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My mindset is anyone who is a "maxi" is just an idealist. Most (all?) idealists end up being wrong; that includes 100% decentralized viewpoints and 100% central

My mindset is anyone who is a "maxi" is just an idealist. Most (all?) idealists end up being wrong; that includes 100% decentralized viewpoints and 100% centralized viewpoints. Anyone who thinks that bitcoin is going to be somehow the most efficient to buy a beer at the local bar is an idealist. Anybody who thinks that their nation's fiat currency is the only safe thing to store value in need only look at Turkey and Venezuela as counter points (or find a list of defunct currencies throughout history if you want to get more philosophical). If you want to make more nuanced arguments about making global investments go ahead; but bitcoin is attractive because the narrative is more simple. Does that guarantee Bitcoin is the answer, nope. NFT's aren't just digital art; digital art is just an easy implementation of NFT's. DAO's are a decentralized usecase. Centralized entities issuing NFT's redeemable for services at a future point in time is another category. For example, Nike issuing a NFT which can be redeemed for a limited edition shoe rather then selling the shoe online directly, having it be bought up by bots and resold on the 3rd party market. Nike gets a cut of the resale value every time the NFT is resold at minimal effort; they don't even have to build/host the marketplace. Consumers get a limited edition shoe shipped to them directly from the manufacturer with worry about middlemen or authenticity. To your point, people already trust Nike (and many other companies) to send them products. Do the decentralized "maxi's" like that nike example, probably not. But they don't really get a say whether it exists or not. Everyone is so quick to declare web3 100% dead or 100% going to take over the world. If this was pre social media, nobody would know about web3. The value would be orders of magnitude lower and you'd probably only find out about it once there were "useful products" or never at all if it's a complete failure. But that's not the world we live in anymore.

rileyphone 5y ago
I think these are some good points. I’m a typical HN skeptic when it comes to crypto, but I think a lot of that comes with web3 being such an encompassing and thus refutable concept. I hope some parts of the tech that is being developed is ultimately helpful, but taking the humans out of the systems we rely on is just going to make them less adaptive and more fragile. Idealists don’t understand that our world is built on messy, imprecise systems and the strongest ones can change over time - defining them in immutable code is a mistake, though at least a noble one.

rileyphone 5y ago

I think these are some good points. I’m a typical HN skeptic when it comes to crypto, but I think a lot of that comes with web3 being such an encompassing and thus refutable concept. I hope some parts of the tech that is being developed is ultimately helpful, but taking the humans out of the systems we rely on is just going to make them less adaptive and more fragile. Idealists don’t understand that our world is built on messy, imprecise systems and the strongest ones can change over time - defining them in immutable code is a mistake, though at least a noble one.