismiss it" seriously is that if I agreed with that take I still wouldn't really see that as a defense of cryptocurrency.

If a bunch of non-experts, even tens of thousands of them, get together and make hundreds and thousands of projects, but the vast majority of them are predicated on the idea that traditional ideas about finance are wrong and that a bunch of people who have never gotten an economics PHD know better, then all you really have is tens of thousands of people who are themselves ignoring complexity.

So the only thing that I think makes sense is to examine Web3 based on the actual claims it makes, and those claims seem pretty bogus to me as someone who has been involved in trying to make the web open for a pretty long time. And they seem bogus to a lot of other experts who care about free culture and free expression, experts that I have over time learned to somewhat trust. Which doesn't mean that there's literally nothing good about Web3, but it can be as nuanced as it wants on the edges while the majority of it still consists of bad ideas, grifts, scams, and pure speculation. And unless those edges get a lot more prominent really quickly, then it's probably a good idea to dismiss the whole thing and let the good ideas come back in another medium or form that doesn't have quite so many toxic attributes.