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‘Extortion’: Why Web3 is making a lot of software developers angry

70 points by mwattsun 4y ago

tluyben2 4y ago
Not smart to compare a nft and the a link to the image the nft represents to a Rolex and a fake Rolex. That gives the ‘believers’ ammunition and it makes no sense. There is nothing fake or different about the 2 images, while fake Rolexes are fake Rolexes.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  Not a fan of NFTs, but my understanding is the NFT is the signature, not the art itself. If you're just trying to make your wall pretty you don't buy signed art that costs a lot of money. If you're buying signed art, you're thinking of resale value. That's all the NFT is, is the signature.
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    Well, it's some type of digital proof that you 'own' the 'linked' thing. So in case you buy a NFT for a Rolex with serial number 1234, then this NFT proves you own that rolex. And then you can say, if I give you a fake Rolex with serial 1234, it is a problem. So that example would work. But most (by very far) NFT's that are 'proofs' that you own some PNG of an ape or what not and the author of the article was specifically talking about those. And there the example doesn't work; the NFT refers to an digital image, not a physical object and that image you can copy or link and so your ownership means absolutely nothing at all as there is no notion of fake. You could argue (not sure how far that would get in court) that you own the license to that image and if someone uses that image, you can go after them, but still, that's not faking anything.
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  Yes, I expected him to at least point out that a real Rolex has intrinsic differences regarding its functionality as a watch in terms of precision, durability, etc. that are superior to those of a fake Rolex. Of course, we all know that the cost a Rolex is not proportional to how good a watch it is, it is a status symbol. But it is also a damn good watch.
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    Not the point; a digital asset is not comparable to a physical asset; the image the nft points to is the same bytes as the image he gave that image to others to prove a point. There is nothing at all fake about the second image; it is the same image. And in this case it was even the actual same link from the nft I think which is even better. There is no notion of fake in digital; you copy something and you have it, identical to the what you copied it from. This does not apply to Rolexes and calling it fake makes no sense and it’s a bad example that doesn’t educate people; people who might have ‘invested’ into nfts but don’t know any tech might think ‘but I have the real Rolex, so it does work!’. And that would be a bad and wrong interpretation of the facts.
    - Mordisquitos 4y ago
      I think you misunderstood my comment as I was emphasising your point. I was saying that a real Rolex is, as a watch, materially different from a fake Rolex regardless of how much of a real Rolex's value comes from its image and recognition. The fact that a "real" NFT is, as a URL on a blockchain, no different from a "fake" NFT was implied.
      - tluyben2 4y ago
        Ah, sorry about that! Thanks for clearing it up ; I read it differently. Then we agree. (it doesn't happen often online!)
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
No other technology platform has been so denigrated and ridiculed Web3 is very likely to fail because a substantial proportion of both the tech and business space think it’s a load of unnecessary nonsense backed by fraudsters or the gullible who think they can get rich fast and want nothing todo with it.
- waste_monk 4y ago
  To be fair, it IS a load of unnecessary nonsense backed by latest bandwagon jumpers, fraudsters and the gullible who think they can get rich fast. There's no technical merit to it. > No other technology platform has been so denigrated and ridiculed As far as I am concerned it's entirely deserved. Web3, NFTs, etc. are a cancer and should not exist. It's on the same tier as DRM and pop-up ads.
  - MadeThisToReply 4y ago
    "Web3" is just a new label to make it seem like the same old bullshit is somehow novel and revolutionary. First "blockchain" was the future, it was the next big thing, it was a revolution, it was going to change everything, you'd be a fool not to get involved. Sure, there might not be a lot there yet, but it's like the Internet in 1994 - this is only the beginning! If they were still saying the same things about "blockchain" then people would notice that these lofty promises have delivered nothing for ten years. But give it a sexy new name like "Web3" and now it feels new again, even though nothing has changed, and they can continue to entice people in with the same old promises. Sure, Web3 doesn't seem to have produced much yet, but this is only the beginning. It's like the Internet in 1994!
- prox 4y ago
  Nothing that came out of crypto, nfts or web3 impresses me. I love new tech in general, and I go “that’s nice” a lot, but it feels like problems looking for solutions. The problem is mostly people trying to push it like the “new economy” in the early 00s, just before it crashed.
  - 4y ago
3np 4y ago
> The next generation of the internet was already clearly defined - the inventor of the worldwide web had a definition for it, companies had been founded to that vision. This doesn't seem in line with how Berners-Lee has been talking about the state of the web.
burnoot 4y ago
This makes many factually incorrect statements, over generalizations, and is filled with emotion. I don’t know where to start. Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t own the term “web 3(.0)”. Miners/validators charge a fee. Any cloud provider also charges a fee. DIY isn’t free either. I’ll ignore DeFi because I know it doesn’t necessarily sit well with HN, but there are valid use cases for blockchain in Gaming. 10 years is a long time, yes. But there are a lot of things that need to be built, tested, and adopted. Blockchain moves slowly. So what? Comparing anything to the iPhone is a terrible argument. The iPhone is arguably the biggest success (design, marketing, need) of the last 25 years and comparing anything to it doesn’t tell us anything other than “yes, iPhone good”.
- searchableguy 4y ago
  > 10 years is a long time That period also excludes all the work and progress in phones it took to get there. > I’ll ignore DeFi because I know it doesn’t necessarily sit well with HN DeFi is revolutionary. The idea of programmable finance and bank which can be created by anyone (we have 12 year old engineers with complex defi financial products) is nothing short of eye watering. On top of it, all the primitives are composeable which makes risk stacking possible. That's capital efficient for the capital owner compared to tradfi. You can criticise the grifters in the space which are too many but what it enables is amazing to me.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > we have 12 year old engineers with complex defi financial products It means they are not complex. Honestly, none of the DeFi projects are (it's flash loans and currency speculation across the board). And none of them are banks.
- nhinck2 4y ago
  > but there are valid use cases for blockchain in Gaming Like?
  - burnoot 4y ago
    Trading game assets (items) outside of the mechanics of a game. Loaning assets (items) to other players without the game developers building the loan functionality. Clan memberships that are recognised across different games.
beebmam 4y ago
> I still have an iPhone, which came out 13 years ago - blockchain also came out 13 years ago. The iPhone has changed the world in that time, but crypto has not. It has searched for a use case and the one use case it’s really found is extortion. The computer science behind cryptocurrencies and decentralized ledgers and ownership blockchains are all interesting and cool to think about. But outside of computer science, on the social and economic plane, all of this is a pile of shit.
ChefboyOG 4y ago
I am very critical/skeptical of more or less all things crypto, but I heard an interesting point from an artist recently who had begun selling NFTs of their work. It is in line with the thinking around the Rolex example in the article, but in my opinion, more salient: I asked them about what appeared to me as the inherent silliness of selling an "exclusive" tokenized image, which could be easily copied with a right-click for free. Their response was that this is essentially no different from print making. When you buy a print, you are buying something you have the means to produce yourself. You aren't paying for the quality of the print making materials--you could order identical prints of the image from a print shop, or if you're less concerned with quality, simply print at home. But when you buy a print from the artist, you're paying for that signature that says "#3 of 100." There's nothing stopping the artist from printing more, and there's nothing stopping random people from duplicating the print, but we're comfortable with the idea that a signature confers a "uniqueness" to the print that makes it valuable. I don't know if that is an argument against print making or a case for NFTs, but I found the point interesting. Context: I own no NFTs nor do I plan to.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Prints and NFTs are very different. You will very rarely be able to print it yourself because high quality copies will not be available to you. You also wouldn’t expect a print to have resale value. You are buying it because it looks nice on your wall. Not as an investment. NFTs are still a load of crap. Im glad some artists found a way to make money off them, but that doesn’t make them any less of a scam.
  - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    A print, especially a classic gelatin silver B&W or c-print, is something the artist has ostensibly personally labored over. It is as much a product of their craft as the original source material was, whether that was a negative, positive, digital image, or PSD file. NFTs...eh, not so much.
    - web4 4y ago
jagermo 4y ago
I have a sincere question I've been too afraid to ask. Are there any examples of web3 projects that solve a problem or have features that would not be possible otherwise?
- junofan 4y ago
  Aave pretty much cracked anonymous P2P lending. You can go borrow a few hundred million dollars anonymously right now.
  - notfed 4y ago
    So...money laundering.
    - notfed 4y ago
      Also, it's hard to be impressed by "web3" if every "web3" app is just moving cryptocurrency around.
      - MadeThisToReply 4y ago
        Why would web3 be capable of anything else? Satoshi invented the blockchain to solve one specific problem: creating a decentralised currency. It was never supposed to be some kind of universal "truth machine" applicable to any other kind of real-world problem. How would it? The existence of data on a blockchain doesn't prove anything except that some data was added to a blockchain. The idea that this has practical applications for anything other than a currency (e.g. supply chain management, concert tickets, property deeds, all the other classic examples that cryptoheads have been citing for years without a single successful example in real life) is absurd, in fact it's so laughably absurd that I question the intelligence of anyone who can say it with a straight face. Basically, I think that everything in the crypto space is bullshit, with the possible exception of Bitcoin itself, but I'm still agnostic on that front. I hope I'm wrong - it's appealing to think that we're on the cusp of another technological revolution that will make everything better, especially if it gives me a chance to get rich! - but for fuck's sake, it's been five years since this classic article and still nothing has fundamentally changed: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
todd3834 4y ago
I stopped paying too much attention to NFT image arguments and started looking at blockchain technologies. Things like Arweave, IPFS, EPNS. These are very interesting projects that I started some draft blog posts about. Also, I do think people are graduating from owning an “image” to seeing them as tickets to something greater. I was a web3 skeptic. You can probably see it in my comment history. However, I really wanted to understand it more and focusing on infrastructure parts that get less media attention is where I’m finding my home. Call it web3, distributed, p2p… whatever. There is some really cool stuff being built that solves things in a novel (to me ) way. I wish more engineers were looking into this from a purely intriguing set of engineering examples.
- pavlov 4y ago
  There are interesting distributed protocols out there, but they fundamentally have nothing to do with "blockchain". For example IPFS which you mention. What so many people take exception with isn't distributed protocols, P2P, etc. — it's the corruption of these useful, existing technologies to intertwine them with an ecosystem of artificial scarcity metered in cryptocurrencies. This latter is what people call "web3" now. If I make the world's greatest pure-P2P WebRTC application that stores permanent data on IPFS, no web3 proponent will get excited about that because it doesn't include magic beans that could make them rich.
  - notfed 4y ago
    To add to this, yes, distributed computing is full of really cool stuff. It's been pumping out tons of solutions to real-world scalability problems for decades. I get the feeling that a bunch of people are just now coming into the conversation with no knowledge of this, and thinking that Blockchain == distributed computing, like it's the first and only kind of distributed algorithm ever to exist or something.
    - todd3834 4y ago
      Do you think it is fair to say distributed computing is part of web3 or has it been defined as only blockchain?
heckerhut 4y ago
This is frankly ridiculous. The interviewed dev complains that web3 makes everything pay to play. If anything, web3 makes it explicit that the internet has become a place that is purely pay to play. Just today you pay with your data and you don’t know the prices.
suyash 4y ago
Web3 needs to detangled on beyond crypto/NFT, Crypto has very little if anything to do with web technologies like HTML/CSS/JS which are core of the current Web 2.0 era
bashwizard 4y ago
If NFTs and pay to win in gaming is the only thing you think about when it comes to Web3, crypto and DeFi you're kinda dense to be honest.
- MadeThisToReply 4y ago
  What do you think about when it comes it Web3, crypto and DeFi?
bambax 4y ago
> Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are betting the emerging Web3 space is the next generation of the internet Venture capitalists that are "betting on crypto" are not, in fact, betting on crypto. They are committing securities fraud en masse. 1/ Invest in crypto startups 2/ Let them offer tokens to the public, which are, in effect, unlicensed securities (that's the fraud part) 3/ Either wait for the value of the startups to skyrocket, or, even better, obtain the crypto tokens for cheap and resell them yourself in exchange for real money 4/ Profit! Cf. this video by a Berkeley CompSci professor https://youtu.be/J9nv0Ol-R5Q?t=2733 https://youtu.be/J9nv0Ol-R5Q?t=2733
labrador 4y ago
The article doesn't mention it, but software devs are gamers. Cryptomining has made video cards expensive and hard to get, so that along with sheer brain deadness of building a system built around wasting electricity... anger seems like an appropriate reaction
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- orwin 4y ago
  I'm not a gamer, my only usage of Gpu is Cuda basically. Still angers me.
- MadeThisToReply 4y ago
  I don't play videogames and know very little about crypto mining, but isn't the mining being done on specialised hardware these days and not GPUs? Are GPUs still being wasted on crypto nonsense?
  - Tcepsa 4y ago
    Given the continuing high price of video cards these days, I'm going to say yes, many people are still leveraging GPUs for mining. EDIT: Maybe not as much as previously, but still enough to have a noticeable impact on the market.
betwixthewires 4y ago
So I'm skeptical of web3, I dig cryptocurrency but all this nonsense about NFTs and metaverse and whatever is just that, nonsense. But there is one glaring mistake in the article, and one I often see in arguments against web3, that is the idea that the internet becomes some pay to play thing. First of all, running services costs money. Running services for free costs money, it just doesn't cost you money. So you're asking someone to either do you a solid, or get paid another way. And 9 out of 10 times they choose the latter, and track you and sell the data. You pay, one way or another. So all the concept does is allow people to pay for services they use that someone else provides them. Think about renting a rack vs a vps, now imagine making that sort of service more granular. Things get cheaper when you do that. Things become more egalitarian, you're on equal footing online with providers. When was the last time we could say that? And when someone tries to make a web3 version of something that doesn't require all that nonsense, people will make free alternatives. And if those alternatives serve the same needs, the ones that cost micro transactions will wither on the vine. So the market takes care of it. Web3 will serve the roles that it serves best, and things that are better done different ways will be done differently. I'm skeptical of anyone telling me the world will run on this stuff, but to say it doesn't offer some utility, at this point you're deluding yourself. Time will tell what utility it truly provides, but one thing's for sure, this idea of a free as in beer internet isn't working out.
sshine 4y ago
> [C]ompanies like Rolex spend a lot of money on enforcement to get rid of counterfeits because counterfeits remove the willingness for people to play to pay the high price for an original. An interesting scene from the movie House of Gucci (2021)[1] is when Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), the wife of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) discovers the fake bags you can buy on the street and tells Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino) who is then the family brand leader. The point Aldo makes is: The distribution of fakes strengthens the brand, because it gives normal people a belief that they can own a Gucci bag. They know their bag is fake, their peers may or may not know, but they still advertise for the real bag and the belief that if you're affluent, you want a Gucci bag. The brand would be worth very little if only the people who could afford it cared to speak of it. [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11214590/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11214590/
arvindsgulati 4y ago
This guy has grossly misunderstood web3. It’s not just nft or for that matter only about currencies, but about designing specifically constrained computer networks , where nodes are free to behave in their own self interest, yet the network has a overall value to sustain itself. It is the intersection of game theory and distributed systems. Here is a more academic perspective on the same https://youtu.be/KNJGPI0fuFA https://youtu.be/KNJGPI0fuFA

70 points by mwattsun 4y ago

Not smart to compare a nft and the a link to the image the nft represents to a Rolex and a fake Rolex. That gives the ‘believers’ ammunition and it makes no sense. There is nothing fake or different about the 2 images, while fake Rolexes are fake Rolexes.

betwixthewires 4y ago
Not a fan of NFTs, but my understanding is the NFT is the signature, not the art itself. If you're just trying to make your wall pretty you don't buy signed art that costs a lot of money. If you're buying signed art, you're thinking of resale value. That's all the NFT is, is the signature.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  Well, it's some type of digital proof that you 'own' the 'linked' thing. So in case you buy a NFT for a Rolex with serial number 1234, then this NFT proves you own that rolex. And then you can say, if I give you a fake Rolex with serial 1234, it is a problem. So that example would work. But most (by very far) NFT's that are 'proofs' that you own some PNG of an ape or what not and the author of the article was specifically talking about those. And there the example doesn't work; the NFT refers to an digital image, not a physical object and that image you can copy or link and so your ownership means absolutely nothing at all as there is no notion of fake. You could argue (not sure how far that would get in court) that you own the license to that image and if someone uses that image, you can go after them, but still, that's not faking anything.
Mordisquitos 4y ago
Yes, I expected him to at least point out that a real Rolex has intrinsic differences regarding its functionality as a watch in terms of precision, durability, etc. that are superior to those of a fake Rolex. Of course, we all know that the cost a Rolex is not proportional to how good a watch it is, it is a status symbol. But it is also a damn good watch.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  Not the point; a digital asset is not comparable to a physical asset; the image the nft points to is the same bytes as the image he gave that image to others to prove a point. There is nothing at all fake about the second image; it is the same image. And in this case it was even the actual same link from the nft I think which is even better. There is no notion of fake in digital; you copy something and you have it, identical to the what you copied it from. This does not apply to Rolexes and calling it fake makes no sense and it’s a bad example that doesn’t educate people; people who might have ‘invested’ into nfts but don’t know any tech might think ‘but I have the real Rolex, so it does work!’. And that would be a bad and wrong interpretation of the facts.
  - Mordisquitos 4y ago
    I think you misunderstood my comment as I was emphasising your point. I was saying that a real Rolex is, as a watch, materially different from a fake Rolex regardless of how much of a real Rolex's value comes from its image and recognition. The fact that a "real" NFT is, as a URL on a blockchain, no different from a "fake" NFT was implied.
    - tluyben2 4y ago
      Ah, sorry about that! Thanks for clearing it up ; I read it differently. Then we agree. (it doesn't happen often online!)

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

No other technology platform has been so denigrated and ridiculed Web3 is very likely to fail because a substantial proportion of both the tech and business space think it’s a load of unnecessary nonsense backed by fraudsters or the gullible who think they can get rich fast and want nothing todo with it.

waste_monk 4y ago
To be fair, it IS a load of unnecessary nonsense backed by latest bandwagon jumpers, fraudsters and the gullible who think they can get rich fast. There's no technical merit to it. > No other technology platform has been so denigrated and ridiculed As far as I am concerned it's entirely deserved. Web3, NFTs, etc. are a cancer and should not exist. It's on the same tier as DRM and pop-up ads.
- MadeThisToReply 4y ago
  "Web3" is just a new label to make it seem like the same old bullshit is somehow novel and revolutionary. First "blockchain" was the future, it was the next big thing, it was a revolution, it was going to change everything, you'd be a fool not to get involved. Sure, there might not be a lot there yet, but it's like the Internet in 1994 - this is only the beginning! If they were still saying the same things about "blockchain" then people would notice that these lofty promises have delivered nothing for ten years. But give it a sexy new name like "Web3" and now it feels new again, even though nothing has changed, and they can continue to entice people in with the same old promises. Sure, Web3 doesn't seem to have produced much yet, but this is only the beginning. It's like the Internet in 1994!
prox 4y ago
Nothing that came out of crypto, nfts or web3 impresses me. I love new tech in general, and I go “that’s nice” a lot, but it feels like problems looking for solutions. The problem is mostly people trying to push it like the “new economy” in the early 00s, just before it crashed.
- 4y ago

3np 4y ago

> The next generation of the internet was already clearly defined - the inventor of the worldwide web had a definition for it, companies had been founded to that vision. This doesn't seem in line with how Berners-Lee has been talking about the state of the web.

burnoot 4y ago

This makes many factually incorrect statements, over generalizations, and is filled with emotion. I don’t know where to start. Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t own the term “web 3(.0)”. Miners/validators charge a fee. Any cloud provider also charges a fee. DIY isn’t free either. I’ll ignore DeFi because I know it doesn’t necessarily sit well with HN, but there are valid use cases for blockchain in Gaming. 10 years is a long time, yes. But there are a lot of things that need to be built, tested, and adopted. Blockchain moves slowly. So what? Comparing anything to the iPhone is a terrible argument. The iPhone is arguably the biggest success (design, marketing, need) of the last 25 years and comparing anything to it doesn’t tell us anything other than “yes, iPhone good”.

searchableguy 4y ago
> 10 years is a long time That period also excludes all the work and progress in phones it took to get there. > I’ll ignore DeFi because I know it doesn’t necessarily sit well with HN DeFi is revolutionary. The idea of programmable finance and bank which can be created by anyone (we have 12 year old engineers with complex defi financial products) is nothing short of eye watering. On top of it, all the primitives are composeable which makes risk stacking possible. That's capital efficient for the capital owner compared to tradfi. You can criticise the grifters in the space which are too many but what it enables is amazing to me.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > we have 12 year old engineers with complex defi financial products It means they are not complex. Honestly, none of the DeFi projects are (it's flash loans and currency speculation across the board). And none of them are banks.
nhinck2 4y ago
> but there are valid use cases for blockchain in Gaming Like?
- burnoot 4y ago
  Trading game assets (items) outside of the mechanics of a game. Loaning assets (items) to other players without the game developers building the loan functionality. Clan memberships that are recognised across different games.

beebmam 4y ago

> I still have an iPhone, which came out 13 years ago - blockchain also came out 13 years ago. The iPhone has changed the world in that time, but crypto has not. It has searched for a use case and the one use case it’s really found is extortion. The computer science behind cryptocurrencies and decentralized ledgers and ownership blockchains are all interesting and cool to think about. But outside of computer science, on the social and economic plane, all of this is a pile of shit.

ChefboyOG 4y ago

I am very critical/skeptical of more or less all things crypto, but I heard an interesting point from an artist recently who had begun selling NFTs of their work. It is in line with the thinking around the Rolex example in the article, but in my opinion, more salient: I asked them about what appeared to me as the inherent silliness of selling an "exclusive" tokenized image, which could be easily copied with a right-click for free. Their response was that this is essentially no different from print making. When you buy a print, you are buying something you have the means to produce yourself. You aren't paying for the quality of the print making materials--you could order identical prints of the image from a print shop, or if you're less concerned with quality, simply print at home. But when you buy a print from the artist, you're paying for that signature that says "#3 of 100." There's nothing stopping the artist from printing more, and there's nothing stopping random people from duplicating the print, but we're comfortable with the idea that a signature confers a "uniqueness" to the print that makes it valuable. I don't know if that is an argument against print making or a case for NFTs, but I found the point interesting. Context: I own no NFTs nor do I plan to.

Gigachad 4y ago
Prints and NFTs are very different. You will very rarely be able to print it yourself because high quality copies will not be available to you. You also wouldn’t expect a print to have resale value. You are buying it because it looks nice on your wall. Not as an investment. NFTs are still a load of crap. Im glad some artists found a way to make money off them, but that doesn’t make them any less of a scam.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  A print, especially a classic gelatin silver B&W or c-print, is something the artist has ostensibly personally labored over. It is as much a product of their craft as the original source material was, whether that was a negative, positive, digital image, or PSD file. NFTs...eh, not so much.
  - web4 4y ago

jagermo 4y ago

I have a sincere question I've been too afraid to ask. Are there any examples of web3 projects that solve a problem or have features that would not be possible otherwise?

junofan 4y ago
Aave pretty much cracked anonymous P2P lending. You can go borrow a few hundred million dollars anonymously right now.
- notfed 4y ago
  So...money laundering.
  - notfed 4y ago
    Also, it's hard to be impressed by "web3" if every "web3" app is just moving cryptocurrency around.
    - MadeThisToReply 4y ago
      Why would web3 be capable of anything else? Satoshi invented the blockchain to solve one specific problem: creating a decentralised currency. It was never supposed to be some kind of universal "truth machine" applicable to any other kind of real-world problem. How would it? The existence of data on a blockchain doesn't prove anything except that some data was added to a blockchain. The idea that this has practical applications for anything other than a currency (e.g. supply chain management, concert tickets, property deeds, all the other classic examples that cryptoheads have been citing for years without a single successful example in real life) is absurd, in fact it's so laughably absurd that I question the intelligence of anyone who can say it with a straight face. Basically, I think that everything in the crypto space is bullshit, with the possible exception of Bitcoin itself, but I'm still agnostic on that front. I hope I'm wrong - it's appealing to think that we're on the cusp of another technological revolution that will make everything better, especially if it gives me a chance to get rich! - but for fuck's sake, it's been five years since this classic article and still nothing has fundamentally changed: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

todd3834 4y ago

I stopped paying too much attention to NFT image arguments and started looking at blockchain technologies. Things like Arweave, IPFS, EPNS. These are very interesting projects that I started some draft blog posts about. Also, I do think people are graduating from owning an “image” to seeing them as tickets to something greater. I was a web3 skeptic. You can probably see it in my comment history. However, I really wanted to understand it more and focusing on infrastructure parts that get less media attention is where I’m finding my home. Call it web3, distributed, p2p… whatever. There is some really cool stuff being built that solves things in a novel (to me ) way. I wish more engineers were looking into this from a purely intriguing set of engineering examples.

pavlov 4y ago
There are interesting distributed protocols out there, but they fundamentally have nothing to do with "blockchain". For example IPFS which you mention. What so many people take exception with isn't distributed protocols, P2P, etc. — it's the corruption of these useful, existing technologies to intertwine them with an ecosystem of artificial scarcity metered in cryptocurrencies. This latter is what people call "web3" now. If I make the world's greatest pure-P2P WebRTC application that stores permanent data on IPFS, no web3 proponent will get excited about that because it doesn't include magic beans that could make them rich.
- notfed 4y ago
  To add to this, yes, distributed computing is full of really cool stuff. It's been pumping out tons of solutions to real-world scalability problems for decades. I get the feeling that a bunch of people are just now coming into the conversation with no knowledge of this, and thinking that Blockchain == distributed computing, like it's the first and only kind of distributed algorithm ever to exist or something.
  - todd3834 4y ago
    Do you think it is fair to say distributed computing is part of web3 or has it been defined as only blockchain?

heckerhut 4y ago

This is frankly ridiculous. The interviewed dev complains that web3 makes everything pay to play. If anything, web3 makes it explicit that the internet has become a place that is purely pay to play. Just today you pay with your data and you don’t know the prices.

suyash 4y ago

Web3 needs to detangled on beyond crypto/NFT, Crypto has very little if anything to do with web technologies like HTML/CSS/JS which are core of the current Web 2.0 era

bashwizard 4y ago

If NFTs and pay to win in gaming is the only thing you think about when it comes to Web3, crypto and DeFi you're kinda dense to be honest.

MadeThisToReply 4y ago
What do you think about when it comes it Web3, crypto and DeFi?

bambax 4y ago

> Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are betting the emerging Web3 space is the next generation of the internet Venture capitalists that are "betting on crypto" are not, in fact, betting on crypto. They are committing securities fraud en masse. 1/ Invest in crypto startups 2/ Let them offer tokens to the public, which are, in effect, unlicensed securities (that's the fraud part) 3/ Either wait for the value of the startups to skyrocket, or, even better, obtain the crypto tokens for cheap and resell them yourself in exchange for real money 4/ Profit! Cf. this video by a Berkeley CompSci professor https://youtu.be/J9nv0Ol-R5Q?t=2733 https://youtu.be/J9nv0Ol-R5Q?t=2733

labrador 4y ago

The article doesn't mention it, but software devs are gamers. Cryptomining has made video cards expensive and hard to get, so that along with sheer brain deadness of building a system built around wasting electricity... anger seems like an appropriate reaction

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orwin 4y ago
I'm not a gamer, my only usage of Gpu is Cuda basically. Still angers me.
MadeThisToReply 4y ago
I don't play videogames and know very little about crypto mining, but isn't the mining being done on specialised hardware these days and not GPUs? Are GPUs still being wasted on crypto nonsense?
- Tcepsa 4y ago
  Given the continuing high price of video cards these days, I'm going to say yes, many people are still leveraging GPUs for mining. EDIT: Maybe not as much as previously, but still enough to have a noticeable impact on the market.

betwixthewires 4y ago

So I'm skeptical of web3, I dig cryptocurrency but all this nonsense about NFTs and metaverse and whatever is just that, nonsense. But there is one glaring mistake in the article, and one I often see in arguments against web3, that is the idea that the internet becomes some pay to play thing. First of all, running services costs money. Running services for free costs money, it just doesn't cost you money. So you're asking someone to either do you a solid, or get paid another way. And 9 out of 10 times they choose the latter, and track you and sell the data. You pay, one way or another. So all the concept does is allow people to pay for services they use that someone else provides them. Think about renting a rack vs a vps, now imagine making that sort of service more granular. Things get cheaper when you do that. Things become more egalitarian, you're on equal footing online with providers. When was the last time we could say that? And when someone tries to make a web3 version of something that doesn't require all that nonsense, people will make free alternatives. And if those alternatives serve the same needs, the ones that cost micro transactions will wither on the vine. So the market takes care of it. Web3 will serve the roles that it serves best, and things that are better done different ways will be done differently. I'm skeptical of anyone telling me the world will run on this stuff, but to say it doesn't offer some utility, at this point you're deluding yourself. Time will tell what utility it truly provides, but one thing's for sure, this idea of a free as in beer internet isn't working out.

sshine 4y ago

> [C]ompanies like Rolex spend a lot of money on enforcement to get rid of counterfeits because counterfeits remove the willingness for people to play to pay the high price for an original. An interesting scene from the movie House of Gucci (2021)[1] is when Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), the wife of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) discovers the fake bags you can buy on the street and tells Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino) who is then the family brand leader. The point Aldo makes is: The distribution of fakes strengthens the brand, because it gives normal people a belief that they can own a Gucci bag. They know their bag is fake, their peers may or may not know, but they still advertise for the real bag and the belief that if you're affluent, you want a Gucci bag. The brand would be worth very little if only the people who could afford it cared to speak of it. [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11214590/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11214590/

arvindsgulati 4y ago

This guy has grossly misunderstood web3. It’s not just nft or for that matter only about currencies, but about designing specifically constrained computer networks , where nodes are free to behave in their own self interest, yet the network has a overall value to sustain itself. It is the intersection of game theory and distributed systems. Here is a more academic perspective on the same https://youtu.be/KNJGPI0fuFA https://youtu.be/KNJGPI0fuFA