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Why sigh? Why are Bitcoin maxis and HN Web 2.0 people so intent on keeping everyone from advancing to the next phases of the Web? Do you like centralized VC-f

by EGreg 4y ago

Why sigh? Why are Bitcoin maxis and HN Web 2.0 people so intent on keeping everyone from advancing to the next phases of the Web? Do you like centralized VC-funded “cloud”-hosted startups incubated in Silicon Valley that get gobbled up by big tech or dumped on the public? You like the extreme power inequality between those who run these systems and the public? You think the best our systems can do is extract rents at the behest of Wall Street? People who bought the shares at $100 dont want them to drop to $50 so Uber will take 50% of all drivers’ paychecks, while a decentralized autonomous network wouldn’t. Selling tokens is a one-time deal that makes the founders rich and then the network belongs to the participants. What happened to the open source, hacker ethos? You know, counterculture, hacking on something, or at the very least not buying into the corporate morass? What happened to cypherpunks and people who wrote M$ and worked on Free Software alternatives to Big Tech? Once upon a time America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy were today’s Google, Facebook etc. People left for the open, decentralized protocols like HTTP, as soon as good enough clients (browsers) appeared. Web 2.0 companies like FB or Google could have never even gotten started if they needed permission of AOL or MSN … the permissionless nature Web 1.0 made it possible. Once upon a time, long distance calls cost $3 a minute. Then the decentralized file sharing network Kazaa guys made Skype, and it became so widespread that VOIP dropped the cost to zero. We can all videoconference now and the telcos are reduced to providing dumb pipes. So why if Web 1.0 broke barriers and allowed anyone to write some HTML and serve via HTTP a website to the whole world … why is it sooooo terrible that in Web 3.0 people can write a smart contract and deploy it on some EVM compatible blockchain making the rules or payments instantly accessible to people around the world who control their own keys? Do you really think this won’t have any real applications?

mtsr 4y ago
It might have something to do with all the cryptobro’s pushing get-rich-quick-schemes. Crypto-enthusiasts ignore how regulations existed for good reasons before regulatory capture made a mess of things. Not everyone likes the idea of an anarchocapitalist future. And I’m not even talking about the outright scamming and the fact that most crypto’s primary use case is criminal. Or the environmental issues of spending energy we can’t spare on something we could solve so many other ways.
- r00bot 4y ago
  I personally take a hesitant approach to crypto/blockchain technology. I'm open to using it where it's legitimately better than other approaches, but for the vast, vast majority of applications traditional methods are always going to be better than shoe-horned decentralization. It's very unfortunate that the grifters have given the technology such a bad name when, like any technology, it has applications it excels in and others it doesn't. We're still definitely in the phase of working out what, if anything, blockchain is better (than centralised implementations) for. And it sucks that that search is being negatively impacted by all the grifters. In the future I wouldn't be surprised if we saw 99.99% of blockchain stuff dead, but the small percentage that survive could disrupt some industries (I'm not convinced finance is one of those industries though lol).
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > like any technology, it has applications it excels in Name five.
    - r00bot 4y ago
      I don't really think there are five applications it excels in, but there might be in the future..? Like I said, we're still working out what it's good for. I've seen promising applications but nothing I'd say is obviously better than traditional technology. To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion.
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        You said it has applications it excels at. Turns out "maybe in the future" and "we're still figuring out". So. No applications it excels at. > To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion. It's been 13 years. When will dismissing it become mature? In another 13 years? Or maybe the tech is just bad.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
Because if you actually look at what cryptocurrency is being used for, it’s overwhelmingly: - Scams - Risky financial structures that we regulated out of existence because they were risky and unregulated - Money laundering If there are real applications of the technology, they would’ve popped up by now. Just look at the whole space of cryptocurrency lending. Regulations exist for good reason, we have stress tests https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/large-bank-capital-requirements-20210805.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/large-bank-capit..., consumer protections, all kinds of safeguard so when you put money in a bank account you don’t have to worry that somebody’s gonna run with it. Web 3.0 is a buzzword-filled collective hallucination. People keep shouting the buzzwords, but still nobody knows what it’s supposed to mean in any concrete way. NFTs are scams and still haven’t found a real use case that’s not a ponzi, crypto lending is 2008 capital structures but turned up to 11, DAOs are useless because courts and corporate governance are things that exists, I can go on and on. If you have a concrete proposal of how this magical Web 3.0 future is supposed to be better I’m all ears, but where I’m standing it’s all ponzi, scams, shaky capital structuring, and criminal enterprises.
- eldenwrong 4y ago
  Love how you think your money is safe. You are losing 10-15% a year from inflation. Nobody has to literally steal it when they can dilute it
  - xeromal 4y ago
    Straight to criticizing something else. lol
    - eldenwrong 4y ago
      Because you live in a privileged bubble. You have no idea how serious the problems Bitcoin is trying to solve are. One day you will be forced to understand it though. Hopefully it doesn't result in you losing all your savings, like it has happened to billions of people through history....
manigandham 4y ago
> "Do you really think this won’t have any real applications?" So where are they? The consensus is denying it on principle but rather wondering what it's actually useful for. It's strange to see all the claims of opportunities and problems to solve, yet nothing seems to be produced.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Many of them are here, fully documented and explained to laypeople, with links to GitHub, feel free to take the open source software and use them: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications Is that not good enough for now? What more would you like?
kmeisthax 4y ago
I am philosophically opposed to "Web 3.0" because I am philosophically opposed to cryptocurrency and do not believe it decentralizes anything. Regardless of the follies of Wall Street, blockchains and smart contracts do not fix them. There is no particular reason why a DAO would not also cut worker wages to benefit the tokenholder class - it's the exact same structure as a corporation, just without the pesky regulation getting in the way. There is nothing about decentralized finance that guarantees that the employees are also tokenholders anymore than regular ol' brick-and-mortar capitalism guarantees that employees are also shareholders. If you want a worker's cooperative, you can start one right now without needing to buy Ethereum and develop a fragile smart contract. DeFi isn't destroying power structures, nor is it making them less rigid. It's just a changing of the guard, from corporations and investors to anonymous "whales" and DAOs. This isn't actually decentralizing anything, it's just obfuscating how much the system has been corrupted. As for open source and Free Software, well... their political opinions outside of hacker ethos are all over the map. The space is vaguely libertarian and vaguely leftist, which means there's plenty of people in the space who don't want more unregulated capitalism. Your example about long distance calls is also wrong. Or, at least, missing some context. Skype was actually kind of late to the "cheap long-distance" party; the government had already done the hard work of breaking up the phone monopoly and ensuring that companies could place and terminate calls on other people's networks. This is because "permissionless" is not a capability, it is a policy. Even ostensibly permissionless blockchains could effectively become permissioned if miners and exchanges colluded in a way that made economic sense. I know this can happen because it's exactly the same thing that happened in Web 2.0.

by EGreg 4y ago

mtsr 4y ago

It might have something to do with all the cryptobro’s pushing get-rich-quick-schemes. Crypto-enthusiasts ignore how regulations existed for good reasons before regulatory capture made a mess of things. Not everyone likes the idea of an anarchocapitalist future. And I’m not even talking about the outright scamming and the fact that most crypto’s primary use case is criminal. Or the environmental issues of spending energy we can’t spare on something we could solve so many other ways.

r00bot 4y ago
I personally take a hesitant approach to crypto/blockchain technology. I'm open to using it where it's legitimately better than other approaches, but for the vast, vast majority of applications traditional methods are always going to be better than shoe-horned decentralization. It's very unfortunate that the grifters have given the technology such a bad name when, like any technology, it has applications it excels in and others it doesn't. We're still definitely in the phase of working out what, if anything, blockchain is better (than centralised implementations) for. And it sucks that that search is being negatively impacted by all the grifters. In the future I wouldn't be surprised if we saw 99.99% of blockchain stuff dead, but the small percentage that survive could disrupt some industries (I'm not convinced finance is one of those industries though lol).
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > like any technology, it has applications it excels in Name five.
  - r00bot 4y ago
    I don't really think there are five applications it excels in, but there might be in the future..? Like I said, we're still working out what it's good for. I've seen promising applications but nothing I'd say is obviously better than traditional technology. To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      You said it has applications it excels at. Turns out "maybe in the future" and "we're still figuring out". So. No applications it excels at. > To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion. It's been 13 years. When will dismissing it become mature? In another 13 years? Or maybe the tech is just bad.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago

Because if you actually look at what cryptocurrency is being used for, it’s overwhelmingly: - Scams - Risky financial structures that we regulated out of existence because they were risky and unregulated - Money laundering If there are real applications of the technology, they would’ve popped up by now. Just look at the whole space of cryptocurrency lending. Regulations exist for good reason, we have stress tests https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/large-bank-capital-requirements-20210805.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/large-bank-capit..., consumer protections, all kinds of safeguard so when you put money in a bank account you don’t have to worry that somebody’s gonna run with it. Web 3.0 is a buzzword-filled collective hallucination. People keep shouting the buzzwords, but still nobody knows what it’s supposed to mean in any concrete way. NFTs are scams and still haven’t found a real use case that’s not a ponzi, crypto lending is 2008 capital structures but turned up to 11, DAOs are useless because courts and corporate governance are things that exists, I can go on and on. If you have a concrete proposal of how this magical Web 3.0 future is supposed to be better I’m all ears, but where I’m standing it’s all ponzi, scams, shaky capital structuring, and criminal enterprises.

eldenwrong 4y ago
Love how you think your money is safe. You are losing 10-15% a year from inflation. Nobody has to literally steal it when they can dilute it
- xeromal 4y ago
  Straight to criticizing something else. lol
  - eldenwrong 4y ago
    Because you live in a privileged bubble. You have no idea how serious the problems Bitcoin is trying to solve are. One day you will be forced to understand it though. Hopefully it doesn't result in you losing all your savings, like it has happened to billions of people through history....

manigandham 4y ago

> "Do you really think this won’t have any real applications?" So where are they? The consensus is denying it on principle but rather wondering what it's actually useful for. It's strange to see all the claims of opportunities and problems to solve, yet nothing seems to be produced.

EGreg 4y ago
Many of them are here, fully documented and explained to laypeople, with links to GitHub, feel free to take the open source software and use them: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications Is that not good enough for now? What more would you like?

kmeisthax 4y ago

I am philosophically opposed to "Web 3.0" because I am philosophically opposed to cryptocurrency and do not believe it decentralizes anything. Regardless of the follies of Wall Street, blockchains and smart contracts do not fix them. There is no particular reason why a DAO would not also cut worker wages to benefit the tokenholder class - it's the exact same structure as a corporation, just without the pesky regulation getting in the way. There is nothing about decentralized finance that guarantees that the employees are also tokenholders anymore than regular ol' brick-and-mortar capitalism guarantees that employees are also shareholders. If you want a worker's cooperative, you can start one right now without needing to buy Ethereum and develop a fragile smart contract. DeFi isn't destroying power structures, nor is it making them less rigid. It's just a changing of the guard, from corporations and investors to anonymous "whales" and DAOs. This isn't actually decentralizing anything, it's just obfuscating how much the system has been corrupted. As for open source and Free Software, well... their political opinions outside of hacker ethos are all over the map. The space is vaguely libertarian and vaguely leftist, which means there's plenty of people in the space who don't want more unregulated capitalism. Your example about long distance calls is also wrong. Or, at least, missing some context. Skype was actually kind of late to the "cheap long-distance" party; the government had already done the hard work of breaking up the phone monopoly and ensuring that companies could place and terminate calls on other people's networks. This is because "permissionless" is not a capability, it is a policy. Even ostensibly permissionless blockchains could effectively become permissioned if miners and exchanges colluded in a way that made economic sense. I know this can happen because it's exactly the same thing that happened in Web 2.0.