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by throwpoaster 537 days ago
I'm a web3 guy. Big believer in blockchain, and I know web3 is not limited to that. I think the consequences of blockchain tech might take several decades / centuries to become apparent ("the Romans had steam engines", etc).

When you take a break from it and come back you notice the significant usability hurdles with little-to-no functionality payoff to justify them.

The vast majority of people simply do not need a less trust-based, more complex financial system.

2 comments

At the end of the day, web3 is just the web with a new payment processor (a blockchain)

That payment processor just has no support, no UX team, no security team, and nobody to hold accountable.

It’s actually a more trust based system than what we have. Instead of trusting a single payment provider, you need to trust a wallet extension, the website you’re on, and the contract you’re interacting with.

Any failure in judgement is also irreversible.

It’s just a really bad solution to a problem most people don’t even know exists.

Web3 is more than that because some people genuinely thought the future was running actual code on the blockchain and using that as part of the backend. Of course that works reasonably well as long as your code is terse, straightforward, trustworthy, easy to read, bug-free and you have no performance requirements for execution speed or deployment speed.
> thought the future was running actual code on the blockchain and using that as part of the backend

What did that code do besides process transactions and distribute tokens?

Almost nothing.

It’d be the payment gateway layer of any backend. Processing payments and returning proof of purchase.

So almost never?
That's the joke.
...and the crypto it's based on. ...and it's implementation.

I can't wait for the biggest bank heist in history due to an exploit in a crypto algorithm.

I suppose one could argue that has already happened multiple times?
> The vast majority of people simply do not need a less trust-based, more complex financial system.

I work at a bank. Do you know where the complexity comes from ?

It is all derived from: (1) risk management and (2) regulation compliance.

Crypto is simpler because it can't be bothered to take either seriously.