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What if this new generation is just repeating the mistakes of former generations? They talk about decentralization which has been done so often before and only

by tpetry 5y ago

What if this new generation is just repeating the mistakes of former generations? They talk about decentralization which has been done so often before and only worked for niche use-cases. What if crypto is just a big money pump and dump scheme? It‘s sold to the poor to solve their financial situation which mostly don‘t have bank accounts. But the ones loosing the most in crypto crashes is not the new-generation web3 developer earning a good income. It‘s the poor guy somewhere with a bad local currency which was now using crypto which is now not worth anything too. —- People are always repeating that many people didn‘t e.g. saw the need in the internet and had been totally wrong in it. But crypto isn‘t new anymore like the internet was at that time! Bitcoin is almost 13 years old and Etherum 6! The internet had already shown very good usecases after that time and crypto is still searching for it‘s _one_ use case than money speculation on a highly volatile asset which doesn‘t have any real money. More interesting what will happen to crypto in a real world economy crash like 2008!

thebean11 5y ago
> They talk about decentralization which has been done so often before What’s an example from earlier generations?
- tpetry 5y ago
  Diaspora and Mastodon. These are the prime example what the web 3 generation wants: no central company, everyone runs it‘s own server, user is in control of all it‘s data And they are a total empty space. Because it‘s complex to use ans is missing the network effect which is really really hard to get without a central company doing marketing in some form
  - thebean11 5y ago
    Got it I see what you mean. In my mind though, the real innovation in web3 is native ability to move money around, and turing complete (ish) programmability. Comparisons to social networks seems like apples and oranges. It’s not a product that needs to be marketed to end users. Think AWS not Amazon.com. The people building products on it will do the marketing.
    - jjulius 5y ago
      But web 1.0 and 2.0 are largely called as much based on what end users did with it and how they interacted with one another. You can't just ignore that vital component in regards to 3.0.
      - thebean11 5y ago
        Sorry what do you mean by 1 and 2 being “called as much”? Being called decentralized?
    - bccdee 5y ago
      AWS does not have any trouble moving money around or writing programs to move money around. Finance has been digitized for ages. You might say "those are just digital abstractions — this is native." But so what? What does it matter if my money transfer routine talks to a bank or broadcasts a new block? It does the same thing in the end, except that the blockchain version is slower and more expensive. Blockchain offers no concrete advantages over traditional finance except for decreased regulation. That's why it's so hard to argue in favour of blockchain as a replacement for traditional financial systems. You end up constructing weak arguments, because you can't play to blockchain's strengths. Let me present the strong argument in favour of blockchain: "Blockchain helps you make lots of anonymous money through pump & dumps, ransomware, and other assorted scams." This is an unethical argument, but a concretely fact-based one. The track record speaks for itself. Look how much more robust the strong argument is than any argument about decentralization for its own sake, or about the "native"ness of bitcoin transfers. Occam's razor suggests that the strong argument is the driving force behind blockchain adoption, not the weak ones. Nobody cares about decentralization. They just wanna make a buck.
      - thebean11 5y ago
        The value of nativeness combined with a totally neutral execution environment is that money can be directly controlled by software, with no practical human override. Suddenly the cost and risk of transactions goes down, as I don’t need to worry about whether I will get paid, or whether the intermediary actually handling the money will arbitrarily decide to freeze my account. Obviously this is a double edged sword; having no human override is actually a very bad thing for many things. You can code in human overrides of course, but they are transparent to all parties. When you make a bank transfer or a PayPal transaction, it’s 100% opaque. The terms are not truly binding and it can be reverted or altered for any or no reason. I’m not arguing this is the reason for valuations currently, but I find it pretty surprising how many people can’t or won’t understand the value of a neutral execution environment for financial transactions. It is not something that exists elsewhere.
- engineerDave 5y ago
  internet 1.0, post AOL, pre dot com crash. You had to roll everything and could even run a server with little fanfare from your home because ISPs allowed you to run your own servers. Now most prohibit or outright block it without a higher tier plan. There were problems with this approach though, spam, malware, etc. It's only with Web 2 that we became addicted to offloading everything to central providers. Their siren call was too much to resist and now they have all our data. It wasn't designed to be like this, we can just go back but a lot lack the skills to roll the full stack now sans AWS/Google Cloud.

by tpetry 5y ago

thebean11 5y ago

> They talk about decentralization which has been done so often before What’s an example from earlier generations?

tpetry 5y ago
Diaspora and Mastodon. These are the prime example what the web 3 generation wants: no central company, everyone runs it‘s own server, user is in control of all it‘s data And they are a total empty space. Because it‘s complex to use ans is missing the network effect which is really really hard to get without a central company doing marketing in some form
- thebean11 5y ago
  Got it I see what you mean. In my mind though, the real innovation in web3 is native ability to move money around, and turing complete (ish) programmability. Comparisons to social networks seems like apples and oranges. It’s not a product that needs to be marketed to end users. Think AWS not Amazon.com. The people building products on it will do the marketing.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    But web 1.0 and 2.0 are largely called as much based on what end users did with it and how they interacted with one another. You can't just ignore that vital component in regards to 3.0.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      Sorry what do you mean by 1 and 2 being “called as much”? Being called decentralized?
  - bccdee 5y ago
    AWS does not have any trouble moving money around or writing programs to move money around. Finance has been digitized for ages. You might say "those are just digital abstractions — this is native." But so what? What does it matter if my money transfer routine talks to a bank or broadcasts a new block? It does the same thing in the end, except that the blockchain version is slower and more expensive. Blockchain offers no concrete advantages over traditional finance except for decreased regulation. That's why it's so hard to argue in favour of blockchain as a replacement for traditional financial systems. You end up constructing weak arguments, because you can't play to blockchain's strengths. Let me present the strong argument in favour of blockchain: "Blockchain helps you make lots of anonymous money through pump & dumps, ransomware, and other assorted scams." This is an unethical argument, but a concretely fact-based one. The track record speaks for itself. Look how much more robust the strong argument is than any argument about decentralization for its own sake, or about the "native"ness of bitcoin transfers. Occam's razor suggests that the strong argument is the driving force behind blockchain adoption, not the weak ones. Nobody cares about decentralization. They just wanna make a buck.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      The value of nativeness combined with a totally neutral execution environment is that money can be directly controlled by software, with no practical human override. Suddenly the cost and risk of transactions goes down, as I don’t need to worry about whether I will get paid, or whether the intermediary actually handling the money will arbitrarily decide to freeze my account. Obviously this is a double edged sword; having no human override is actually a very bad thing for many things. You can code in human overrides of course, but they are transparent to all parties. When you make a bank transfer or a PayPal transaction, it’s 100% opaque. The terms are not truly binding and it can be reverted or altered for any or no reason. I’m not arguing this is the reason for valuations currently, but I find it pretty surprising how many people can’t or won’t understand the value of a neutral execution environment for financial transactions. It is not something that exists elsewhere.
engineerDave 5y ago
internet 1.0, post AOL, pre dot com crash. You had to roll everything and could even run a server with little fanfare from your home because ISPs allowed you to run your own servers. Now most prohibit or outright block it without a higher tier plan. There were problems with this approach though, spam, malware, etc. It's only with Web 2 that we became addicted to offloading everything to central providers. Their siren call was too much to resist and now they have all our data. It wasn't designed to be like this, we can just go back but a lot lack the skills to roll the full stack now sans AWS/Google Cloud.