8 ms·

Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity

• mccorrinall 5y ago
  I know exactly one legitimate use case for blockchain: a public ledger like bitcoin. The thing is that you don’t need more than this one online currency though, right? It’s also the safest in terms of PoW [1]. I don’t see any reason for all other altcoins to exist other than charting and trading on exchanges (which is certainly fun, but does not provide value). [1] https://howmanyconfs.com/ https://howmanyconfs.com/
  • hunterb123 5y ago
    Coins have different attributes and use cases. Who is to say who can make what. The best of the niche needed will win out, just like every other sector of all industries. Ethereum has it's EVM. Monero has it's RandomX algo to prevent ASICs, and it's Ring signatures to prevent tracing. Some coins are pure Proof of Stake and try to solve scaling differently, see Algorand and Cardano. There are altcoins that are just clones, referred to generally as shitcoins.
    • mccorrinall 5y ago
      Just because you can’t buy an ASIC Ant miner doesn’t mean that they have not developed one internally and are running a monopoly. (Spoiler: Bitmain already developed several ASIC miners for Cryptonight in the past)
  • hannasanarion 5y ago
    A public ledger is not inherently valuable. A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not. If for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be public, you can tweet a picture of the receipt. Or, even better, you can mail it to yourself, the postmark is legally binding. Bitcoin uses almost as much energy as the entire global banking system, with its associated costs in capital, emissions, and e-waste, to process less than 0.001% the transaction volume of Visa alone, while providing no additional benefit.
    • hunterb123 5y ago
      Blockchains can be public or private, the key is they are distributed ledgers.
      • hannasanarion 5y ago
        A distributed ledger is also not inherently valuable. A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger does not need to be distributed to be trusted. See above. If, for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be in a lot of places, you can ship out usb sticks, put copies of it on different data centers. Or, just use a regular-ass bank. They already have distributed ledger systems for redundancy and responsiveness. What, you think that out of all of Chase's data centers there's only one server that has any transaction data on it? Blockchain adds nothing that existing database and data transfer solutions don't have, but it always comes with cost and immutability (which is not the same as correctness- the >1 billion dollars stolen out of people's crypto wallets per year since 2018 is testament to that).
      • cuteboy19 5y ago
        Private blockchains are entirely useless. If you already have a permissioned system, there is not point in using a trustless and permission less database
      • yashg 5y ago
• zhoujianfu 5y ago
  You say that like speculative gambling isn’t legitimate!
• bigbonch 5y ago
  Walmart Canada has used blockchain [1] to better their supply chains systems. I suspect when you say you "haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain" you're referring to the consumer space based on current offerings. I would argue that "blockchain" just as an idea and technology has plenty of use cases. [1] https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-to-solve-supply-chain-challenges https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-t...
  • dmead 5y ago
    so would a database, or a linked list, or literally any data structure... again, a solution looking for a problem.
    • yashg 5y ago
      Hammer in search of a nail.
  • cmdli 5y ago
    I just don't see how that use case couldn't have been more easily served with a boring old centralized database. Why do you need a trustless system where all the users are either in-house or contractually obligated to not screw each other over?
    • hunterb123 5y ago
      Probably in logistics where many nodes of many companies need to record offline quite often. Trucks, warehouses, resellers, manufacturers, all with their own systems and problems can record to the same ledger reliably.
      • yashg 5y ago
        And they can't on a Walmart owned database based system? You know the good old boring web application? HN is one example. Hundreds of people are using it, upvoting and commenting at at any given second. Works just fine.
• mtkhaos 5y ago
  I believe in a decentralized web, but one that you don't need a data center to participate in; nor, a buy in to participate. As at the end if the day, that's what the web was back in the day. And still is if you ignore the main stays. It's silly really, but it's more of a question as to what is possible with access to a boundless tape of computers. How do you organize and for what purpose.
  • jeroenhd 5y ago
    The "original" web3 before the cryptocurrency scammers claimed the term was all about the decentralized web with protocols like IPFS backing them. With IPFS, someone needs to host the data (either yourself or some service you pay) but the more popular your data is, the more hosts will have it cached and the quicker and cheaper the content loads. Even now, after the surge of cryptocurrency gambling, products like NFTs often leverage IPFS to store data, since the blockchains themselves are absolutely useless for actually storing information and nobody wants their decentralized system to rely on someone else's server.
• valcron1000 5y ago
  What about international transfers without a middle man dictating what, when and how? If not for blockchain I would probably be working on a completely different field. Just because you don't find it useful does not mean that it's the same for everyone else
  • cardy31 5y ago
    Turns out most people wanting to do international transfers without a middleman are criminals. Regular people are for the most part fine with international transfers going through banks, likely via SWIFT.
    • GeorgeWBasic 5y ago
      Turns out that's no longer the case since banks started to adopt cancel culture too, as seen in Canada. Overbearing governments have created legitimate use cases for crypto money transfers.
    • auggierose 5y ago
      Except if you live in Russia, of course. Or are you saying every Russian is a criminal?
      • gorgoiler 5y ago
        If your jurisdiction has imposed sanctions on Russia but you then help a Russian national bypass sanctions then you are the criminal.
        • auggierose 5y ago
          If you are a Russian, and you want to bypass sanctions imposed on you by others, are you then a criminal, too?
          • everfree 5y ago
            If it's illegal for me to send $200 back home to help my family pay for food to be able to eat, call me a criminal I guess.
• steve76 5y ago
• jxi 5y ago
  You haven't looked very hard if you think it's 100% useless. Some top of mind things: - Transferring funds overseas - Trading/speculation on public exchanges - Selling art online There's a lot of sensationalist articles about how these things are all ponzis or as you say "providing liquidity to early adopters", but you don't have to buy and hodl major coins to use Web3/decentralization. Many of the above use cases are much easier on the blockchain than using traditional brokers. Not to mention there's a lot of friction in the form of providing personal info when you sign up (which may end up hacked/leaked) and chance of being subject to random discrimination.
• jeroenhd 5y ago
  There are some use cases for blockhains, namely cryptocurrencies and their unregulated nature. There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy. Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical if they can even get a contract with any payment provider at all. Furthermore, the USA has a severe problem that stems from companies like Equifax deciding what you can and cannot afford with no way to protest their decisions. I suppose the only useful use case for blockchain is close to money laundering, but there are definitely legitimate use cases for it. It's the closest thing we have to cash in the online world. While I'm all for regulating shitcoins and the gambling ("speculation") that accompanies them, it's an alternative that will need to exist as long as the normal payment system continues to force their own arbitrary, corrupt ideologies on everyone.
  • cuteboy19 5y ago
    Just ban crypto advertising. That way people who actually need crypto for whatever reason can use it, and Matt Damon can't convince your aunt to throw away her inheritance into some shitcoin
    • shafyy 5y ago
      At the very least, crypto advertising should be regulated like gambling ads, not like finacial investment ads.
  • jfkimmes 5y ago
    > There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy. Private payments can easily solved without a blockchain. For private payments you don't need a completely trust-less system. Taler[1] solves this quite elegantly: they provide completetly anonymous payments for the customer but still require the merchant to be 'on-record' to make money laundering harder/impossible. For that they rely on a regulated and trusted party as you would with a regular payment provider or bank. No proof of work needed, no value volatility, just an online representation of cash with accountability for the merchant built-in. Of course, this also means that your second point is still valid for Taler: The involved trusted parties could collectively decide that they want to discriminate against certain merchants, in the same way the current payment providers did. [1]: https://taler.net/en/ https://taler.net/en/
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• telomero22 5y ago
  Here are just some of the use cases 1. 100x cheaper, faster cross-border transfers 2. Immutable, digital, accessible, secure ownership of music, video, real-estate, cars, gaming assets, health data 3. Instant access to nearly all possible financial products (loans, lending, startup investments etc.) without a middle man There are many, many more use cases. Crypto drastically increases accountability, transparency, accessibility, trustworthiness for every kind of use case. It seems like you are creating a lot of straw men to not see that, for example an impossible standard such as saying not all of crypto is 100% decentralized, so it's centralized, which just makes no sense and is a very strong logical fallacy.
  • smt88 5y ago
    1. Transfers of what? The recipient has to convert to fiat to do anything useful. Cheaper and faster don't seem to be happening either, at the moment. 2. You can never digitally own a physical object. Your ownership is centralized in the real-world legal system. You say "secure" as though people are going around stealing houses from each other by snatching their deeds. Ownership of all of those things is already secure enough. 3. In the US at least, none of this is true. Users still have to go through KYC and there is almost always a middleman involved. Crypto has escaped neither institutionalization nor regulations in developed countries.
    • nullc 5y ago
      I agree that the whole NFT whatever crap is 99.99% bull, but XKCD386 compels me: > You say "secure" as though people are going around stealing houses from each other by snatching their deeds. https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-man-charged-with-stealing-14-homes-through-deed-theft/ https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-man-charged-with-stea... (not that blockchain woo would add much or any value to this problem, but title fraud is an actual thing)
  • yashg 5y ago
    1. Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees. 2. Nope. It doesn't grant any ownership. It's a just a pointer to a file on third party server. Ownership is enforced by a central authority. Code is not law. 3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything. Trust me when I say this, I did a lot of research and reading in earnest. I really hoped there was something of substance in it. I really wanted to embrace web3 and its promise of an open distributed web. I am a programmer. I am always open to learning about and adopting new technologies. I tried hard. I started by reading the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi. I looked at the web3.js framework. I read as many whitepapers as I could. I looked at many of the projects. Things just don't add up.