| Not everyone is focused on "number go up". Some teams actually care about making distributed systems that serve communities around the world, and prefer to see people not have to trust centralized middlemen. Blockchains are not the best infrastructure for this, but they're good enough (Polygon Edge for instance), for many applications: https://intercoin.org/applications Having said that, blockchains are going to go the way of mainframes and vacuum tubes eventually. Here is the roadmap of what has to happen for Web3 (smart contracts) to go mainstream: https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf I see a lot of use cases for it. Unfortunately many activists on HN love to comment how useless smart contracts are, while also silently downvoting any comments that disagree with that position. I think the profit motive really did derail a lot of Web3 -- but also the same can be said for Web2, it's just that VCs were the only ones who could invest (until the JOBS act, at least). So Web2 got stuck in near-monopolies, buying up competition, and extracting rents, while completely dominating our public forums. It didn't have to be this way. Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down Microsoft's $1M offer in high school, and put his software online for free. Even after he coded facemash and facebook, he was going to build a decentralized, open source file sharing system called Wirehog -- but then Sean Parker and Peter Thiel "put a bullet in that thing"[1]. They killed Mark Z's decentralized visions and turned him from an open source bro who loves hacking things together into a corporate golden boy who loves acqui-hiring competition (WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus[2] etc.) and then trying to turn them into corporate teams, until they bounce when their golden handcuffs vest (founders of those companies). The people who did this to Zuck were themselves peculiar. Sean Parker himself used to be for open sharing (Napster) but rentseeking corporations in that sphere (RIAA, MPAA) sued and destroyed it. He learned a lesson and started Plaxo, and other VC-backed companies to basically lock up people's data in giant centralized server farms. It was he who told Zuck to basically cut out the decentralized open nonsense. And Peter Thiel with Clarion Capital had a far more radical vision: Competition is for losers! Build a monopoly.[3]. The result in our society is that Big Tech oligopolies have totally captured Web2 and own all our public forums. Elon and Zuck own our largest public forums and messengers. TikTok, WeChat and others have had a meteoric rise but they are even more closely tied with the government of China than FB and Twitter are with the US government. You'd think We the People should have an open source alternative. But HN loves Web2 and hates Web3. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Open-source_softw... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-... |