[spaceman_2020]

That's not a good enough critique of a new tech. Applicable once it has reached maturity, but Ethereum and EVM smart contracts are relatively very new. If they're still slow and expensive in 2025, Web3 will rightly deserve to be forgotten and abandoned.

[galdosdi]

Crypto's been around for over a decade dude. How many decades do you want?

Why would I ever build a business around an Ethereum smart contract when I could just write a normal contract, and then I know the courts will enforce it even if one of my business associates tries to pull a fast one?

If it's about the precise coding of constraints and all that, you can easily write a legal contract that specifies that the piece of code should be followed. Ask wall street derivatives traders if they have any issues with making paper legal contracts arbitrarily mathematically complex. It works fine for them.

[spaceman_2020]

Crypto has been around for decades but most of the tech we now call "Web3" is very nascent. The ERC-721 standard used by most NFTs was first proposed in 2018, and didn't even reach technical maturity until 2019.

And yes, you can write normal contracts and get the courts to enforce it. But what if your customers are in India or Vietnam or Tibet? Under which jurisdiction will you attempt to enforce the contract?

The entire critique rests on the thesis that the world will always be the way it is - dominated by a handful of western (mostly American) corporations who will get to dictate what billions of people in the rest of the world consume, create, and share.

The reality is that the non-western part of the internet is already larger, will grow even larger, and it needs tools and products that are built for its scale and diversity. Whether that's Web3 or Web2 or Web2500, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that more and more countries will seek to yank back control from western corporations (like India making its own national mobile app store).

I, for one, will cheer on anything that challenges the FAANG oligopoly.

[lottin]

A so-called 'smart contract' is not a replacement for a contract. Just because you call something a contract doesn't mean it is. The same applies to 'decentralised finance'. It's not finance unless it can do financing, and defi can't.

[spaceman_2020]

my dude, do you always evaluate things for what they are rather than what they could be?

[pwinnski]

Absolutely! 100%, twice over. What a thing is is real. What a thing could be is limited only by one's imagination, and my imagination with regard to crypto has been burned to the tune of $1.7 trillion as of May, 2022[0].

If you'd started with the disclosure of your money-colored sunglasses, you'd have saved everybody here the time of reading your comments.

0. https://twitter.com/SuburbanDrone/status/1524870565806366730

[root_axis]

cryptocurrency has no credibility with respect to "what could be". Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are full of hype and bluster with nothing to show for it except a massive ecosystem of wasteeful scams, theft, and fraud.

[lottin]

Well, obviously, we're discussing facts right? In a world of fantasy pigs might fly, but I don't know what is the point of bringing this up in this discussion.

[skinnymuch]

Mostly yeah. Otherwise we get issues like neoliberalism.