8 ms·

I've done my due diligence, there is no future in web3. I don't disparage early VCs who invested in blockchain startups because it is their job to put money int

by pg_bot 4y ago

I've done my due diligence, there is no future in web3. I don't disparage early VCs who invested in blockchain startups because it is their job to put money into companies that could be revolutionary. However, the revolution has failed to materialize. While it may not be obvious to all it should become clearer in the coming months. When I say 'fraud' I don't mean juicing the numbers or asking forgiveness instead or permission. I'm not talking about things that will receive a slap on the wrist or a fine from a regulator. There is a great deal of organized crime that is the backbone of the industry. A lot of people will deserve to go to prison when the music stops.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
web3 is going to thrive whether you like it or not. Primarily because of three reasons: - Greed. Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto. As long as that's possible, money will keep pouring into the system. - Gambling. The global gambling industry is half a trillion every year. Even if you think crypto has no fundamentals and is akin to gambling, it still represents a massive market. Opening a 50x long on a random shitcoin might be the same as yoloing in $10,000 at the roulette table. If the latter can happen sustainably, the former can as well. - Principles. Crypto/web3/blockchain - whatever you might call it - will continue to attract people at the edge cases simply because of the principles and narratives behind it. Self-sovreignity, privacy, ownership - these are ideas worth pursuing. If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms, or had done more for privacy, web3 would have died in 2017. But because they didn't, web3 will continue to find users simply because of the "privacy + self-ownership" narrative. More than anything else, I see the massive amounts of money flowing into web3 as a failure of the web2 platforms. If Facebook wasn't such a scummy company, and if Google wasn't tracking everything I do so maliciously, I would have completely ignored web3 as an idea.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  > Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto. Not at all. It's easy for one person to make a lot of money _at the expense of another_. It's a less than zero sum game, though, so each net transaction _cost_ people money todal. > Self-sovreignity, privacy, ownership - these are ideas worth pursuing. The ability to evade government regulations and scrutiny is crime. The underlying idea is that you don't like the laws on financial disclosure, so you want to "get around" them. As an honest citizen, I see the desire to evade the securities laws as literally criminal intent, which it legally is.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > long as that's possible, money will keep pouring into the system This was an easy-money phenomenon. We have another rates announcement today. I expect crypto to respond like the clockwork leveraged risk asset it models. > global gambling industry is half a trillion every year This is a good analogy. It’s one I hear in legislative and regulatory halls in the U.S. and Europe, the money centres crypto depends on for its legal demand. The VCs largely have downside protection. Retail with get screwed but it’s a risk asset; they always get screwed late cycle and we have resolution mechanisms for that. Crypto company employees, however, stand to be boned. It’s unclear where the legal risk winds up. My bet is the first layer that has not been talking to lawyers so far. That includes dumb executives and naïve employees working for savvy ones.
  - ejanus 4y ago
    Would stock markets be jumpy after rates announcement?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Would stock markets be jumpy after rates announcement? “Announcement effects appear somewhat ambiguous for the [British] stock market” [1]. For the last year, it’s largely been high P/E tech stocks that have reacted viciously to rates announcements. The rest of the market is less sensitive to small changes in rates (jargon: duration). And/or it’s better at pricing it in ex ante. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1057521904001000 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10575...
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    > Crypto company employees, however, stand to be boned. I'm not going to be crying any tears for them. If you got into this from a business perspective you have zero excuse for pretending that you are not also partially to blame for the outcome. They'll be lucky if they avoid jail time in some cases.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms, or had done more for privacy, web3 would have died in 2017. Honestly nobody cares about these things. This is just a narrative that was grafted onto Web3 after the fact.
  - RF_Savage 4y ago
    Yep. Considering how web2.0 hype was about AJAX and webpages with dynamic content that did not require reloading the page.
  - ricochet11 4y ago
    I care about these things and i've been in crypto since before gavin coined web3. In fact most of the devs I know that started pre-2017 deeply care about these things. Many were around in the OWS groups back in the day, they transformed via bitcoin and now mostly work on eth projects. The cool thing is most of those people who were in it for political reason (rather than the newer investors looking to make quick money, and new devs looking for decent paid job) have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives working on this stuff regardless of it making them any richer. I think we can outwork and outlast the cynics and keep building the things we think are cool. they hype will come and go, the fraudsters will sweep in during mania and con people regardless of our warnings, the authoritarians will try get the state to make it illegal, the google employees will keep complaining that its not innovative. we'll keep on working towards what we think is right.
    - hansword 4y ago
      I care about these things and left crypto over a decade ago.
      - landemva 4y ago
        By that timeline, you were in during 2009 - 2011. Bitcoin was developing. Bitcoin blockchain then was not privacy enhancing. What were you involved in? And you missed a giant price run.
- threeseed 4y ago
  > Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto At least right now mainly be doing something illegal e.g. scamming, rug pulling, insider trading. SEC and other regulators may be late to the party but are starting to put people in jail for this fast and easy money.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    I turned 10k into 300k without doing any of the above in 6 months. You need to fight your biases.
    - rnk 4y ago
      You should advertise on youtube then ;-) Lately it seems every youtube video I watch has endless steams of scammy "How do I invest to get good returns". "You should invest with fred johnson crypto, I made 100k off a 10k investment in 1 week".
    - guelo 4y ago
      By timing the market on a coin hype cycle?
      - spaceman_2020 4y ago
        Pretty much - no “long term” passive investment in crypto. Its a casino, but one with extremely good odds for players if you time it right.
        hgsgm 4y ago
        HWR_14 4y ago
        As I understand it, either you're good at timing the market or you got lucky. If you got lucky, there's no reason to be so cocky. If you are good at timing the market why aren't you making a fortune on Wall Street? (Unless you are making a fortune on Wall Street)
- D13Fd 4y ago
  > If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms What are you talking about?
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Do you have any say whatsoever how your data and content are used by, say, Facebook? Or what kind of content is allowed/disallowed?
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      > Do you have any say whatsoever how your data and content are used by, say, Facebook? You're describing DRM. It doesn't exist for blockchain either - famously I can copy/paste NFTs all day long. And it's not clear whether most NFTs even provide any copyrights for the content they link to so you still don't even "own" the content in the legal sense.
    - acdha 4y ago
      That’s not web2.0 but rather a couple of companies. Nothing prevents anyone else from doing different things with their web applications, and more importantly there’s no indication that magical thinking about blockchains will somehow prevent that business model from continuing. The blockchain design makes it even easier to mine peoples’ activity and prevents retroactive privacy improvements but, more importantly, the underlying problem is that people like not spending money. Various people have tried micropayments on the web but ads have less friction and don’t bother a sufficiently large group of people enough to pay more than advertisers, not to mention the precedent suggesting that sites will display ads to even paying customers. Similarly, content hosting has the same failed promise. Blockchains are too inefficient to store the content, which is why all of the “web3” services are so commonly dependent on normal web companies. NFT pirates trying to steal artists’ work are routinely halted by takedown requests to Google, AWS, etc. There are services like IPFS which try to provide less centralized hosting but they’re expensive and have the same issues with most of the actual hosting being on ISPs who are legally required to honor things like DMCA or other illegal content requests.
  - 4y ago
ejanus 4y ago
Do you have concrete details?

by pg_bot 4y ago

spaceman_2020 4y ago

web3 is going to thrive whether you like it or not. Primarily because of three reasons: - Greed. Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto. As long as that's possible, money will keep pouring into the system. - Gambling. The global gambling industry is half a trillion every year. Even if you think crypto has no fundamentals and is akin to gambling, it still represents a massive market. Opening a 50x long on a random shitcoin might be the same as yoloing in $10,000 at the roulette table. If the latter can happen sustainably, the former can as well. - Principles. Crypto/web3/blockchain - whatever you might call it - will continue to attract people at the edge cases simply because of the principles and narratives behind it. Self-sovreignity, privacy, ownership - these are ideas worth pursuing. If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms, or had done more for privacy, web3 would have died in 2017. But because they didn't, web3 will continue to find users simply because of the "privacy + self-ownership" narrative. More than anything else, I see the massive amounts of money flowing into web3 as a failure of the web2 platforms. If Facebook wasn't such a scummy company, and if Google wasn't tracking everything I do so maliciously, I would have completely ignored web3 as an idea.

TomSwirly 4y ago
> Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto. Not at all. It's easy for one person to make a lot of money _at the expense of another_. It's a less than zero sum game, though, so each net transaction _cost_ people money todal. > Self-sovreignity, privacy, ownership - these are ideas worth pursuing. The ability to evade government regulations and scrutiny is crime. The underlying idea is that you don't like the laws on financial disclosure, so you want to "get around" them. As an honest citizen, I see the desire to evade the securities laws as literally criminal intent, which it legally is.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> long as that's possible, money will keep pouring into the system This was an easy-money phenomenon. We have another rates announcement today. I expect crypto to respond like the clockwork leveraged risk asset it models. > global gambling industry is half a trillion every year This is a good analogy. It’s one I hear in legislative and regulatory halls in the U.S. and Europe, the money centres crypto depends on for its legal demand. The VCs largely have downside protection. Retail with get screwed but it’s a risk asset; they always get screwed late cycle and we have resolution mechanisms for that. Crypto company employees, however, stand to be boned. It’s unclear where the legal risk winds up. My bet is the first layer that has not been talking to lawyers so far. That includes dumb executives and naïve employees working for savvy ones.
- ejanus 4y ago
  Would stock markets be jumpy after rates announcement?
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Would stock markets be jumpy after rates announcement? “Announcement effects appear somewhat ambiguous for the [British] stock market” [1]. For the last year, it’s largely been high P/E tech stocks that have reacted viciously to rates announcements. The rest of the market is less sensitive to small changes in rates (jargon: duration). And/or it’s better at pricing it in ex ante. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1057521904001000 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10575...
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > Crypto company employees, however, stand to be boned. I'm not going to be crying any tears for them. If you got into this from a business perspective you have zero excuse for pretending that you are not also partially to blame for the outcome. They'll be lucky if they avoid jail time in some cases.
arcticbull 4y ago
> If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms, or had done more for privacy, web3 would have died in 2017. Honestly nobody cares about these things. This is just a narrative that was grafted onto Web3 after the fact.
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  Yep. Considering how web2.0 hype was about AJAX and webpages with dynamic content that did not require reloading the page.
- ricochet11 4y ago
  I care about these things and i've been in crypto since before gavin coined web3. In fact most of the devs I know that started pre-2017 deeply care about these things. Many were around in the OWS groups back in the day, they transformed via bitcoin and now mostly work on eth projects. The cool thing is most of those people who were in it for political reason (rather than the newer investors looking to make quick money, and new devs looking for decent paid job) have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives working on this stuff regardless of it making them any richer. I think we can outwork and outlast the cynics and keep building the things we think are cool. they hype will come and go, the fraudsters will sweep in during mania and con people regardless of our warnings, the authoritarians will try get the state to make it illegal, the google employees will keep complaining that its not innovative. we'll keep on working towards what we think is right.
  - hansword 4y ago
    I care about these things and left crypto over a decade ago.
    - landemva 4y ago
      By that timeline, you were in during 2009 - 2011. Bitcoin was developing. Bitcoin blockchain then was not privacy enhancing. What were you involved in? And you missed a giant price run.
threeseed 4y ago
> Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto At least right now mainly be doing something illegal e.g. scamming, rug pulling, insider trading. SEC and other regulators may be late to the party but are starting to put people in jail for this fast and easy money.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I turned 10k into 300k without doing any of the above in 6 months. You need to fight your biases.
  - rnk 4y ago
    You should advertise on youtube then ;-) Lately it seems every youtube video I watch has endless steams of scammy "How do I invest to get good returns". "You should invest with fred johnson crypto, I made 100k off a 10k investment in 1 week".
  - guelo 4y ago
    By timing the market on a coin hype cycle?
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Pretty much - no “long term” passive investment in crypto. Its a casino, but one with extremely good odds for players if you time it right.
      - hgsgm 4y ago
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        As I understand it, either you're good at timing the market or you got lucky. If you got lucky, there's no reason to be so cocky. If you are good at timing the market why aren't you making a fortune on Wall Street? (Unless you are making a fortune on Wall Street)
D13Fd 4y ago
> If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms What are you talking about?
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Do you have any say whatsoever how your data and content are used by, say, Facebook? Or what kind of content is allowed/disallowed?
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > Do you have any say whatsoever how your data and content are used by, say, Facebook? You're describing DRM. It doesn't exist for blockchain either - famously I can copy/paste NFTs all day long. And it's not clear whether most NFTs even provide any copyrights for the content they link to so you still don't even "own" the content in the legal sense.
  - acdha 4y ago
    That’s not web2.0 but rather a couple of companies. Nothing prevents anyone else from doing different things with their web applications, and more importantly there’s no indication that magical thinking about blockchains will somehow prevent that business model from continuing. The blockchain design makes it even easier to mine peoples’ activity and prevents retroactive privacy improvements but, more importantly, the underlying problem is that people like not spending money. Various people have tried micropayments on the web but ads have less friction and don’t bother a sufficiently large group of people enough to pay more than advertisers, not to mention the precedent suggesting that sites will display ads to even paying customers. Similarly, content hosting has the same failed promise. Blockchains are too inefficient to store the content, which is why all of the “web3” services are so commonly dependent on normal web companies. NFT pirates trying to steal artists’ work are routinely halted by takedown requests to Google, AWS, etc. There are services like IPFS which try to provide less centralized hosting but they’re expensive and have the same issues with most of the actual hosting being on ISPs who are legally required to honor things like DMCA or other illegal content requests.
- 4y ago

ejanus 4y ago

Do you have concrete details?