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Reading through the linked article on "real world uses for Web3", most of them seem to consist of things that public key cryptography has been able to solve for

• gjulianm 5y ago
  > because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. This is a constant issue I have with crypto advocates. Most of the use cases can be done with crypto, but also with other techs (sometimes it's as simple as "we need a database for this"). But there's never a serious analysis of why those use cases have not been covered with previous tech, and when you point out that there might be issues other than the tech then you get labeled as a "crypto hater". And I wouldn't care too much if random people called you a hater, but when all crypto people label dissent as "haters" it makes me think it's like a cult where all you need to do is believe.
  • wisty 5y ago
    I love pointing out that if it becomes a serious currency banks would offer bitcoin-denominated loans (causing an increase in money supply); and if there's then a credit crunch the Fed could offer bitcoin-denominated (but unbacked) bonds. It would be like the gold standard all over again.
    • kevinak 5y ago
      I'm curious why you think this is the case. It's close to impossible (good luck convincing people to devalue their money) to increase the Bitcoin supply other than through minig.
      • anchpop 5y ago
        Loans create “virtual money” in a way, which does contribute to inflation (in fact, controlling lending is a primary way the federal reserve controls inflation)
        • kevinak 5y ago
          Yes, in the current fiat system that is the case, but there is no way for someone (a bank or government) to inflate the supply in world where Bitcoin is the currency everyone uses.
          • wodenokoto 5y ago
            No, you increase the amount of IOU's. I own 1 bitcoin, and everybody knows I'm good for my bitcoin (e.g., that is what a bank is. An institution everybody trusts to have money and they pay their dues.) I know write you an IOU for 1 bitcoin, and you buy a car with that IOU, because anyone who owns that IOU can come to me and get their bitcoin, and everybody knows that I am good for my money, because that is the whole condition of this thought experiment. I now write another IOU and give to my uncle, who buys a house with it, because everybody knows I'm good for it. Now the money supply has increased, without minting new bitcoins, and this is exactly what happened to gold (which, as you know as well as anybody, you can't just print)
            • azth 5y ago
              Once you ban money lending with interest, this is automatically solved.
        • azth 5y ago
          This is why loans, except out of pure charity and nothing expected in return other than the principal, are immoral and cause chaos and destruction as we've seen time and time again. There's a reason Islam prohibits money lending with interest. Same with Judaism and Christianity before they got corrupted.
    • Hjfrf 5y ago
      Exchanges and stablecoin issuers are already involved in fractional reserve banking. It's free money to them, why not?
    • Karunamon 5y ago
      There's no way to create "unbacked" bitcoin. You either have the transaction outputs pointing at your wallet address on the public blockchain, or you do not. Nobody wants or will accept FedBTC.
      • astrange 5y ago
        Celsius offers interest-bearing bitcoin accounts which they use to do margin lending, so this already exists.
        • Karunamon 5y ago
          Said lending is denominated in stablecoins, not BTC. It's secured with a crypto, but that's not relevant. Unlike fractional reserve (which was the topic under discussion), this does not result in an increase to the money supply. No new BTC is created.
    • azth 5y ago
      Would be great to go back to the gold standard.
• mypastself 5y ago
  I often feel like I’m missing a key piece of technological or intellectual insight when I read bullish articles like the linked one. I cannot see a single use-case in there that would definitively be improved by the use of blockchain, and in most cases, I’d expect the opposite to happen.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    The key insight you are missing is that someone makes a lot of money trying to convince you that this stuff is the future of the internet.
  • NicoJuicy 5y ago
    You aren't, no worries.
  • ianm98 5y ago
    What do you think about cryptocurrency enabled sports betting and prediction markets? There's a pretty clear technical path to these replacing traditional sports betting market makers and I personally cannot wait. Current market makers like DraftKings still put out betting lines with insane spreads, because in the US atleast, their markets are protected by regulatory capture. This [1] is one of the projects I have my eye on in this space but there is many that are starting to get to work now that a lot of the technical issues around Oracles are being sorted out. 1. https://www.betdex.com/ https://www.betdex.com/ * No affiliation
    • mypastself 5y ago
      Since the use of an oracle introduces a source of information external to the blockchain, we’re left with centralization issues again. I feel like this removes the unique advantage of using the technology in the first place. I suppose there are ways to gamble exclusively using the blockchain, but I don’t think sports betting is among them.
      • ianm98 5y ago
        Suppose they use a fully centralized oracles, isn't there still a huge benefit in having much lower fees and tighter spreads, even if it's not decentralized? For the end user, having settlement, custody, and market making decentralized while having centralized oracles is still a huge advantage. Then consider that people are tackling the issue of decentralized oracles. The most common platform for that is Chainlink [1]. In this space specifically, Augur [2] is among those who has attempted to make decentralized sports reporting Oracles. I'm not sure if their solution is fully fleshed out, but regardless it doesn't seem to be an insurmountable technical issue for something that is as easy to verify as outcome of a game. If your willing to accept that the Oracle problem will be solved, I'm not sure how you would say this doesn't create value for consumers. 1.https://chain.link/education/blockchain-oracles https://chain.link/education/blockchain-oracles 2. https://augur.net/ https://augur.net/
• legutierr 5y ago
  > because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data. Previously, you could run your own webserver, your own email server, etc, and you could trust your own data, but other people collaborating with you would need to trust you to manage that data, and trust that you hadn’t manipulated the data in some way. What if they don’t know you well enough to trust you? Sure, other people could keep their own copy of that same data, and sync with you somehow, but most pre-blockchain data services lack replication capability out of the box, and as far as I know there are no non-blockchain data services that can give you any assurances at all that data has not been tampered with. And on top of the issue of trust is the issue of network size. If you personally know who you want to collaborate with, you can share a single server, but what if you want open collaboration and discovery to be part of the application? Federated application services capable of competing with big tech have been a dream and an objective of open-source advocates for decades, but no one has been able to deliver. I would say the major reason is because trustless data syncing at scale is orders of magnitude harder than running a single standalone server, and all of the solutions until web3 attempted to perform data syncing at the application layer—which means a lot of duplicated effort, and almost zero opportunity for reuse between projects. Blockchain tech moves replication and tampering protection to the data layer, as a generalized service that is relatively trivial to set up. The promise of web3 is that shared-data applications can be built on top of that data layer in the same way that complex centralized applications can be built on well-defined centralized data layers like the file system and the relational database. A robust and abstracted data layer allows application developers to spend more time thinking about application logic and less time thinking about data.
  • neilalexander 5y ago
    > But blockchains do introduce a technical capability that never existed before: shared, “trustless” access to and control over data. I don’t think blockchains control access over data at all without the integration of other technologies (i.e. using public key authentication to prove to some third-party service that you hold a key that performed a blockchain transaction). They only control permissions to update things on-chain and everything on the chain is still publicly readable anyway. PKI is capable of doing the same thing and has existed for a very long time. > Sure, other people could keep their own copy of that same data, and sync with you somehow, but most pre-blockchain data services lack replication capability out of the box, and as far as I know there are no non-blockchain data services that can give you any assurances at all that data has not been tampered with. Look at the existing NFT mess. The problem here is that the blockchain _doesn’t_ replicate anything other than a bit of metadata for these types of applications — the content still has to be stored elsewhere, often on a classic web server which is centralised and can go down any time. If you want an example of something that replicates data and guarantees integrity then look at IPFS. > Federated application services capable of competing with big tech have been a dream and an objective of open-source advocates for decades, but no one has been able to deliver. I would say the major reason is because trustless data syncing at scale is orders of magnitude harder than running a single standalone server, and all of the solutions until web3 attempted to perform data syncing at the application layer—which means a lot of duplicated effort, and almost zero opportunity for reuse between projects. Blockchain’s answer to “federation is hard” is just to replicate the entire chain to all participants and have all participants repeat the exact same work to arrive at the same position. This is not exactly a glamouring success story of how to avoid “duplicated effort” — in fact, duplicated effort is a fundamental part of the blockchain architecture. > Blockchain tech moves replication and tampering protection to the data layer, as a generalized service that is relatively trivial to set up. The promise of web3 is that shared-data applications can be built on top of that data layer in the same way that complex centralized applications can be built on well-defined centralized data layers like the file system and the relational database. This isn’t really true though — it’s more like the blockchain provides a tamperproof metadata store. Putting actual quantities of information onto a typical blockchain is either prohibitively expensive computationally (it needs to be replicated everywhere) or prohibitively expensive financially (Ethereum gas costs as an example).
• paradite 5y ago
  > because the writer has apparently never heard of a web server. This gives me the initial dropbox dismissal comment (you can do it trivially with ftp) vibe... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  • anaisbetts 5y ago
    Sure but the difference was that Dropbox was an order of magnitude more accessible and convenient in its experience. web3 has yet to make anything tangibly better than the thing it wants to replace - only more convoluted, risky, and expensive. It turns operations that were free and instant into operations that cost significant money and take minutes/hours
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    It's been years, over a decade since bitcoin came out, and still nothing useful came out of it. Dropbox was well understood to be useful shortly after it came out and the initial reactions were over.
• arnvald 5y ago
  One more point from that article I noticed: in a section talking about taking on multiple projects, the author writes "This is how much of Hollywood works." How can you not think: well, if this is how much of Hollywood works now, isn't that proof that you don't need a blockchain for it?!
  • JohnFen 5y ago
    Not to mention that "how Hollywood works" is seriously problematic as it is. I'm not sure it should be replicated.
    • ozim 5y ago
      Add to that - it really is talking "how Hollywood works" - on the movie set. It disregards all that happen before and after and outside of movie set. It also disregards that loads of projects/works are not "how Hollywood works".
• goodpoint 5y ago
  > Compute power is nearing post scarcity Nearing? 99.9% of the Internet content I care about is pure text. In quantities could be served and stored on SBC or a phone from 10 years ago. Think of text messaging, IM rooms, forums like HN or mailing lists, activitypub. Do the math around how much text a person can consume in a day and how much data can a SBC handle in a day.
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    > Do the math around how much text a person can consume in a day and how much data can a SBC handle in a day. A $0.80 microcontroller would get you pretty far.
• malermeister 5y ago
  The way I see it this scarcity thing is exactly the point, and I'll go a bit deeper. Capitalism can only work with scarcity to monetize. With scarcity nearing an end, there's now two camps: * those that are excited for the post-scarcity future where we can freely share data and culture * those who are deeply bought into capitalist ideology and who are terrified of capitalism ending with scarcity. The first group hates all the crypto stuff because it's a technological attempt to put the genie back in the bottle and undo the progress we've made in eliminating scarcity. The second group hails crypto as their savior and thinks it will revolutionize everything by reintroducing scarcity everywhere, giving capitalism a life line. I think that's the core disconnect.
  • brightstep 5y ago
    I don't think capitalism is going anywhere. "Web3" might succeed but, absent a political fight, only if it can be assimilated into existing capital and power structures.
    • malermeister 5y ago
      I'm not sure you fully got the point I was trying to make. Despite all the claims from crypto advocates about crypto freeing us from existing power structures, I think the truth is actually the opposite. Crypto entrenches existing power structures, where capital = power. You can see that formalized in various decentralized organizations where votes are allocated by token count, or in other words, more capital means more power. Crypto is an effort to preserve the status quo, not to change it. If the "web3" were to succeed, moneyed interests would still be controlling everything, with the only change being that some early crypto adopters would also rise to their level. Crypto advocacy comes down to an attempt to rise to the ruling class by serving it, not to topple it.
      • brightstep 5y ago
        Yes! That's what I've been saying. If crypto succeeds, it will be because it serves capital (what crypto believers refer to as "centralixed authority") not in spite of it.
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  With the added benefit every transaction you do with a "persona" isn't on a blockchain that almost everyone has access to into perpetuity.