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It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto

It saddens me that they chose "web3" for the latest crypto pyramid scheme. Call it what you want, but please don't sully the web with your plat du jour crypto antics. Also for what it is worth, the web has been decentralised from the very start, I don't see what the fuss is about apart from just everyone getting rich selling the next hot coin/token/whatever.

cblconfederate 5y ago
social networking 'web2' had little lot to do with web also
- mattlondon 5y ago
  I'd disagree with that. Web 2 was the idea of site content being dynamic and user generated, and not curated by journalists/editors/whoever working a 9-5 or whatever. For many things like reddit, digg, youtube etc there was only a web interface to these things. They were of and for the web
  - onion2k 5y ago
    web1 was reading other people's content, web2 was about creating content and handing it to someone else to publish online, and web3 should be about retaining ownership of your own work. In theory, a web3 website could aggregate content produced by users while the users would be free to revoke the site's access, or they could move their content to a different site if they want, or they could delete it entirely. In a web3 world it should be the case that Reddit's access to content is by looking it up on a blockchain to publish, rather than claiming joint ownership of it. This, obviously, assumes that you believe users retaining ownership of the content they make is a real and necessary benefit. I'm not sure about that yet. I don't really see why people need to. Unfortunately however, regardless of whether web3 content ownership is a good thing or not, the current cohort of web3 businesses and evangelists seem more interested in shilling their own coins and many-thousands-of-dollars coding courses instead.
    - mattlondon 5y ago
      This all sounds very noble, but it will last precisely as long as it takes someone to right-click copy right-click paste. Sure you can verify the hash and signature etc, but no one reading an article is going to bother verifying the signature apart from the real die-hards. Heck my mum can't even verify she typed in the right URI and ends up on all sorts of crazy scam sites (e.g. "I went to google and they said I had to call them about a virus and pay them £150 to fix it"). If someone posts something to reddit3, then someone copies it and reposts it again with a different hash and sig, what will happen? Nothing I expect.
      - onion2k 5y ago
        The ownership aspect of web3 doesn't fix the problem you outline, sure, but it isn't meant to. Ownership of something isn't proof of uniqueness, it doesn't stop copying, and it would have no impact on what user's are able to do with other user's content. That's the same as ownership in the real world - the fact you own a Picasso doesn't stop me copying it, or photographing it, or telling people it's really by me. Ownership is about control of how legitimate third parties interact with your things, not how people copy them, illegally or otherwise. The control over copying comes from the legal mechanisms we attach to ownership, not the ownership itself. You can sue me for copying something, or report me to the police. The same would be true for web3 (if the courts choose to recognise that aspect of it all). The benefit of web3 is about users being able to control how their content is published by web3 websites. Reddit3 would not be able to claim ownership of user's creations. Like I said, I don't know if it's necessary or even that useful for users to have that control, but people definitely complain about it a bit. Maybe it would be.
        gondo 5y ago
        Legal system is still playing catch-up with web1.
        lottin 5y ago
        > You can sue me for copying something, or report me to the police. The same would be true for web3 (if the courts choose to recognise that aspect of it all). So web3 is exactly like web2 then?
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    Wikis existed long before the term "Web 2" was invented, "Web 2" wasn't about user generated content or "socializing", but simply a commercial land grab.
    - boudin 5y ago
      Can't agree more. Creating and sharing content in a decentralized way is exactly what the web is about from its inception. The only change that occured in the era marketed as "web2" is strong attacks against decentralization.
  - xorcist 5y ago
    That was only a small part of "web 2.0". Just as important were syndication, embeddability and APIs. Web 2 were podcasts, blogs, RSS and pingbacks. Web 1.0 evolved with user generated content and now more of the world's information is locked up behind a login screen than before. What this has to do with what is being sold as "web 3.0" is not clear. Blockchains have their uses but it's not the web.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    Web2, in the social media sense, was about advertising and merchandising. Let’s not reinvent history with a fiction that never was.
nathias 5y ago
Dry your tears, then you might see better and see what the fuss is about.
- padolsey 5y ago
  Can you elucidate us with how exactly this is an advancement of web technologies per se? I agree with OP comment that it's strange to adopt web3 as a moniker when it is a distinct stack/infra much akin to IPFS in spirit.
  - nathias 5y ago
    Web 1/2/3 is a designation of the global structure of web, if you don't see how 1 and 2 differ (like op) then you don't care that 2 and 3 do.
  - fastball 5y ago
    web1 – the original web, decentralized information sharing but everyone is hosting their own stuff web2 – make it easier for people to create stuff, but it's all centralized (boo), which in turn makes the interop of the original web much less present. i.e. gatekeepers everywhere web3 – allow the unfettered creativity of web2 with the benefits of decentralizing in web1. You can use one "account" to login to any web3 service, people can send money to that same account, etc, etc. In other words, web3 allows you to do things that weren't present in web1 at all without all the web2 centralization/gatekeeping baggage.
legutierr 5y ago
> the latest crypto pyramid scheme The client libraries for Ethereum are called “web3”, and have been for half a decade at least. Web3 has been a core concept promoted by the Ethereum team from the beginning. Say what you will about Ethereum, it is not the “latest crypto pyramid scheme”.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Yes I guess we can drop the "latest".
  - legutierr 5y ago
    Regardless as to whether Eth is currently overpriced, real people pay gas fees to the Ethereum network to use the services it provides. And regardless as to how you feel about value of those services, to those people who are paying those fees, those services do have value. In other words, the price of Eth is derived in part from real demand for the use of the services of the Ethereum network. If speculative interest in Eth were to completely collapse, its price would not go to zero, because demand for the use of the Ethereum network would sustain it. I imagine that you would argue that demand for Ethereum network services is itself driven by pyramid schemes, and is therefore inflated. Perhaps. That does not mean, however, that Ethereum itself is a pyramid scheme. And certainly not all of the demand for Ethereum services is illegitimate. A pyramid scheme requires that cashing out of one's investment depend on new investment money entering the scheme. It is not unreasonable, however, to purchase Ethereum with the hope that the price will go up because it will need to be purchased by users of the network, who will pay higher prices in the future when demand for the network's services goes up. You can disagree with this proposition without calling Ethereum a pyramid scheme. Just because you think Eth is a bad investment does not necessarily mean that it is a pyramid scheme.
    - ohCh6zos 5y ago
      Why would I pay gas when a Pi board gives me the same amount of computing power but is cheaper?
    - 5y ago
wruza 5y ago
My sadness comes from the fact people perceive X N as better than X N-1. As if web got any better with 2 (in a general sense, not in tech). And what’s this anyway, The Web? Are we spiders, or maybe fishermen? Ridiculous. Don’t stick too much to these names.
- fifilura 5y ago
  > My sadness comes from the fact people perceive X N as better than X N-1 Terminator 3 Home Alone 3 Jurassic Park 3 Police academy 3 Alien 3 The list is long...
  - vegetablepotpie 5y ago
    GPL 3 Gnome 3 All these third iterations…
    - bitwize 5y ago
      Half-Life, er, wait a minute...
bravenous 5y ago
Yes web was decentralised till it became centralised with big tech gatekeepers. AMZN makes more money from sellers fee than AWS now. Thus killing small businesses - the lifeblood of most economies. Link below. It is time to get rid of gatekeepers, toll collector and have control of our data & communities. Web 3 is a way do that and will take about a decade as the infra builds out. So it certainly is BS for big tech landlords and their retinue. Crypto, is part of that plan for payments. Certainly there are scams but no different than scams today - where we are treated like lab rats subjected to data stimuli, our data stolen without permission or compensation. Sure I will take the Internet of 90s any day over today’s web with its surveillance capitalism. But that boat passed long back, as will the current one. Web3 allows users to be in control of the network(s) or communities collectively. That certainly is good for most folks. https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/amazon-has-a-special-business-that-investors-dont-understand-and-its-more-important-to-the-company-than-aws/articleshow/73752146.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/amazon-has-a-spe...
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Amazon has been fantastic for my small business. The fees aren't too crippling (around 15% of revenue) and FBA is an absolute Godsend for anyone based outside of the US trying to crack into that market (similar for Europe). I could not thank Mr. Bezos more for the opportunities Amazon has given my family. The income from FBA was a major factor in my decision to quit my job back in 2020, and because of that my daughter can be with her daddy every single day.
  - pokepim 5y ago
    How much you get for shilling?
    - dang 5y ago
      You can't post like this here, and we ban accounts that do. Please read the rules and don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
austincheney 5y ago
I agree that cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme, but the web is incredibly centralized. The whole point of DNS is to normalize an easy to remember name to an address so that everyone can access that same address easily. That is almost the purest essence of centralization. In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud provider for all your family to access? That is centralized: an agreed upon location for everyone to access. In contrast decentralization means no third party. Grandma pushing the family photos directly onto the kids hard drive from across the network, for example. The confusion here is most people confuse the web for the internet. The internet is a big decentralized network thanks to BGP. The web is an application riding that network thanks to HTTP. The goal of the web, as it was invented. was to allow decentralized content access via hyperlinks. That vision is essentially dead. Content is now an index on a database behind a walled garden. On the web content is king. In a true decentralized platform autonomy and availability are king while content is trivial.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud provider for all your family to access? That is centralized: an agreed upon location for everyone to access. As there are multiple places where the family photos can be posted (Facebook, 500px, Google, etc), that demonstrates that the web is decentralized. What it may not be is distributed, where one can easily self-host: * https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralized/ https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralize...
  - austincheney 5y ago
    Choice is not a principle concept of decentralization. In decentralization the only quality that matters is degree of autonomy. If I need your common access point to send/receive content the system is highly centralized as autonomy is fully vested in the third party content host. The presence of choice only means there are multiple centralized systems not interconnecting. This is why the web is highly centralized despite choice and why Web3 won’t work. Web3 is focused upon federated solutions. A federated solution is semi-autonomous, less centralized than the web but not fully decentralized.
flooow 5y ago
If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings). In reality, non-deflationary cryptocurrencies have been tried on various occasions. Surprise! None of them have taken off because "number doesn't go up".
- iso1210 5y ago
  Isn't that Dogecoin? (although inflation rate itself is deflationary - dropping from 5% pa about now to 2% in about 20 years)
  - Hjfrf 5y ago
    Dogecoin is a copy+paste of bitcoin with a few config values changed. That's why it shares the inflationary model. The reason bitcoin is often described as deflationary is that many coins are lost, and the inflation is somewhat priced-in.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      How is Bitcoin inflationary? Even without coin lossage (a ridiculous concept in any other financial system, short of literally setting your money on fire), the network is programmed to eventually stop minting coins. Fixed supply on increased demand (if it’s the economic substitute we’ve all been promised) is the precondition for deflationary movement. No amount of “pricing in” changes that.
      - paulgb 5y ago
        It’s an argument of semantics, really: if it will eventually stop printing coins, I’d consider it inflationary until that point in time and non-inflationary thereafter. In practice, current holders are being diluted to subsidize the security of the network.
jiveturkey 5y ago
> the web has been decentralised maybe the web per se, but in practical terms it depends on the DNS which is decidedly not decentralized.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  always seemed weird to me that the hosts file never became a little personal address book, with some push mechanism to notify me of address changes, “gmail.com is moving to x.x.x.x”
  - tata71 5y ago
    DNS servers do that. You're just along for the ride.
zepto 5y ago
The web is pretty sullied already, no?
notacoward 5y ago
What did you expect from people who ruined "crypto" by using it for only one kind of system of which cryptography is only one element?
p2p_astroturf 5y ago
Ironically, the worst part of web3 is that everything that calls itself that, such as web3.js and metamask, are web based. > The web is decentralized I know you just want to throw in the invalid "look at me I'm an old school hacker" definition that can't be argued with, but it isn't. To serve content, it has to be hosted somewhere, and that place must be a single entity, and it must have infinite money to replicate the content for infinite users. On freenet or torrent, this isn't the case. Then there are also the other 700 ways the web is centralized...
- anentropic 5y ago
  > it must have infinite money to replicate the content for infinite users what?
  - p2p_astroturf 5y ago
    imagine you make a website imagine it blows up in popularity do you get the problem now?
GuB-42 5y ago
Crypto is not a pyramid scheme, it is not a Ponzi scheme either. Call it a bubble, tulips, "greater fool", pump-and-dump... if you don't believe in the latest crypto-scheme, but pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes are something different. For pyramid schemes, the idea is that you have to pay to enter a network, and you make money by recruiting new members. The system breaks down once there a no people left to recruit, which happen quickly due to the exponential nature of the scheme. The core of a pyramid scheme is the filiation system, there is no such thing in, say, a NFT market. You can make a pyramid scheme with cryptocurrencies, but none of the popular trends are. Ponzi schemes are also not pyramid schemes. Ponzi schemes involve a promise of unrealistic returns on investment, and they do get paid, at least in the early phase. The trick is that the returns come from new investors, and the system breaks down when people stop investing. A Ponzi scheme requires a secretive central authority that pays out the promised interests. And by nature, cryptocurrencies have no central authority and make no promise, so, not a Ponzi scheme. Instead, crypto-schemes are simply based on speculation. And if it is a scam, it is a different kind of scam. If we start calling anything a pyramid/Ponzi scheme, the very idea of trade and investment become a pyramid/Ponzi scheme. It will always be the case that early adopters will get more money if the (honest or not) thing takes off, this is a direct consequence of the risks involved.

cblconfederate 5y ago

social networking 'web2' had little lot to do with web also

mattlondon 5y ago
I'd disagree with that. Web 2 was the idea of site content being dynamic and user generated, and not curated by journalists/editors/whoever working a 9-5 or whatever. For many things like reddit, digg, youtube etc there was only a web interface to these things. They were of and for the web
- onion2k 5y ago
  web1 was reading other people's content, web2 was about creating content and handing it to someone else to publish online, and web3 should be about retaining ownership of your own work. In theory, a web3 website could aggregate content produced by users while the users would be free to revoke the site's access, or they could move their content to a different site if they want, or they could delete it entirely. In a web3 world it should be the case that Reddit's access to content is by looking it up on a blockchain to publish, rather than claiming joint ownership of it. This, obviously, assumes that you believe users retaining ownership of the content they make is a real and necessary benefit. I'm not sure about that yet. I don't really see why people need to. Unfortunately however, regardless of whether web3 content ownership is a good thing or not, the current cohort of web3 businesses and evangelists seem more interested in shilling their own coins and many-thousands-of-dollars coding courses instead.
  - mattlondon 5y ago
    This all sounds very noble, but it will last precisely as long as it takes someone to right-click copy right-click paste. Sure you can verify the hash and signature etc, but no one reading an article is going to bother verifying the signature apart from the real die-hards. Heck my mum can't even verify she typed in the right URI and ends up on all sorts of crazy scam sites (e.g. "I went to google and they said I had to call them about a virus and pay them £150 to fix it"). If someone posts something to reddit3, then someone copies it and reposts it again with a different hash and sig, what will happen? Nothing I expect.
    - onion2k 5y ago
      The ownership aspect of web3 doesn't fix the problem you outline, sure, but it isn't meant to. Ownership of something isn't proof of uniqueness, it doesn't stop copying, and it would have no impact on what user's are able to do with other user's content. That's the same as ownership in the real world - the fact you own a Picasso doesn't stop me copying it, or photographing it, or telling people it's really by me. Ownership is about control of how legitimate third parties interact with your things, not how people copy them, illegally or otherwise. The control over copying comes from the legal mechanisms we attach to ownership, not the ownership itself. You can sue me for copying something, or report me to the police. The same would be true for web3 (if the courts choose to recognise that aspect of it all). The benefit of web3 is about users being able to control how their content is published by web3 websites. Reddit3 would not be able to claim ownership of user's creations. Like I said, I don't know if it's necessary or even that useful for users to have that control, but people definitely complain about it a bit. Maybe it would be.
      - gondo 5y ago
        Legal system is still playing catch-up with web1.
      - lottin 5y ago
        > You can sue me for copying something, or report me to the police. The same would be true for web3 (if the courts choose to recognise that aspect of it all). So web3 is exactly like web2 then?
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  Wikis existed long before the term "Web 2" was invented, "Web 2" wasn't about user generated content or "socializing", but simply a commercial land grab.
  - boudin 5y ago
    Can't agree more. Creating and sharing content in a decentralized way is exactly what the web is about from its inception. The only change that occured in the era marketed as "web2" is strong attacks against decentralization.
- xorcist 5y ago
  That was only a small part of "web 2.0". Just as important were syndication, embeddability and APIs. Web 2 were podcasts, blogs, RSS and pingbacks. Web 1.0 evolved with user generated content and now more of the world's information is locked up behind a login screen than before. What this has to do with what is being sold as "web 3.0" is not clear. Blockchains have their uses but it's not the web.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Web2, in the social media sense, was about advertising and merchandising. Let’s not reinvent history with a fiction that never was.

nathias 5y ago

Dry your tears, then you might see better and see what the fuss is about.

padolsey 5y ago
Can you elucidate us with how exactly this is an advancement of web technologies per se? I agree with OP comment that it's strange to adopt web3 as a moniker when it is a distinct stack/infra much akin to IPFS in spirit.
- nathias 5y ago
  Web 1/2/3 is a designation of the global structure of web, if you don't see how 1 and 2 differ (like op) then you don't care that 2 and 3 do.
- fastball 5y ago
  web1 – the original web, decentralized information sharing but everyone is hosting their own stuff web2 – make it easier for people to create stuff, but it's all centralized (boo), which in turn makes the interop of the original web much less present. i.e. gatekeepers everywhere web3 – allow the unfettered creativity of web2 with the benefits of decentralizing in web1. You can use one "account" to login to any web3 service, people can send money to that same account, etc, etc. In other words, web3 allows you to do things that weren't present in web1 at all without all the web2 centralization/gatekeeping baggage.

legutierr 5y ago

> the latest crypto pyramid scheme The client libraries for Ethereum are called “web3”, and have been for half a decade at least. Web3 has been a core concept promoted by the Ethereum team from the beginning. Say what you will about Ethereum, it is not the “latest crypto pyramid scheme”.

speedgoose 5y ago
Yes I guess we can drop the "latest".
- legutierr 5y ago
  Regardless as to whether Eth is currently overpriced, real people pay gas fees to the Ethereum network to use the services it provides. And regardless as to how you feel about value of those services, to those people who are paying those fees, those services do have value. In other words, the price of Eth is derived in part from real demand for the use of the services of the Ethereum network. If speculative interest in Eth were to completely collapse, its price would not go to zero, because demand for the use of the Ethereum network would sustain it. I imagine that you would argue that demand for Ethereum network services is itself driven by pyramid schemes, and is therefore inflated. Perhaps. That does not mean, however, that Ethereum itself is a pyramid scheme. And certainly not all of the demand for Ethereum services is illegitimate. A pyramid scheme requires that cashing out of one's investment depend on new investment money entering the scheme. It is not unreasonable, however, to purchase Ethereum with the hope that the price will go up because it will need to be purchased by users of the network, who will pay higher prices in the future when demand for the network's services goes up. You can disagree with this proposition without calling Ethereum a pyramid scheme. Just because you think Eth is a bad investment does not necessarily mean that it is a pyramid scheme.
  - ohCh6zos 5y ago
    Why would I pay gas when a Pi board gives me the same amount of computing power but is cheaper?
  - 5y ago

wruza 5y ago

My sadness comes from the fact people perceive X N as better than X N-1. As if web got any better with 2 (in a general sense, not in tech). And what’s this anyway, The Web? Are we spiders, or maybe fishermen? Ridiculous. Don’t stick too much to these names.

fifilura 5y ago
> My sadness comes from the fact people perceive X N as better than X N-1 Terminator 3 Home Alone 3 Jurassic Park 3 Police academy 3 Alien 3 The list is long...
- vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  GPL 3 Gnome 3 All these third iterations…
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Half-Life, er, wait a minute...

bravenous 5y ago

Yes web was decentralised till it became centralised with big tech gatekeepers. AMZN makes more money from sellers fee than AWS now. Thus killing small businesses - the lifeblood of most economies. Link below. It is time to get rid of gatekeepers, toll collector and have control of our data & communities. Web 3 is a way do that and will take about a decade as the infra builds out. So it certainly is BS for big tech landlords and their retinue. Crypto, is part of that plan for payments. Certainly there are scams but no different than scams today - where we are treated like lab rats subjected to data stimuli, our data stolen without permission or compensation. Sure I will take the Internet of 90s any day over today’s web with its surveillance capitalism. But that boat passed long back, as will the current one. Web3 allows users to be in control of the network(s) or communities collectively. That certainly is good for most folks. https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/amazon-has-a-special-business-that-investors-dont-understand-and-its-more-important-to-the-company-than-aws/articleshow/73752146.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/amazon-has-a-spe...

AussieWog93 5y ago
Amazon has been fantastic for my small business. The fees aren't too crippling (around 15% of revenue) and FBA is an absolute Godsend for anyone based outside of the US trying to crack into that market (similar for Europe). I could not thank Mr. Bezos more for the opportunities Amazon has given my family. The income from FBA was a major factor in my decision to quit my job back in 2020, and because of that my daughter can be with her daddy every single day.
- pokepim 5y ago
  How much you get for shilling?
  - dang 5y ago
    You can't post like this here, and we ban accounts that do. Please read the rules and don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

austincheney 5y ago

I agree that cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme, but the web is incredibly centralized. The whole point of DNS is to normalize an easy to remember name to an address so that everyone can access that same address easily. That is almost the purest essence of centralization. In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud provider for all your family to access? That is centralized: an agreed upon location for everyone to access. In contrast decentralization means no third party. Grandma pushing the family photos directly onto the kids hard drive from across the network, for example. The confusion here is most people confuse the web for the internet. The internet is a big decentralized network thanks to BGP. The web is an application riding that network thanks to HTTP. The goal of the web, as it was invented. was to allow decentralized content access via hyperlinks. That vision is essentially dead. Content is now an index on a database behind a walled garden. On the web content is king. In a true decentralized platform autonomy and availability are king while content is trivial.

throw0101a 5y ago
> In practice if you want to share family photos with your family do you upload those photos to a third party like a social media site or a cloud provider for all your family to access? That is centralized: an agreed upon location for everyone to access. As there are multiple places where the family photos can be posted (Facebook, 500px, Google, etc), that demonstrates that the web is decentralized. What it may not be is distributed, where one can easily self-host: * https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralized/ https://berty.tech/blog/decentralized-distributed-centralize...
- austincheney 5y ago
  Choice is not a principle concept of decentralization. In decentralization the only quality that matters is degree of autonomy. If I need your common access point to send/receive content the system is highly centralized as autonomy is fully vested in the third party content host. The presence of choice only means there are multiple centralized systems not interconnecting. This is why the web is highly centralized despite choice and why Web3 won’t work. Web3 is focused upon federated solutions. A federated solution is semi-autonomous, less centralized than the web but not fully decentralized.

flooow 5y ago

If the crypto community wants to demonstrate that it isn't a giant Ponzi scheme, why not come up with a non-deflationary token, which will not massively reward 'early adopters' at the expense of everyone else, in perpetuity? (A non-deflationary token would be one where the supply grows by some reasonable percentage every year, effectively acting as a flat tax on one's holdings). In reality, non-deflationary cryptocurrencies have been tried on various occasions. Surprise! None of them have taken off because "number doesn't go up".

iso1210 5y ago
Isn't that Dogecoin? (although inflation rate itself is deflationary - dropping from 5% pa about now to 2% in about 20 years)
- Hjfrf 5y ago
  Dogecoin is a copy+paste of bitcoin with a few config values changed. That's why it shares the inflationary model. The reason bitcoin is often described as deflationary is that many coins are lost, and the inflation is somewhat priced-in.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    How is Bitcoin inflationary? Even without coin lossage (a ridiculous concept in any other financial system, short of literally setting your money on fire), the network is programmed to eventually stop minting coins. Fixed supply on increased demand (if it’s the economic substitute we’ve all been promised) is the precondition for deflationary movement. No amount of “pricing in” changes that.
    - paulgb 5y ago
      It’s an argument of semantics, really: if it will eventually stop printing coins, I’d consider it inflationary until that point in time and non-inflationary thereafter. In practice, current holders are being diluted to subsidize the security of the network.

jiveturkey 5y ago

> the web has been decentralised maybe the web per se, but in practical terms it depends on the DNS which is decidedly not decentralized.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
always seemed weird to me that the hosts file never became a little personal address book, with some push mechanism to notify me of address changes, “gmail.com is moving to x.x.x.x”
- tata71 5y ago
  DNS servers do that. You're just along for the ride.

zepto 5y ago

The web is pretty sullied already, no?

notacoward 5y ago

What did you expect from people who ruined "crypto" by using it for only one kind of system of which cryptography is only one element?

p2p_astroturf 5y ago

Ironically, the worst part of web3 is that everything that calls itself that, such as web3.js and metamask, are web based. > The web is decentralized I know you just want to throw in the invalid "look at me I'm an old school hacker" definition that can't be argued with, but it isn't. To serve content, it has to be hosted somewhere, and that place must be a single entity, and it must have infinite money to replicate the content for infinite users. On freenet or torrent, this isn't the case. Then there are also the other 700 ways the web is centralized...

anentropic 5y ago
> it must have infinite money to replicate the content for infinite users what?
- p2p_astroturf 5y ago
  imagine you make a website imagine it blows up in popularity do you get the problem now?

GuB-42 5y ago

Crypto is not a pyramid scheme, it is not a Ponzi scheme either. Call it a bubble, tulips, "greater fool", pump-and-dump... if you don't believe in the latest crypto-scheme, but pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes are something different. For pyramid schemes, the idea is that you have to pay to enter a network, and you make money by recruiting new members. The system breaks down once there a no people left to recruit, which happen quickly due to the exponential nature of the scheme. The core of a pyramid scheme is the filiation system, there is no such thing in, say, a NFT market. You can make a pyramid scheme with cryptocurrencies, but none of the popular trends are. Ponzi schemes are also not pyramid schemes. Ponzi schemes involve a promise of unrealistic returns on investment, and they do get paid, at least in the early phase. The trick is that the returns come from new investors, and the system breaks down when people stop investing. A Ponzi scheme requires a secretive central authority that pays out the promised interests. And by nature, cryptocurrencies have no central authority and make no promise, so, not a Ponzi scheme. Instead, crypto-schemes are simply based on speculation. And if it is a scam, it is a different kind of scam. If we start calling anything a pyramid/Ponzi scheme, the very idea of trade and investment become a pyramid/Ponzi scheme. It will always be the case that early adopters will get more money if the (honest or not) thing takes off, this is a direct consequence of the risks involved.