"Web3" isn't even able to solve problems it's supposed to solve.
The big pitch was that you could have non-copyable items which you could move between virtual worlds. The Second Life / Open Simulator ecosystem already has that problem. People looked into NFTs as a way to solve it, and concluded it would not help.
You can download content and upload it as new content, perhaps with a minor mod, creating a new object. This is called "copybotting" in Second Life and Open Simulator. As with any copyright violation, you can file DMCA takedown requests if you find a copy of your stuff.
Would NFTs stop copybotting? No. They just protect the object's ID, not its content. You can still copy the content. If you want to copy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT image and make a poster of it, the NFT system does nothing to stop you. It's not even clear that's a copyright violation in the US, since BAYC images are computer-generated.
Many NFTs don't even have an on-chain cryptographic hash of the content, only a URL for some server. Nor do most NFTs have their NFT ID watermarked into the actual content. So the NFT doesn't even give you a verifiable proof of ownership independent of the creator's server. There isn't info that would allow a server to tell if a new image upload is a copy of an existing item. An image search might help, but that doesn't need NFTs. Decentraland's solution to this problem is to charge a $500 "curation fee" to get an object onto their platform, which cuts down content to the point that they can check for duplicates.
> The big pitch was that you could have non-copyable items which you could move between virtual worlds.
The whole "moving objects between virtual worlds" thing is one of the most ridiculous concepts I see pushed by the crypto/NFT/web3 community.
As you've outlined there is a potential for this functionality in non-game/metaverse environments - even if NFTs fail to do it properly.
However, when this gets applied to video games at large, I really start to roll my eyes. Even if you could magically hand-wave away all the technical issues that go along with trying to implement something like this - why would developers even bother? Game economies have to be tightly controlled to combat things like RMT, botting, and unsanctioned item trading. Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible.
> Why is Epic going to design and support a Fortnite version of your hat NFT when they get nothing out of it?
They do though. The argument is two-pronged: (a) developers earn secondary fees on open markets, and (b) players get to resell stuff they don't want. It's literally a win-win.
Epic can make more money by locking players into their walled garden. Nothing short of government regulation would convince them to spend more money implementing exponentially more items into their game while also taking a smaller cut of each item's purchase and resale.
You forgot what drives every good for consumer thing a company does: competition.
If every games company is allowing users to resell their items, and Epic is not, they just look evil. We're not there yet but when we are you don't want to get the reputation of being the evil company that seeks profits above all else.
Social media companies "look evil" when they don't allow users to freely use third-party apps and clients, but they still don't, because that doesn't make them money.
And competition doesn't/won't solve either problem, because third-party apps aren't why most people choose social media platforms, and reselling hats isn't why most people choose a game.
In other words, the proposed feature is something developers want, not users.
That still leaves you with the chicken-and-egg problem of how you get to the point where "every games company is allowing users to resell their items", when it's not beneficial to any of them to start with.
The amusing thing is the people who actually are drafting standards to move objects between virtual worlds have nothing to do with NFTs.[1] That group includes Epic, Unity, NVidia, W3C, Autodesk, Microsoft, Meta... The people who make stuff work.
"Game economies have to be tightly controlled to combat things like RMT, botting, and unsanctioned item trading. Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible. "
Except in Diablo 3. Where all that killed the game.
> Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible.
This is missing the forest for the trees. Of course it wouldn't be a carte blanche, but it would be trivial to let people transfer in cosmetic items (think stickers, color schemes, etc.) based on another ecosystem/game/achievement/etc.
Cosmetic digital items (e.g. non-gameplay-impacting) are like a hundred-million-dollar+ industry.
There are a lot of examples where it's trivial to do this now. For example, Diablo III and Immortal are owned by the same company and run through the same portal - can I transfer gems, skins, or titles between the games? If I'm a Master's SCII player could that show up in Overwatch somehow? Maybe I could play as a Zealot!
If this "transfer between games" thing is such a killer feature why isn't it happening now? Shouldn't we be seeing stuff like this in Steam games where Steam could easily expose your progress between other Steam games.
> Shouldn't we be seeing stuff like this in Steam games where Steam could easily expose your progress between other Steam games.
Amusingly, Valve has already experimented with this (and, as far as I can tell, given up on it). There were a handful of in-game items in Team Fortress 2 which were given to players as a reward for purchasing certain games, or for completing specific achievements in those games.
This made TF2 unplayable for me - I have a rare item (iPod earbuds) from the initial Mac launch, and the next few times I signed in I couldn’t get away from people spamming me to trade them.
This is one reason you wouldn’t be a crypto billionaire no matter how prices went up; you’d probably sell first.
That’s actually why email is centralized now. Gmail’s good spam filtering works because it can see what’s going to every account.
Some email providers (Hey in the US) don’t accept emails from other senders without prior authorization from the user. IIRC Chinese providers won’t accept any of yours unless you have a contract with them.
> If this "transfer between games" thing is such a killer feature why isn't it happening now?
Do you even play games? It's literally happening between Blizzard games lol. Hearthstone and WoW had all kinds of cross-game cosmetics (mounts, card backs, etc.). Let alone all the goodies you get from Blizzcon in-game (which have a sizable secondary grey market on eBay).
But they only do it for special occasions, otherwise the respective stores would be full of hundreds of them, which they aren't. And if they are doing it right now, NFT's don't provide any added bonus here.
> but it would be trivial to let people transfer in cosmetic items (think stickers, color schemes, etc.) based on another ecosystem/game/achievement/etc.
It would not. Every one of those items would need to be intentionally added by the game devs. Every piece would need to be created, modeled, textured, and animated.
I suppose it would be trivial if you created a pile of uninteresting and uninspiring games with the exact same engine, assets, and art style, like so many NFT's of depressed-looking monkeys
> Every one of those items would need to be intentionally added by the game devs.
There are plenty of games that support user-created assets. There's like zillions of skins in CS:GO that don't need to be "manually created, textured, and animated" by Valve (by design). Your argument just betrays a complete non-understanding of modern game engines and how cosmetic items work/are created.
Gamedev here. Each engine and each game will have vastly different asset pipelines, you can't just copy something across and it just works. Models, textures, shaders, animations, etc usually go through several stages of internal tools before making it into the game. Of course, games with user generated content will make tools available to create things for that particular game, but you can take that and use it somewhere else.
And that's just the technical side, design and art would be horrified if you have no control on what can be added to a game.
Ok, so it's just textures, not new game objects, models, or animations? That's even more like the sad NFT monkey images than before!
You can't put those CS:GO skins into Skyrim. It would probably be easier, like I said, to move it to another source engine game with the same art style and the exact same models, but that's it.
> Cosmetic digital items (e.g. non-gameplay-impacting) are like a hundred-million-dollar+ industry.
Exactly. If I were a game studio given a choice between letting my users bring in objects from anywhere or forcing them to buy my objects, I would pick the latter.
- All the kids like <random viral NFT> we'll get publicity if we implement it.
- Our game is inspired by <Genre defining game> we will pay homage to this game by including <Genre defining game NFT> in our game.
- Our game supports modding and enough people care about <NFT> that someone is willing to implement that NFT in the game via mods.
There's an order of operations here. These examples rely on the NFT already being meaningful in some community before it gets added in. Anything that a random person creates that nobody cares about would never be ported in.
Yeah the whole gaming usecases are DoA until if/when that changes. I wonder if this backlash is really different then all the related gaming ones that proceeded it. Early Access, kickstarters, Pre-orders, day 1 DLC, micro transactions. I'm sure I'm missing some and all of these were hated by the gaming community at various times with various implementations and nuances. Meanwhile they generally seem accepted now that people know the red flags and how to judge an implementation.
"by including <Genre defining game NFT> in our game."
The part you left out was meant to imply that the "Genre defining game" developer created the NFT's for the purpose of other people integrat them in the game and them getting free publicity,. Therefor rights would have been included.
> Why don’t the mods just put the thing in? Mods don’t need to respect anyone’s NFT ownership.
For the same reasons that people buy games instead of pirating them most likely. "Right click and save" is a fundamental part of the internet yet digital things are still are bought and sold. (edit including DRM type mechanisms if this pattern became a thing that actually mattered money wise).
I don't think it needs to be an NFT. The integration of "check if thing is in wallet" has a low barrier for entry for the needed operations: creation of the various NFT's, the checking of ownership, and cross platform (windows, playstation, steam, Nintendo) support. The key points are the digital wallet decoupled from the usecase and "tokens" that anyone can create which go in the wallet.
I would guess that if "Web3" becomes the thing crypto people aim for, GCP, Azure, and/or AWS will implement "public ledgers" that have a very similar interface and may or may not rely on blockchain underneath. Any decentralized blockchain would be forced to compete with those centralized offerings.
I think of NFTs as a DB entry on a shared database.
The benefit is someone else can make a marketplace, analytics or other tools that work for many items across many games without you having to spend time implementing them yourself or creating and maintaining an API for this data.
But why would I want them taking stuff out of my game? I can see the appeal of putting stuff in the game, but then again, if I wanted to put stuff in the game I could just put it in the game, the NFT doesn't' mean anything to me.
It's about the composability with external tools and users being able to trade assets without you having to explicitly code for it. Games companies want this for the same reason they want modders - because their game is enhanced by it and adds more value for its players.
It's generally considered helpful to point out scams, and NFTs are 100% scam. They really have no redeeming quality. They seem scammy at first, and as you look into details, they fail to be useful at any conceivable level.
To give some examples: (1) they are not legally binding; (2) even when a legal contract exists between the NFT issuer and the first owner, the terms don't carry over in NFT trades, unless additional contract terms are signed outside the blockchain; (3) as such, they don't solve any problem they purport to solve, as buying the NFT itself on chain is irrelevant, only the off-chain contract matters; (4) they don't even contain the item they are about, or at least since hash of it, in the vast majority of cases; (5) they don't even solve the real problem of fungibility, as while the token itself may not be fungible, the item that it represents remains trivially copyable. I am sure there are more.
So an item you bought/found/won now costs you more money to move to a different game. Not only would you have it cost money but there's no guarantee the OrcFucker2000 in Game A has any meaningful ability in Game B. If that's not a scam is certainly is wearing a scam's uniform.
He asked how it could be done. I explained one possible way, there are probably more ways. I don't get why people get upset about this, it's a bit weird.
It could be cheaper than buying a similar item on the new game. I don't see how that is a scam, I just use the definition that's in the dictionary. Who is being deceived and defrauded here?
Why do you assume the item you transfer needs to have an ability? I don't make that assumption, lets keep it simple and assume it's just a cosmetic display item without any abilities and that it's possible to display this item in the other game.
edit:
You could for example display the rank you have in one game in another game, assuming the possibility to do this exists of course.
> I don't make that assumption, lets keep it simple and assume it's just a cosmetic display item without any abilities and that it's possible to display this item in the other game.
Since it costs thousands of dollars to store any significant amount of data on the major blockchains, any game item will just be some reference stored on the blockchain.
Unless every game developer builds an appropriate model for every possible item there's no "simple" importing of an asset. Even if a full asset was shared between games no two games are guaranteed to display even a texture the same way.
Even your example of "rank" is meaningless. Rank in one game doesn't have anything to do with rank in another game. The number of goblins you killed in a fantasy RPG has no meaning to a racing game.
As for these being scams, there's no reason any of these things require a blockchain. Games have at various points supported custom player models, skins, spray decals, and all sorts of other shit. None of it needed the added rent extraction of a blockchain.
The only reason to add a blockchain is to get players to prop up whatever shitcoin blockchain is being used. They get vague promises of asset reusability but actually just get normal scammy in-app purchases.
You're missing the point here, the point is it's possible. There are many different blockchains, it's pretty evident noone is going to add some in game NFT to a blockchain where it costs several thousands of dollars. The technical details really aren't that important for my argument.
I'm not debating whether it's a good idea or not and I'm not interested in that debate either.
You're doing the same thing as you did before, you twist my words into something that is easier to attack. This is the third time now, please stop. Rank in other games is something people ask about or mention when playing somewhat similar genres so I can definitely see that being interesting to some people.
None of the things you mentioned has anything to do with scams? Rent extraction != scam. in-app purchases != scam. Blockchain != scam.
The point of BAYC was the community. So others could copy your image but that wouldn't provide them with access to the community. It's a single-factor login token to a private web forum, which is non-revokable by the client (but AFAICT is revokable by the hosting platform). So sort of the worst all worlds in terms of authentication technology.
To a reasonable approximation, no one actually cares about "access to the BAYC community". I'm sure they made some grandiose promises about it at some point, but the primary feature of their NFT is as a social symbol. I'm not convinced there even is a "community" there to access -- realistically, it's just a customer list.
And to private parties. ApeFest just started in NYC a few minutes ago. If you own a BAYC or MAYC NFT, you get to go to a rave in Manhattan today. Food and drink included.
I'm imagining this as the opening scene of Blade but instead of one guy getting attacked by vampires it's a club full of gullible people getting scammed by con artists. "You must be THIS rich and gullible to attend."
No it isn’t. That’s exactly my point. There is no real problem being solved here, because clearly, events (even illegal ones!) that required tickets for admission have worked fine for ages without NFTs.
This is the problem with most proposed blockchain applications: they have no mechanism to compel behavior in the physical world. Someone controls access to this rave; at the end of the day, the only reason that they accept blockchain tokens instead of entries in a centralized database is because they’ve decided to arbitrarily.
You could totally feasibly create a private club whose members you track yourself in a spreadsheet (allowing them to sell their membership to other people, or not, as you prefer). Someone else, or more likely yourself, could then decide to give your members access to private parties, and everything would work the same way.
The only thing NFTs give you is irrevocability of the initially stated membership rules: with my example of a private club tracked in a spreadsheet, you could choose to change the rules at any time (say, charging a fee for anyone who wants to transfer ownership). You couldn’t for NFTs. But this advantage of NFTs is somewhat illusory because, again, whoever controls access to benefits in the physical world can themselves change the rules at any time, and so you haven’t really changed the number of parties you have to trust. Whatever organization is running these raves might decide tomorrow that you need a Super Duper Bored Ape that costs extra or has different transferability characteristics, and you’re back where you started.
You are missing some of the functionality you say you can’t do. You can. You missing permanence and open marketplaces aspects of it. I don’t own or think BAYC is a great thing, but as a membership token to some club it’s as good as a Costco card. and then someone did raves for Costco members.
In such a way that records would be preserved past the dissolving of the original issuer? In a way that doesn’t touch the existing financial system? In a way that permits trust less exchange of memberships?
Of course anything can be done without a blockchain, but it has trade offs. Not understanding the trade offs will drive you towards centralized solutions.
Why would Rave Club care if the Rave Club membership data doesn't survive past the dissolution of Rave Club?
This seems very much like the argument that, say, Blizzard would build support for NFT-based items into WoW so that people could buy NFTs outside of WoW and transfer them into the game (or buy them inside of WoW and still be able to use them elsewhere even if they quit playing WoW). Sure, it might have some value for the customers, but there's negative incentive for the actual companies to do it.
Why would I want to be part of a "community" composed solely of people stupid enough to pay money for low-effort cartoon monkey drawings? I would actually pay to keep losers like that away from me.
IME loudly reactionary types are over-represented in most pay-lots-to-enter social spaces (country clubs, common spaces in gated communities, that sort of thing). Or maybe it's just the flowing alcohol.
That was definitely not 'the big pitch' of web3. That's a pitch of nfts. Different web3 companies have different pitches. Uniswap for example has little to do with virtual world items and is definitely web3.
I just launched a web server on my computer (python -m SimpleHTTPServer) which anyone in the world can connect to. If I wanted to I could build an unmoderated Twitter or Reddit and foster a community maybe one day being the biggest in the world.
And if my current government decided to regulate me then I could move to a country that didn't.
Web3 seems to be much more about decentralised payments. Which is not really a problem many people are demanding a highly complex solution for.
Anyone could build such applications that they might hope become the biggest in the world, but there is still a conglomeration effect. You have centralization, but anyone can become the center. This is displayed by your "biggest in the world" winner takes all perspective. For decentralization, the graph of connectivity has to not have these large communities. There would be no single Twitter (unmoderated or otherwise) that is the biggest by far.
> Web3 seems to be much more about decentralised payments. Which is not really a problem many people are demanding a highly complex solution for.
Stripe being a $100B company contradicts this.
Payments and especially finance is a gigantic industry that is still mostly centralized but doesn't need to be. If we can make wealth flow as easy as data does today without any gatekeepers or middlemen that is a huge upgrade for the internet.
"Decentralized" doesn't mean "large companies don't exist."
There are hundreds of thousands of banks, but hundreds of crypto exchanges. Imagining crypto to be less centralized than traditional finance is deeply, deeply incorrect.
Having centralized aspects does not diminish the decentralized aspects. People spend over $10M/day in fees to use decentralized platforms and they had $250B in wealth in them.
It's only a matter of time before decentralized rails become the primary form of wealth transfer on the internet, because they are much more efficient and composable than current systems.
I literally work in decentralized finance, and so do now 20,000+ developers. Many of my financial transactions already happen in DeFi, and it's only a 2 year old industry.
Being confidently ignorant doesn't make you correct, it just makes you miss out on the future.
A server that you can keep at home that you can plug in to make it part of this huge network of machines located all around the world that communicate with each other - this is the decentralized web.
That has nothing to do with centralization, and everything to do with the fact that it's hard to run a website with 0 computer skills, which crypto doesn't improve on in any way.
It has all to do with centralization and crypto certainly helps by providing a way of decentralization that doesn't require everyone to run infra in their home.
Crypto today is dominated by a few central players (wallets, trading) with strict access requirements, including unambiguous government-issued ID. Even mining is dominated by people with much more capital than you have access to, so that it is never worth it to run a miner as a private individual. Everything "web3" has been co-opted by corporatized interests trying to invent fresh new ways to get in on the scam before regulators make it unprofitable.
Access is difficult for private individuals for more reasons than just "technology is complicated".
Web3 is centralized because the source of money causing it to appear to be a thing is coming from one place (a16z). It’s just a way for them to do securities fraud.
Although the entire crypto ecosystem valuation is based on another source of fictional money (Tether).
> They just protect the object's ID, not its content.
This is very similar to how DRM works (protects the ID, not the content, hence we need DMCAs if someone tries to illegally stream a movie on YouTube or whatever) and it seems to be doing a pretty good job. In spite of everyone hating it, we have the luxury of Spotify, Netflix, Apple+, etc. because of DRM. NFTs definitely have a use case in gaming and digital collectibles; they also happen to be consumer-friendly (unlike the current status quo of digital collectibles). I wish I could sell my thousands of items in WoW for real money, or my Fornite skins for real money, or my unneeded Magic Arena cards for real money, but I'm locked in their ecosystem.
The tokenomnics aspect of Web3 is mainly speculation, which imo also has a use case, but it most likely will be impacted by some much-needed regulation.
> I wish I could sell my thousands of items in WoW for real money, or my Fornite skins for real money, or my unneeded Magic Arena cards for real money, but I'm locked in their ecosystem.
That's exactly it: you may wish it, but the reason it won't happen isn't that NFTs weren't invented yet, it's that companies making these products really don't want you to. One simple reason is that it might make someone else play less if they could all those items by just paying a little money.
The other reason why selling in-game items for real money will never be permitted (again) is all the gigantic legal crap that it brings along. If the items are worth real money, you can sue Blizzard or other players for events which unfairly make you lose an item, or affect the value of the items you hold.
> If the items are worth real money, you can sue Blizzard or other players for events which unfairly make you lose an item, or affect the value of the items you hold.
This isn't true at all, because Magic (the card game) already has a vibrant secondary market with no legal problems. They nerf/buff cards all the time.
People like you are just pushing back so vehemently because it's popular to hate on crypto and NFTs right now. Rightfully so, even, as there's tons of scams out there, but that doesn't mean the idea and technology is interesting or useful.
This is not true. It is exceedingly rare for paper cards to be nerfed or buffed. The only real notable example is with the Companion mechanic from a few years ago. Wizard's solution is to ban problematic cards.
Magic: The Gathering was designed from the beginning as a Trading Card Game. Very importantly, it is a physical game, where the laws of physics prevent trivial copying of their cards, while the laws of copyright prevent them from stopping people selling the cards they bought.
There is also no way for someone to exploit a flaw in MTG and gain access to all of your cards to sell. Conversely, if someone exploited a bug to steal your WoW account and sell off your items for thousands of dollars, you would sue Blizzard for damages. Even worse, if you did something against their terms of service and they wanted to ban you, they would probably have to have some way to compensate you for all the items you would lose access to.
Further, WotC they actually do have problems because of this trading: they have had to create a list of cards they promise not to reprint, because of all the backlash from traders who perceived a re-print of Black Lotus as "flooding the market". Afterwards, they once wanted to still go ahead with a re-print of these cards with some special features, and again faced serious backlash and threats of lawsuits, so they backed down.
genuine question: what is the value of a virtual artifact outside of the sofware where it is played? What would one do with a token of a lotus123 addon?
There's probably a niche market. Some people collect boxed games or software so maybe there's some VR/AR collectable shelf in the future to put them on, but then the price needs to reflect that its some bobble collecting virtual dust on a virtual shelf.
> In spite of everyone hating it, we have the luxury of Spotify, Netflix, Apple+, etc. because of DRM.
I doubt this. All of these services have one thing in common: it's easier to just subscribe than it is to torrent the content. It's not particularly difficult to find original-quality torrents of Netflix content, for example.
Don't encourage them. There is no Web3 and if there ever is, it's not fucking blockchain apps.
What these hucksters call Web3 is the digital equivalent of essential oils. Blockchain apps have no real productive use beyond selling them to each other. Calling the whole thing Web3 was a fairly transparent grasp at trying to legitimize the whole charade.
Also, does that mean that you going to finally stop using Signal for not only having mobile wallet [3] for payments, but also facilitating in using cryptocurrencies for donations? [4]
Only a very small percentage of the population has a demand for encrypted email or decentralized anything. Most people trust institutions blindly and it gives them anxiety to even think about not trusting them. Most people don't even agree that there's a problem at all with centralized institutional trust-based systems. They don't understand or trust algorithms, they trust brands on TV.
Web 2.0 gave us legitimate added productivity and functionality of being able to do stuff online for the first time. Web 3.0 does nothing but give us a trustless system that nobody asked for. Zero new functionality in any of those apps.
If you trust banks and FAANG companies, as most people do, Web 3.0 has exactly zero value.
Most people blindly trust the binaries they download from the internet; open source still has value despite this. In an ideal world this value would never be realized (or at least forking or compiling from source aspects of it). Similarly I'd argue that in an ideal world Web 3.0 would have "exactly zero value". But if a person or communities threat model includes web 3.0 style decentralization then who am I to stop them.
Let me flip the question: if you think that "this" web3 has no value, what kind of web do you think could be built by and for those who don't trust FAANG?
I am not even asking you to do anything. I am just asking you to think of an alternative.
No. This web is controlled by these "some companies". They monopolize social media, e-commerce, games, telecommunication platforms. Billions of people go by assuming that Facebook is the internet.
Go ahead and try to live on the internet without being forced to interact with any of FAANG services. It's impossible even for me, who tries to keep as strict of a "digital hygiene" as possible and use open source and open standards as much as possible.
If you think that we can not improve on the web that we have today, either your standards are way too low or you already got so used to be manipulated by Big Tech that you can't even imagine how much better and freer life could be without it.
To add to your comment. It is more fundamental. Modern protocols and standards -- from WebAssembly to TLS 1.3, to QUIC are FAANG controlled, we like it or not.
There was a post recently on hackernews about forcing client support of SNI being problematic according to some people.
So the effect of FAANG is far more fundamental; beyond ads and content that is.
> They monopolize social media, e-commerce, games, telecommunication platforms. Billions of people go by assuming that Facebook is the internet.
how exactly web3 is supposed to fix that?
> or you already got so used to be manipulated by Big Tech
assuming without knowing is the worst form of arrogance.
but even if that was true, I don't believe that the guy in the small village here in Italy that makes olive oil and sell it on Amazon to markets he could never even imagine existed is going to go decentralized and trustless just because Amazon is virtually a monopoly.
FAANG provided opportunities that have much more value for people than idealism (that doesn't even work!)
By providing a set of tools that allow (but not require) disintermediation.
> FAANG provided opportunities
Sure. It also blocked them. It also has created massive costs to people. It has also created Surveillance Capitalism. It employs thousands of people whose sole job is dedicated to keep its users addicted. It is creating a society of people who can "connect" with anyone on the other side of the world, but who get anxiety attacks if they have to talk with their own neighbor next door. It is destroying all chance of civil discourse, making groups increasingly polarized and isolated.
> that have much more value for people than idealism
To some people. Good for them. When it works, it is great. The question is: what about those people who don't get to enjoy these benefits? And can we get to provide this value without having all this collateral damage?
> (that doesn't even work!)
It works for some cases, and it works for some people. There is no technology in human history that was "born" perfectly ready for mass-usage. And there shouldn't be.
I'm not advocating here that we should all be dropping the systems and institutions that work, just to adopt something for the sake of "new tech". What I am saying is that there are whole lots of groups who are not being served by the current systems and institutions, and that we can do more than collectively shrug our shoulders and/or attack those who are attempting to create a solution.
> By providing a set of tools that allow (but not require) disintermediation.
How exactly is it gonna make people do the switch from Google search, Google maps, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, iPhones/MacBooks etc.?
> The question is: what about those people who don't get to enjoy these benefits? And can we get to provide this value without having all this collateral damage?
Make your own website, communicate via e-mail, host your own mail server, etc.
FAANG is not "the web" and "the web" is not the Internet.
> It works for some cases, and it works for some people
I don't think it actually works, or to put it in other words, it works like casinos in Las Vegas work.
But that they improve society it's highly questionable IMO.
> How exactly is it gonna make people do the switch from Google search...
I don't think we are talking about the same thing. The issue is not in getting people to consume the services that are "freely" available. The issue is in enabling people to participate both as consumers as well as producers in the larger economy without depending on intermediaries.
Instead of "get people out of Google Search", think "allow people to buy and sell things online without depending on Paypal" or "how can we have an alternative for the small olive oil producer in Amazon if for some reason Amazon decides to enter the market and abuses its power?"
> The issue is in enabling people to participate both as consumers as well as producers in the larger economy without depending on intermediaries.
larger than what exactly?
How web3 is gonna make it possible?
I can already send my tomato sauce produced by my family to Japan by simply putting up a website.
what could web3 make for my family?
> allow people to buy and sell things online without depending on Paypal
it's been possible for at last 20 years.
I pay using my credit card, not Paypal.
In Europe I can use SEPA transfers (usually free), SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (they cost me about 90 cents, money is transferred in seconds), the new PSD2 directive allow merchants to withdraw money directly from customers' accounts after being authorized and I believe GNU Taler is a much better option than any wallet solution web3 is proposing.
People can pay using any channel already available, they can also send me cash in an envelope if they want to, I'll gladly accept it.
And any of those systems (except cash in an envelope) are protected from fraud, insured, and refundable in full.
What about Web3?
Technically depending on Paypal is a choice.
Of course if you are talking about the possibility that your shady or illegal business will be banned from using one of those payment systems, well, that's a feature, not a bug.
You sound just like David Letterman when interviewing Bill Gates in 1995 ("why would I need a computer?", "oh, you mean I can listen the baseball game. Does radio ring a bell?") https://youtu.be/fs-YpQj88ew?t=155
> Of course if you are talking about the possibility that your shady or illegal business
This, right here, is the problem. The problem is that because you have all the privileges (SEPA, access to international transfers and open markets, etc, etc, etc) you think that only "shady" and "illegal" business will want to do these things.
Try being someone living in Argentina or Venezuela, who simply wants to work as a web designer with someone else from another continent. See how much Paypal (and by PayPal, I mean any money transmitting service) will eat in fees. See what exchange rate will be made available by the government.
> You sound just like David Letterman when interviewing Bill Gates
So you're comparing Web3 with the computer and the internet revolution, but are not even able to tell me what's the advantage over current technologies, that are still evolving?
> The problem is that because you have all the privileges
You mean we have found a solution to a problem?
> Try being someone living in Argentina or Venezuela
My uncle is from Argentina.
He's not looking for web3, he's looking for political stability and blames US for installing a totalitarian regime that destroyed his country that killed 30 thousand people, created 30,000 desaparecidos and imprisoned 400,000 [1]
You've never spoken to someone from poorer countries, did you?
Anyway, if someone from Argentina build a website, I can send them money directly to their bank account from my European bank account.
No intermediary necessary, except good old banks.
My instinct tells me that the only thing people in web3 "space" (it's more like a cult) are interested in is avoiding taxes and keeping their money hidden.
> The fact that your uncle is not "looking for web3" does not mean that other people are not using it.
the fact that a couple of your friends are using it, doesn't make it "Letterman interviewing Gates" material.
(btw, Letterman was being facetious, as per usual Letterman)
> And, fiy, I was born and raised in Brazil.
which is 10th economy by GDP in the World, just below Italy, my country, in front of many of what you called "privileged" European countries, such as Spain or the Netherlands...
More importantly: sending money to Brazil from Europe costs me a fixed Euro 0.5-0.6, plus maximum 1% of the sum (if sending up to Euro 115, less if sending more).
Very cheap, if you ask me.
> Your instinct is wrong. I can not do anything about that.
You could tell us why you are not able to explain what's the advantage for the average internet user, except avoiding taxes and hiding money...
Look at the numbers per capita, and look at the economic inequality indicators.
> sending money to Brazil from Europe
How much of these 100€ are going to get to the hands of the recipient, if sent by the "traditional" route? How fast can this money be made available to the recipient? What exchange rate is going to be used, the one offered to big international traders or the shitty one that banks offer to tourists? How much will be taken in fees by the banks? (not taxes, fees...).
I'll tell you: there is a good chance that middlemen are going to eat 7-12% of those 100€, just because they can and no competitor can challenge them.
And this is only for the first movement. What if the recipient in Brazil wants to have the money to buy something back in any other part of the world?
> You could tell us why you are not able to explain what's the advantage for the average internet user
Much like Bill Gates could not really explain the advantage of the internet to a privileged person in 1990's America?
Honestly?! I am tired. I might be throwing tens of different possible use-cases, and to all of them your reaction will be "I can do that already, all I need is <insert middleman service provider>". There isn't much to say, is there? If you are satisfied with the status quo and you don't see a need for decentralized technology meant for disintermediation, good for you.
> How much of these 100€ are going to get to the hands of the recipient, if sent by the "traditional" route?
Are you trolling or what?
If I send 100 euros to Brazil it will cost me 101.6 euros.
I pay the fee.
The recipient gets the 100.
If the recipient pays the fee, they get the 98.4% of it.
If I send 1,000 euros, it will cost 9.5 euros to send. The recipient get > 99%
how much does it cost to move money over web3 wallets?
because it is not free..
they can be free if you move them from a coinbase wallet to another coinbase wallet (for example)
If I have to chose, I prefer centralized banks over centralized coinbase.
> Much like Bill Gates could not really explain the advantage of the internet to a privileged person in 1990's America?
Bill Gates in the 90s wanted to sell MSN not internet.
You got your facts completely wrong.
And you can't still explain the advantages.
Except "it's hidden from governments, it cuts the middle man, I don't pay taxes over it"
like if maintaining the network was free.
Go hide your money and avoid your taxes if you like, but people don't want that.
They want safe tools, not useless, mob oriented, expensive scams.
If you really believe that people would prefer an insecure web3 wallet that has no safety and offer no guarantees, over a system like SEPA, you're delusional or a criminal.
> What if the recipient in Brazil wants to have the money to buy something back in any other part of the world?
Drug cartels do it all the time and they pay up to 40% in fees.
If that's your business, understand that it's a costly one.
If your only argument is "international, probably illegal, traffic of goods is gonna be easier" well, it's a very poor argument.
Imagine now that we are sanctioning Russia for invading Ukraine what would happen if everybody could freely make business with Russia unpunished.
You send Euros. The recipient gets Brazilian Reais. This exchange fee goes through a bank. The bank takes more fees.
You continue to argue from a vantage point of someone who does not understand how the other side works and who only see the abstractions.
That is perfectly fine, and I am glad that you are fortunate enough to not need to learn that. But don't pretend that you understand all the costs involved, or how the sausage is made, or even that your solutions are applicable to everyone else.
Take a look at this thread here [0], see how people are either stuck in a sense of either "it's not possible to live without using WhatsApp. Resistance is futile" or "Apple does everything I need to live a happy and peaceful life".
The "whole thing" is a mess of Surveillance Capitalism that serves no one but the elites, who is shaped to keep us in a constant state of anxiety and fear to try anything different and with enough energy to be able to do nothing but consume the crap they want us to consume.
Yes, it's very easy to cherry pick one product and say "I can live without it".
The important question is: "can society at large use the web without being forced to use products that exploit their data and/or locks them into rent-seeking vendors?"
NFTs can come with programmable contracts, so there was some thought that this could be used to manage royalties. For example, resell the art for a profit, and the original artist gets a cut.
But... instead of that, it was just pure speculation, with nobody really wanting any of the art. And none of it ever came with that contract to give original artists money anyway. So even the smidge of a good idea in there never got done.
His point was applying smart contracts to old libraries and new music. BAYC is a different approach as they use the NFT is an access token vs. art work, in my opinion.
He’s in PE so he’s probably looking at this from a particular lease, which isn’t the wide adoption folks are hoping for.
Most systems are not complicated because of centralised tech, but rather due to the number of parties involved (countries & copyrights/licensing when it comes to music) or systems have not become digital yet (Law + Owenrship etc). NFTs can't solve for either.
Sure they can. I mean, HomeDepot uses blockchain for inventory with multiple parties involved. I don’t know if they ever went through with it but Chipotle was heavily investing into blockchain for food supply chains and the tech is 100% coming to specific food items that have higher chance of food born illness (think listeria vs. E. Coli —- foods that may contain listeria is heavily monitored. For example, you can tell a lot more about Feta cheese from their barcode than Mozz because feta is susceptible to listeria).
Real world example:
- I worked for a hospitality chain and we have an order management system for our locations.
- we had many different vendors, different SKUs, and vendors went in/out based on annual contracts.
- when a vendor was switched, someone had to update the entire database and propagate it to stores.
- all vendors, stores, etc. had different databases and there were times were wrong items are sent, items never sent, or damaged/bad items. It takes an hour, on average, to check in an order.
With Smart Contracts, this process would be simplified: order management would require less data entry, loading orders on truck would have higher accuracy (removing errors when entering new item into the system), and there are general savings since order management protocol that all the big players use is proprietary and a pain to use.
How would NFT's solve the complexities of music royalty payments? (i.e. the complexity here is that Time Warner needs to ensure they get paid when one of their songs is played on a TV show).
So there are multiple layers of rights ownership in music, and multiple ways to license music.
There are songs that may have 10+ different owners of specific rights (author, composer, singer, recording, distribution, exclusive vs non-exclusive, regional vs national vs international).
With a smart contracts, you can abstract a ton of the lawyer-y stuff. Smart contracts are also good for indie, in terms of licensing samples.
This doesn’t really answer the question - I mean from a process perspective how does it work.
Like I write a song that has 10 different owners - is the idea then that I purchase rights via purchase of an NFT? Because that will need a lawyer-y real world contract attached to it anyway, so I’m not sure what it’s replacing. And how does that NFT determine the cost of rights, which will be different if I am using it as the theme song for my movie compared to a tiny sample in a song?
I understand the complexities from that post, I just don’t understand how NFTs and smart contracts are the solution to the complexity.
The first step is for RIAA to adopt a centralized database/block chain. This would be similar to how HomeDepot uses IBMs prop blockchain to handle their inventory. I will use DB, for short.
The DB would allow current, and previous, copywriter holders to opt-in to the system. Ownership stake would be written into the smart contract with trenches of rights. Once you have a "movie" contract, that attributes X percent to Y people, based on rights, the contract can be easily reused for another project.
In most cases, music royalties are a fixed income business and the profits are easy to model. This was the foundation of the WB/Pershing Sq deal. Their prospectus is quite interesting.
Using the WB case for simplicity, the idea would be to take the current licenses and create trenches of rights, which would be sold/minted (not sure of right work) with all the legal/operational stuff baked in. For a real world example:
- WB owns the rights to song X
- DMX (hospitality) licenses music from WB to play on their connected devices, which service the hospitality sector, primarily (restaurants/bars)
- DMX renews their license on annual basis.
- Copy write owners would receive royalties per non-exclusive, commercial, non-reproducible trench when their song is played.
With NFTs, the initial licensing and renewal could be performed from a user interface similar to Amazon vs the current paper process.
This is applicable to chains like Starbucks too, as they license songs, burn them on CDs that have specific DRM and play on a (what I would guess) is a specialized CD player. Those CDs cannot be played outside the store, from my understanding.
TL;DR - you encode different licenses in smart contracts and once you have a framework, it’s easy to grant similar rights without the overhead. Specialized licenses can be created quicker. This would be applicable to large copywrite holders and flow down to indie, with time.
Why couldn’t this just be done with a centralised online portal?
Seems there would be lots of issues on the artist side of things with NFTs - like what if one of the 10 artists that are part of a song doesn’t want to sign up or get paid in crypto? Do you still get the NFT and handle the 1 person manually and sit half in NFT world and half outside? Or do you need 100% adoption before it is at all useful?
What if the music company wanted to vet who they licenced music to? Or particular songs can only be licenced for particular use cases by particular companies?
I’m not sure NFTs actually solve the complexities here.
Why would crypto be involved? You are using the blockchain and smart contracts. The token aspect does not need to be included or can be abstracted away into internal reserve where tokens == $1. Artists paid in $ or w/e fiat currency.
The idea is to encapsulate the current contracts into smart contracts to downsize legal overhead.
Also, not sure why it HAS to be decentralized.
Look at IBMs implementation of HomeDepot’s inventory tracking. There is no decentralization (in a general sense), no tokens. They created a system that was easy to onboard vendors, vendors can process orders, and Home Depot can verify them with a lot less paper work and a trail.
Smart Contracts will not look how the space looks now and the ethos of crypto won’t survive most real-world use cases but some technologies will be adapted, if they fit well.
NFT royalties often relate to resale, not media access. But in some web3 platforms, sales and revenue could be directed automatically to creators through smart contract functionality.
Skiff.org charges $8 USD/month for it's premium service, and it's just an implementation of PGP encryption. I have no idea what this as to do with crypto.
ens.domains is a privately owned and managed DNS provider. It's litterally the exact opposite of what web3 claims to be. Having a "constitution" is just re-wording "Terms of Service". I love how it sells hard covers versions of it's Terms of Service for fiat at Blurb.com. And no, Blurb does not accept cryptocurrency payments even, lol.
Signal.org existed well before they added crypto, and quite frankly, yes I did just about completely stop using it - and so did many others. The introduction of cryptocurrency in that app litterally chased away users rather than improve adoption.
Skiff allows login with MetaMask and Brave wallet, lets you store files with E2EE on IPFS, and lets you send/receive emails to your wallet address. And of course you can pay for your subscription with crypto. There's no coin, because there's absolutely no need for one.
Again, how is this a web3 service and not just a version of SSO that allows for a couple not-so-commonly-used centralized authentication services? Taking payments in crypto doesn't really seem to me to be anything "web3"-related apart from their finance department participating in the speculation game on the backend.
Way to miss the point. ENS being "privately owned" or "having a constitution" only really matters if you care about participating in the governance - which I will admit is silly - or if you want to have have some influence in further developments. But as an user, none of this matters. You can claim an id and no government or "owner" will take it from you. No registrar will give names to squatters to put in marketplaces. Actual ownership is public and transparent. Prices are reasonable. You can now have completely censorship-resistant sites by tying a ENS address with an IPFS page.
ENS is already super useful if you care about owning your identities without worrying about intermediaries.
> But as an user, none of this matters. You can claim an id and no government or "owner" will take it from you...
I don't think this is even true.
For one, the service has a public governance process, and it is almost certainly the case that a proposal could be passed through that process which seized ownership of a "domain".
Second, any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction of has the ultimate veto power -- they can order it to take action under the threat of legal charges against their company's principals, or the seizure of their infrastructure. You may see this as a problem, but it isn't a problem which can be solved by software.
> passed through that process which seized ownership of a "domain".
No, this is not how it works. To be able to do that, they would have to rewrite the smart contract with the specific rules to revoke ownership, "upgrade" the contract (which I am not even sure if it is something supported by ENS current protocol) and then they would have to convince everyone else (or the significant majority of users) to migrate to the new contract as well.
> any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction
What is the jurisdiction of "the internet"? There isn't one. There isn't a company behind this, there is no ZIP code, and so on. You can not stop tens of thousands of people running ethereum nodes all around the world. You might try to stop the current developers from doing further work, but the contract that is already deployed on the blockchain can not simply be removed. It is physically impossible to do it. That is the meaning of "censorship-resistant".
> What is the jurisdiction of "the internet"? There isn't one.
It’s the US, except for when it’s China or Russia.
You may feel you aren’t under their jurisdiction. It turns out it doesn’t matter what you think though, much like if an elephant is charging at you, your opinion of the situation doesn’t really have an effect.
US controls all financial infrastructure everywhere. You can’t buy coins if you can’t use the onramps (due to KYC), can’t use the off-ramps (due to Chainalysis and exchange KYC noticing your coins came from a wallet used for crimes a year or two ago). They can extradite you and just wait for you to give up your keys. And so on.
You can’t get away by just not being interesting right now. Transactions are public and forever on most blockchains, so anyone can find you at any time in the future.
These people tried but they barely got to spend their winnings due to how hard it really is to launder money.
I am not asking about the finance side of things, and I am not asking as someone who is trying to do anything illegal.
The question was "how the US government can stop people from making a transaction on the blockchain?" More specifically: what government who would have the capacity to stop people from using a dapp?
Can the US government stop people from getting their (completely KYC'd) crypto and exchanging on Uniswap? Can it stop them from making a Tornado Cash transfer? Can it stop them from buying a domain name on ENS?
The answer, of course, is no, they can not. Your talk about government reach is just unrelated bullshit.
That’s a theoretical argument; in real life it doesn’t matter what happens in a single transaction right now. All those services are operated and used by real people, if they’re legal now it’s because they’re complying with laws, and if they stop complying with laws they won’t be legal.
Assuming you expect to still be alive in the next few years, it’s not a good idea to pretend like you don’t have to care about this. You can end up in front of a judge if you do something illegal, and they aren’t impressed with “you can’t stop me” as an argument. They can find someone who can do something and they can order them to do that.
> if they’re legal now it’s because they’re complying with laws, and if they stop complying with laws they won’t be legal.
Laws from what country?
OP's comment was trying to argue that "the country of jurisdiction has veto power". My question was "which country has jurisdiction over a distributed application running in thousands of independent computers spread around the world?"
It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped. A government could try to stop its citizens from using the service but even if they were successful (good luck with that...) the service itself would still be around.
Contrast that with, e.g, The Pirate Bay. To stop the service, Governments could and did manage to go after the individuals, or the hosting providers and even the DNS registrars. These were all the choke points that the governments tried to use, because these are points where they can have some jurisdiction. But no government can order an ENS domain to be suspended. No court can stop an IPFS hash to being a representation of a file, and while one could get an order for a specific server to be disconnected, there is no way to issue an order to delete all files of a given hash from the network. There is no one who can remove a contract that is deployed on a blockchain, so there is no way that a judge "can find someone to do something about it..."
And no, this is not a "theoretical argument". It is a very real one. The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature. If dapps were not censorship-resistant, then of course developers would just stick with what is more efficient, cheaper and well-established.
> OP's comment was trying to argue that "the country of jurisdiction has veto power". My question was "which country has jurisdiction over a distributed application running in thousands of independent computers spread around the world?"
The US. No, it doesn't matter where you live, it's the US. As Bandit Keith says, every country in this world belongs to America. (Except for a few like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.)
> It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped.
It can continue, but this is a Pyrrhic victory, ie there's no way this could work out in the real world that anyone would be happy about.
Imagine if someone puts child porn in your immutable distributed database. Is anyone getting away with it merely because it can't be deleted? No, now the service is illegal for everyone, forever.
More mild real example is crypto exchanges banning coins that were transferred out of a coin mixer in the last few transactions. Which is something they have done, and will do more of:
> There is no one who can remove a contract that is deployed on a blockchain, so there is no way that a judge "can find someone to do something about it..."
But they can! Judges are more powerful than you and more powerful than computers. The mere fact that you can't technically fulfill the order makes everything /worse/. Whoever they find is in contempt until they find some way out of doing something impossible; better to have had admin capabilities in the first place.
> The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature.
Well, or because a16z is giving them money to do it. I don't agree that not getting prosecuted is proof it's fine; you need to get prosecuted and be found not guilty, get an SEC no-action letter, etc.
> Is anyone getting away with it merely because it can't be deleted? No, now the service is illegal for everyone, forever.
We could extend that "logic" to the Internet itself. Let's then just declare that because there are illegal things done in the Internet, all of it is illegal. Also, the only reason we are not suffering any repercussion is because Uncle Sam doesn't care about us (yet).
This is nothing but a cheap rhetorical trick. Hasn't anyone called you on your bullshit before?
> Let's then just declare that because there are illegal things done in the Internet
The difference is that the various law enforcement agencies across the globe frequently succeed in taking sites offering child porn down and prosecute those involved. The point being made was that once it's on your immutable blockchain you can't do that.
You certainly need to have people validating incoming blocks, and currently you need to have at least some nodes archiving all the data if you want to be able to reconstruct the whole history. But there is a lot of research going on in regards to state pruning, which would let nodes discard parts of the chain that are not interesting.
I agree if you can find a way to delete things then it's fine. That's not exactly immutable, but it may be workable, maybe.
But currently all blockchain users have to download the entire thing unless they're just accessing it through a web API, which would be "centralized" and makes them not really blockchain users.
Re: Skiff, it looks like a very cool product but I'm skeptical they can make enough money. The primary path to monetization for a product like this would be enterprise SaaS licensing but I simply don't see how you can sell to enterprises without centralizing the product. Auditability, compliance, SSO, etc. would all seem to be difficult if not impossible with the product as specced.
seems like you're saying "hey, here's an email company that takes crypto payments, here's two domain name companies for crypto, here's two posts about one company that takes donations in crypto, that means a multiple hundred billion dollar system that produces several nations of pollution and serves no tractable purpose other than being an unlicensed securities casino somehow isn't a scam"
to which i reply: "shaka, when the moon lambo fell"
So lets say that none of these web3 coins are scams. They still aren't actually solving anything that hasn't already been solved with web2. So at best they are unnecessary. And while the examples you have listed may not be scams, unfortunately the general web3 landscape is rife with them.
This is such a typical web 3 page. It doesn't even try to tell me what it is about, except promising "quadratic" money showers for open source Blockchain apps.
Apparently "the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community". Mathematics sure have increased in scope since I left uni.
Its a cool project but nothing about how it works requires web3 technologies or blockchain technologies. Web3 still isn't "solving" any problem in that system.
Javascript is cool but no websites really need it. You could build a website without javascript. There's really no reason for it to exist other than to enrich the pockets of consultants. It's not solving any problem on the internet.
You can make this argument for any technology at this point. If people like crypto it will exist. It's the same with a lot of other things I think shouldn't exist like gold.
> Javascript is cool but no websites really need it. You could build a website without javascript. There's really no reason for it to exist other than to enrich the pockets of consultants. It's not solving any problem on the internet.
That was a perfectly reasonable position to hold until, like, Google Maps. Meanwhile we're 10 years and counting into the crypto hype and still zero legitimate use cases where it adds value.
The only difference I can tell from the Plain Jane Web is they pay you out of the premine coins they held on to at the beginning. I assume, maybe people donate also.
I’ll have to poke around later and see if I can quit my day job while getting paid to solve real problems.
After waiting 20 seconds for that page to load for some reason, I scrolled all the way to the bottom without being told what it does. It appears to be some sort of foundation that provides grants to open source projects, except given it's "web3," I'm guessing that means it isn't actually a non-profit so gives none of the tax advantages a real foundation would give, doesn't have a board with a non-financial interest in the mission the way a real foundation would, and pays creators in cryptocurrency, which is a much less predictable and usable funding source since it varies so wildly in real currency denominated value and needs to be off-ramped to real currency to actually pay your developers and energy bills and what not.
After waiting 20 seconds for that page to load for some reason, I scrolled all the way to the bottom without being told what it does.
There are far too many web sites like that. Not just crypto-related ones. The ones with a flashy design, a blank for your email address, and far too little useful information. I refer to this as "the giant sucking sound of the onboarding funnel".
Yes, I remember reading about this site on Hacker news post. There are a lot of search results here for gitcoin. Also, Product dropdown at the top shows what it does. Payment in crypto coins seems to be free from a lot of regulatory burden, I'm not saying that it's a good thing, but it's just there. Getting a crypto wallet is also a lot simpler than creating a bank account, I'm again in favor of KYC norms, but there's an appeal to it, if you're too young or because of some other reason you cannot get a bank account.
If I won a contest and the prize was the choice between 100 BTC and 1 small vial of "Thieves" essential oil, I'd take the Thieves. Why? Because it has value (excellent in my homemade mouthwash). Also I can't support something that vampires countries' worth of electricity.
Correct, I value doing the right thing over money. By transacting in something like that, even if for a moment, I would be accomplice to a major environmental destroyer.
Crypto was sold as the hedge against inflation. Well, how did that go? Inflation started creeping up and crypto crashed. That's not the hedge I'm looking for.
What problem does Web3 solve? It helps us better manage nonsense. As we face fuel shortages, potential food shortages, a recession and stagflation I wouldn't want to be in the business of solving make-believe problems. If you're not doing work for a business that's providing tangible value to their customers then you're likely to be out of a job soon. All it takes is another rate hike of 25 basis points and we're in a whole new ballgame - and unlike 2008, which was fueled by financial nonsense that had been going on the preceding 10 years, we're going to have bona fide supply shortages to contend with as well.
Can I roll a private/public key pair and use it to authenticate everywhere as the user BabyFarkMcgeeZax? Can I authorize Spotify to BabyFarkMcgeeZax/playlist?
In theory, I can use an OAuth provider for this kind of stuff, but then who owns what? Why can't I host my own content wherever I want and allow different permissions to it? Why can't I delegate certain things to some provider and revoke it when I want? How does anyone get paid for being such a service provider, especially with the idea that the data is host proof in some cases and thus can't be monetized?
Blockchains / tokens are trying to answer this question. Most are data that doesn't fit on a blockchain or are issuing tokens with arbitrary monetary policies and following them up with bad fiscal policy.
Thus far most of Web3 just requires some algebra to see a database that doesn't solve these problems.
I've been using EVM blockchain as an immutable registry / ledger to record small bits of data linked to IPFS to record events. These are supposed to be immutable by me or anyone else (essentially they act like logs and events).
Is there "regular" immutable events database like this that I don't have to host myself, has a super easy-to-use API, and costs less than $5/mo, but keeps my data around after I stop paying for it?
Do you use a standalone EVM node or mainnet? Recording small bits of data on mainnet must cost you hundreds of dollars in gas fees? If it’s your own personal blockchain then why not use a regular database?
oh! I'm actually using Matic, and all I'm doing is posting a URL that either points to IPFS or my API endpoint.
Yes I know, the API endpoint is silly and mutable and it actually links to my Airtable API lol, but this helps me track "when/where" that I don't want to track on a regular DB.
To date the entire thing's cost less than $10, and I have maybe 30-40 posts. Definitely not production yet though
I've thought about using Github and using Github Actions to roll up different people's GH accounts' data into a "central ledger" but yeah, this isn't immutable and Github Actions keeps going down lol.
Twitter is a no-go since their API changes fairly frequently and I still feel burned from their API rug pull a decade ago.
That’s actually the only reason it’s usable for this. Because you can’t use a public database for anything at all once it’s full of spam and CSAM; not only will it get blocked but nobody will work on maintaining it.
I'm ever the optimist so believe the fallout from these blockchain experiments will likely leave at least one useful idea/technology in the ruins for future us to build on
Or perhaps all the experiments lead to the creation of a US digital dollar which can be spent online as anonymously as an ordinary paper dollar. This would have a clear advantage over Bitcoin, plus be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States
DAI is a decentralized US dollar that has existed for over 5 years now.
Many people want a government authorized dollar backed by the government and are ok with the controls on it.
You're free to choose the digital dollar you want. That's what this is about - freedom of choice in holding and spending your wealth in any currency or form you like.
My world view, summarized to the simplest term, is “incentives”. You can find places and times where people act altruistically. We all do it regularly. We most reliably act altruistically when it comes to our own families, with our children as the highest recipient of our altruism.
When you get beyond the immediate family, relying on altruism as the organizing principle starts to break down.
Societies that provide incentives for delivering value to other citizens - going to work, doing a job, becoming wealthy if you drastically improve society - will win long term over those that provide disincentives to hard work and providing value.
Web3 and crypto provide artificial scarcity to digital goods. This is an experiment in economics. I believe providing economic incentives, when properly aligned with the tasks desired, can result in a more efficient and successful internet. Relying solely on volunteers in any group has very rarely worked - even the largest non-profits have highly paid directors and legions of paid employees. This is not some revolutionary idea, other than the fact that digital goods can have artificial scarcity.
Part of the problem here is that good incentive design is incredibly, incredibly difficult.
We've learned this lesson over and over again. If you apply an incentives layer to anything, people will attempt to game it. Watch what happens at any company that starts rewarding developers for number-of-issues-closed or lines-of-codes-written.
The only responsible way to work with incentives is to constantly monitor and re-balance them. I use Duolingo a lot and I find it really interesting watching how they tweak the various gamification models over time as people's behaviour alters. They need to balance their models such that people who game them will also learn the language most effectively.
The token model - represented by things like DAOs - generally requires this incentive design to be perfect up front. It assumes that people can design a perfect incentive system from day one - which obviously they cannot.
This goes right back to the beginning of smart contracts: Vitalik was famously inspired to create Ethereum after his World of Warcraft character got nerfed. But nerfing is essential to how game design works! If you don't constantly rebalance things your game ends up being broken.
I am a member of many token projects that have successfully altered their rules via governance vote. These include contract upgrades and fundamental changes to structure. It is possible to fix and augment post-launch, and in 2022 is quite common.
the entire language used here, from altruism, to value, to efficiency makes no sense in a world that isn't scarce. You don't need efficiency or altruism when resources aren't limited.
Imposing artificial scarcity on the internet is like imposing the caste system on a modern society. It's a way to differentiate people by status in a world that has no need for that distinction any more. Literally putting a rotten economic system on a domain that could be free of it and practically limitless, like people driving cars with the break pulled so others can feel faster.
What we really need to do is get the ideology out of people's heads that burning energy so you can get a hexagonal twitter avatar to set yourself apart from all the round avatar people is a way to organize society.
But using the word scarcity seems to try and piggyback on what we all know scarce goods are. Goods become scarce because of excess demand or difficulty with production. A real finite thing.
what is scarce about tokens? the hash? why are they desired, for speculative investing?
No, think scarcity in the "artificial scarcity" sense where only 1000 copies of a certain handbag were made so they can market it as "limited edition" and demand a higher price than if they were making as many as they could.
Yes - Ferrari could make far more cars than they do. But new cars are limited edition and sold only to prior owners of Ferraris. This is a marketing strategy that keeps them artificially exclusive cars.
The problem is web3 hasn't yet come up with an experience as cool as owning and driving a ferrari and it's much easier to recreate/knockoff an nft than it is to make a facsimile ferrari
And yet, our current medium of exchange relies on artificial scarcity as well, controlled by central banks. This is where your average crypto proponent will follow up with their spiel on the benefits of decentralization, but I personally believe decentralization is a distraction, or at best only relevant for those in charge of the supply of the currency. On the demand side, what cryptocurrencies really bring to the table is an alternative, asymmetrical channel for currency and values to move through; and in a capitalist system that naturally skews towards inequality, the more money changes hands, the more likely it is that the next hand to take it will be that of the rich. So as far as the rich are concerned, the incentives to bootstrap the crypto economy and keep it funded well enough to slowly suck up conventional economic activity is already there.
You and I have fundamentally different world views. I don’t see an increase of commerce = more inequality. I see it as more services and goods being provided and more needs being met. I like when commerce happens. It means people are voluntarily exchanging useful things and mutually benefiting.
Despite my cynical tone, I don’t see inequality as a primary outcome of commerce, either; I do see the increased exchange of goods that the crypto economy brings as a general positive. But it’s almost always been the case that the more commerce happens, the more extreme the gap between the rich and the poor becomes; arguably it’s not always a bad thing, as long as everyone’s getting a piece of the pie. I’m just speculating on why there’s big money rolling into crypto, and there will continue to be.
There is big money coming into crypto because it is rebuilding the financial system with software protocols, assembled into building blocks, and each block is tokenized like a stock. It’s like being able to invest in TCP at the dawn of the internet. You can say this is a bad idea, illegal, and so on, but fundamentally this is what’s happening and the reason why VCs are investing.
The surest way to get rich in the world without using a gun or getting into a position of political power and stealing, is to create something people want to use voluntarily.
If I create a new widget and convince 10 million people to give me $10, I have $100 million of revenue. Let’s say my expenses are in total 75%. I’ve now made $25 million. This is certainly a princely sum of money, but I made 10 million people’s lives better! Or else they wouldn’t have voluntarily given me money.
Certain people would say, “You have $25 million when 99% of so little! This is unfair! You should give (some large percentage) of it back to society for the politicians to decide how to disperse.
And this is where I fundamentally disagree. The person who convinces enough people to give them that much money is rare. They have a unique ability to spot market needs, assemble people to work cooperatively, and work towards a goal of delivering widgets that meet the desires of society. I want to let them keep as much of their money as possible because they are highly likely to reinvest it properly, vs. the politicians which have a 99% chance of failure / theft.
As I’ve said, I express no judgement as to whether any of this is morally objectionable, or good/bad for society in general. You’re arguing with yourself at this point.
There are other people here who will read our comment thread and I am hopeful my arguments may encourage people to think differently whether or not you will.
I question your assumption about the velocity of money belonging to rich people. Barring flash trading, if they’re not hoarding it and collecting interest, they’re spending it on real goods or investing? Isn’t that more along the lines of what seibelj said? Aren’t the rich mode likely to sit and let it collect interest?
I would pay a lot of money for a Crypto Punk, the very first NFT collection. The floor price is about $50,000 currently. I would pay around $10k, but maybe in the future I’d be willing to pay more.
Owning a Punk is a status symbol in crypto. I know many wealthy crypto people who have them. It’s like an expensive watch or classic car - I want it because of what it signals to the community I’m part of.
But at $50k… a bit too expensive for me at this moment. However I know people who have paid hundreds of thousands for them.
Why would you want to tag your addrs like this.
I just don’t get NFT as a conspicuous consumption device.
What happens to someone who lights a flare in the dark forest?
After failing to solve the financial system with crypto and digital rights with NFTs the desperate search of a solution seeking a problem moves on to Web3. Hint: it's not here either.
Take something as simple as identity. In the Web3 world that's basically a wallet. lose your access to an account on a website currently and you can reset it. Lose your Web3 ID key? Well, you need a "smart" contract for recovery. I've seen variations on this such as nominating some other wallets who can give a consensus for what is essentially a takeover to recover your account.
These are really just more attack vectors created on the altar of automation and blockchain.
Web2 is also stupid as at the end of the day your identity is just whatever some call center rep is willing to believe, and you can be locked out of your account to the point where you can no longer even prove who you are for any reason at any time. This is an alternative, and it comes with different tradeoffs. I see you don't like the tradeoffs, and would rather trust companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google because you apparently don't trust yourself with your own key. I think that is simultaneously sad and naive, but "you do you", I guess? That doesn't mean none of this is useful, because not everyone is in a position to trust random US companies.
Social recovery wallets are a much better solution than some website which may or may not have customer support giving me access to my data again.
Look at the amount of threads on HN of people pleading about how google banned them and they can't get through to a human to get their data back. Is that the future you want everywhere? You think having to talk to your parents + friends to recover your data is worse than that?
Blockchain just one potential category of technologies or set of implementations. Web 2.0 was not defined by its technologies or implementations, it was defined by its value proposition. So, forget blockchain... at a higher level, Web3 is going to be about ownership.
Billions of people gave Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. value by creating the content that made those products useful. Web3 still has a lot to workout, and as much as blockchain is trying to co-opt web3, it may not be a part of it in the end -- but the people who create the content will get paid this time around. That is what will define Web3.
People on Web 2.0 are getting paid more than they deserve already by using these services for free. Most accounts don’t need to make YouTube money as long as the big ones are subsidizing them.
A decentralized system where users don’t have to view ads etc. will necessarily be more expensive for everyone - because you have to fund infrastructure, because you have to penalize spammers, and just because if posters are getting paid it has to come from somewhere.
My favorite use of crypto is having “cash” stored in a wallet that can’t be seized by anyone. Until someone ties me up and starts threatening two start hitting me with a baseball bat.
As it is to have your private keys for your Bitcoin. Just like you can "hide" those things, you can hide your private keys (arguably in more creative ways, too).
Web3 sucks, yes. But that’s because it’s based on blockchain. Web5 won’t be.
Not all things crypto are about speculation and number go up. Many projects have added tokens for utility. THOSE projects are eventually going to be far better than their Web2 counterparts. By the people, not just for the people
IPFS team released Filecoin to let you store files in more than one “cloud” company like AWS or GCP or Azure.
MaidSAFE goes way further. They are building the ultimate in decentralized, uncensorable networks.
Jack Dorsey’s Web5 is using really good technologies like Microsoft’s ION (sidetree protovol) for identity, etc.
Okay and now for the part that will get me downvotes… I started two companies in 2010 and 2017 respectively, to build open source software and give it away on GitHub. I built them for Web2 ans Web3 to decentralize social networks, payment systems, voting, governance and more. Because communities need to run their own open source software, rather than relying on states and corporations. Otherwise our communications and transactions will be taking place on privately owned and centrally planned platforms.
PS: before downvoting me, actually look at this. It is not shilling any tokens. It is actually BUILT open source solutions, on github, that you can take and use today. If you don’t like something, at least comment and use your words before downvoting.
I appreciate the points you’re making here but the phrase “web5” is so extremely toxic that it makes it really hard to judge the other things you saying fairly.
Is web4 any better? How is web5 toxic when it barely was announced?
Web2 is VCs funding closed silos and all our interactions and public forums on privately owned platforms. How is that better? In only one way: it scales!
Web3 (smart contracts) can (as in right now) reduce the level of trust required to persuade people to use certain services (or at least parts of them).
For example: crowdfunding platforms. I can write a smart contract that reasonably and securely associates unique IDs to Ethereum wallets, keeps track of wallets that donate to a specific ID and refunds donators or rewards the wallets associated with the IDs according to explicitly set rules (ie. minimum currency threshold). I can then create a website for it, deploy it as "givemeyourmoney.xyz" and still be considered (and verified) trustworthy and safe just because everyone can read the contract's behavior.
Without a smart contract, everyone would understandably think the site is a scam and wouldn't use it - even if it was totally legitimate. That's obviously an extreme example, but that basic attribute has a lot of other implications.
The problems with smart contracts begin once you have to codify a rule that isn't so easy to translate into code (ie. it turns out that a crowdfunded project was a scam). Now people are creating DAOs to deal with situations like that, with at best mixed results.
But what if you need to verify that a condition has been met that isn't based on the blockchain, like checking if someone actually did deliver the pizza that someone else ordered? Then you're completely screwed.
You could say that these problems are eventually solve-able if the right hardware/software infrastructure was created to address them, but if so then it's at least a decade away from being verifiable and therefore useful.
Anyways, regardless of what could be possible it looks like web3 people are more interested in scamming each other because non-technical users can't read smart contracts and few people do any proper auditing.
This is an overly theoretical description of a single potential benefit of web3.
How many people—even very technically skilled ones—read smart contracts in their entirety? Launching a crowdfunding platform backed by a smart contract should give it zero credibility by itself. Unfortunately, we popularized the idea that a smart contract equals zero trust equals you can actually trust it. None of which is true.
We moved even further away from that with upgradable contracts. Where is zero trust there? Yesterday’s Solend disgrace is a very clear proof of that.
It's exactly the same as Linux and open source software. I have never read the kernel source code, but I trust it way more than windows because I know others have read it and not reported any secret backdoors or exploits.
That’s not exactly the same. How can a user tell who and when (i.e. which version of an upgradeable contract) has reviewed this particular contract? Linux core has a long history and a ton of processes around introducing changes. When I visit a crowdfunding web3 website there is none of that.
People are working on auditing services for smart contracts and web3 apps, but it's slow going.
Considering the behavior of the current community I totally understand your skepticism toward the technology itself. It hasn't really proven itself useful or safe for anything but a few use cases, and the only thing it really has going for it is the theory and the core development. Fixes and new features are slowly being added to the tech to make trustless services possible.
The criticism that web3 - even if it did work properly - turns literally everything into a token-based speculative market is accurate. I think it's an emergent property of the technology that isn't good for anyone, and it's bad enough that it might be worth ditching completely.
The contracts are immutable once deployed. There are proxy contracts that allow for upgrading but the highest quality teams usually fix them after a while to guarantee they won't change. The sites are often all on IPFS to also have hashed content, or are open source so you can run the frontend yourself.
Nah, missing the point. I’ll still stand by some web3 idea like using an NFT as some kind of license to access a service using web3 auth is a true and valid use case. It doesn’t need a monetary-like token but it does need a single record bound to an address stored eternally.
Jpeg NFTs are dumb, cos the record is public. But a singular record that can out of band handle authorizations? Neat.
> NFT as some kind of license to access a service using web3 auth
Firstly, we have that on the web today with OAuth. It is centralised in the hands of a few companies but that's because people trust those companies. There simply is no consumer demand to allow other options but it's easy enough to do.
Secondly, the problem with the NFT approach you described is that it coerces people to use a single wallet for everything. Which goes against the best practice for crypto at the moment which is to have multiple wallets due to the many, many NFT scams that can steal your wallet. So in effect your approach trades off centralisation in one area for another. With the end user not really being in a fundamentally better position.
> It is centralised in the hands of a few companies but that's because people trust those companies.
You trust them. I don't. Now what? Are you saying I'm forced to trust them, because you do?
For every story of crypto projects going awry we can find a story of Google shutting down someone's account without any recourse, Apple abusing their App Store position to ban reasonable content (commentary on sweat shops or even mildly adult content), or Facebook accidentally toppling an entire democracy.
The reality is that these centralized systems aren't some panacea and you are frankly naive to be so happy about using them for the rest of your life.
OpenSea takes the blockchain data, filters it and augments it with their proprietary data. Which means that as a user I may buy an NFT that OpenSea is filtering and which therefore is useless on other sites.
There is nothing inherently special about blockchain that prevents centralisation or allows you to have a trustless ecosystem. At some point I will trust Metamask with my wallet, Binance for my trades etc.
The whole not needing an a&a database part? That’s the onchain part. You don’t need to track authz as it’s just real-time lookups on blockchain state.
Rather than maintain and protect a local set of usernames and hashes, you let anyone in who can present signature and address. Then server side you check that address has some NFT. Done. No hashes or usernames or anything.
Let’s say I’m a saas vendor that has some web product, it doesn’t need user profiles as such, just gated access. Without need to take credit card payments, one can sell a token that provides access, and know that the api to query its status is going to be stable and eternal. It simplifies a particular use case that I think works.
They don’t need the generate it, the user supplies it with the client side web3 wallet. They don’t need to maintain a blockchain, they can use various portable apis to query it.
Ok now how do I do it with storage in some eternal way that doesn’t required a trusted third party. And not having to maintain any kind of session or user state mapping between my app and the oauth2 or saml provider.
Ya know, about 14 years ago something happened where we could maintain these eternal data structures with rules around state mutation. Humanity is only learning the power of such structures a decade later. There are very much unique problems being solved here and you are missing the dark forest for the legacy trees.
The user can read the source code of a wallet and they know it's never going to change on them or have a service block them, and there are many options available which they can switch between at any time.
It's about user empowerment and not letting other entities have any control over any aspect of it.
Money is inherently a liability of the issuer. No one is liable to accept bitcoin (for example) as payment, therefore it is not money.
However, if you can build a currency that represents real world assets, liabilities, and/or collateral, then it potentially becomes money, and can solve real problems such as liquidity in markets.
I've played with it a little bit, there are some cool use-cases here and there but the wild speculation and get-rich quick schemes kill it's usefulness
IMO It's likely there will be an iteration of protocols and storage mechanisms that will be more useful in the future
I also think "Web3" is probably the dumbest imaginable branding
"What is the value of cryptocurrency/blockchain/web3? Why should anyone care?
Here is my opinion (as a developer who studied and built blockchains):
It allows digital information (value) to be open/free (as in not under the control or in the power of another) and virtually permanent.
That's basically it.
If you want digital money, we already got that (Cash app, Venmo, online/mobile banking, etc.).
You want digital collectibles, that's been around forever in games, etc.
But I think we all know most people see value purely in the speculation. Be careful not to confuse all the "innovation" and hype as real substance, because most of the time someone is trying to PUMP and DUMP, which can make a lot of money. Just look at any of the thousands of blockchains/coins that are no longer used or traded, but were supposed to change the world."
And when Venmo bans you for using it in the "wrong country" as has happened to friends of mine? Or when PayPal freezes your account because you're "suspicious"? or Robinhood stops you buying a stock because it's hurting their friends?
You may be ok with companies messing with your life because they can, many of us are not. Especially non US citizens where we face a lot more financial discrimination.
1. The most beautiful and innovative things being done in the Web3 space are much more beautiful and innovative than anything you will do in your life.
2. The most dastardly things being done in the Web3 space are much more dastardly than anything you will do in your life.
Now for the two broad camps of people I see here:
a. People who think 2. is not relevant to pursuing 1.
b. People who think 2. can never justify pursuing 1. – or even finding out about it.
Look at the kids: the day is better spent curious.
Both 1 and 2 are nonsense. I am very curious about blockchains (Etherium primarily), but so far have not seen any web3 projects that are more “beautiful” than Electric Counterpoint by Reich or more “dastardly” than the holocaust.
If you mean that both of these are achievable on an individual level, then I fail to see how coding an idea has any more potential to achieve these extremes than using a paintbrush.
Look at the kids: they get far more excited by video games than DeFi.
The basic premise of web3 is decentralization of value transfer and digital ownership. Examples of value transfer: payments, swapping assets, escrow, auctions, crowdfunds. Examples of digital ownership: limited-edition art ownership, domain names, collectibles, game assets, shares, access tokens, user accounts, private keys, and maybe eventually other assets.
Real-world use cases could replace parts of PayPal, Patreon, Bandcamp or Kickstarter with a crypto-native solution to decentralize some parts of payments, user accounts, and ownership. Where is the killer Web3 app? It's only been a ~year or so since Web3 has entered mainstream consciousness, and the few-years-old tech is still far from a usable state. Crypto has a long way yet to go: Proof of Stake, rollups, zk privacy preservation, light clients, and a host of other solutions need to be first solved for it to be widely usable. In the meantime, most current Web3 apps are best to view as high-risk "beta" experiments.
> The Web was about making information accessible to all, Web 3 is trying to provide value to a few, where everything is done for the benefit of the few rather than benefit of all.
This is a gross misunderstanding of web3. Take a look at NFT art world, almost all the media and information is freely accessible, to the point that it is regularly ridiculed with "Right Click Save" by the out-crowd. This is distinctly different than Patreon and Bandcamp models, where artists might put digital media behind a paywall, making the information only accessible to a limited few. See more here[1]
Literally everyday there's an article that is posted that completely misunderstands cryptocurrencies and the related ecosystem. The most common critique I see on HN of this is that NFTs are garbage and rug pulls suck.
Thats like saying the modern web sucks because a couple of shitty websites are live and you got your CC stolen by phishing e-mails. It just makes no sense as an argument.
Crypto has a long, long, very long way to go but if folks truly do not believe that transferring something that we believe to have some value (i.e bitcoin, or USD, or whatever) without the need for a middleman, while also keeping your funds truly safe from external control (i.e banks, governments, and the like) then cryptocurrency is simply not for you, full stop thank you for considering it.
In the first world, the full value of such decentralization and trustlessness will never be understood until they get burned like Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Cyprus, and other countries with massive hyperinflation and complete loss of wealth (temporary or not). The daily fluctuations of BTC are literally nothing next to the hyperinflation of the Turkish Lira, the Lebanese pound, the Zimbabwean dollar, and so on.
As a side note, its getting kinda tiring to see these boring, lame takes on crypto which seem as half assed as they are uninsightful posted on HN. Lets get some moderation done on this front IMO.
I don’t think bitcoin actually saves you from these problems. It replaces something like a Swiss bank account with a group of miners who you have never met running code you don’t have time to audit (and probably couldn’t practically speaking), and can’t hire a lawyer to understand for you.
> folks truly do not believe that transferring something that we believe to have some value (i.e bitcoin, or USD, or whatever) without the need for a middleman, while also keeping your funds truly safe from external control (i.e banks, governments, and the like) then cryptocurrency is simply not for you, full stop thank you for considering it.
None of that applies to Bitcoin or any other digital currency. There is always a middle man (and fees), disintermediation is a myth (and don't get me started on decentralization).
TL;DR -> just ignore this post as it has no substance and it has no arguments. It is just a rant about something which is not clear, but not even examples are given to make their point.
Or even proud of sitting on extremely absolutist statements like 100% of all of it is going to be wiped out, or even the other side suggesting that everything is going to take over the current system.
Both outcomes are simply not going to happen and those supporting either of those outcomes will be disappointed.
Co-existence with the current system is the most highly likely outcome with some cryptocurrency projects staying around and meme-coins, tokens will disappear even after regulations coming in.
We are in a prison surounded by high walls, wire fences and guard towers occupied by watchful guards. Some of us are digging a ditch so we can all escape this hell, and you're standing at the entrance yelling at us that the ditch doesn't do anything. Why don't you help, or at least shut up?
To stretch this metaphor even further, I guess some people don’t believe this is a prison and wonder why you are digging up the community park with a bunch of holes that seem dangerous and at the very least tear up the greenery we could have played on.
> I guess some people don’t believe this is a prison
> tear up the greenery we could have played on
Can hardly believe HN is earnestly arguing that walled gardens controlled by Google / Facebook / et al are a preferable future for the internet. There's some serious cognitive dissonance on this site when it comes to blockchain tech.
> a) Web3 doesn't prevent centralisation. Look at NFTs and OpenSea and how it manipulates the output of the blockchain to flag/hide stolen NFTs.
No one, including OP, is arguing that web3/blockchain/whatever is "solved." It's obviously very new tech with tons of flaws. Why can't we have a frank conversation about the flaws and work on solutions? Instead on HN we get brainless vitriol against ANYTHING blockchain related and arguments that decentralization is unnecessary (just use a database, duh! Just trust Google, duh!). The whole thing is frustratingly dishonest.
> b) I don't use Facebook and Google only for search engine. So those aren't walled gardens for many people.
Facebook, Google, and/or Apple control your life. You can't even operate a phone without one of them.
> Instead on HN we get brainless vitriol against ANYTHING blockchain related and arguments that decentralization is unnecessary (just use a database, duh! Just trust Google, duh!). The whole thing is frustratingly dishonest.
I’m honestly trying not to throw the baby out with the bath water here but struggling to find out if the baby was ever even in the bath amidst all this dirty water. The problem statements people say crypto will solve and then the implementation always seem like total non-sequiturs to me. I could just be dumb and missing the next big thing from the internet, I accept that. But it’s not for a lack of trying or good faith that smart people could see something there, I assure you.
> Facebook, Google, and/or Apple control your life. You can't even operate a phone without one of them.
How is a blockchain going to approach solving this problem? Why are we conflating these issues? This is the kind of thing that makes me scratch my head like I mentioned above.
Except that ditch leads to a second prison that you built, but this one has no guards and no rules, and people are getting stabbed to death and a daily basis while a few unelected and unaccountable inmates are robbing everyone else.
The big pitch was that you could have non-copyable items which you could move between virtual worlds. The Second Life / Open Simulator ecosystem already has that problem. People looked into NFTs as a way to solve it, and concluded it would not help.
You can download content and upload it as new content, perhaps with a minor mod, creating a new object. This is called "copybotting" in Second Life and Open Simulator. As with any copyright violation, you can file DMCA takedown requests if you find a copy of your stuff.
Would NFTs stop copybotting? No. They just protect the object's ID, not its content. You can still copy the content. If you want to copy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT image and make a poster of it, the NFT system does nothing to stop you. It's not even clear that's a copyright violation in the US, since BAYC images are computer-generated.
Many NFTs don't even have an on-chain cryptographic hash of the content, only a URL for some server. Nor do most NFTs have their NFT ID watermarked into the actual content. So the NFT doesn't even give you a verifiable proof of ownership independent of the creator's server. There isn't info that would allow a server to tell if a new image upload is a copy of an existing item. An image search might help, but that doesn't need NFTs. Decentraland's solution to this problem is to charge a $500 "curation fee" to get an object onto their platform, which cuts down content to the point that they can check for duplicates.
NFTs are thus useless for their claimed purpose.