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A lazy article that recycles common web3 hate without showing any sign of understanding about the problems with web2, and the potential of web3. I would agree

by fleddr 4y ago

A lazy article that recycles common web3 hate without showing any sign of understanding about the problems with web2, and the potential of web3. I would agree that web3's potential hasn't materialized. Possibly it never will, but at least engage with some of the concepts. Further, when you use Stephen Diehl as a source, you already lost. This guy has an unhealthy obsession with hating crypto fueled by his own crypto startup failure.

logicalmonster 4y ago
> an unhealthy obsession with hating crypto Why is this unhealthy obsession so common on HN? Expressing some concern or doubt about crypto is perfectly reasonable, but it seems odd to me that a forward looking site that's tech-focused has such intense emotionality against crypto.
- berkes 4y ago
  Purely on speculation and anecdotal pointers seen in my own social rings, there's a lot of "missed-the-train-dissonance" happening. Many of the people in tech I meet, knew about Bitcoin very early. They even saw the potential. Some acted on that (with hindsight this may seem the "smart" move, but really, it was a gamble with lot of downside potential. Still is). Most did not -which actually, financially or investment-wise, was probably the smart move-. Those people now must find ways to deal with this internally. The simple thing is to keep convincing yourself that web3, crypto, etc is bad - a conviction that isn't too hard to base in fact, really. I gave talks in Bitcoin on tech meetups back in 2012. I've had numerous people from back then, tell me that they are really bummed that they didn't really believe me back then, to at least dabble around a bit with some spare change. Or just the tech. I strongly believe there are far more people in the tech scene who aren't this honest, not even to themselves, and instead strongly and loudly "hate" on all crypto.
  - GlassKingdom 4y ago
    Are you able to list any reasons why HackerNews dislikes web3, beyond “they have sour grapes because they missed the market.”? There are many many reasons, and if you are unable to think of any then perhaps you are in a propaganda bubble?
    - berkes 4y ago
      I am. And there are a lot of good arguments brought up on why web3 is not delivering, a scam, cannot work, churning out C02 and so on. But the many, lazy oneline comments, even on HN, like "Crypto is a scam" lacking any arguments, body or even basis, do show me an unhealthy amount of "hate" on HN.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    I made several tens of thousands of dollars on BTC, buying a small stake when it was $10. I'm still HODLing some crypto though I've sold most of it, and I'm definitely one of the haters because it hasn't shown any evidence that any of it will ever deliver on its promises, and I've seen so many scams over the years. The whole ecosystem is just a mass of speculation and competing scams.
- GlassKingdom 4y ago
  It’s not emotionality, it’s rationalism. web3 is a naked pyramid grift, and most people promoting it are hoping to get rich from the “greater sucker” or have been subsumed into a cult-type mindset. HackerNews is a high-quality rational discussion medium. The problem is not with this community, it is with the propaganda bubble of web3.
  - Hendrikto 4y ago
    Claims like > web3 is a naked pyramid grift are not fostering an intellectually honest and objective debate. Sure, there are countless speculators. Agreed, many things are overhyped. The underlying technology is still innovative and enables novel solutions.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      >The underlying technology is still innovative and enables novel solutions. The only situations where blockchain provides novel solutions is where you need something to be absolutely trustless, and even then the trustlessness is limited to things that happen on the blockchain. The moment the blockchain has to interact with the real world outside of the blockchain you get back to problems of trust. The range of problems that such technology is capable of solving is incredibly small. 99% of problems that I see people claiming are "solved" by blockchain were already solved by a boring old normal database like Postgres, or a distributed database like CockroachDB, or a distributed consensus algorithm like Raft. All of which are several orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than using a trustless, distributed blockchain. Please name a single real-world problem that you believe blockchain "solves."
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      Yes, let's have an intellectualky honest and objevtive debate about if the world is flat. No, stop wasting people's time and energy with your obvious pyramid scheme.
    - jeremyjh 4y ago
      We don't need a debate. We know shit from shinola when we see it.
- rvz 4y ago
  I am all fine for anyone to disagree with cryptocurrency projects and the idea of putting everything on-chain or a social network fully on-chain is also a bad idea which I also think that makes no sense. But the extreme idea of banning all of them or thinking all these projects will survive or using a false generalization towards all cryptocurrencies if one of them has an inefficiency in its consensus mechanism, then this is where I disagree with that. It's interesting to see on a site that calls itself 'Hacker News' where the whole point is being curious about upcoming startup projects or technologies. Theranos turned out to be a scam with many investors losing their money, does that mean all startups are scams? No. So given that many companies like Stripe, MoneyGram, Namecheap, etc have re-entered into cryptocurrencies, perhaps they are also aware that some of the ones they have chosen to use have a use case?
  - GlassKingdom 4y ago
    The number of people with genuine belief in web3 is SWAMPED by people hoping to make a quick buck from the “greater fool”’ Unfortunately it’s a “curate’s egg” situation, and anyone genuinely promoting web3 is indistinguishable from the grifters.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    For somebody with such an unhealthy obsession with consensus based trust, you're certainly disturbed by the consensus on Hacker News that cryptocurrencies are a scam, and the widespread and uniform distrust of people who shill them. What's so bad about consensus and trust, again? Is the only kind of consensus you trust the kind of consensus that's arrived at by burning tons of coal?
    - cowtools 4y ago
      To be fair, HN discussions are prone to sybil attacks, of which cryptocurrencies are not.
- melenaboija 4y ago
  My hate is based on how useless it is and how completely goes against the ideas being claimed for it. It is capitalism at its maximum exponent and the only thing that managed to do is more wealth concentration (of USD BTW)
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    > how useless it is Very often on HN, we see new stories about how Payment Provider X stole $$$ from some individual/group/business, ruining their lives. Or we see governments blocking bank accounts from doubleplusungood protesters. I cannot understand how people see this kind of thing happen all of the time and then rationalize that there's no conceivable use cases for crypto.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - pnt12 4y ago
      There's also stories about lost wallets, crypto scams, contracts gone wrong, damage to the environment, shortage of chips and graphic cards, and so on. To put it short: web2 is bad, web3 is worse.
fleddr 4y ago
First, regarding unhealthy obsession I was referring to this Stephen Diehl character. Everyone's free to dislike or hate crypto, but most ordinary people would express that opinion and carry on. That's quite different from making it your life mission and devote all your energy to it. I find that obsessive and suspicious. Like a crusade. As for this community, I too find it disappointing how it engages with the crypto topic. I understand that crypto gives plenty of reasons for skepticism. I personally share the opinion that > 90% of it is garbage without utility. And yet still I think there's room to intellectually engage with the good parts. Even parts that are good "in theory" at this point. Even more so when it's so common to bash "web2" tech monopolies. I do get it though. Crypto is huge, complex and fast-moving. To get a deep and nuanced understanding of it means investing a huge amount of time without a tangible reward. Hence, people resort to simplistic binary conclusions. It's terrible or the future, there's no middle ground. It's even worse when a topic gets politicized and becomes part of the culture war. A lot of brands are looking to experiment with crypto but are walking on egg shells or have to retract plans as to not offend the Twitter mob. Is Elon Musk a Disney-style billionaire villain or our savior? It can be only one of those two options, such is the way of the world right now.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  This idea of obsession is funny. Like you keep asking if I want to play your carnival game and every time I say "no" and you can't get me to say "yes" so your solution is to follow me around asking "why are you so obsessed with me?"
  - fleddr 4y ago
    What does this even mean? Who follows you around?
- shkkmo 4y ago
  > I personally share the opinion that > 90% of it is garbage without utility. > And yet still I think there's room to intellectually engage with the good parts. Then please provide some examples. Over and over here on HN we ask what is Cryptocurrency good for besides speculation and breaking the law that wouldn't be better solved by using a DB instead of a block chain? Oddly enough nobody seems able to answer that question. If 10% of projects are the "good parts" it shouldn't be that hard to find a few examples.
MadeThisToReply 4y ago
What's the potential of web3, and how does it solve the problems of web2?
raspberry1337 4y ago
>at least engage with some of the concepts. What's so telling to me is that in posts like yours, it is never said what the "concept" that's so good actuallay is. Please enlighten me

by fleddr 4y ago

logicalmonster 4y ago

> an unhealthy obsession with hating crypto Why is this unhealthy obsession so common on HN? Expressing some concern or doubt about crypto is perfectly reasonable, but it seems odd to me that a forward looking site that's tech-focused has such intense emotionality against crypto.

berkes 4y ago
Purely on speculation and anecdotal pointers seen in my own social rings, there's a lot of "missed-the-train-dissonance" happening. Many of the people in tech I meet, knew about Bitcoin very early. They even saw the potential. Some acted on that (with hindsight this may seem the "smart" move, but really, it was a gamble with lot of downside potential. Still is). Most did not -which actually, financially or investment-wise, was probably the smart move-. Those people now must find ways to deal with this internally. The simple thing is to keep convincing yourself that web3, crypto, etc is bad - a conviction that isn't too hard to base in fact, really. I gave talks in Bitcoin on tech meetups back in 2012. I've had numerous people from back then, tell me that they are really bummed that they didn't really believe me back then, to at least dabble around a bit with some spare change. Or just the tech. I strongly believe there are far more people in the tech scene who aren't this honest, not even to themselves, and instead strongly and loudly "hate" on all crypto.
- GlassKingdom 4y ago
  Are you able to list any reasons why HackerNews dislikes web3, beyond “they have sour grapes because they missed the market.”? There are many many reasons, and if you are unable to think of any then perhaps you are in a propaganda bubble?
  - berkes 4y ago
    I am. And there are a lot of good arguments brought up on why web3 is not delivering, a scam, cannot work, churning out C02 and so on. But the many, lazy oneline comments, even on HN, like "Crypto is a scam" lacking any arguments, body or even basis, do show me an unhealthy amount of "hate" on HN.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  I made several tens of thousands of dollars on BTC, buying a small stake when it was $10. I'm still HODLing some crypto though I've sold most of it, and I'm definitely one of the haters because it hasn't shown any evidence that any of it will ever deliver on its promises, and I've seen so many scams over the years. The whole ecosystem is just a mass of speculation and competing scams.
GlassKingdom 4y ago
It’s not emotionality, it’s rationalism. web3 is a naked pyramid grift, and most people promoting it are hoping to get rich from the “greater sucker” or have been subsumed into a cult-type mindset. HackerNews is a high-quality rational discussion medium. The problem is not with this community, it is with the propaganda bubble of web3.
- Hendrikto 4y ago
  Claims like > web3 is a naked pyramid grift are not fostering an intellectually honest and objective debate. Sure, there are countless speculators. Agreed, many things are overhyped. The underlying technology is still innovative and enables novel solutions.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    >The underlying technology is still innovative and enables novel solutions. The only situations where blockchain provides novel solutions is where you need something to be absolutely trustless, and even then the trustlessness is limited to things that happen on the blockchain. The moment the blockchain has to interact with the real world outside of the blockchain you get back to problems of trust. The range of problems that such technology is capable of solving is incredibly small. 99% of problems that I see people claiming are "solved" by blockchain were already solved by a boring old normal database like Postgres, or a distributed database like CockroachDB, or a distributed consensus algorithm like Raft. All of which are several orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than using a trustless, distributed blockchain. Please name a single real-world problem that you believe blockchain "solves."
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Yes, let's have an intellectualky honest and objevtive debate about if the world is flat. No, stop wasting people's time and energy with your obvious pyramid scheme.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    We don't need a debate. We know shit from shinola when we see it.
rvz 4y ago
I am all fine for anyone to disagree with cryptocurrency projects and the idea of putting everything on-chain or a social network fully on-chain is also a bad idea which I also think that makes no sense. But the extreme idea of banning all of them or thinking all these projects will survive or using a false generalization towards all cryptocurrencies if one of them has an inefficiency in its consensus mechanism, then this is where I disagree with that. It's interesting to see on a site that calls itself 'Hacker News' where the whole point is being curious about upcoming startup projects or technologies. Theranos turned out to be a scam with many investors losing their money, does that mean all startups are scams? No. So given that many companies like Stripe, MoneyGram, Namecheap, etc have re-entered into cryptocurrencies, perhaps they are also aware that some of the ones they have chosen to use have a use case?
- GlassKingdom 4y ago
  The number of people with genuine belief in web3 is SWAMPED by people hoping to make a quick buck from the “greater fool”’ Unfortunately it’s a “curate’s egg” situation, and anyone genuinely promoting web3 is indistinguishable from the grifters.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  For somebody with such an unhealthy obsession with consensus based trust, you're certainly disturbed by the consensus on Hacker News that cryptocurrencies are a scam, and the widespread and uniform distrust of people who shill them. What's so bad about consensus and trust, again? Is the only kind of consensus you trust the kind of consensus that's arrived at by burning tons of coal?
  - cowtools 4y ago
    To be fair, HN discussions are prone to sybil attacks, of which cryptocurrencies are not.
melenaboija 4y ago
My hate is based on how useless it is and how completely goes against the ideas being claimed for it. It is capitalism at its maximum exponent and the only thing that managed to do is more wealth concentration (of USD BTW)
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > how useless it is Very often on HN, we see new stories about how Payment Provider X stole $$$ from some individual/group/business, ruining their lives. Or we see governments blocking bank accounts from doubleplusungood protesters. I cannot understand how people see this kind of thing happen all of the time and then rationalize that there's no conceivable use cases for crypto.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pnt12 4y ago
    There's also stories about lost wallets, crypto scams, contracts gone wrong, damage to the environment, shortage of chips and graphic cards, and so on. To put it short: web2 is bad, web3 is worse.

fleddr 4y ago

First, regarding unhealthy obsession I was referring to this Stephen Diehl character. Everyone's free to dislike or hate crypto, but most ordinary people would express that opinion and carry on. That's quite different from making it your life mission and devote all your energy to it. I find that obsessive and suspicious. Like a crusade. As for this community, I too find it disappointing how it engages with the crypto topic. I understand that crypto gives plenty of reasons for skepticism. I personally share the opinion that > 90% of it is garbage without utility. And yet still I think there's room to intellectually engage with the good parts. Even parts that are good "in theory" at this point. Even more so when it's so common to bash "web2" tech monopolies. I do get it though. Crypto is huge, complex and fast-moving. To get a deep and nuanced understanding of it means investing a huge amount of time without a tangible reward. Hence, people resort to simplistic binary conclusions. It's terrible or the future, there's no middle ground. It's even worse when a topic gets politicized and becomes part of the culture war. A lot of brands are looking to experiment with crypto but are walking on egg shells or have to retract plans as to not offend the Twitter mob. Is Elon Musk a Disney-style billionaire villain or our savior? It can be only one of those two options, such is the way of the world right now.

guerrilla 4y ago
This idea of obsession is funny. Like you keep asking if I want to play your carnival game and every time I say "no" and you can't get me to say "yes" so your solution is to follow me around asking "why are you so obsessed with me?"
- fleddr 4y ago
  What does this even mean? Who follows you around?
shkkmo 4y ago
> I personally share the opinion that > 90% of it is garbage without utility. > And yet still I think there's room to intellectually engage with the good parts. Then please provide some examples. Over and over here on HN we ask what is Cryptocurrency good for besides speculation and breaking the law that wouldn't be better solved by using a DB instead of a block chain? Oddly enough nobody seems able to answer that question. If 10% of projects are the "good parts" it shouldn't be that hard to find a few examples.

MadeThisToReply 4y ago

What's the potential of web3, and how does it solve the problems of web2?

raspberry1337 4y ago

>at least engage with some of the concepts. What's so telling to me is that in posts like yours, it is never said what the "concept" that's so good actuallay is. Please enlighten me