[EGreg]

Why sigh?

Why are Bitcoin maxis and HN Web 2.0 people so intent on keeping everyone from advancing to the next phases of the Web?

Do you like centralized VC-funded “cloud”-hosted startups incubated in Silicon Valley that get gobbled up by big tech or dumped on the public? You like the extreme power inequality between those who run these systems and the public? You think the best our systems can do is extract rents at the behest of Wall Street? People who bought the shares at $100 dont want them to drop to $50 so Uber will take 50% of all drivers’ paychecks, while a decentralized autonomous network wouldn’t. Selling tokens is a one-time deal that makes the founders rich and then the network belongs to the participants.

What happened to the open source, hacker ethos? You know, counterculture, hacking on something, or at the very least not buying into the corporate morass? What happened to cypherpunks and people who wrote M$ and worked on Free Software alternatives to Big Tech?

Once upon a time America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy were today’s Google, Facebook etc. People left for the open, decentralized protocols like HTTP, as soon as good enough clients (browsers) appeared. Web 2.0 companies like FB or Google could have never even gotten started if they needed permission of AOL or MSN … the permissionless nature Web 1.0 made it possible.

Once upon a time, long distance calls cost $3 a minute. Then the decentralized file sharing network Kazaa guys made Skype, and it became so widespread that VOIP dropped the cost to zero. We can all videoconference now and the telcos are reduced to providing dumb pipes.

So why if Web 1.0 broke barriers and allowed anyone to write some HTML and serve via HTTP a website to the whole world … why is it sooooo terrible that in Web 3.0 people can write a smart contract and deploy it on some EVM compatible blockchain making the rules or payments instantly accessible to people around the world who control their own keys? Do you really think this won’t have any real applications?

[e63f67dd-065b]

Because if you actually look at what cryptocurrency is being used for, it’s overwhelmingly:

- Scams - Risky financial structures that we regulated out of existence because they were risky and unregulated - Money laundering

If there are real applications of the technology, they would’ve popped up by now.

Just look at the whole space of cryptocurrency lending. Regulations exist for good reason, we have stress tests https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/large-bank-capit..., consumer protections, all kinds of safeguard so when you put money in a bank account you don’t have to worry that somebody’s gonna run with it.

Web 3.0 is a buzzword-filled collective hallucination. People keep shouting the buzzwords, but still nobody knows what it’s supposed to mean in any concrete way. NFTs are scams and still haven’t found a real use case that’s not a ponzi, crypto lending is 2008 capital structures but turned up to 11, DAOs are useless because courts and corporate governance are things that exists, I can go on and on.

If you have a concrete proposal of how this magical Web 3.0 future is supposed to be better I’m all ears, but where I’m standing it’s all ponzi, scams, shaky capital structuring, and criminal enterprises.

[eldenwrong]

Love how you think your money is safe.

You are losing 10-15% a year from inflation. Nobody has to literally steal it when they can dilute it

[xeromal]

Straight to criticizing something else. lol

[eldenwrong]

Because you live in a privileged bubble.

You have no idea how serious the problems Bitcoin is trying to solve are.

One day you will be forced to understand it though. Hopefully it doesn't result in you losing all your savings, like it has happened to billions of people through history....

[manigandham]

> "Do you really think this won’t have any real applications?"

So where are they? The consensus is denying it on principle but rather wondering what it's actually useful for. It's strange to see all the claims of opportunities and problems to solve, yet nothing seems to be produced.

[EGreg]

Many of them are here, fully documented and explained to laypeople, with links to GitHub, feel free to take the open source software and use them: https://intercoin.org/applications

Is that not good enough for now? What more would you like?

[kmeisthax]

I am philosophically opposed to "Web 3.0" because I am philosophically opposed to cryptocurrency and do not believe it decentralizes anything.

Regardless of the follies of Wall Street, blockchains and smart contracts do not fix them. There is no particular reason why a DAO would not also cut worker wages to benefit the tokenholder class - it's the exact same structure as a corporation, just without the pesky regulation getting in the way. There is nothing about decentralized finance that guarantees that the employees are also tokenholders anymore than regular ol' brick-and-mortar capitalism guarantees that employees are also shareholders. If you want a worker's cooperative, you can start one right now without needing to buy Ethereum and develop a fragile smart contract.

DeFi isn't destroying power structures, nor is it making them less rigid. It's just a changing of the guard, from corporations and investors to anonymous "whales" and DAOs. This isn't actually decentralizing anything, it's just obfuscating how much the system has been corrupted.

As for open source and Free Software, well... their political opinions outside of hacker ethos are all over the map. The space is vaguely libertarian and vaguely leftist, which means there's plenty of people in the space who don't want more unregulated capitalism.

Your example about long distance calls is also wrong. Or, at least, missing some context. Skype was actually kind of late to the "cheap long-distance" party; the government had already done the hard work of breaking up the phone monopoly and ensuring that companies could place and terminate calls on other people's networks. This is because "permissionless" is not a capability, it is a policy. Even ostensibly permissionless blockchains could effectively become permissioned if miners and exchanges colluded in a way that made economic sense. I know this can happen because it's exactly the same thing that happened in Web 2.0.

[mtsr]

It might have something to do with all the cryptobro’s pushing get-rich-quick-schemes. Crypto-enthusiasts ignore how regulations existed for good reasons before regulatory capture made a mess of things. Not everyone likes the idea of an anarchocapitalist future.

And I’m not even talking about the outright scamming and the fact that most crypto’s primary use case is criminal. Or the environmental issues of spending energy we can’t spare on something we could solve so many other ways.

[r00bot]

I personally take a hesitant approach to crypto/blockchain technology. I'm open to using it where it's legitimately better than other approaches, but for the vast, vast majority of applications traditional methods are always going to be better than shoe-horned decentralization.

It's very unfortunate that the grifters have given the technology such a bad name when, like any technology, it has applications it excels in and others it doesn't. We're still definitely in the phase of working out what, if anything, blockchain is better (than centralised implementations) for. And it sucks that that search is being negatively impacted by all the grifters.

In the future I wouldn't be surprised if we saw 99.99% of blockchain stuff dead, but the small percentage that survive could disrupt some industries (I'm not convinced finance is one of those industries though lol).

[dmitriid]

> like any technology, it has applications it excels in

Name five.

[dane-pgp]

1. Permissionless, censorship-resistant global money transfer

2. Smart contracts

3. Append-only logs synchronised between mutually distrusting parties

4. Decentralised identities

5. Microtransactions for online games and to replace web advertising

[NoGravitas]

1. Except cryptocurrencies aren't any good for that, because the transaction costs are too high, and the value of cryptocurrencies too volatile. Cryptocurrencies are not a medium of exchange.

2. Now, what's a valid use-case for a smart contract, and please explain how it functions if there's a bug in the contract?

3. Maybe. You'll need to provide a more concrete use-case. Also, you have the outside-world problem (you know the data hasn't been altered, but you don't necessarily know where it comes from).

4. All you need for decentralized identities is a public key. (Though if you want your identity to be long-lived, you'll have to also have a system of secure key rotation, and the most straightforward system is blockchain-ish in that it involves a signed append-only log. But it doesn't need a global trustless ledger.

5. See 1, except worse, because the transaction cost dwarf the actual payment.

[dane-pgp]

1. If you're sending a portion of your monthly wages as a remittance to your family, spending a dollar[1] isn't too much.

2. A smart contract allows decentralised organisations to function, with democratic voting and transparency. (That's not appropriate or necessary for every organisation, but it can be an improvement on one person hosting a server and saying "Trust me"). If there's a bug in the contract, you have to vote to change the contract. Traditional contracts, businesses, and even countries fail all the time, but we haven't give up on them as concepts.

3. For a concrete use-case, I offer the example of blockchain technology being used to make the fishing industry supply chain more transparent.[3] It's true that someone could enter fake information onto the blockchain, but they could also fake signatures on paperwork, so a system can still be useful even if it doesn't prevent all possible attacks.

4. If the ledger isn't trustless, then someone is controlling it, so your identities aren't really decentralised.

5. There are better currencies than BTC if transaction costs are the main concern. The equivalent number for BCH is half a cent.[5]

[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

[3] https://www.reutersevents.com/sustainability/using-blockchai...

[5] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin%20cash-transact...

[tester756]

>1. Permissionless, censorship-resistant global money transfer

>5. Microtransactions for online games and to replace web advertising

how money transfer and microtransactions are different?

[dane-pgp]

They are (at least) two separate use cases, even though they are both examples of sending money. (You could equally say that they are all examples of sending data).

1. Some people want to be able to send large amounts of money internationally to their family in a country which has currency controls and "official" exchange rates. Others want to be able to send funds to organisations that have been banned by traditional money transmitters, such as Wikileaks, or protest groups, or adult content, or cannabis.

5. Separate groups of people don't have a problem with their government's fiscal or censorship policies, but simply want to be able to buy an emote or a skin in an online game, or to listen to a piece of music or read an article without being tracked around the web or needing to wire 50 cents from their bank in Mongolia to the service provider's bank in Cyprus.

[r00bot]

I don't really think there are five applications it excels in, but there might be in the future..?

Like I said, we're still working out what it's good for. I've seen promising applications but nothing I'd say is obviously better than traditional technology. To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion.

[dmitriid]

You said it has applications it excels at. Turns out "maybe in the future" and "we're still figuring out".

So. No applications it excels at.

> To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion.

It's been 13 years. When will dismissing it become mature? In another 13 years?

Or maybe the tech is just bad.

[EGreg]

So Web2 has gotten such a bad name due to centralized bullshit that entire democracies are up in arms. And the Zucks of the world just say “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you” and proceed to continue to do the very thing people have been mad about (Libra? Beacon?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

Zuck correctly described the situation early on: “I don’t know. They ‘trust me’. Dumb f#%ks”. And it’s still true today and you want to bury any alternative to that system.

[kuramitropolis]

>Crypto-enthusiasts ignore how regulations existed for good reasons before regulatory capture made a mess of things.

What way do you propose out of regulatory capture?

[NoGravitas]

Transparency laws, stricter regulation on moving between regulatory agencies and regulated industries, in general, better democratic accountability. All of these are imperfect, but it's also the case that cryptocurrency doesn't make any of it better.

[kuramitropolis]

>stricter regulation on moving between regulatory agencies and regulated industries

You seem to assume the existence of a competent and non-corrupt metaregulator (some form of supervisory body that would "regulate the regulators" and somehow prevent "revolving door" scenarios).

- If it exists, why was long-term regulatory capture possible in the first place?

- If it doesn't, how would we go about instituting one?

We're on Hacker News. Exit wishful thinking, enter systems thinking.

- Feedback between regulatory agency and regulated industry: continuous.

- Feedback between regulatory agency and supervisory body: continuous.

- Feedback between supervisory body and sovereign (=the general public getting shafted by the regulatory capture): discrete, and of appalingly low resolution.

I'm told that in the world's dominant democracy, where most of the ideas that we're discussing originate, the sovereign is throttled to expressing its interest in the form of a binary decision once every ~35000 hours.

So, the boffins at the revolving door email each other and call each other on the phone all the time, but the public can only talk to the legislature at the grand rate of 1 bit per 4 years? In that case, I'm prone to applying the concept of "regulatory capture" to any and all regulation that nominally serve the public interest. They simply don't have the bandwidth to establish what the public interest is.

Even at Bitcoin's "low" speed of 7 transactions per second, on-chain voting would still support a much faster democratic process. That's why people are opposed to it. For now, people use cryptos to vote mostly on inconsequential things. That's while the quirks are being ironed out. Some crypto bros who got in for teh gainz got shafted. So what. Maybe in a fairer economic system a fool and his money would be parted even more easily.

Currently, crypto does not work... except as a public "exit"/"no confidence" vote towards the methods through which industry is organized and regulation is instituted. For one to devote time and effort to this emergent form of economic organization, no matter how uncertain its realities might be, is simply to refuse to take part in maintaining a status quo that one has had no part in establishing - and to look for alternatives, no matter how tenuous.