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> Frankly, it is all too much for me. Same. I've been actively unfollowing people on Twitter every day to clean my feeds of it. I'm not anti-web3 or anti-crypt

> Frankly, it is all too much for me. Same. I've been actively unfollowing people on Twitter every day to clean my feeds of it. I'm not anti-web3 or anti-crypto, but I definitely don't need to read the same rhetoric from 100 people a day. Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

duxup 5y ago
Crypto seems to attract a lot of high minded hot air as far as social media goes.
indigochill 5y ago
> Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it... And the order of operations. Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and market it. The crypto community has been putting the marketing before the building. It's probably uncontroversial to say although cryptocurrency -could- do great things, right now the bulk of trade in the first world is speculation. Meanwhile there are television ads in the US aimed at football fans telling them how they can trade cryptocurrency. WTF does the average football fan need with cryptocurrency?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- krrrh 5y ago
  This is such a good point. "Web 2.0" didn't really emerge as a term of art until there was a need to describe the widespread adoption of UGC, REST, & AJAX and blockbuster web applications like gmail replacing desktop applications.
  - pedalpete 5y ago
    I was actually thinking the opposite. I seem to recall talking about Web 2.0 and AJAX, SOAP, etc. before most apps were built using those technologies. We were using AJAX minimally, CSS was a thing, but UGC was still a few years away, from what I recall.
- dathinab 5y ago
  I read an article recently which claimed that the majority of transaction volume is not speculation, but scams, fraud and similar. Like e.g. pyramid schemes. And that is where an average football fan needs crypto, to provide more monetary volume for scams and speculators manipulating the marked to siphon of. Or at least that was the take of the article, I'm not completely sure in either direction.
  - mediocregopher 5y ago
    The difference between "speculation" and "scams, fraud, and similar" is in the eye of the beholder. Lots of people find all crypto to be a giant scam, others find all of it to be a potential investment (hopefully with the understanding that the long-tail of individual investments in the space will go to zero).
    - acdha 5y ago
      > The difference between "speculation" and "scams, fraud, and similar" is in the eye of the beholder. The definitions of those terms really comes down to intention: a scammer is selling something they _know_ does not deliver what they're promising while a speculator should be making good-faith claims. This line gets blurry with optimism but most of the cryptocurrency speculation which called out is indeed misrepresentation of what a potential buyer would get, such as claiming that an NFT conveys ownership when it does not.
    - ShamelessC 5y ago
      Just FYI - that is a _deeply_ unconvincing argument where you are effectively saying "sure it's a scam (the one you know), but I have since updated _my_ definition of scam; and let me tell you - it sure did make me some money and avoid a lot of cognitive dissonance!" Like calling a pyramid scheme a reverse funnel system.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  > Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and market it. I don't like the Web3 hype either but generally people say one should market their product first then build it if there's enough demand, through a landing page capturing emails or pre-payments, or other such ways of gauging demand. It just seems that Web3 fanatics took the marketing side too far that they've forgotten they actually have to build a product (that solves an actual problem, not yet another coin) for which the marketing will be used.
  - aquateen 5y ago
    > generally people say one should market their product first then build it if there's enough demand I don't agree this is the common wisdom, and it's kind of a surprising take to see on this website specifically.
    - cercatrova 5y ago
      It's what I commonly see on startup fora including HN, reddit, IndieHackers etc. There's books about this method like Lean Startup, Mom Test and so on. The advice to build first and market later is actually advice that is much maligned in my experience, as there are too many stories of engineers who build and then find out they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it.
      - lottin 5y ago
        > they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it Or more likely, there was no demand for their product to begin with.
        cercatrova 5y ago
        Indeed, the worst is when they don't actually solve any problems whatsoever, they treat it as a way to have fun building the product, using new technologies, new architectures etc. There's nothing wrong with building to learn but the problem arises when engineers think building automatically leads to business success; the two are often entirely disjointed. WordPress is maligned as well but it's wildly successful for Automattic.
- ThomPete 5y ago
  The crypto community does what every startup should do. They find the customers before they start building i.e. they build community first and in effect build products. To say that things aren't being build in the crypto community is simply flat out false. It's one of the fastest developing industries and more and more talent are leaving their previous jobs or industries.
  - unicornmama 5y ago
    Talent is pouring in because free money is gushing out from the mother of all bubbles. Enjoy it while it lasts.
    - maybecrypto 5y ago
      Applies to me - leaving enterprise infrastructure for crypto. I think the tech is mostly useless, but the hype is real, the VC dollars are real. I want to try to capitalize on this.
      - ThomPete 5y ago
        if you believed it was a bubble you wouldn't leave your current job.
        maybecrypto 5y ago
        I think the current token prices are a bubble, but I think the space itself is here to stay.
        unicornmama 5y ago
        Wish you luck on making piles of cash. It’s here to stay? Care to share your thoughts?
        ThomPete 5y ago
        if the space is here to stay so is the token price, in fact we haven't even begun seeing the gains as almost no one is in this field yet.
- jrsj 5y ago
  The reason you see this is that the entire “web3” landscape is controlled by VCs. Also the underlying infra this stuff is running on isn’t very decentralized at all and with proof of stake it likely never will be. If you want true decentralization you’re going to need a combination of Bitcoin/Lightning Network/side chains to recreate a lot of what has been built out on other more centralized platforms. But VCs don’t want to fund this because there’s way less potential upside for them.
  - zhoujianfu 5y ago
    Or just bitcoin cash!
- irrational 5y ago
  Have you seen the one with Matt Damon hawking a crypto site? How much must it cost to get someone of his caliber to star in your commercial?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    To get George to do those expresso ads it costs 18 million. To get Matthew mcconaughey to drive 3 million. As for Matt Damon. cryto.com gave 1 million to water.org and Matt said any money he makes will go to water.org and that's worth millions. My guess 4-5 million on the highside but probably 3 to 4 million
- devin 5y ago
  To be fair, it's not a bad target market. Look at FanDuel and PokerStars and such. For many watching, it's just a new kind of gambling. The decision many are likely making is to throw their money at bitcoin instead of placing a bet at an online sportsbook. The feeling of "investing" in crypto versus outright gambling is a nice little story to tell oneself, even if it's not particularly true.
acdha 5y ago
> Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it... This is the tell for me that most of the people promoting it are just trying to find buyers for their tokens: there's tons of marketing for things which either don't exist at all or offer a worse experience than the status quo, and it's very rare to find someone who clearly understands the problem and how we got there. For example, we started with a more decentralized web than we have now — any conversation about how to go in a different direction needs to be based on the economic factors which produced the current state.
- CiPHPerCoder 5y ago
  Their MVP is a slide deck, or a sales website.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  An interesting quote I heard was something along the lines of: any action you take that doesn't cost fees on your wallet is probably not actually running on web3. A lot of stuff you see is just pretending to be web3 but not actually decentralized.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Yes — between the people who only work with a handful of company's APIs or which are still completely dependent on the real web, it seems a lot less decentralized than, say, Tor.
austincheney 5y ago
Web3 is federated, not decentralized. The distinction is significant.
- verdverm 5y ago
  I like this distinction, but I will note that not all web3 is federated or decentralized. It has been become more of a marketing word for projects which both do and don't adhere to the foundations.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    That's a problem I see, too. A lot of things are far less decentralized/federated in practice then they claim to be. It's not uncommon that some of the points why something is federated or even decentralized are only there in hypothetical scenarios (let's say in theory) which just don't happen in practice. Not because they technically can't, but because there are no marked dynamics insensitiveing it (probably more the opposite).
    - verdverm 5y ago
      Many of the protocol level 2 scaling like rollups are far more centrally controlled than they lead you to believe
- jagger27 5y ago
  Can you give a specific definition of federated in this context? To me, federated means that autonomous entities can talk to each other if they agree on a protocol. E.g. making a phone call between different carriers, or, uhh, the internet.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    Here are the definitions from an older comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640046
throwaway984393 5y ago
Decentralized trust is another way of saying a grapevine. Grapevine communication (or trust) is only useful in specific circumstances, and is often actively detrimental. Why are so many people just going along with these concepts as if they make sense? It's like nobody's using their brain.
- jandrese 5y ago
  I thought the whole web of trust concept was proven unworkable/unscalable with PGP? Most of crypto still seems like a solution in search of a problem. Or they are solving the problems that people don't have. The primary problem that most crypto systems seem to be trying to solve is "How can I make the founders as rich as possible?"
- stathibus 5y ago
  There's a small number of grifters leading a very large number of naive tech types who genuinely believe they're about to make a bunch of money on this thing they don't quite understand but must be legit or there wouldn't be so many people working on it.
- brightstep 5y ago
  I think there's a class of crypto believers who see "Web3" as a political movement, a way to dilute or break the power of institutions like e.g. the fed, Facebook, etc. To them, the grapevine is a secret sauce that will magically eliminate centralized power.
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    Which is ironic when you think about it. Those are the aims of Anarchist political philosophy, which is often anti-capitalist. So you could say Web3 is the "Capitalist-Anarchist Internet"
    - brightstep 5y ago
      Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to find a lot of AnCaps among Web3 advocates. I know there are also leftists who think it will challenge capitalism. Both parties are wrong to think a technology alone can make the changes they're looking for.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
Same. I actually see a lot of comparison with the "firehose of falsehoods", which is a known propaganda technique. I'm actually worried about people picking it up and getting suckered in without knowing anything on the technical side.
corobo 5y ago
I do keep wondering if it's worth being first on the scene with a new idea People pushing image NFTs will likely be keen to promote anything that can ding an argument against the naysayers, especially if they're cryptographically compensated somehow (whatever the web3 version of affiliate links is, is it airdrops?) Might be some free real estate to be had if anyone's got any png-less ideas Side comment I do realise I probably come off super naive to people who have already learned all this. I am trying! I've not come across a less newcomer friendly community since I started tinkering with Linux 20 years ago haha. "You just don't understand" is almost as much a web3 catchphrase as wagmi Admittedly Linux is now my sole non-mobile daily driver, maybe I'll get there with web3. Having had a tinker I do like the idea of the tech, I've just not had the "click" into how it's actually usable (for me) yet /blog
- shiohime 5y ago
  I'm creating an NFT project that's doing something I've never really seen other projects doing in any capacity, and can confirm it's pretty hard doing something against the current perception of what is possible with the tech. It's been disheartening sometimes tbh because of the stigma the tech has currently, and I've been called a scammer more than a few times simply because I'm creating a project that utilizes NFTs, by people who only know of the current "link to png on cloud storage and nothing else" model that is most common. Oh well, I just hope that when I release my project next month that I can prove that it's an incredibly unique experience that some group of people find it to be an exciting product.
tehjoker 5y ago
It's just a grift that people want you to buy into. That's why they're so invested in talking about it. If the technology was good, it'd practically sell itself.
- closetnerd 5y ago
  This is often not necessarily the case. For web3 - I'm still waiting to figure out what problem it can solve meaningfully.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    If you want to retain your sanity and finances, unless someone can explain in one sentence a clear and obvious use for the technology, all of crypto can be explained as unhinged speculation and rug pulls. We're over ten years in at this point with insane investment and nothing has appeared. My guess is that this is where the next financial crash will come from since it's totally unregulated and the "shadow banks" were mostly banned after 2008. All the shadow money just goes to crypto.
    - vanusa 5y ago
      We're over ten years in at this point with insane investment and nothing has appeared. You can't dismiss the $69 million Beeple sale as "nothing". Truly, it is a watershed moment in human history.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    That's more or less what the GP said. "If the technology is good" applies both to how well it works, but also how useful it is. Neither of those has a good answer yet. But the best way to see it being useful is to actually create an MVP and show it in practice, not through fancy words.
    - closetnerd 5y ago
      Was talking about "it'd sell itself". Good technology often doesn't sell itself.
Nav_Panel 5y ago
As someone who's out here building a web3 site (and is a heavy twitter user), I agree completely. Most of the twitter talking heads also have no clue what they're talking about, waxing on about grand visions when the first set of pragmatic implications are already here, basically (metamask/web wallet login).
- corobo 5y ago
  Do you have a tech blog or anything folks could keep up with? Preferably RSS based but I'd sign up to a mail list
  - Nav_Panel 5y ago
    Unfortunately not, I only really blog about philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. I have very little I consider "blogworthy" to say about the web3 space, other than technical documentation; I build it and leave exploration and design to the product guys.
- shiohime 5y ago
  It's honestly difficult to discuss ideas in the space outside of specialized discord channels given how divisive people on social media like twitter have been on the subject. Wallet based authentication is amazingly simple to work with and provides a great developer and end user experience, but you only really hear about it in passing and it gets overshadowed by the noise. Same with using NFTs for novel purposes; you can use them as essentially authz tokens for specialized services. I've been working on an NFT project exploring these concepts and am quite happy with the end results.
tehjoker 5y ago
The phrase "stock touts" comes to mind.
thedjpetersen 5y ago
Instead of unfollowing I've found that muting specific terms or words to be fairly useful at tuning the signal
jsemrau 5y ago
Don't want to appear as spammy, but please have a look at my project finclout.io. Here people are incentivised to moderate and curate content. Thus supporting the build-up of trust and clout. The incentivces are coming through the monetary policy of the participating proof-of-stake chains, so it's not necessary to put money in to get money out. It's simply taking some of the economic value away from Google/FB. If you look at their insane profit margins, it's worthwhile to attack.
- hooande 5y ago
  scanned your home page, have no idea what this is or how it can help me
  - jsemrau 5y ago
    Noted. Will put an example on the page. That might make it easier. The main value proposition is that if you are investing, then you can earn extra money by providing context on recent news for other investors. Currently this is done for free on other social sites.
    - arwineap 5y ago
      So a platform for pumping/selling your picks?
      - jsemrau 5y ago
        Quite the opposite.
- yunohn 5y ago
  > It's simply taking some of the economic value away from Google/FB. If you look at their insane profit margins, it's worthwhile to attack. I believe that you believe that Google/FB are competitors to your finclout.io. But I think you are very confused about your business model versus Google/FB. Neither of them are doing what you do - you are competing with blogs and social media groups/channels that curate investment advice.

duxup 5y ago

Crypto seems to attract a lot of high minded hot air as far as social media goes.

indigochill 5y ago

> Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it... And the order of operations. Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and market it. The crypto community has been putting the marketing before the building. It's probably uncontroversial to say although cryptocurrency -could- do great things, right now the bulk of trade in the first world is speculation. Meanwhile there are television ads in the US aimed at football fans telling them how they can trade cryptocurrency. WTF does the average football fan need with cryptocurrency?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
krrrh 5y ago
This is such a good point. "Web 2.0" didn't really emerge as a term of art until there was a need to describe the widespread adoption of UGC, REST, & AJAX and blockbuster web applications like gmail replacing desktop applications.
- pedalpete 5y ago
  I was actually thinking the opposite. I seem to recall talking about Web 2.0 and AJAX, SOAP, etc. before most apps were built using those technologies. We were using AJAX minimally, CSS was a thing, but UGC was still a few years away, from what I recall.
dathinab 5y ago
I read an article recently which claimed that the majority of transaction volume is not speculation, but scams, fraud and similar. Like e.g. pyramid schemes. And that is where an average football fan needs crypto, to provide more monetary volume for scams and speculators manipulating the marked to siphon of. Or at least that was the take of the article, I'm not completely sure in either direction.
- mediocregopher 5y ago
  The difference between "speculation" and "scams, fraud, and similar" is in the eye of the beholder. Lots of people find all crypto to be a giant scam, others find all of it to be a potential investment (hopefully with the understanding that the long-tail of individual investments in the space will go to zero).
  - acdha 5y ago
    > The difference between "speculation" and "scams, fraud, and similar" is in the eye of the beholder. The definitions of those terms really comes down to intention: a scammer is selling something they _know_ does not deliver what they're promising while a speculator should be making good-faith claims. This line gets blurry with optimism but most of the cryptocurrency speculation which called out is indeed misrepresentation of what a potential buyer would get, such as claiming that an NFT conveys ownership when it does not.
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    Just FYI - that is a _deeply_ unconvincing argument where you are effectively saying "sure it's a scam (the one you know), but I have since updated _my_ definition of scam; and let me tell you - it sure did make me some money and avoid a lot of cognitive dissonance!" Like calling a pyramid scheme a reverse funnel system.
cercatrova 5y ago
> Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and market it. I don't like the Web3 hype either but generally people say one should market their product first then build it if there's enough demand, through a landing page capturing emails or pre-payments, or other such ways of gauging demand. It just seems that Web3 fanatics took the marketing side too far that they've forgotten they actually have to build a product (that solves an actual problem, not yet another coin) for which the marketing will be used.
- aquateen 5y ago
  > generally people say one should market their product first then build it if there's enough demand I don't agree this is the common wisdom, and it's kind of a surprising take to see on this website specifically.
  - cercatrova 5y ago
    It's what I commonly see on startup fora including HN, reddit, IndieHackers etc. There's books about this method like Lean Startup, Mom Test and so on. The advice to build first and market later is actually advice that is much maligned in my experience, as there are too many stories of engineers who build and then find out they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it.
    - lottin 5y ago
      > they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it Or more likely, there was no demand for their product to begin with.
      - cercatrova 5y ago
        Indeed, the worst is when they don't actually solve any problems whatsoever, they treat it as a way to have fun building the product, using new technologies, new architectures etc. There's nothing wrong with building to learn but the problem arises when engineers think building automatically leads to business success; the two are often entirely disjointed. WordPress is maligned as well but it's wildly successful for Automattic.
ThomPete 5y ago
The crypto community does what every startup should do. They find the customers before they start building i.e. they build community first and in effect build products. To say that things aren't being build in the crypto community is simply flat out false. It's one of the fastest developing industries and more and more talent are leaving their previous jobs or industries.
- unicornmama 5y ago
  Talent is pouring in because free money is gushing out from the mother of all bubbles. Enjoy it while it lasts.
  - maybecrypto 5y ago
    Applies to me - leaving enterprise infrastructure for crypto. I think the tech is mostly useless, but the hype is real, the VC dollars are real. I want to try to capitalize on this.
    - ThomPete 5y ago
      if you believed it was a bubble you wouldn't leave your current job.
      - maybecrypto 5y ago
        I think the current token prices are a bubble, but I think the space itself is here to stay.
        unicornmama 5y ago
        Wish you luck on making piles of cash. It’s here to stay? Care to share your thoughts?
        ThomPete 5y ago
        if the space is here to stay so is the token price, in fact we haven't even begun seeing the gains as almost no one is in this field yet.
jrsj 5y ago
The reason you see this is that the entire “web3” landscape is controlled by VCs. Also the underlying infra this stuff is running on isn’t very decentralized at all and with proof of stake it likely never will be. If you want true decentralization you’re going to need a combination of Bitcoin/Lightning Network/side chains to recreate a lot of what has been built out on other more centralized platforms. But VCs don’t want to fund this because there’s way less potential upside for them.
- zhoujianfu 5y ago
  Or just bitcoin cash!
irrational 5y ago
Have you seen the one with Matt Damon hawking a crypto site? How much must it cost to get someone of his caliber to star in your commercial?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  To get George to do those expresso ads it costs 18 million. To get Matthew mcconaughey to drive 3 million. As for Matt Damon. cryto.com gave 1 million to water.org and Matt said any money he makes will go to water.org and that's worth millions. My guess 4-5 million on the highside but probably 3 to 4 million
devin 5y ago
To be fair, it's not a bad target market. Look at FanDuel and PokerStars and such. For many watching, it's just a new kind of gambling. The decision many are likely making is to throw their money at bitcoin instead of placing a bet at an online sportsbook. The feeling of "investing" in crypto versus outright gambling is a nice little story to tell oneself, even if it's not particularly true.

acdha 5y ago

> Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it... This is the tell for me that most of the people promoting it are just trying to find buyers for their tokens: there's tons of marketing for things which either don't exist at all or offer a worse experience than the status quo, and it's very rare to find someone who clearly understands the problem and how we got there. For example, we started with a more decentralized web than we have now — any conversation about how to go in a different direction needs to be based on the economic factors which produced the current state.

CiPHPerCoder 5y ago
Their MVP is a slide deck, or a sales website.
ehsankia 5y ago
An interesting quote I heard was something along the lines of: any action you take that doesn't cost fees on your wallet is probably not actually running on web3. A lot of stuff you see is just pretending to be web3 but not actually decentralized.
- acdha 5y ago
  Yes — between the people who only work with a handful of company's APIs or which are still completely dependent on the real web, it seems a lot less decentralized than, say, Tor.

austincheney 5y ago

Web3 is federated, not decentralized. The distinction is significant.

verdverm 5y ago
I like this distinction, but I will note that not all web3 is federated or decentralized. It has been become more of a marketing word for projects which both do and don't adhere to the foundations.
- dathinab 5y ago
  That's a problem I see, too. A lot of things are far less decentralized/federated in practice then they claim to be. It's not uncommon that some of the points why something is federated or even decentralized are only there in hypothetical scenarios (let's say in theory) which just don't happen in practice. Not because they technically can't, but because there are no marked dynamics insensitiveing it (probably more the opposite).
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Many of the protocol level 2 scaling like rollups are far more centrally controlled than they lead you to believe
jagger27 5y ago
Can you give a specific definition of federated in this context? To me, federated means that autonomous entities can talk to each other if they agree on a protocol. E.g. making a phone call between different carriers, or, uhh, the internet.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Here are the definitions from an older comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640046

throwaway984393 5y ago

Decentralized trust is another way of saying a grapevine. Grapevine communication (or trust) is only useful in specific circumstances, and is often actively detrimental. Why are so many people just going along with these concepts as if they make sense? It's like nobody's using their brain.

jandrese 5y ago
I thought the whole web of trust concept was proven unworkable/unscalable with PGP? Most of crypto still seems like a solution in search of a problem. Or they are solving the problems that people don't have. The primary problem that most crypto systems seem to be trying to solve is "How can I make the founders as rich as possible?"
stathibus 5y ago
There's a small number of grifters leading a very large number of naive tech types who genuinely believe they're about to make a bunch of money on this thing they don't quite understand but must be legit or there wouldn't be so many people working on it.
brightstep 5y ago
I think there's a class of crypto believers who see "Web3" as a political movement, a way to dilute or break the power of institutions like e.g. the fed, Facebook, etc. To them, the grapevine is a secret sauce that will magically eliminate centralized power.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Which is ironic when you think about it. Those are the aims of Anarchist political philosophy, which is often anti-capitalist. So you could say Web3 is the "Capitalist-Anarchist Internet"
  - brightstep 5y ago
    Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to find a lot of AnCaps among Web3 advocates. I know there are also leftists who think it will challenge capitalism. Both parties are wrong to think a technology alone can make the changes they're looking for.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

Same. I actually see a lot of comparison with the "firehose of falsehoods", which is a known propaganda technique. I'm actually worried about people picking it up and getting suckered in without knowing anything on the technical side.

corobo 5y ago

I do keep wondering if it's worth being first on the scene with a new idea People pushing image NFTs will likely be keen to promote anything that can ding an argument against the naysayers, especially if they're cryptographically compensated somehow (whatever the web3 version of affiliate links is, is it airdrops?) Might be some free real estate to be had if anyone's got any png-less ideas Side comment I do realise I probably come off super naive to people who have already learned all this. I am trying! I've not come across a less newcomer friendly community since I started tinkering with Linux 20 years ago haha. "You just don't understand" is almost as much a web3 catchphrase as wagmi Admittedly Linux is now my sole non-mobile daily driver, maybe I'll get there with web3. Having had a tinker I do like the idea of the tech, I've just not had the "click" into how it's actually usable (for me) yet /blog

shiohime 5y ago
I'm creating an NFT project that's doing something I've never really seen other projects doing in any capacity, and can confirm it's pretty hard doing something against the current perception of what is possible with the tech. It's been disheartening sometimes tbh because of the stigma the tech has currently, and I've been called a scammer more than a few times simply because I'm creating a project that utilizes NFTs, by people who only know of the current "link to png on cloud storage and nothing else" model that is most common. Oh well, I just hope that when I release my project next month that I can prove that it's an incredibly unique experience that some group of people find it to be an exciting product.

tehjoker 5y ago

It's just a grift that people want you to buy into. That's why they're so invested in talking about it. If the technology was good, it'd practically sell itself.

closetnerd 5y ago
This is often not necessarily the case. For web3 - I'm still waiting to figure out what problem it can solve meaningfully.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  If you want to retain your sanity and finances, unless someone can explain in one sentence a clear and obvious use for the technology, all of crypto can be explained as unhinged speculation and rug pulls. We're over ten years in at this point with insane investment and nothing has appeared. My guess is that this is where the next financial crash will come from since it's totally unregulated and the "shadow banks" were mostly banned after 2008. All the shadow money just goes to crypto.
  - vanusa 5y ago
    We're over ten years in at this point with insane investment and nothing has appeared. You can't dismiss the $69 million Beeple sale as "nothing". Truly, it is a watershed moment in human history.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  That's more or less what the GP said. "If the technology is good" applies both to how well it works, but also how useful it is. Neither of those has a good answer yet. But the best way to see it being useful is to actually create an MVP and show it in practice, not through fancy words.
  - closetnerd 5y ago
    Was talking about "it'd sell itself". Good technology often doesn't sell itself.

Nav_Panel 5y ago

As someone who's out here building a web3 site (and is a heavy twitter user), I agree completely. Most of the twitter talking heads also have no clue what they're talking about, waxing on about grand visions when the first set of pragmatic implications are already here, basically (metamask/web wallet login).

corobo 5y ago
Do you have a tech blog or anything folks could keep up with? Preferably RSS based but I'd sign up to a mail list
- Nav_Panel 5y ago
  Unfortunately not, I only really blog about philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. I have very little I consider "blogworthy" to say about the web3 space, other than technical documentation; I build it and leave exploration and design to the product guys.
shiohime 5y ago
It's honestly difficult to discuss ideas in the space outside of specialized discord channels given how divisive people on social media like twitter have been on the subject. Wallet based authentication is amazingly simple to work with and provides a great developer and end user experience, but you only really hear about it in passing and it gets overshadowed by the noise. Same with using NFTs for novel purposes; you can use them as essentially authz tokens for specialized services. I've been working on an NFT project exploring these concepts and am quite happy with the end results.

tehjoker 5y ago

The phrase "stock touts" comes to mind.

thedjpetersen 5y ago

Instead of unfollowing I've found that muting specific terms or words to be fairly useful at tuning the signal

jsemrau 5y ago

Don't want to appear as spammy, but please have a look at my project finclout.io. Here people are incentivised to moderate and curate content. Thus supporting the build-up of trust and clout. The incentivces are coming through the monetary policy of the participating proof-of-stake chains, so it's not necessary to put money in to get money out. It's simply taking some of the economic value away from Google/FB. If you look at their insane profit margins, it's worthwhile to attack.

hooande 5y ago
scanned your home page, have no idea what this is or how it can help me
- jsemrau 5y ago
  Noted. Will put an example on the page. That might make it easier. The main value proposition is that if you are investing, then you can earn extra money by providing context on recent news for other investors. Currently this is done for free on other social sites.
  - arwineap 5y ago
    So a platform for pumping/selling your picks?
    - jsemrau 5y ago
      Quite the opposite.
yunohn 5y ago
> It's simply taking some of the economic value away from Google/FB. If you look at their insane profit margins, it's worthwhile to attack. I believe that you believe that Google/FB are competitors to your finclout.io. But I think you are very confused about your business model versus Google/FB. Neither of them are doing what you do - you are competing with blogs and social media groups/channels that curate investment advice.