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The quality of arguments against web3 seem related to a trend where smart people indulge in acting dumb on twitter because it feels powerful. It's just an off t

The quality of arguments against web3 seem related to a trend where smart people indulge in acting dumb on twitter because it feels powerful. It's just an off the cuff tweet by a giant of our age, not some ex cathedra papal bull. The basic innovation of proof of work is that it sidesteps the need to solve hard economic problems of energy storage and transmission and lets you turn energy where you find it into fungible, valuable compute and transmit it back as information. Economically, this means if you can find power, you can refine and sell it in the form of mining compute, which means I can make money that enables a supply line to wherever I can harvest an energy source. Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple. Maybe I'm being dumb and web3 dies in a fire, but if it sucks that badly, maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet. Even though I like who web3 annoys and why, seeing them at less than their best is unsatisfying.

dmitriid 5y ago
> Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. No, we can't. Becuse all energy is going towards bitcoin mining. > maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet. There is no "other side".
hbosch 5y ago
I had a friend in college say to me, Web 2.0 is "more than rounded buttons". But, if you looked around in 2009, 2010... well, Web 2.0 was mainly crapware covered in rounded buttons. I guess we got... Farmville? Similarly, if Web3 wants to be taken seriously it has to provide more than access to private Discords. NFTs are basically a digital lanyard, they get you in and around some niche areas of the web's convention center but once the big show comes and goes what's left? Web3's value prop needs to be greater than "we can see your coins".
runnerup 5y ago
> When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple. What? Just use an RDBMS, it'll "refine" that electricity to the same end product millions of times more efficiently. That's the argument most Web3 critics have.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  The efficiency of an RDBMS treats trust as both an assumption and an externality, and that's not efficient in any risk adjusted model. An RDBMS depends on trust, where web3 uses consensus, and that consensus is a different product, which also has some useful anti-technocrat and anti-leviathan properties. Are all these kids writing crypto protocols for smart contracts just too dumb to spin up postgress? Doubtful. The ideology behind it is from a generation raised on narrative and they are inventing a way to relate based on something concrete that requires proofs and truth. The problem I think web3 techs solve is the forfeit of trust that institutions and platforms have engaged in over the last decade. There's no point in even talking to anyone involved in them because there's no reason to believe they would argue in good faith. Consensus protocols and proofs provide stability and some of that trust the culture has lost. The people who still believe in those institutions are just clinging to a precarious bourgeois and managerialist aspiration to become a part of them, where it's people from wealth (material and cultural), and working class people with less education and money who are the marks of those institutions who are typically the ones flocking to cryptocurrencies and now web3. They're also where growth comes from. In this sense, web3 is less ideological than just a polarized class strategy. The question isn't why not use an RDBMS, it should be, can you reasonably expect that anyone involved in the EMV payments partners, banks, government, social platforms, google, media(hah), non-stem academia, etc, are willing or able to act or debate in good faith? Consensus protocols route around that problem.
lostdog 5y ago
> It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple. I guess that's the case if your refinery is producing absolutely nothing of value. That's the overall point of critics: web3 has huge costs for tiny (and disputable) benefits. Even your comment lacks any benefits of web3. Making electricity more expensive isn't a benefit at all. It sure won't put a colony on the moon. And we were already able to turn electricity into "information" using an invention called a "computer."

dmitriid 5y ago

> Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. No, we can't. Becuse all energy is going towards bitcoin mining. > maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet. There is no "other side".

hbosch 5y ago

I had a friend in college say to me, Web 2.0 is "more than rounded buttons". But, if you looked around in 2009, 2010... well, Web 2.0 was mainly crapware covered in rounded buttons. I guess we got... Farmville? Similarly, if Web3 wants to be taken seriously it has to provide more than access to private Discords. NFTs are basically a digital lanyard, they get you in and around some niche areas of the web's convention center but once the big show comes and goes what's left? Web3's value prop needs to be greater than "we can see your coins".

runnerup 5y ago

> When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple. What? Just use an RDBMS, it'll "refine" that electricity to the same end product millions of times more efficiently. That's the argument most Web3 critics have.

motohagiography 5y ago
The efficiency of an RDBMS treats trust as both an assumption and an externality, and that's not efficient in any risk adjusted model. An RDBMS depends on trust, where web3 uses consensus, and that consensus is a different product, which also has some useful anti-technocrat and anti-leviathan properties. Are all these kids writing crypto protocols for smart contracts just too dumb to spin up postgress? Doubtful. The ideology behind it is from a generation raised on narrative and they are inventing a way to relate based on something concrete that requires proofs and truth. The problem I think web3 techs solve is the forfeit of trust that institutions and platforms have engaged in over the last decade. There's no point in even talking to anyone involved in them because there's no reason to believe they would argue in good faith. Consensus protocols and proofs provide stability and some of that trust the culture has lost. The people who still believe in those institutions are just clinging to a precarious bourgeois and managerialist aspiration to become a part of them, where it's people from wealth (material and cultural), and working class people with less education and money who are the marks of those institutions who are typically the ones flocking to cryptocurrencies and now web3. They're also where growth comes from. In this sense, web3 is less ideological than just a polarized class strategy. The question isn't why not use an RDBMS, it should be, can you reasonably expect that anyone involved in the EMV payments partners, banks, government, social platforms, google, media(hah), non-stem academia, etc, are willing or able to act or debate in good faith? Consensus protocols route around that problem.

lostdog 5y ago

> It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple. I guess that's the case if your refinery is producing absolutely nothing of value. That's the overall point of critics: web3 has huge costs for tiny (and disputable) benefits. Even your comment lacks any benefits of web3. Making electricity more expensive isn't a benefit at all. It sure won't put a colony on the moon. And we were already able to turn electricity into "information" using an invention called a "computer."