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Riding off a wave of addicts and their enthusiasm for gambling. Meanwhile, Cash App, Apple Pay, and Stripe have done more for fintech in the past month than al

Riding off a wave of addicts and their enthusiasm for gambling. Meanwhile, Cash App, Apple Pay, and Stripe have done more for fintech in the past month than all other cryptocurrency technologies combined in the last decade.

echelon 5y ago
Bingo. They can't even get their numbering scheme right. This would be "web4" Disregarding the semantic web throws out the history of the tech that sought to build p2p knowledge graphs before the social giants pushed it aside. They care little for these concepts given their blatant disregard.
- tata71 5y ago
  Nah, jamming shitty responsive sites into phone screens was Web 2.5. Convergence, meaning plug your phone or tablet into fullsize keyboard and display, will be the new normal. Crossplatform web app EVERYTHING, PWA if you please, with web3 hooks where relevant, is Web 3.0.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Honestly i think its perfect. Both are big ideas that sound very impressive to an outsider but problematic once you get into the details.
  - echelon 5y ago
    In a world without the concentration of development to venture capital-backed tech firms, semantic models of data create a web of rich APIs and data that are interlinked and that can grow and evolve. You have schemas for representing people that you can download as contacts. Schemas for representing articles that can be linked to people. Schemas for comments and upvotes... Fully distributed Facebook / Reddit / Twitter that anyone could extend. Venture-backed startups grew faster than the Semantic Web. That's the reason it didn't materialize.
Vetch 5y ago
Where I live none of those services are available but cryptocurrency tech is. Connecting to services like patreon or getting small amounts for games on itch.io are headache inducing high friction activities involving several extra third party services that are barely worth the effort. The attached risk is hard to state as better given all the fly by night operations in the local finance industry. Even if very few people use crypto, it's orders of magnitude less stress to put up a link to a wallet for donations on say a page with a visual demo on how linear acceleration and light bending motivate gravity. It's instrumental in financing sci-hub, which is also vital here. You probably live in a country where central institutions are trusted. Probably without overwhelming levels of corruption actively antagonistic to citizens, or double digit inflation, or very high unemployment rates and a general lack of opportunity. I don't think cryptocurrencies are some magical cure and can't say they will be part of a solution concept. Neither do I care for gambling and scummy activity on it. For some of us it isn't about inflation hedging (although it has a useful role if you can anticipate impending economic collapse) or anti-fiat or overthrowing governments. It's about imagining a network of transactions where anyone can participate regardless of their country of birth, without a central synchronizing consensus mechanism and a strongly tamper resistant storage useful in coordinating economic activity. Blockchain free decentralized tech are preferable where possible but there are some things only blockchain structures (or even worse scaling massive communication overhead systems) can do.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Your poetic invocation of the theoretical glorious potential of crypto aside, what country do you live in?
  - askonomm 5y ago
    Not sure about OP, but I live in Argentina, and there is no Apple Pay, Stripe, or Cash App here either. Not in most of the Latin American countries, actually. I had to make a U.S Wyoming company in order to be able to use Stripe. And Latin America is a pretty big chunk of land, with a ton of people. And with the ever-increasing inflation of 40% YoY and government restrictions on the ability to convert foreign currency to local currency, crypto P2P is a saving grace here. I do think most crypto stuff is probably still a scam, but the ability to buy stable coins and sell them to someone local here for peso's by getting 2x more than I would with the official central bank rate is a godsend.

echelon 5y ago

Bingo. They can't even get their numbering scheme right. This would be "web4" Disregarding the semantic web throws out the history of the tech that sought to build p2p knowledge graphs before the social giants pushed it aside. They care little for these concepts given their blatant disregard.

tata71 5y ago
Nah, jamming shitty responsive sites into phone screens was Web 2.5. Convergence, meaning plug your phone or tablet into fullsize keyboard and display, will be the new normal. Crossplatform web app EVERYTHING, PWA if you please, with web3 hooks where relevant, is Web 3.0.
bawolff 5y ago
Honestly i think its perfect. Both are big ideas that sound very impressive to an outsider but problematic once you get into the details.
- echelon 5y ago
  In a world without the concentration of development to venture capital-backed tech firms, semantic models of data create a web of rich APIs and data that are interlinked and that can grow and evolve. You have schemas for representing people that you can download as contacts. Schemas for representing articles that can be linked to people. Schemas for comments and upvotes... Fully distributed Facebook / Reddit / Twitter that anyone could extend. Venture-backed startups grew faster than the Semantic Web. That's the reason it didn't materialize.

Vetch 5y ago

Where I live none of those services are available but cryptocurrency tech is. Connecting to services like patreon or getting small amounts for games on itch.io are headache inducing high friction activities involving several extra third party services that are barely worth the effort. The attached risk is hard to state as better given all the fly by night operations in the local finance industry. Even if very few people use crypto, it's orders of magnitude less stress to put up a link to a wallet for donations on say a page with a visual demo on how linear acceleration and light bending motivate gravity. It's instrumental in financing sci-hub, which is also vital here. You probably live in a country where central institutions are trusted. Probably without overwhelming levels of corruption actively antagonistic to citizens, or double digit inflation, or very high unemployment rates and a general lack of opportunity. I don't think cryptocurrencies are some magical cure and can't say they will be part of a solution concept. Neither do I care for gambling and scummy activity on it. For some of us it isn't about inflation hedging (although it has a useful role if you can anticipate impending economic collapse) or anti-fiat or overthrowing governments. It's about imagining a network of transactions where anyone can participate regardless of their country of birth, without a central synchronizing consensus mechanism and a strongly tamper resistant storage useful in coordinating economic activity. Blockchain free decentralized tech are preferable where possible but there are some things only blockchain structures (or even worse scaling massive communication overhead systems) can do.

wpietri 5y ago
Your poetic invocation of the theoretical glorious potential of crypto aside, what country do you live in?
- askonomm 5y ago
  Not sure about OP, but I live in Argentina, and there is no Apple Pay, Stripe, or Cash App here either. Not in most of the Latin American countries, actually. I had to make a U.S Wyoming company in order to be able to use Stripe. And Latin America is a pretty big chunk of land, with a ton of people. And with the ever-increasing inflation of 40% YoY and government restrictions on the ability to convert foreign currency to local currency, crypto P2P is a saving grace here. I do think most crypto stuff is probably still a scam, but the ability to buy stable coins and sell them to someone local here for peso's by getting 2x more than I would with the official central bank rate is a godsend.