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I have an unpopular opinion for which I expect both web2 people and web3 people will downvote me for. The current generation of web3 companies aren't for you.

• batesy 4y ago
  This is a really great take. Agree wholeheartedly.
• Jasper_ 4y ago
  I mean, that's cool and all, except I've been hearing "it's too early, it's not for you, give it 10 more years" for like 10 years now. So I don't really believe you when you say it'll get there eventually. Have you considered... it just won't get there? Or that there are incentives in place to prevent it from getting there?
  • batesy 4y ago
    But like, who are you to say that it won't get there? If such a large group of very smart people want to continue to work on this tech that they all believe has massive potential, maybe you should consider the possibility that you are wrong? It's not like Blockchain is the only tech people have been talking about for the last 10 years that hasn't been fully actualized yet. Doesn't mean it's not well on its way.
    • Jasper_ 4y ago
      And a lot of very smart people worked on Itanium! Or on the Segway. TransMeta. Google Glass must have taken thousands of world-class engineers. 3D TVs! The world is full of plenty of Very Smart People who are all dying to work on cool tech, often blissfully unaware of the economic and social consequences of what they build. Saying very smart people work on it doesn't do much to really convince me. Bitcoin's block size isn't a technical debate that requires Very Smart People to solve. It's a social one, about externalities, core beliefs, power structures, and motivations. And those are ones that Very Smart People tend not to make progress on, because they're unable to step outside of their lens of technicalities.
    • acdha 4y ago
      > It's not like Blockchain is the only tech people have been talking about for the last 10 years that hasn't been fully actualized yet. How many of those technologies had no impact for that long but then went on to be significantly useful? The only examples which come to mind are things like mRNA vaccines which had far more development & approval hurdles, which is a pretty different situation from systems which are globally available but generally just haven't found a niche where they're a good fit and affordable.
  • swalsh 4y ago
    Here have been the phases so far: Gen 1: Bitcoin - general ideas established, mostly a proof of concept Gen 2: ETH - Building on bitcoin's ideas it establishes the idea of the VM + chain, which transforms bitcoin into essentially a new digital economy. Gen 3: AVAX/SOL/DOT - ETH with scaling and fixes environmental concerns AVAX, the chain I develop on, and the one that has the best technology to enable the capabilities required is less than a year old. Solona and Polka Dot are 2 years old. The stuff i'm talking about is what I would call Gen 5. I think it's pretty unfair to say it's always been "10 years in the future".... a lot of progress has been made, it just might not be apparent if you're not active in the space.
    • acdha 4y ago
      > I think it's pretty unfair to say it's always been "10 years in the future".... a lot of progress has been made, it just might not be apparent if you're not active in the space. My general metric is when people use something for a purpose other than working on that technology. For example, the web very quickly passed that point very quickly because you had people sharing scientific information, building personal sites, using it for businesses which weren't selling web technologies, etc. where the underlying technology was the vehicle but not the purpose. There haven't been many examples of that in the blockchain space so far — a few places accepting it in addition to credit card transactions, etc. — but almost all of it has been focused on generating business for various blockchains rather than being better than or even competitive with existing options (e.g. how many NFTs were marketed and priced based on their artistic merits versus “you're going to make a fortune if you buy now!”?). Do you have an good examples of things like that which are actually used by non-cryptocurrency people[1] and have some advantage from using this stack unrelated to selling tokens? 1. The equivalent of, say, the people I helped get online in the mid-90s because they wanted to join hobby forums like photo.net, email relatives, get stock quotes, etc. but weren't really interested in the technology in its own right.
      • axg11 4y ago
        You're looking in the wrong places. Look up VitaDAO, Molecule, HairDAO - three projects making real scientific impact enabled by crypto.
• mjburgess 4y ago
  Do the opposite: take the best functioning crypto system you can imagine, and remove all the tech decentalisation and inherent transaction costs. I think you'll find you've just invented a better version of that system.
  • sshine 4y ago
    > remove all the tech decentalisation and inherent transaction costs. cost: check, definitely. decentralisation: nope, that's the point. If you have to go to bitcoin.com to get your drug money, you can just shut that site down. The Pirate Bay still works even though it's blocked in lots of countries, because running a mirror on a new domain is incentivised by littering the site with scammy ads, and the trackers and magnet links are an organic, decentralised matter.
    • mjburgess 4y ago
      Cash Yes, you'd then need some middlemen... but are the cost of those middlemen really higher than a skil-road rugpull? Or a crypto crash? Or all the pyramid-scheme lot coming in to pump your dark money system, and screwing you over?
• jshen 4y ago
  I don't see how a blockchain will ever be ready. They don't scale by their nature, have huge security risks (regular people don't want to manage their keys), the unit economics of running on other peoples computers do not pencil out, people don't want immutability once you think about it holistically, and many other reasons.
  • CodeShmode 4y ago
    > regular people don't want to manage their keys They don't have to, but they can if they want to.
    • jameshart 4y ago
      If regular people manage their own keys, they will lose everything.
  • swalsh 4y ago
    > They don't scale by their nature I think there's a few different things to think about here. Does EVERYTHING need to be on-chain? No, clearly not. but for the stuff that does it's been found that you can scale by having multiple chains. I mostly use AVAX, it's like ETH but uses a DAG for consensus, which means finality is WAY faster (seconds). It also has a concept called subnets, so scale is accomplished by having multiple blockchains which can interoperate with each other. Not all validators validate all subnets, but all subnets have multiple validators. Your need for level of security is going to depend on your application. Defi has a high need for security, gaming has a low need. The idea of 1 chain for everything is kind of obsolete.
    • jshen 4y ago
      That still doesn’t scale. It’s slightly better than ethereum
• acdha 4y ago
  It's more that web3 was created as a marketing term to escape the bad reputation cryptocurrencies had developed over the first decade or so. “web2 people” don't really exist — it's just the web, which all of the “web3” projects also rely on. When someone builds something useful with web technologies, the definition of “web” will expand to include it. If they end up with a stack which doesn't bridge to the web, it'll get a different name.
• a2800276 4y ago
  I believe you may be missing the point: "It's just not possible today to build a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product today." The things that customer's didn't ask for is a vaporous abstraction such as "a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product"
  • bytelines 4y ago
    Here's a more concrete example: coupons. I, as a supplier, want to prevent coupon fraud - a ~300M year problem. Today they mitigate this with trust relationships between retailers and distributers, which consequentially means that coupons are less widely distributed and more marginal in what discounts they offer than they could be. When coupons are redeemed, a cashier stuffs them in a bag, they get counted and redeemed and the supplier cuts a check. A shady retailer can simply say they have double the coupons they actually received, and they will get the same check. There's nothing unique about the coupon to prevent this. Ignoring web3, how could you solve this? You could set up some simple database and rest api and have the coupons have some unique identity. You'd need to make this cryptographically secure so you couldn't simply forge identities, you'd need to be able to issue these easily and in bulk, have them expire at a certain time, onboard retailers to easily redeem these coupons and then facilitate payments to the retailer. And, well, that's essentially what Hedera does[1], as a cryptographic DLT. Its value is that the cryptographic proof of whether something is unique and how it can be redeemed is done via NFT, and this protects against a number of attacks at the "consensus level". It offers you a secure way to do this and not run any computer, for minimal and predictable fees. Every transaction is fixed to USD and costs 0.0001 USD and completes in 5 seconds. https://hedera.com/users/coupon-bureau https://hedera.com/users/coupon-bureau If you don't believe me that the customer is asking for this maybe you can listen to them yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=--Bw8yYwJL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=--Bw8yYwJL4
    • a2800276 4y ago
      "It's just not possible today to build a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product today." Granted, Hedera is digital, but from the description in the link you posted it's neither autonomous nor decentralized. "Target and General Mills" may have access to it, but I certainly can't post a "50% off my hand knitted sweater"-Coupon to it. I may also need some convincing that Hedera users are able to verify the cryptographic integrity of a coupon without running "any computer". "Ignoring web3, how could you solve this?" Roughly in the way you describe, with a database. You even go on to say "that's essentially what Hedera does", I fail to see the added benefit of slapping a blockchain/web3/NFT/whatever on top, but maybe I'm just ignorant.
• jayd16 4y ago
  What crypto business do you imagine making and what are the missing pieces?
  • swalsh 4y ago
    This is just me, don't interpret what i'm saying as being some kind of community consensus. Many probably disagree with me. I think nearly anything digital can be turned into a crypto business that can operate more effeciently than a corporation. Anything that touches the real world however will require a corporation with people. The solutions I've seen for interfacing with the real world just suck, and I suspect that is a fundumental problem. So in my opinion, the strength is digital. Fortunately for crypto, most things real world have the ability to be turned digital (think CAD -> 3D printer). Why would a crypto business out compete a corporation? To me the answer comes down to how your business is structured. Corporations are structured around managing people. Crypto businesses (I think when some workflow pieces are added) can be structured around interfacing with AI. An entire world of AI can freely contribute value to a crypto business where as a corporation will have to prioritize, plan, and execute. We can kind of see that today, the biggest whales in crypto have bots doing the heavy lifting. People struggle to interface with crypto, but bots interface natively. This probably sounds hand wavy. At some point when I find time I'll try to write into more detail on how I personally believe this can work. I'm certain Crypto + AI = an accerlerated future. I'm motivated to work in this space, because if done wrong, this is a disaster for society. If done fairly, we can build something amazing.
• spamizbad 4y ago
  Can you provide any estimates on when the crypto world will start building things for regular folks that aren't just new ways to speculate on assets? Because, quite frankly, this is exactly what I've been hearing for the last decade. Because right now the web3 ecosystem seems to cut directly against the ethos of "build stuff that solves a problem for your users". It seems like it's becoming increasingly insular for who its solving problems for - namely other people building things in the web3 space. Like imagine its the 1980s and the industry decided it was stupid to build a home computer because we didn't have X Y or Z built yet so these machines are for computer enthusiasts, scientists, and researchers ONLY.
  • swalsh 4y ago
    Each generation of tech seems to take 3-4 years, and I think we're 2 generations away when I map out a roadmap of needs (which I might be completely wrong about). So 6-8 years? My own personal opinion.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • axg11 4y ago
    The early "killer" products and projects are there, but most people are looking in the wrong places (DeFi). Some examples below. Consumer apps: - STEPN - Superlocal The future of brands (NFTs): - Doodles - BAYC Science funding: - VitaDAO - Molecule - HairDAO
    • mysore 4y ago
      if BAYC is a killer app then web3 is doomed. Using NFTs to enforce digital scarcity and 'ownership' of content can be cool. but the idea of a exclusive social club where you can only get into by buying a million dollar avatar is a little ridiculous. IF they actually had good content in the group that would make sense but it seems to be mostly an MMO the pictures dont even have any taste and the whole thing feels overly commercial and reeks of group-think.
    • smolder 4y ago
• rvz 4y ago
  > So a lot of the good stuff that was/is being built this cycle, the stuff that's going to survive the bear market is critical infrastructure meant to support the future new startups in the blockchain space... the customer of crypto today, is crypto. Combined these capabilities will enable a very powerful platform which will eventually serve businesses and individuals. Today, it's not ready for your needs. This is why Stripe, Moneygram, Checkout.com, etc are choosing the blockchain technologies that are useful to them, which tells us that some of them are going to survive past this bear market and make it past regulations. Not all of these crypto projects will survive either but a certain few will. Again, like the free-software activists who have been disappointed with their mission in removing all non-free software which the web2 tech bros have hijacked the 'open-source' term as cover to suggest their so-called 'transparency' in closed-source surveillance capitalist companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc, we are now seeing them going to be very disappointed with the hope of absolute obliteration and complete removal of everything web3 and blockchain related. I'm afraid that this 'destroying' or 'removal' of it all is not going to happen, just like it isn't going to take over the current system. Like closed-source software, crypto is here to stay and both web2 and web3 people are going to be very disappointed.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  > how you would build a blockchain based business What problems does a "blockchain based business" solve? That's what I don't understand. Most businesses out there derive value by interacting with off-chain, real-world state. If you wanted to use a blockchain in this case you'd need some trusted party to sync the blockchain state with the state of the real world, which then nullifies most/all of the advantages of using a blockchain over just letting this trusted party run an old school database.