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The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Skepticism is healthy,

by axg11 5y ago

The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Skepticism is healthy, but criticism without being constructive is not. There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space, even if you think the state of the community today is not healthy. Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs). Most of them will fail and be forgotten, but there is a chance that _some_ of them will create genuinely novel and interesting products. Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?

kahrl 5y ago
How would you like us to be constructive when discussing fraud, scams, and Ponzi schemes?
_pmf_ 5y ago
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Like I wasn't forced to participate in the resolution and the fallout of the housing crash?
monktastic1 5y ago
Why is criticism without being constructive unhealthy? Isn't it possible to know that something is bad without having a clear answer of what to do instead other than simply stop?
nikanj 5y ago
I don't support robocall spammers, even if their tech stacks might contain interesting nuggets. At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud. I don't care that it might contain cool tech. The same goes for e.g. ransomware. It might be innovative. It's still a huge blight on humanity.
- jsharf 5y ago
  Usually I hate skeptical mean comments like this on hackernews. Right or wrong, there's a certain level of empathy missing. And yet... In this case I find myself guiltily agreeing.
  - kerneloftruth 5y ago
    I don't see anything mean in the comment, and I also fully agree (it's really well-stated). Being direct and not mincing words is not being mean.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      It's not mean, it's just very skewed in one way without acknowledging different perspectives. Take this sentence: > At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud Obviously the "at best" part is still a negative, just like the "at worst". That's no way of starting a curious conversation and frankly, it makes for boring reading no matter if you're for/against cryptocurrencies as a whole.
      - akiselev 5y ago
        Pointing out that a spade is a spade does make for boring reading. I don't understand what more there is to say about NFTs but maybe I'm just taking crazy pills.
  - A_non_e-moose 5y ago
    Skepticism is like an anchor, too much and you go nowhere, too little and you're adrift. The interesting questions are how much and where do you place your skepticism? NFTs sound enough alarms for me that I feel the need to drop anchor on that before steering to any BS with potential financial consequences.
    - kongolongo 5y ago
      I think if you're going to support anything - crypto or otherwise, you should start with some level of skepticism, if it can overcome that initial skepticism then maybe it is worth believing in, otherwise remain skeptical imo.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Unfortunately, I kinda feel the same way. I'm a blockchain apologist for the most part, whenever I hear people complaining about how the blockchain is some kind of automated discrimination process I cringe a little bit and try my hardest to explain to them that the technology itself is neither good nor evil, just implemented pretty poorly. With that being said, I generally cannot stand cryptocurrency. I have yet to meet a single starry-eyed crypto fanatic who wasn't either woefully uninformed or completely jaded by their investment. I'm not sure if I'd go as far as calling it a "huge blight on humanity" (any more than I'd call Denmark a huge blight on humanity for existing and consuming electricity/food), but digital money is indeed a sucker's game these days.
- steelstraw 5y ago
  Bitcoin and crypto might seem unnecessary in a democracy with a stable currency and it's easy to focus on the scams. But in countries with deeply unstable economies and authoritarian politics, it is a lifeline. Bitcoin has been used by dissidents and activists in places like Cuba, Nigeria, and Belarus. In Russia, the country’s most prominent opposition politician and Putin critic, Alexei Navaly, has raised millions in Bitcoin. Putin can do a lot of things, but he can't freeze a bitcoin account. If you want to understand what crypto is really about, ask Venezuelans if they’d rather own bolívar or Bitcoin. And with creeping authoritarianism in the West, and the USD inflating and at risk of losing global reserve currency status (petrodollar), I wouldn't be so confident it'll never happen here.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Don’t forget to ask them again after they learn how helpful Bitcoin is to the police. Once it’s big enough to care about, leaving a signed confession is not a good idea.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    > Putin can do a lot of things, but he can't freeze a bitcoin account. He can if he's got the private key.
    - imglorp 5y ago
      Even if he can't freeze it, he has access to the public ledger and with some effort can figure out who sent money to whom. Either of those two parties could then get a visit and politely invited to reveal the other. If you want (more?) anonymous you need Monero or Zerocoin.
    - toss1 5y ago
      ... and Putin has lots of thugs happy to wield USD$5 (RUB 388) wrenches to obtain those private keys, and the globally known precedent of the year-long torture & murder of Sergi Magnitsky to let the key-holders know that there's no way out.
  - boringg 5y ago
- intev 5y ago
  > I don't care that it might contain cool tech. As a tech enthusiast, that's just sad to hear.
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    Any cool innovations genuinely offered in good faith by web3/crypto are confounded by all the bad actors.
  - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    If you think that's sad, wait until you hear about the people who give crimes against society and the planet the "ok" because they involve cool tech.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ddrdrck_ 5y ago
  There is crypto ecosystems that do not use PoW (proof-of-work, ala Bitcoin) but other consensus schemes (most notably proof-of-stake, e.g. Cosmos) that do not destroy the planet. Unregulated casino with eco-friendly tech is quite nice actually. No government should be able to forbid me to gamble imho.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post shallow-indignant flamewar comments, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It makes for dumbed-down, tedious internet threads, and we'd prefer to avoid those. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
CPLX 5y ago
> but there is a chance that _some_ of them will create genuinely novel and interesting products Right. And there's a 100% certainty that most of the products that already exist are vehicles for scams at worst, and gambling at best.
simonw 5y ago
"Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology" Plenty of its advocates very clearly WANT to force people to partake though. Anything to keep that number going up.
- jack_pp 5y ago
  No they don't want to force anyone and there's no evidence of this. Just because there are a lot of evangelists doesn't mean anyone is forced to do anything
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    There's plenty of evidence of this; there are proposals to move house deeds, drivers' licenses, elections, etc. onto the blockchain. These wouldn't be "oh, you can just not participate" sorts of scenarios.
    - kyruzic 5y ago
      A blockchain is not web3 or crypto.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman The Venn diagram of web3, cryptocurrency, and blockchain proponents is substantially similar to a circle.
        kyruzic 5y ago
        No it really is not, but nice try and great meme!
        jakelazaroff 5y ago
        Can you give an example of web3 tech that doesn't involve a blockchain in any way?
jakelazaroff 5y ago
It's disingenuous to describe it as just a new technology, though. Adherents promote crypto and web3 as a specific set of transformations to our society. That is what people are so stridently against. The very explicit goal of NFT folks, for example, is to commodify everything. I can't just not use the technology, because if they get their way it will greatly affect me. So I'm forced to stake out a position.
endisneigh 5y ago
What’s a single idea in the crypto space that requires no centralized entity involved and can sustain indefinite price drops of the underlying cryptocurrency? I find it amusing how most of the interesting things in crypto are centralized.
- DennisP 5y ago
  Uniswap, a decentralized exchange. The smart contracts have no centralized administration at all, anyone can set up a GUI for them, and it doesn't break just because the price of ETH falls. This is one of the most successful projects on Ethereum, with trading volume comparable to Coinbase.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Uniswap itself is centralized, using GitHub for centralized repository code storage and the app itself is also centralized. The organization is centralized, with employees reporting into a centralized structure as well.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      I suppose there's a spectrum of centralization between "totally controlled by one person" and "magically appears out of the collective intelligence of the entire internet." So I can't say that Uniswap is completely decentralized. But the code on chain can't be changed by anyone, has no admin functions, and doesn't rely on external data feeds. UI for it can be developed and hosted by anyone or skipped entirely by anyone willing to deal directly with the contract using standard tools. So I'd say Uniswap meets your request above for something that doesn't require a centralized entity. The entities you mention could disappear and Uniswap would keep going.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
No one's being forced, but it seems many people are being tricked. It's important to inject a considerable amount of skepticism into a conversation that is often dominated by proponents in it only to make money off of speculation.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Those people are probably going to be tricked anyway. Many things in society are tricks. Google is a trick. Self-help is a trick. Fast food is a trick. MLM is a trick. Political ideologies are tricks. Everyone wants to be lied to, or rather everyone wants to believe in something, and they'll throw away their money just to maintain that belief. While aspects of the world of cryptocurrency are tricks, it's hardly unique to it or the responsibility of others to prevent people from being tricked.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    I don't know what you're trying to say here. Fast food is a trick? Does it not prevent me from starving? It seems like you're saying something like "stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons." What are those reasons? If I see someone trying to scam others, why shouldn't I warn those people?
    - ravenstine 5y ago
      Fast food is a trick because it is highly marked up and designed to be addictive moreso than most healthful meals. Yes, there is trickery in fast food and snack foods in general, and if you don't believe that, there's plenty of material on how the food industry and really the system in general have used the institution of fast food to keep people poor and sick. This isn't to say that everyone in fast food, even those in its upper echelons, are acutely aware of this, but discounting the involvement of conscious thought, it is a manifestation of modernity that developed to trick minds. > stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons No, that's not what I'm saying, at least in your brutal interpretation. Should society allow anyone to be scammed? My answer to that question is a clear no, especially when it comes to fraud. Society functions orders of magnitude better with a level of self-control than it would otherwise. Does this mean that society should protect people from themselves? Or rather, if someone believes they are going to get rich putting their life savings into cryptocurrencies because they lack foresight or technical aptitude, should we do what we can to prevent people from being this foolish despite the existing level of trickery that we are willing to tolerate? If people need to be saved from cryptocurrency, then why aren't we saving them from payday loans, or guzzling HFCs in sodas, or wasting time smoking weed, or gambling at casinos? All of those are examples of tricks (yes, they are tricks) designed to extract wealth and lifeforce. Hell, our monetary system itself is a trick. At times we may point them out as evils, but we don't take them so seriously because life can't be so safe. Unless something radically changes in our societies, for all intents and purposes, we are allowing some of us to hang ourselves by our own rope. Yet somehow crypto bears more fault for some? To me, that doesn't follow. If I create an NFT for my soul, put it up for sale for $1000, and someone actually buys it, are they being scammed? If I fork Bitcoin into a new cryptocurrency, publish a bunch of poppycock about how it will be the next big thing because I got rid of its limits, and I sell those coins and run off with the money, is it of no fault of the customer that they believed such a specious lie? No and no, in my opinion, because it's not reasonable for society to protect people to such an extent as it would neither be sustainable nor good for every business to be scrutinized to the degree necessary to provide said protection.
eqmvii 5y ago
> The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. But they ARE financially incentivized to bring more people into the ecosystem, which makes for a very loud and persistent hype machine. I find the negativity here refreshing, to be honest. The proponents of the tech are so organized but the skeptics have the choice to just ignore it.
danso 5y ago
One of the criticisms against web3 and crypto is that it’s ultimately a high tech pyramid scheme, solving few problems that it didn’t create on it’s own. If that’s the case, then we should want and expect to see rising criticism and pushback. Crypto doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and if unscrutinized, can have unintended harms across technology and society in general
- yellow_postit 5y ago
  one thing that's been a good development in my view is central banks taking more seriously retailer and digital concerns, even if the impetus is one of regulation. Trying to stay neutral on the inherent politics of it all...but the Fed's recently released paper [1] for comment on developing a centrally backed digital currency recognizes some very real challenges and opportunities that the current US banking system has not well solved for. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
- kyruzic 5y ago
  Nothing, literally nothing about web3 is a pyramid scheme. Yes you can build a pyramid scheme on top of web3. No web3 is not a pyramid scheme. You can build a pyramid scheme on facebook too, but facebook is not a pyramid scheme.
  - throwawaysysd 5y ago
    >No web3 is not a pyramid scheme. As long as it's centered around the value of BTC, this is false. BTC has totally failed as a currency and is completely dependent on speculators pushing its valuation up to keep the miners profitable. I'll be willing to concede this point to you if eventually all proof-of-work coins disappear and the BTC maxis go away, and the incentives change to move away from mining and towards providing real services, but I doubt this will ever happen given this was the whole reason the crypto bubble happened in the first place. Perhaps you want to define web3 in a more vague way like "any web business that uses a merkle tree publicly in some fashion". You can do that but either you're still left with BTC maxis leading the charge on that, or you have to expand it in such a way that the term becomes meaningless because it applies to a lot of unrelated things. Was google a web3 business before anyone knew what that was because they used a merkle tree in google drive, and google drive was public? How about github with their public git repositories? See what I mean here?
slaw3 5y ago
Its easy for me to forget that the majority of people working in tech are employed by companies offering centralized services. The majority of these companies have little to gain from traction of cryptocurrency and many have no plan in place to benefit from web3. Not surprising to me that people shun the hand that does not feed them.
rrjjww 5y ago
It’s not just HN. It’s all over the web. There are some novel and interesting products being developed (reading about the theory behind Uniswap liquidity pools blew my mind) that people totally ignore because it’s easier to hate on the latest meme coin.
- rideontime 5y ago
  If (hypothetically) I’m anti-crypto, why should I care about defi, which, as I understand it, is all about trading crypto for crypto? e: This isn’t meant to be a rhetorical question. Ever since Mark Cuban tweeted something about some loans that defi enables I’ve been wondering why I should care.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    You shouldn't. It's exactly that. It is complicated gambling, nothing else.
acdha 5y ago
The criticism isn’t unconstructive just because it’s inconvenient for sales and marketing purposes. Most of it is detailed point by point lists of problems the community would need to address to be successful — but trying to pretend it’s ignorable all but ensures that those advances won’t happen. If someone is working on a novel idea, the grifters using them as a blind not only aren’t helping but in fact will be competing for resources and attention. It’s true that nobody is being forced to use cryptocurrency but we have to live on the planet blockchain proponents are polluting, and we know that many people will lose money speculating on systems which do not work. Even if you don’t care about them, that causes economic disruption and diverts resources away from better business ideas.
hooande 5y ago
It's possible that crypto/web3 are a lot of diverting attention, resources and energy toward ideas that are fundamentally impractical. The fact that so many people have a financial interest in promoting these ideas makes the whole thing suspicious. I'm really waiting for these novel and interesting products based on blockchain. like, waiting every day to see one break into the daily workflow of the average consumer. Until then I'm going to treat this technology trend with the great skepticism that it deserves.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  To be fair, if the attention, resources, and energy employed in the crypto/web3 space weren't... a lot of them would be coming up with new financial derivative products. So, from that perspective, crypto/web3 is bloodletting some of the crazies from the legacy financial system, which probably isn't the worst thing.
rideontime 5y ago
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. For now. That won’t remain the case if we don’t continue to push back. And we all breathe the air that the crypto miners pollute, we all suffer from the GPU shortages, whether we participate or not.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  And that is a stupid argument anyway. Nobody is forcing anybody to smoke, use heroin, gamble, drink excessive amounts of alcohol, etc, that does not mean you can criticize the practice without having to "offer constructive criticism", sometimes, "Just dont do it" is enough.
yehNonsense0 5y ago
Preference is evidence. There is no obligation on others to validate your feelings by debating the merits. Indifference is just fine as indifference is biologically possible. There does not have to be a debate; agency cannot be forced. Hacker News does not have to make you feel warm and fuzzy about every technology. K8s and Kilo or Linux and Wireguard; boom federated Web3 is an alternative option for machine state but it’s not the only one. It does not need to win or be debated.
deleted 5y ago
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indymike 5y ago
> The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. It's not really cryptocurrency that is fueling it. It is the absolute silliness around NFTs and the rush to import some "blockchain" to otherwise uninteresting products and companies to make them somehow relevant. This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI. > Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs). Skepticism is what happens when the thousands of failures start failing. There are sure to be some winners, but the space is overheated, and the silliness that has ensued over NFTs is the kind of thing that happens when a space gets overheated. > Isn't that what Hacker News should be about? Yes, but part of that is realizing that maybe your time is served better by hacking on something else where there are not thousands of failures happening. I don't see this as unhealthy community, it feels like maybe the market is maturing and you are going to get that signal earlier here than you will in the general market. Why? Because a lot of technology elites are here.
- zeruch 5y ago
  "This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI." This is the industry pattern and has been the case going back many decades; the only real change is since the dotcom era, it's spread to consumers playing along, whereas prior to that it was largely just the 'investor class' in the sandbox.
  - acdha 5y ago
    The difference is that all of those had real products early on. The web was changing how people and businesses interacted by the mid-90s, despite computers costing far more and network access being limited and both being terribly slow. Search was a huge deal shortly afterwards, changing how people shopped, researched, etc. ML/AI has had ups and downs but we also live in a world where machines reading text, organizing your photos, responding to natural language queries, etc. are routine. In contrast, the blockchain world has consistently failed to produce anything which many people want to buy. The lure of high returns on speculation has attracted more people than any of the products, but there's no durable business hook the way there was for, say, going back to buying plane tickets over the phone.
user-the-name 5y ago
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology Absolutely, completely wrong. Bitcoin is using HALF A PERCENT of the electricity on the ENTIRE PLANET. That affects every single person living on this planet. It will affect people living here into the future. It is an absolute catastrophe that is hurting everyone. We don't get to "not partake" in that. Bitcoin is the one single thing that has enabled the ransomware epidemic by making it possible for ransomware to be massively profitable. Critical infrastructure and hospitals get shut down by this. This affects millions of people, putting some at deadly risk. We don't get to "not partake" in that. And once we get to smaller, less dramatic negative effects of cryptocurrency, the list just goes on and on. We are affected by this. We don't get to opt out. Ban cryptocurrencies NOW, before they do any more harm to us and our planet. They are worthless and damaging.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  By that logic, we're all participating in the remaining 99% of electricity usage. But this isn't even close to being the case. Are northeastern American states being forced to participate in air conditioning because the southwestern states use so much of it? I don't see the reason in that.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    They are forced to participate in the consequences. You can't tell someone who is arguing for decreasing excessive use of air conditioning that "well if you don't like it, don't use it".
AlexandrB 5y ago
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. And yet we're all being impacted by the externalities such as higher energy costs in some jurisdictions, poor GPU availability, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. There's also a growing risk that when the music stops parts of crypto will be deemed "too big to fail" and the public will be stuck bailing out large crypto speculators.
galosh 5y ago
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology https://twitter.com/mcm_ct/status/1485295498806403077 https://twitter.com/mcm_ct/status/1485295498806403077 Unfortunately Michael Saylor is the rule rather than the exception. Crypto marketing is extremely coercive, with slogans like "have fun staying poor!", intended to maximize shame and peer pressure to encourage the vulnerable and ignorant to become "believers". This is explicitly bullying behaviour.
bikamonki 5y ago
Well put. Not everything is bad about crypto, some ideas may turn into the "next thing". One use I find interesting and look forward to see if it grows into something truly useful is DAOs. I know is a naive thought but I do see decentralized governance as a way of fixing the broken democracy we currently have. I also believe crypto has the potential to fix banking and insurance. We'll see.
RandomLensman 5y ago
There are indeed and they are probably not even technological but conceptual. In practice blockchains/DLTs etc. might not solve many real world issues (any?) but the associated experimentation has surfaced some interesting ideas, e.g.,: (i) ability to split governance layers more, i.e., what was once thought of as one monolith could be run along many dimensions (ii) things like AMMs in DeFi might point the way towards making market making more investable in general (iii) The possibility for creation of new asset classes/creation of new volatility. This might not be crypto/not only crypto, but (also) markets in entirely different things
ravenstine 5y ago
That's what really bums me out. Both pro-crypto and anti-crypto have become such cults that even as a curious person it's hard to make sense of anything anymore. No matter what side you're on, there's little room for reason or middle-ground. Yeah, there's problems with cryptocurrency remaining to be solved. Yes, there's shenanigans and scams. Yes, it's not great for the environment (and I cannot wait for a smartass to reply with the word "understatement"). But the technologies surrounding cryptocurrencies can solve problems. It's just that crypto primarily solves trust issues. If you can trust your currency, trust your banks, and trust your payment processors, cryptocurrencies don't do that much for you. Mainline digital banking does a better job than cryptocurrencies currently do. Yet I'm glad that Bitcoin and other coins exist; in an increasingly authoritarian world, such things can be a last resort for those who become "depersoned", and I suspect that one day I'll be depersoned. And if there comes a point where cryptocurrency becomes so perfect that the banks can't compete, then what's there to complain about? Unfortunately, countless hordes looking to get rich quick have latched on to these things because they're so accessible to anyone with too much time on their hands. The tired word "blockchain" is so abused that upon hearing it I have sadness in me. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about blockchains. A blockchain without a consensus algorithm won't amount to much, but you can have consensus algorithms without necessarily having a blockchain. But blockchain sounds more mysterious to the average person, thus it's the buzzword of favor. You don't even need to know what a blockchain actually is. Just say the word blockchain and you'll be one of the cool people! A lot of people on the other side of the coin (yuk yuk) don't even have the faintest clue of how cryptocurrencies work or how even traditional fiat currencies work. One guy I was talking to recently said that "if people didn't think they could make money off of Bitcoin, it would be worth absolutely nothing." Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception. He didn't understand that there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, and that it wouldn't be easy to change that number without a majority of the nodes agreeing, and that there are practical reasons why some would want to use Bitcoin over fiat. If anything, fiat currency better fits his mental model. This is not uncommon, in my experience. Very few people actually read anything. Oh my f---- ----... is every USB power bank a f---- piece of s---??? ARGGG. Sorry, side tangent.
- egypturnash 5y ago
giaour 5y ago
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Nobody is forcing anyone to burn fossil fuels, either, but we all breathe and thus can't opt out of its negative externalities. This argument only works when externalities are acceptable or nonexistent.
8note 5y ago
Imo the crypto is an overemphasized implementation detail. If a genuinely novel product is going to happen, it's a product that would do just fine without the crypto. If the selling point of your product isn't the product, it seems like you're focusing on the wrong thing
UncleMeat 5y ago
> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Today. Advocates insist that cryptocurrencies will replace state currencies, that NFTs will replace other forms of ownership like deeds and manage your participation in all communities, and that DAOs will replace corporations and other governance systems. Many of us think that this world is a worse world, with more opportunities for capitalists and corporations to exert control over our lives and buy and sell every component of our being. People buying and selling bored apes doesn't affect me. But the reason people buy and sell bored apes is because they believe and advocate for a world where everything functions like bored apes.
duxup 5y ago
What would be constructive? Most of the articles are fairly detailed, people put in effort.
deleted 5y ago
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beepbooptheory 5y ago
However much these various blogs and such are right, which they seem to be, the continuing, constant, vitriol that at this point can only be for the chorus already singing it, starts to look like something in itself, something beyond just trying to "warn" people. I can't help but feel it is, at least in part, coming from (perhaps unconscious) shame. We are at the sunset of a Californian Ideology where VC could save the world, Twitter could facilitate democracy, YouTube could democratize entertainment, culture. We are in a situation where any possible tech-minded business models can only promise to become so monolothic that they become de facto libertarian states, or be so fractured and specific that they inevitably prey on specific mental ticks of their users, or otherwise contrive value through subscriptions. Everything has led to this, whether you all can accept that or not, whether you should feel "responsible" or not (you shouldn't). This almost comically absurd force of computers and money and energy now comes forward, with an army of infrastructure and knowledge and VC funding ready to greet it. You can see all our sins wrapped up into it, along with some newer things as well. I think people are so angry because they see that, they see a likeness, even if distorted, in the macro structures of crypto, and in that they feel shame. It's as if there was quick a shortcut taken to the worst possible evolution of everything everyone was already working on in this space, big or small. And there is shame in realizing that this is what we were working towards, a secretly terrible teleology realized. And so, to attempt to atone, you write a blog post about how evil it all is, as if it was something that literally came ex nihilo to threaten all our good work from before, denying that, in fact, it is merely a secret, forbidden wish granted. The logical culmination of this wild ride of capitalism and technology we have been riding. We are all guilty.
- tarsinge 5y ago
  Nicely put. Crypto is the end-game of that ideology. It's easy to scapegoat, but the problem is deeper.
throwawaysysd 5y ago
>There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space Depending on what you mean here, I don't agree. Every novel idea I've seen coming out of cryptocurrency/defi can be generally applied to distributed computing and is useful in other fields or with other forms of finance. The ideas that are explicitly dependent on cryptocurrency appear almost exclusively to be the really terrible ideas. (NFTs, smart contracts, DAOs, etc)
oliwarner 5y ago
It continues to appear to be a fad designed to make a select few extraordinarily rich for being first in, to further facilitate criminals, all while layering approximately zero for standard users, all chuffing away atop a technology that has literally recommissioned coal power stations. This, off the back of the collective insanity that is NFTs. This is a low point for humanity, for tech. Thanks for your concern but we're going to keep going on about it.
xtracto 5y ago
I really hated Web2 when it started, and when the term started to get coined. I hated these "javascript heavy" pages that prevented accessibility. I hated the huge increase in load times and the concentration of everything in HTTP. I was happy using FTP/SFTP, NNTP, SMTP, IRC, among other protocols. And yet we are here, 20 years later.
mdoms 5y ago
Web3 is not above criticism. Advocates want it to dominate the internet, monetary systems and ultimately our lives. It should be criticised within an inch of its life, and if it's all that you say it is then it should rise above it.
balsam 5y ago
Imagine if nicotine, which may or may not have beneficial effects on your mental & physical health, was hyped up as much as web3. why not simply discuss the studies of these effects instead of opinions thereof?
albertopv 5y ago
The fundamental problem of something like web3 is that is totally unrealistic. Imagine someone "posting" something that should be kept private. Can you go back and delete it? No, because the blockchain is immutable, you can try to hide it but it will still be there. Think of porn revenge videos, it would be a nightmare. Another example: I recall a videogame on blockchain that had tons of issues patching it self, again because blockchain is immutable. Also, web3 would really bring democracy to authoritarian states? A country like China with 1.3 billions of people 100% would not improve its democracy situation. That's a lot of people. Last but not least, almost nobody really cares how web is implemented as far they can browse to their favourite porn site or facebook page or blog or something else.

by axg11 5y ago

kahrl 5y ago

How would you like us to be constructive when discussing fraud, scams, and Ponzi schemes?

_pmf_ 5y ago

> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Like I wasn't forced to participate in the resolution and the fallout of the housing crash?

monktastic1 5y ago

Why is criticism without being constructive unhealthy? Isn't it possible to know that something is bad without having a clear answer of what to do instead other than simply stop?

nikanj 5y ago

I don't support robocall spammers, even if their tech stacks might contain interesting nuggets. At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud. I don't care that it might contain cool tech. The same goes for e.g. ransomware. It might be innovative. It's still a huge blight on humanity.

jsharf 5y ago
Usually I hate skeptical mean comments like this on hackernews. Right or wrong, there's a certain level of empathy missing. And yet... In this case I find myself guiltily agreeing.
- kerneloftruth 5y ago
  I don't see anything mean in the comment, and I also fully agree (it's really well-stated). Being direct and not mincing words is not being mean.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    It's not mean, it's just very skewed in one way without acknowledging different perspectives. Take this sentence: > At best your typical crypto project is just a planet-destroying unregulated casino, at worst it's criminal fraud Obviously the "at best" part is still a negative, just like the "at worst". That's no way of starting a curious conversation and frankly, it makes for boring reading no matter if you're for/against cryptocurrencies as a whole.
    - akiselev 5y ago
      Pointing out that a spade is a spade does make for boring reading. I don't understand what more there is to say about NFTs but maybe I'm just taking crazy pills.
- A_non_e-moose 5y ago
  Skepticism is like an anchor, too much and you go nowhere, too little and you're adrift. The interesting questions are how much and where do you place your skepticism? NFTs sound enough alarms for me that I feel the need to drop anchor on that before steering to any BS with potential financial consequences.
  - kongolongo 5y ago
    I think if you're going to support anything - crypto or otherwise, you should start with some level of skepticism, if it can overcome that initial skepticism then maybe it is worth believing in, otherwise remain skeptical imo.
smoldesu 5y ago
Unfortunately, I kinda feel the same way. I'm a blockchain apologist for the most part, whenever I hear people complaining about how the blockchain is some kind of automated discrimination process I cringe a little bit and try my hardest to explain to them that the technology itself is neither good nor evil, just implemented pretty poorly. With that being said, I generally cannot stand cryptocurrency. I have yet to meet a single starry-eyed crypto fanatic who wasn't either woefully uninformed or completely jaded by their investment. I'm not sure if I'd go as far as calling it a "huge blight on humanity" (any more than I'd call Denmark a huge blight on humanity for existing and consuming electricity/food), but digital money is indeed a sucker's game these days.
steelstraw 5y ago
Bitcoin and crypto might seem unnecessary in a democracy with a stable currency and it's easy to focus on the scams. But in countries with deeply unstable economies and authoritarian politics, it is a lifeline. Bitcoin has been used by dissidents and activists in places like Cuba, Nigeria, and Belarus. In Russia, the country’s most prominent opposition politician and Putin critic, Alexei Navaly, has raised millions in Bitcoin. Putin can do a lot of things, but he can't freeze a bitcoin account. If you want to understand what crypto is really about, ask Venezuelans if they’d rather own bolívar or Bitcoin. And with creeping authoritarianism in the West, and the USD inflating and at risk of losing global reserve currency status (petrodollar), I wouldn't be so confident it'll never happen here.
- acdha 5y ago
  Don’t forget to ask them again after they learn how helpful Bitcoin is to the police. Once it’s big enough to care about, leaving a signed confession is not a good idea.
- CPLX 5y ago
  > Putin can do a lot of things, but he can't freeze a bitcoin account. He can if he's got the private key.
  - imglorp 5y ago
    Even if he can't freeze it, he has access to the public ledger and with some effort can figure out who sent money to whom. Either of those two parties could then get a visit and politely invited to reveal the other. If you want (more?) anonymous you need Monero or Zerocoin.
  - toss1 5y ago
    ... and Putin has lots of thugs happy to wield USD$5 (RUB 388) wrenches to obtain those private keys, and the globally known precedent of the year-long torture & murder of Sergi Magnitsky to let the key-holders know that there's no way out.
- boringg 5y ago
intev 5y ago
> I don't care that it might contain cool tech. As a tech enthusiast, that's just sad to hear.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  Any cool innovations genuinely offered in good faith by web3/crypto are confounded by all the bad actors.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  If you think that's sad, wait until you hear about the people who give crimes against society and the planet the "ok" because they involve cool tech.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ddrdrck_ 5y ago
There is crypto ecosystems that do not use PoW (proof-of-work, ala Bitcoin) but other consensus schemes (most notably proof-of-stake, e.g. Cosmos) that do not destroy the planet. Unregulated casino with eco-friendly tech is quite nice actually. No government should be able to forbid me to gamble imho.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dang 5y ago
Please don't post shallow-indignant flamewar comments, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It makes for dumbed-down, tedious internet threads, and we'd prefer to avoid those. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

CPLX 5y ago

> but there is a chance that _some_ of them will create genuinely novel and interesting products Right. And there's a 100% certainty that most of the products that already exist are vehicles for scams at worst, and gambling at best.

simonw 5y ago

"Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology" Plenty of its advocates very clearly WANT to force people to partake though. Anything to keep that number going up.

jack_pp 5y ago
No they don't want to force anyone and there's no evidence of this. Just because there are a lot of evangelists doesn't mean anyone is forced to do anything
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  There's plenty of evidence of this; there are proposals to move house deeds, drivers' licenses, elections, etc. onto the blockchain. These wouldn't be "oh, you can just not participate" sorts of scenarios.
  - kyruzic 5y ago
    A blockchain is not web3 or crypto.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman The Venn diagram of web3, cryptocurrency, and blockchain proponents is substantially similar to a circle.
      - kyruzic 5y ago
        No it really is not, but nice try and great meme!
        jakelazaroff 5y ago
        Can you give an example of web3 tech that doesn't involve a blockchain in any way?

jakelazaroff 5y ago

It's disingenuous to describe it as just a new technology, though. Adherents promote crypto and web3 as a specific set of transformations to our society. That is what people are so stridently against. The very explicit goal of NFT folks, for example, is to commodify everything. I can't just not use the technology, because if they get their way it will greatly affect me. So I'm forced to stake out a position.

endisneigh 5y ago

What’s a single idea in the crypto space that requires no centralized entity involved and can sustain indefinite price drops of the underlying cryptocurrency? I find it amusing how most of the interesting things in crypto are centralized.

DennisP 5y ago
Uniswap, a decentralized exchange. The smart contracts have no centralized administration at all, anyone can set up a GUI for them, and it doesn't break just because the price of ETH falls. This is one of the most successful projects on Ethereum, with trading volume comparable to Coinbase.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Uniswap itself is centralized, using GitHub for centralized repository code storage and the app itself is also centralized. The organization is centralized, with employees reporting into a centralized structure as well.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    I suppose there's a spectrum of centralization between "totally controlled by one person" and "magically appears out of the collective intelligence of the entire internet." So I can't say that Uniswap is completely decentralized. But the code on chain can't be changed by anyone, has no admin functions, and doesn't rely on external data feeds. UI for it can be developed and hosted by anyone or skipped entirely by anyone willing to deal directly with the contract using standard tools. So I'd say Uniswap meets your request above for something that doesn't require a centralized entity. The entities you mention could disappear and Uniswap would keep going.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

No one's being forced, but it seems many people are being tricked. It's important to inject a considerable amount of skepticism into a conversation that is often dominated by proponents in it only to make money off of speculation.

ravenstine 5y ago
Those people are probably going to be tricked anyway. Many things in society are tricks. Google is a trick. Self-help is a trick. Fast food is a trick. MLM is a trick. Political ideologies are tricks. Everyone wants to be lied to, or rather everyone wants to believe in something, and they'll throw away their money just to maintain that belief. While aspects of the world of cryptocurrency are tricks, it's hardly unique to it or the responsibility of others to prevent people from being tricked.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  I don't know what you're trying to say here. Fast food is a trick? Does it not prevent me from starving? It seems like you're saying something like "stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons." What are those reasons? If I see someone trying to scam others, why shouldn't I warn those people?
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    Fast food is a trick because it is highly marked up and designed to be addictive moreso than most healthful meals. Yes, there is trickery in fast food and snack foods in general, and if you don't believe that, there's plenty of material on how the food industry and really the system in general have used the institution of fast food to keep people poor and sick. This isn't to say that everyone in fast food, even those in its upper echelons, are acutely aware of this, but discounting the involvement of conscious thought, it is a manifestation of modernity that developed to trick minds. > stop trying to prevent people from being scammed, because reasons No, that's not what I'm saying, at least in your brutal interpretation. Should society allow anyone to be scammed? My answer to that question is a clear no, especially when it comes to fraud. Society functions orders of magnitude better with a level of self-control than it would otherwise. Does this mean that society should protect people from themselves? Or rather, if someone believes they are going to get rich putting their life savings into cryptocurrencies because they lack foresight or technical aptitude, should we do what we can to prevent people from being this foolish despite the existing level of trickery that we are willing to tolerate? If people need to be saved from cryptocurrency, then why aren't we saving them from payday loans, or guzzling HFCs in sodas, or wasting time smoking weed, or gambling at casinos? All of those are examples of tricks (yes, they are tricks) designed to extract wealth and lifeforce. Hell, our monetary system itself is a trick. At times we may point them out as evils, but we don't take them so seriously because life can't be so safe. Unless something radically changes in our societies, for all intents and purposes, we are allowing some of us to hang ourselves by our own rope. Yet somehow crypto bears more fault for some? To me, that doesn't follow. If I create an NFT for my soul, put it up for sale for $1000, and someone actually buys it, are they being scammed? If I fork Bitcoin into a new cryptocurrency, publish a bunch of poppycock about how it will be the next big thing because I got rid of its limits, and I sell those coins and run off with the money, is it of no fault of the customer that they believed such a specious lie? No and no, in my opinion, because it's not reasonable for society to protect people to such an extent as it would neither be sustainable nor good for every business to be scrutinized to the degree necessary to provide said protection.

eqmvii 5y ago

> The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. But they ARE financially incentivized to bring more people into the ecosystem, which makes for a very loud and persistent hype machine. I find the negativity here refreshing, to be honest. The proponents of the tech are so organized but the skeptics have the choice to just ignore it.

danso 5y ago

One of the criticisms against web3 and crypto is that it’s ultimately a high tech pyramid scheme, solving few problems that it didn’t create on it’s own. If that’s the case, then we should want and expect to see rising criticism and pushback. Crypto doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and if unscrutinized, can have unintended harms across technology and society in general

yellow_postit 5y ago
one thing that's been a good development in my view is central banks taking more seriously retailer and digital concerns, even if the impetus is one of regulation. Trying to stay neutral on the inherent politics of it all...but the Fed's recently released paper [1] for comment on developing a centrally backed digital currency recognizes some very real challenges and opportunities that the current US banking system has not well solved for. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
kyruzic 5y ago
Nothing, literally nothing about web3 is a pyramid scheme. Yes you can build a pyramid scheme on top of web3. No web3 is not a pyramid scheme. You can build a pyramid scheme on facebook too, but facebook is not a pyramid scheme.
- throwawaysysd 5y ago
  >No web3 is not a pyramid scheme. As long as it's centered around the value of BTC, this is false. BTC has totally failed as a currency and is completely dependent on speculators pushing its valuation up to keep the miners profitable. I'll be willing to concede this point to you if eventually all proof-of-work coins disappear and the BTC maxis go away, and the incentives change to move away from mining and towards providing real services, but I doubt this will ever happen given this was the whole reason the crypto bubble happened in the first place. Perhaps you want to define web3 in a more vague way like "any web business that uses a merkle tree publicly in some fashion". You can do that but either you're still left with BTC maxis leading the charge on that, or you have to expand it in such a way that the term becomes meaningless because it applies to a lot of unrelated things. Was google a web3 business before anyone knew what that was because they used a merkle tree in google drive, and google drive was public? How about github with their public git repositories? See what I mean here?

slaw3 5y ago

Its easy for me to forget that the majority of people working in tech are employed by companies offering centralized services. The majority of these companies have little to gain from traction of cryptocurrency and many have no plan in place to benefit from web3. Not surprising to me that people shun the hand that does not feed them.

rrjjww 5y ago

It’s not just HN. It’s all over the web. There are some novel and interesting products being developed (reading about the theory behind Uniswap liquidity pools blew my mind) that people totally ignore because it’s easier to hate on the latest meme coin.

rideontime 5y ago
If (hypothetically) I’m anti-crypto, why should I care about defi, which, as I understand it, is all about trading crypto for crypto? e: This isn’t meant to be a rhetorical question. Ever since Mark Cuban tweeted something about some loans that defi enables I’ve been wondering why I should care.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  You shouldn't. It's exactly that. It is complicated gambling, nothing else.

acdha 5y ago

The criticism isn’t unconstructive just because it’s inconvenient for sales and marketing purposes. Most of it is detailed point by point lists of problems the community would need to address to be successful — but trying to pretend it’s ignorable all but ensures that those advances won’t happen. If someone is working on a novel idea, the grifters using them as a blind not only aren’t helping but in fact will be competing for resources and attention. It’s true that nobody is being forced to use cryptocurrency but we have to live on the planet blockchain proponents are polluting, and we know that many people will lose money speculating on systems which do not work. Even if you don’t care about them, that causes economic disruption and diverts resources away from better business ideas.

hooande 5y ago

It's possible that crypto/web3 are a lot of diverting attention, resources and energy toward ideas that are fundamentally impractical. The fact that so many people have a financial interest in promoting these ideas makes the whole thing suspicious. I'm really waiting for these novel and interesting products based on blockchain. like, waiting every day to see one break into the daily workflow of the average consumer. Until then I'm going to treat this technology trend with the great skepticism that it deserves.

ethbr0 5y ago
To be fair, if the attention, resources, and energy employed in the crypto/web3 space weren't... a lot of them would be coming up with new financial derivative products. So, from that perspective, crypto/web3 is bloodletting some of the crazies from the legacy financial system, which probably isn't the worst thing.

rideontime 5y ago

> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. For now. That won’t remain the case if we don’t continue to push back. And we all breathe the air that the crypto miners pollute, we all suffer from the GPU shortages, whether we participate or not.

Ostrogodsky 5y ago
And that is a stupid argument anyway. Nobody is forcing anybody to smoke, use heroin, gamble, drink excessive amounts of alcohol, etc, that does not mean you can criticize the practice without having to "offer constructive criticism", sometimes, "Just dont do it" is enough.

yehNonsense0 5y ago

Preference is evidence. There is no obligation on others to validate your feelings by debating the merits. Indifference is just fine as indifference is biologically possible. There does not have to be a debate; agency cannot be forced. Hacker News does not have to make you feel warm and fuzzy about every technology. K8s and Kilo or Linux and Wireguard; boom federated Web3 is an alternative option for machine state but it’s not the only one. It does not need to win or be debated.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

indymike 5y ago

> The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. It's not really cryptocurrency that is fueling it. It is the absolute silliness around NFTs and the rush to import some "blockchain" to otherwise uninteresting products and companies to make them somehow relevant. This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI. > Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs). Skepticism is what happens when the thousands of failures start failing. There are sure to be some winners, but the space is overheated, and the silliness that has ensued over NFTs is the kind of thing that happens when a space gets overheated. > Isn't that what Hacker News should be about? Yes, but part of that is realizing that maybe your time is served better by hacking on something else where there are not thousands of failures happening. I don't see this as unhealthy community, it feels like maybe the market is maturing and you are going to get that signal earlier here than you will in the general market. Why? Because a lot of technology elites are here.

zeruch 5y ago
"This is a pattern we saw a lot with prior trends like search, cloud, machine learning and AI." This is the industry pattern and has been the case going back many decades; the only real change is since the dotcom era, it's spread to consumers playing along, whereas prior to that it was largely just the 'investor class' in the sandbox.
- acdha 5y ago
  The difference is that all of those had real products early on. The web was changing how people and businesses interacted by the mid-90s, despite computers costing far more and network access being limited and both being terribly slow. Search was a huge deal shortly afterwards, changing how people shopped, researched, etc. ML/AI has had ups and downs but we also live in a world where machines reading text, organizing your photos, responding to natural language queries, etc. are routine. In contrast, the blockchain world has consistently failed to produce anything which many people want to buy. The lure of high returns on speculation has attracted more people than any of the products, but there's no durable business hook the way there was for, say, going back to buying plane tickets over the phone.

user-the-name 5y ago

> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology Absolutely, completely wrong. Bitcoin is using HALF A PERCENT of the electricity on the ENTIRE PLANET. That affects every single person living on this planet. It will affect people living here into the future. It is an absolute catastrophe that is hurting everyone. We don't get to "not partake" in that. Bitcoin is the one single thing that has enabled the ransomware epidemic by making it possible for ransomware to be massively profitable. Critical infrastructure and hospitals get shut down by this. This affects millions of people, putting some at deadly risk. We don't get to "not partake" in that. And once we get to smaller, less dramatic negative effects of cryptocurrency, the list just goes on and on. We are affected by this. We don't get to opt out. Ban cryptocurrencies NOW, before they do any more harm to us and our planet. They are worthless and damaging.

ravenstine 5y ago
By that logic, we're all participating in the remaining 99% of electricity usage. But this isn't even close to being the case. Are northeastern American states being forced to participate in air conditioning because the southwestern states use so much of it? I don't see the reason in that.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  They are forced to participate in the consequences. You can't tell someone who is arguing for decreasing excessive use of air conditioning that "well if you don't like it, don't use it".

AlexandrB 5y ago

> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. And yet we're all being impacted by the externalities such as higher energy costs in some jurisdictions, poor GPU availability, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. There's also a growing risk that when the music stops parts of crypto will be deemed "too big to fail" and the public will be stuck bailing out large crypto speculators.

galosh 5y ago

> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology https://twitter.com/mcm_ct/status/1485295498806403077 https://twitter.com/mcm_ct/status/1485295498806403077 Unfortunately Michael Saylor is the rule rather than the exception. Crypto marketing is extremely coercive, with slogans like "have fun staying poor!", intended to maximize shame and peer pressure to encourage the vulnerable and ignorant to become "believers". This is explicitly bullying behaviour.

bikamonki 5y ago

Well put. Not everything is bad about crypto, some ideas may turn into the "next thing". One use I find interesting and look forward to see if it grows into something truly useful is DAOs. I know is a naive thought but I do see decentralized governance as a way of fixing the broken democracy we currently have. I also believe crypto has the potential to fix banking and insurance. We'll see.

RandomLensman 5y ago

There are indeed and they are probably not even technological but conceptual. In practice blockchains/DLTs etc. might not solve many real world issues (any?) but the associated experimentation has surfaced some interesting ideas, e.g.,: (i) ability to split governance layers more, i.e., what was once thought of as one monolith could be run along many dimensions (ii) things like AMMs in DeFi might point the way towards making market making more investable in general (iii) The possibility for creation of new asset classes/creation of new volatility. This might not be crypto/not only crypto, but (also) markets in entirely different things

ravenstine 5y ago

That's what really bums me out. Both pro-crypto and anti-crypto have become such cults that even as a curious person it's hard to make sense of anything anymore. No matter what side you're on, there's little room for reason or middle-ground. Yeah, there's problems with cryptocurrency remaining to be solved. Yes, there's shenanigans and scams. Yes, it's not great for the environment (and I cannot wait for a smartass to reply with the word "understatement"). But the technologies surrounding cryptocurrencies can solve problems. It's just that crypto primarily solves trust issues. If you can trust your currency, trust your banks, and trust your payment processors, cryptocurrencies don't do that much for you. Mainline digital banking does a better job than cryptocurrencies currently do. Yet I'm glad that Bitcoin and other coins exist; in an increasingly authoritarian world, such things can be a last resort for those who become "depersoned", and I suspect that one day I'll be depersoned. And if there comes a point where cryptocurrency becomes so perfect that the banks can't compete, then what's there to complain about? Unfortunately, countless hordes looking to get rich quick have latched on to these things because they're so accessible to anyone with too much time on their hands. The tired word "blockchain" is so abused that upon hearing it I have sadness in me. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about blockchains. A blockchain without a consensus algorithm won't amount to much, but you can have consensus algorithms without necessarily having a blockchain. But blockchain sounds more mysterious to the average person, thus it's the buzzword of favor. You don't even need to know what a blockchain actually is. Just say the word blockchain and you'll be one of the cool people! A lot of people on the other side of the coin (yuk yuk) don't even have the faintest clue of how cryptocurrencies work or how even traditional fiat currencies work. One guy I was talking to recently said that "if people didn't think they could make money off of Bitcoin, it would be worth absolutely nothing." Effectively, he believed that the value of Bitcoin was entirely in people's perception. He didn't understand that there are a fixed number of Bitcoins, and that it wouldn't be easy to change that number without a majority of the nodes agreeing, and that there are practical reasons why some would want to use Bitcoin over fiat. If anything, fiat currency better fits his mental model. This is not uncommon, in my experience. Very few people actually read anything. Oh my f---- ----... is every USB power bank a f---- piece of s---??? ARGGG. Sorry, side tangent.

egypturnash 5y ago

giaour 5y ago

> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Nobody is forcing anyone to burn fossil fuels, either, but we all breathe and thus can't opt out of its negative externalities. This argument only works when externalities are acceptable or nonexistent.

8note 5y ago

Imo the crypto is an overemphasized implementation detail. If a genuinely novel product is going to happen, it's a product that would do just fine without the crypto. If the selling point of your product isn't the product, it seems like you're focusing on the wrong thing

UncleMeat 5y ago

> Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Today. Advocates insist that cryptocurrencies will replace state currencies, that NFTs will replace other forms of ownership like deeds and manage your participation in all communities, and that DAOs will replace corporations and other governance systems. Many of us think that this world is a worse world, with more opportunities for capitalists and corporations to exert control over our lives and buy and sell every component of our being. People buying and selling bored apes doesn't affect me. But the reason people buy and sell bored apes is because they believe and advocate for a world where everything functions like bored apes.

duxup 5y ago

What would be constructive? Most of the articles are fairly detailed, people put in effort.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

beepbooptheory 5y ago

However much these various blogs and such are right, which they seem to be, the continuing, constant, vitriol that at this point can only be for the chorus already singing it, starts to look like something in itself, something beyond just trying to "warn" people. I can't help but feel it is, at least in part, coming from (perhaps unconscious) shame. We are at the sunset of a Californian Ideology where VC could save the world, Twitter could facilitate democracy, YouTube could democratize entertainment, culture. We are in a situation where any possible tech-minded business models can only promise to become so monolothic that they become de facto libertarian states, or be so fractured and specific that they inevitably prey on specific mental ticks of their users, or otherwise contrive value through subscriptions. Everything has led to this, whether you all can accept that or not, whether you should feel "responsible" or not (you shouldn't). This almost comically absurd force of computers and money and energy now comes forward, with an army of infrastructure and knowledge and VC funding ready to greet it. You can see all our sins wrapped up into it, along with some newer things as well. I think people are so angry because they see that, they see a likeness, even if distorted, in the macro structures of crypto, and in that they feel shame. It's as if there was quick a shortcut taken to the worst possible evolution of everything everyone was already working on in this space, big or small. And there is shame in realizing that this is what we were working towards, a secretly terrible teleology realized. And so, to attempt to atone, you write a blog post about how evil it all is, as if it was something that literally came ex nihilo to threaten all our good work from before, denying that, in fact, it is merely a secret, forbidden wish granted. The logical culmination of this wild ride of capitalism and technology we have been riding. We are all guilty.

tarsinge 5y ago
Nicely put. Crypto is the end-game of that ideology. It's easy to scapegoat, but the problem is deeper.

throwawaysysd 5y ago

>There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space Depending on what you mean here, I don't agree. Every novel idea I've seen coming out of cryptocurrency/defi can be generally applied to distributed computing and is useful in other fields or with other forms of finance. The ideas that are explicitly dependent on cryptocurrency appear almost exclusively to be the really terrible ideas. (NFTs, smart contracts, DAOs, etc)

oliwarner 5y ago

It continues to appear to be a fad designed to make a select few extraordinarily rich for being first in, to further facilitate criminals, all while layering approximately zero for standard users, all chuffing away atop a technology that has literally recommissioned coal power stations. This, off the back of the collective insanity that is NFTs. This is a low point for humanity, for tech. Thanks for your concern but we're going to keep going on about it.

xtracto 5y ago

I really hated Web2 when it started, and when the term started to get coined. I hated these "javascript heavy" pages that prevented accessibility. I hated the huge increase in load times and the concentration of everything in HTTP. I was happy using FTP/SFTP, NNTP, SMTP, IRC, among other protocols. And yet we are here, 20 years later.

mdoms 5y ago

Web3 is not above criticism. Advocates want it to dominate the internet, monetary systems and ultimately our lives. It should be criticised within an inch of its life, and if it's all that you say it is then it should rise above it.

balsam 5y ago

Imagine if nicotine, which may or may not have beneficial effects on your mental & physical health, was hyped up as much as web3. why not simply discuss the studies of these effects instead of opinions thereof?

albertopv 5y ago

The fundamental problem of something like web3 is that is totally unrealistic. Imagine someone "posting" something that should be kept private. Can you go back and delete it? No, because the blockchain is immutable, you can try to hide it but it will still be there. Think of porn revenge videos, it would be a nightmare. Another example: I recall a videogame on blockchain that had tons of issues patching it self, again because blockchain is immutable. Also, web3 would really bring democracy to authoritarian states? A country like China with 1.3 billions of people 100% would not improve its democracy situation. That's a lot of people. Last but not least, almost nobody really cares how web is implemented as far they can browse to their favourite porn site or facebook page or blog or something else.