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Agree completely. There is a ton to criticize about crypto and "Web3" (I hate the term, tbh). It's rife with scams and unearned wealth. Even the things that are

by darawk 5y ago

Agree completely. There is a ton to criticize about crypto and "Web3" (I hate the term, tbh). It's rife with scams and unearned wealth. Even the things that aren't outright scams are mostly people selling hype. But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. A thing that nobody could do before this stuff. And if that has utility, then the infrastructure for trading, lending, and all the rest related to those things has value. Even if you don't personally find it valuable, it should be clear that it is a thing that people could, in principle, legitimately prefer to traditional systems. That being said, a huge percentage of what's happening in the space is bullshit, an outright scam or an "essentially scam" project. All those things deserve heaps of scorn and criticism. Investigate Tether, regulate ICOs, do all the things. But don't go so far as to deny that there's anything there, or say ridiculous things like "Web3 is more centralized". Even if it's true that web3 is more centralized than the internet, that isn't the basis of comparison here. Web3 isn't competing with the internet, it's competing with traditional finance. And there should be no question that Web3 is substantially more decentralized than that.

root_axis 5y ago
Over the years I've witnessed a lot of heated debates on HN... Is the JS ecosystem actually too complex? Is PHP really a fractal of bad design? Is learning vim worth the effort or is it all hype? Is golang fundamentally broken because it lacks(lacked) generics? Does anyone ever actually need k8s? Is nosql always the wrong choice? Is the linux desktop experience truly productive or should you just use a mac? Types or no types? 100% test coverage or overkill? X or Wayland? Gnome2 or Unity? Android or iPhone etc... Yet, only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer about all the scams, hype, vaporware, fraud, waste, hacks, speculation, crime and other insanity before proceeding to make an appeal to the nebulous hope of future possibilities, as if cryptocurrency isn't older than instagram....
- cryptica 5y ago
  I suspect that big corporations and big investment firms are pumping a lot of money into the cryptocurrency space to prevent innovation and to encourage scams in order to discredit the space. They want to buy it up, hype it up, then dump their bags on mom-and-pop investors while attempting a controlled demolition of the space. This might sound far-fetched to outsiders, but not so far-fetched to those who have worked inside the industry and seen the waste. I've seen obvious shitcoins repeatedly succeed while legitimate tokens never get any attention. In this industry, you can feel the unlimited currency coming straight off the money printers. It's just like Wall Street Bets in reverse except it's worth over a $ trillion and they're going after regular people instead of big hedge funds.
  - elevader 5y ago
    Honest question from a total outsider: What is the difference between a "shitcoin" and a "legitimate token"? And who gets to decide that?
    - ijonas 5y ago
      Bitcoiners.
    - cryptica 5y ago
      I've met founders who launched shitcoins which raised a lot of money who acknowledged with no sense of irony that their own token was a shitcoin. But in general, a shitcoin is a poorly designed project (or just a clone of an existing project) where the founder sells a lot of their tokens and quits immediately after the initial ITO/ICO sale.
    - norswap 5y ago
      You decide for yourself, but generally shitcoins are regarded as forks without any technical innovation who are not credibly trying to solve any problem or try out a new idea - just make money. They're often meme-themed (though not always, and there are many legitimate projects that are meme-themed).
- Vetch 5y ago
  > scams, vaporware, fraud, waste, crime In my country, this also describes the day to day situation. You can't trust doctors because they make up diagnoses, people pay taxes but it never shows up in infrastructure, schools or anywhere; daily alerts by banks warning against some new clever form of fraud, until recently there was a fair chance new banks would vanish with customer money (I still only trust a few reputable banks), actual family destroying pyramid schemes, ransoms attached to child kidnappings not data, politicians stealing from their constituents, police not trusted because of lack of transparency and corruption, bribes as a defacto tax. The combination of high levels of poverty and lack of regulation is what leads to the proliferation of scams and dishonest behaviors. Poverty lowers the threshold of criminality, lack of regulation and lack of an enforced justice system enables its flourishing. Poverty also catalyzes more susceptible victims of such crimes. ------- > only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer Financial activity in crypto lacks regulation, which attracts predators, who create scams that attract the poor who are not necessarily gullible, just gambles from desperation. > Android or iPhone In Android vs iPhone or Windows vs Mac, people do argue about vulnerability to malware and the merits and demerits of locked down platforms. I'd also argue your examples are not appropriate, they're more clashes of belief systems and less people freely interacting in market like scenarios. Consider that kickstarter is rife with vaporware, hype and scams. Scams, fraud and hacks in Roblox and Entropia. Crime, speculation and hacks in Habbo Hotel. Western financial systems discriminate against certain professions and citizens of entire countries due to some cost benefit calculations related to fraud. If you have a system where money can exchange hands, you'll find psychopaths preying on the poor and careless. Oh and this isn't just poor countries and virtual markets, psychopaths preying on the poor and desperate also occurs for developed countries too (you just give them fancy names like debt bubbles and mortgage crises).
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  That's because crypto currencies and distributed consensus are inherently economic protocols. They must have monetary value or their consensus mechanisms do not work, which is why proof of work makes you shell out 'value' in the form of energy upfront. It's a bit goofy to make the comparison you made - I mean you didn't even finish your thought, you just painted a vague yet intense picture you expect people finish for you with the worst possible outlook. You aren't getting rid of crypto, so you'd do more to actually find out what's wrong with it and offer solutions rather than winging about it and praying for authoritarianism.
SoldShort22 5y ago
> Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing But what really are the "scarce assets" that Web3 is enabling self-custody for? A token on a blockchain that has metadata pointing to a digital file that anyone can view and reproduce? By definition, every NFT is scarce in that each one is non-fungible. But this scarcity doesn't mean there's any meaningful value. An NFT alone doesn't inherently give you ownership of or rights to anything except the token itself. The minute you want to attach some meaningful rights to an NFT, like legal ownership of the digital or physical asset the NFT points to, or the rights to an income stream produced by such, you have to enter the world of our traditional legal and financial systems.
- xondono 5y ago
  This. There’s a “mind-virus” doing the rounds on the crypto space, the idea that scarce = valuable.
  - darawk 5y ago
    Scarcity is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for value. By establishing the necessary conditions we facilitate the discovery of sufficiency in particular applications. Whether or not any particular scarce digital asset is valuable is a subjective question. Whether or not the underlying infrastructure created the potential for it to be valuable is an objective question, and the answer is yes.
- jakupovic 5y ago
  Do you need someone to repeat what's scarce? The digital anything can be written down in the blockchain notebook with your name/key and it's yours then. Same as when you would get a C from your teacher who would write it into one of those big notebooks with everyone's names. That combination of your name + class + grade is the asset uniquely assigned to you. Now when you asked your teacher to change that C to a B, to maintain your average, that wouldn't be possible as the teacher would have to write a new record and we would all know that you had a C actually. But all those grades are your only and thus scarce by definition.
deivid 5y ago
At least my problem with this entire ecosystem is that it enables artificial scarcity on digital goods, which wasn't really feasible before.
- ramchip 5y ago
  Digital goods in games have had artificial scarcity for ages. Look at the Golden Pan in TF2 for instance, which sells for thousands of dollars.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    The game servers are centralised. Blockchain enables enormously wasteful decentralised scarcity. Woop woop.
- dskloet 5y ago
  Goods that weren't scarce before still can't be scarce. Only a new type of good can be scarce. Do you have a problem with that?
- whodunnit 5y ago
  Isn’t artificial scarcity kind of the cornerstone of Capitalism? Producers restrict supply to maximize profits.
i_hate_pigeons 5y ago
I don't think web3 is just competing with traditional finance, or at least not in the restricted sense of investing/especulation. Also web3 is not replacing anything that already exists, just like "web2" didn't (and to be frank web2 was as much as hyped term than anything else) I see it more as retaining ownership some of the content we produce and happily give to twitter, youtube, facebook etc to monetise and have some more control over it Things as being able to: * remove access to site to display my content but still be published somewhere else if I wish to do so * be able to serve my content to people that prefer to use another tools without relying on twitter to have a public API as long as I granted them access * get the person getting hits and making money of ads to share some of that with me, or maybe pay my gas fees * not be shut down because a given site or state decides my content is not worthy of it, they are still allowed to do this, but I could still continue via another "frontend" and people can choose There are more use cases around this, and there are many gaps yet around the economics of it to make it accessible/free, make it desirable, legality, liability etc which I believe remain to be solved
- lottin 5y ago
  Ownership of "content" requires intellectual property laws, which are enforced by courts of justice, and we already have these. A blockchain cannot enforce intellectual property rights because it lacks coercive power. If your goal is to "retain ownership" of the content that you produce, a blockchain is not going to help you AT ALL with that.
  - i_hate_pigeons 5y ago
    I wasn't talking about it as in copyright / legal sense, and more in the I can allow others to access a snapshot of it at a given time and/or remove access to it for future content if I wish to do so. Now the relationship is the reverse, I give content to some org and they can do as they wish with it; I'm surrending it for them to use in exchange of them allowing me to use their platform for free. e.g. from Twitter's terms of use: > By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating). If the content was hosted somewhere else and then displayed on twitter instead, this would not be the case or I could revoke it in the future but still be able to distribute such content via other means Now, if I want to use another site then I need to duplicate the content myself. Since all that they really offer is the userbase/community, its very hard for competitors to come into play and offer better terms or capabilities. In fact, they can change these terms at anypoint and I can do very little about it aside of deleting my account (if they even allow you to do that!)
tehbeard 5y ago
> But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. ... It gives you a receipt. A digital receipt. That points to a URL that may or may not exist in 10 years?
- Ambolia 5y ago
  That sounds terrible, from hearing about NFTs I expected they would be a hash of the file, not a link to a file. Not like a hash would be much better, as changing one pixel would give you a different hash, but at least it would represent a specific version of an image, a URL could change to anything tomorrow.
  - paulgb 5y ago
    Some NFT platforms use IPFS, which as I understand it is basically hash of the content plus a mechanism for finding it as long as someone keeps hosting it. Of all the things associated with web3, IPFS is the only thing I’ve found that I think is kinda neat.
  - lottin 5y ago
    It doesn't make any difference. The so-called "asset" is just a piece of digital information, e.g. a picture, which can be copied by anyone for free. As a result, owning such an asset on a blockchain doesn't confer any advantage to the owner. The owner has the same rights over the asset as the people who don't own it.
- darawk 5y ago
  Why is everyone here so focused on NFTs? I didn't mention NFTs at all. They just happen to be the hot thing to shit on right now. I am not a fan of NFTs. But "digital receipts" are tremendously valuable. Receipts are proof of provenance. Proof of provenance is valuable in many, many applications. But anyways, that isn't the point. The type of digital self custody i'm referring to is for things like stablecoins. Stablecoins allow you to self-custody dollars in a way that was not possible before cryptocurrency.
  - 5y ago
andreareina 5y ago
By calling it web3 they are explicitly positioning it in terms of, and in contrast to, the traditional web. If they wanted to call out finance there's defi for that.
usrbinbash 5y ago
> Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. How so? This is how "web1" operated all the time: People have a cool idea and fire up a webserver to host it. Self-Custody in its purest form. Sure, others could copy it, but they can also do that with whatever someone generates an NFT for "digital assets" (the certificate cannot be copied, the thing it certifies ownership for can). As for "scarcity": Digital assets are either shared or scarce, there is no in-between. Distributed Ledgers allowing NFTs make the certificate of ownership scarce, not the asset itself.
- darawk 5y ago
  > This is how "web1" operated all the time: People have a cool idea and fire up a webserver to host it. Self-Custody in its purest form. Web1 assets are not scarce, that's the difference. > Sure, others could copy it, but they can also do that with whatever someone generates an NFT for "digital assets" (the certificate cannot be copied, the thing it certifies ownership for can). Forget NFTs. Go print yourself $1000 USDC and try to exchange it for dollars. The thing that prevents you from doing that - that's decentralized digital scarcity. There is no equivalent on web1.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    > There is no equivalent on web1. Of course there is. If the service offered is not just access to some data, but things like computational power, access to a game server, food delivered, etc. I put up a payment system, and unless its used there is no access to the asset. What form that payment system has, and what tokens it accepts USD, EUR, BTC, Seashells or Sliced Bread, is completely irrelevant.
    - darawk 5y ago
      All of the web1 equivalents are centralized systems, where the assets in question cannot be traded independently of the central authority. That is the difference.
      - 5y ago
CJefferson 5y ago
Literally every online game has been doing digital scarcity forever. Let's see if any of the NFT collections end up having the success and lifetime of Eve Online or World of Warcraft. I realise there are hypothetical advantages to NFTs over in-game items, but I am not yet sure they will be worth it in the long term.
- pferde 5y ago
  The predators of computer gaming (EA, Ubisoft, Activision) are already eyeing NFTs and blockchain for their next generation of "online services": https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59167668 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59167668
didroe 5y ago
> But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. It's unfortunately also pretty much pointless. Digital assets aren't scarce, and physical assets mean leaving the system and losing the properties of it.
- simonw 5y ago
  Plus self custody, where if you make a mistake like forgetting your password you lose everything permanently, is a bad idea that is incompatible with how human beings actually work.

by darawk 5y ago

root_axis 5y ago

Over the years I've witnessed a lot of heated debates on HN... Is the JS ecosystem actually too complex? Is PHP really a fractal of bad design? Is learning vim worth the effort or is it all hype? Is golang fundamentally broken because it lacks(lacked) generics? Does anyone ever actually need k8s? Is nosql always the wrong choice? Is the linux desktop experience truly productive or should you just use a mac? Types or no types? 100% test coverage or overkill? X or Wayland? Gnome2 or Unity? Android or iPhone etc... Yet, only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer about all the scams, hype, vaporware, fraud, waste, hacks, speculation, crime and other insanity before proceeding to make an appeal to the nebulous hope of future possibilities, as if cryptocurrency isn't older than instagram....

cryptica 5y ago
I suspect that big corporations and big investment firms are pumping a lot of money into the cryptocurrency space to prevent innovation and to encourage scams in order to discredit the space. They want to buy it up, hype it up, then dump their bags on mom-and-pop investors while attempting a controlled demolition of the space. This might sound far-fetched to outsiders, but not so far-fetched to those who have worked inside the industry and seen the waste. I've seen obvious shitcoins repeatedly succeed while legitimate tokens never get any attention. In this industry, you can feel the unlimited currency coming straight off the money printers. It's just like Wall Street Bets in reverse except it's worth over a $ trillion and they're going after regular people instead of big hedge funds.
- elevader 5y ago
  Honest question from a total outsider: What is the difference between a "shitcoin" and a "legitimate token"? And who gets to decide that?
  - ijonas 5y ago
    Bitcoiners.
  - cryptica 5y ago
    I've met founders who launched shitcoins which raised a lot of money who acknowledged with no sense of irony that their own token was a shitcoin. But in general, a shitcoin is a poorly designed project (or just a clone of an existing project) where the founder sells a lot of their tokens and quits immediately after the initial ITO/ICO sale.
  - norswap 5y ago
    You decide for yourself, but generally shitcoins are regarded as forks without any technical innovation who are not credibly trying to solve any problem or try out a new idea - just make money. They're often meme-themed (though not always, and there are many legitimate projects that are meme-themed).
Vetch 5y ago
> scams, vaporware, fraud, waste, crime In my country, this also describes the day to day situation. You can't trust doctors because they make up diagnoses, people pay taxes but it never shows up in infrastructure, schools or anywhere; daily alerts by banks warning against some new clever form of fraud, until recently there was a fair chance new banks would vanish with customer money (I still only trust a few reputable banks), actual family destroying pyramid schemes, ransoms attached to child kidnappings not data, politicians stealing from their constituents, police not trusted because of lack of transparency and corruption, bribes as a defacto tax. The combination of high levels of poverty and lack of regulation is what leads to the proliferation of scams and dishonest behaviors. Poverty lowers the threshold of criminality, lack of regulation and lack of an enforced justice system enables its flourishing. Poverty also catalyzes more susceptible victims of such crimes. ------- > only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer Financial activity in crypto lacks regulation, which attracts predators, who create scams that attract the poor who are not necessarily gullible, just gambles from desperation. > Android or iPhone In Android vs iPhone or Windows vs Mac, people do argue about vulnerability to malware and the merits and demerits of locked down platforms. I'd also argue your examples are not appropriate, they're more clashes of belief systems and less people freely interacting in market like scenarios. Consider that kickstarter is rife with vaporware, hype and scams. Scams, fraud and hacks in Roblox and Entropia. Crime, speculation and hacks in Habbo Hotel. Western financial systems discriminate against certain professions and citizens of entire countries due to some cost benefit calculations related to fraud. If you have a system where money can exchange hands, you'll find psychopaths preying on the poor and careless. Oh and this isn't just poor countries and virtual markets, psychopaths preying on the poor and desperate also occurs for developed countries too (you just give them fancy names like debt bubbles and mortgage crises).
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
That's because crypto currencies and distributed consensus are inherently economic protocols. They must have monetary value or their consensus mechanisms do not work, which is why proof of work makes you shell out 'value' in the form of energy upfront. It's a bit goofy to make the comparison you made - I mean you didn't even finish your thought, you just painted a vague yet intense picture you expect people finish for you with the worst possible outlook. You aren't getting rid of crypto, so you'd do more to actually find out what's wrong with it and offer solutions rather than winging about it and praying for authoritarianism.

SoldShort22 5y ago

> Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing But what really are the "scarce assets" that Web3 is enabling self-custody for? A token on a blockchain that has metadata pointing to a digital file that anyone can view and reproduce? By definition, every NFT is scarce in that each one is non-fungible. But this scarcity doesn't mean there's any meaningful value. An NFT alone doesn't inherently give you ownership of or rights to anything except the token itself. The minute you want to attach some meaningful rights to an NFT, like legal ownership of the digital or physical asset the NFT points to, or the rights to an income stream produced by such, you have to enter the world of our traditional legal and financial systems.

xondono 5y ago
This. There’s a “mind-virus” doing the rounds on the crypto space, the idea that scarce = valuable.
- darawk 5y ago
  Scarcity is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for value. By establishing the necessary conditions we facilitate the discovery of sufficiency in particular applications. Whether or not any particular scarce digital asset is valuable is a subjective question. Whether or not the underlying infrastructure created the potential for it to be valuable is an objective question, and the answer is yes.
jakupovic 5y ago
Do you need someone to repeat what's scarce? The digital anything can be written down in the blockchain notebook with your name/key and it's yours then. Same as when you would get a C from your teacher who would write it into one of those big notebooks with everyone's names. That combination of your name + class + grade is the asset uniquely assigned to you. Now when you asked your teacher to change that C to a B, to maintain your average, that wouldn't be possible as the teacher would have to write a new record and we would all know that you had a C actually. But all those grades are your only and thus scarce by definition.

deivid 5y ago

At least my problem with this entire ecosystem is that it enables artificial scarcity on digital goods, which wasn't really feasible before.

ramchip 5y ago
Digital goods in games have had artificial scarcity for ages. Look at the Golden Pan in TF2 for instance, which sells for thousands of dollars.
- FabHK 5y ago
  The game servers are centralised. Blockchain enables enormously wasteful decentralised scarcity. Woop woop.
dskloet 5y ago
Goods that weren't scarce before still can't be scarce. Only a new type of good can be scarce. Do you have a problem with that?
whodunnit 5y ago
Isn’t artificial scarcity kind of the cornerstone of Capitalism? Producers restrict supply to maximize profits.

i_hate_pigeons 5y ago

I don't think web3 is just competing with traditional finance, or at least not in the restricted sense of investing/especulation. Also web3 is not replacing anything that already exists, just like "web2" didn't (and to be frank web2 was as much as hyped term than anything else) I see it more as retaining ownership some of the content we produce and happily give to twitter, youtube, facebook etc to monetise and have some more control over it Things as being able to: * remove access to site to display my content but still be published somewhere else if I wish to do so * be able to serve my content to people that prefer to use another tools without relying on twitter to have a public API as long as I granted them access * get the person getting hits and making money of ads to share some of that with me, or maybe pay my gas fees * not be shut down because a given site or state decides my content is not worthy of it, they are still allowed to do this, but I could still continue via another "frontend" and people can choose There are more use cases around this, and there are many gaps yet around the economics of it to make it accessible/free, make it desirable, legality, liability etc which I believe remain to be solved

lottin 5y ago
Ownership of "content" requires intellectual property laws, which are enforced by courts of justice, and we already have these. A blockchain cannot enforce intellectual property rights because it lacks coercive power. If your goal is to "retain ownership" of the content that you produce, a blockchain is not going to help you AT ALL with that.
- i_hate_pigeons 5y ago
  I wasn't talking about it as in copyright / legal sense, and more in the I can allow others to access a snapshot of it at a given time and/or remove access to it for future content if I wish to do so. Now the relationship is the reverse, I give content to some org and they can do as they wish with it; I'm surrending it for them to use in exchange of them allowing me to use their platform for free. e.g. from Twitter's terms of use: > By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating). If the content was hosted somewhere else and then displayed on twitter instead, this would not be the case or I could revoke it in the future but still be able to distribute such content via other means Now, if I want to use another site then I need to duplicate the content myself. Since all that they really offer is the userbase/community, its very hard for competitors to come into play and offer better terms or capabilities. In fact, they can change these terms at anypoint and I can do very little about it aside of deleting my account (if they even allow you to do that!)

tehbeard 5y ago

> But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. ... It gives you a receipt. A digital receipt. That points to a URL that may or may not exist in 10 years?

Ambolia 5y ago
That sounds terrible, from hearing about NFTs I expected they would be a hash of the file, not a link to a file. Not like a hash would be much better, as changing one pixel would give you a different hash, but at least it would represent a specific version of an image, a URL could change to anything tomorrow.
- paulgb 5y ago
  Some NFT platforms use IPFS, which as I understand it is basically hash of the content plus a mechanism for finding it as long as someone keeps hosting it. Of all the things associated with web3, IPFS is the only thing I’ve found that I think is kinda neat.
- lottin 5y ago
  It doesn't make any difference. The so-called "asset" is just a piece of digital information, e.g. a picture, which can be copied by anyone for free. As a result, owning such an asset on a blockchain doesn't confer any advantage to the owner. The owner has the same rights over the asset as the people who don't own it.
darawk 5y ago
Why is everyone here so focused on NFTs? I didn't mention NFTs at all. They just happen to be the hot thing to shit on right now. I am not a fan of NFTs. But "digital receipts" are tremendously valuable. Receipts are proof of provenance. Proof of provenance is valuable in many, many applications. But anyways, that isn't the point. The type of digital self custody i'm referring to is for things like stablecoins. Stablecoins allow you to self-custody dollars in a way that was not possible before cryptocurrency.
- 5y ago

andreareina 5y ago

By calling it web3 they are explicitly positioning it in terms of, and in contrast to, the traditional web. If they wanted to call out finance there's defi for that.

usrbinbash 5y ago

> Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. How so? This is how "web1" operated all the time: People have a cool idea and fire up a webserver to host it. Self-Custody in its purest form. Sure, others could copy it, but they can also do that with whatever someone generates an NFT for "digital assets" (the certificate cannot be copied, the thing it certifies ownership for can). As for "scarcity": Digital assets are either shared or scarce, there is no in-between. Distributed Ledgers allowing NFTs make the certificate of ownership scarce, not the asset itself.

darawk 5y ago
> This is how "web1" operated all the time: People have a cool idea and fire up a webserver to host it. Self-Custody in its purest form. Web1 assets are not scarce, that's the difference. > Sure, others could copy it, but they can also do that with whatever someone generates an NFT for "digital assets" (the certificate cannot be copied, the thing it certifies ownership for can). Forget NFTs. Go print yourself $1000 USDC and try to exchange it for dollars. The thing that prevents you from doing that - that's decentralized digital scarcity. There is no equivalent on web1.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > There is no equivalent on web1. Of course there is. If the service offered is not just access to some data, but things like computational power, access to a game server, food delivered, etc. I put up a payment system, and unless its used there is no access to the asset. What form that payment system has, and what tokens it accepts USD, EUR, BTC, Seashells or Sliced Bread, is completely irrelevant.
  - darawk 5y ago
    All of the web1 equivalents are centralized systems, where the assets in question cannot be traded independently of the central authority. That is the difference.
    - 5y ago

CJefferson 5y ago

Literally every online game has been doing digital scarcity forever. Let's see if any of the NFT collections end up having the success and lifetime of Eve Online or World of Warcraft. I realise there are hypothetical advantages to NFTs over in-game items, but I am not yet sure they will be worth it in the long term.

pferde 5y ago
The predators of computer gaming (EA, Ubisoft, Activision) are already eyeing NFTs and blockchain for their next generation of "online services": https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59167668 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59167668

didroe 5y ago

> But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. It's unfortunately also pretty much pointless. Digital assets aren't scarce, and physical assets mean leaving the system and losing the properties of it.

simonw 5y ago
Plus self custody, where if you make a mistake like forgetting your password you lose everything permanently, is a bad idea that is incompatible with how human beings actually work.