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Hi, author here. So the first thing is as something meant to be an engaging (though casual) read and one which is targeted at an audience who might not all be t

Hi, author here. So the first thing is as something meant to be an engaging (though casual) read and one which is targeted at an audience who might not all be tech buffs, of course there's some simplification, glossing over some things and yes, a bit of hyperbole here and there for dramatic effect. The opening paragraph, for example, obviously lays out a strong and provocative position to immediately engage the reader and establish the post's theme as a critical piece. The other part is the article already comes in at something like 3800 words. I could write five, ten times that on the subject and still not be done. I have to pick and choose what I cover and in what detail. The primary use case of cryptocurrencies (and in particular Bitcoin) today, when used directly as currency, as a means of purchase, is criminal activity. The article glossed over that there are other niche use cases where coins are used as currencies but they are very much a niche, particularly when weighed against the biggest use of crypto today which is simply as a form of something analogous to stock trading only without the regulation. But this is almost a secondary point; the article is about "Web 3" hype, these points are relevant insofar as the thing which is really being challenged is this idea that crypto and blockchain will be the foundation of a major new era in the web. I'll certainly take it as constructive feedback on my writing if that isn't clear enough. Thanks.

only_human 4y ago
I disagree with the comment you're responding to. Please be more aggressive about dismissing crypto and blockchains as a fraud. It's actually shameful how reluctant some engineers are to do this. This isn't just about using them as a currency. They're bad at literally everything else too. There are no actual niche use cases. More software engineers need to be honest and up front about this before the scams continue. The irrational levels of hype must end. Crypto and blockchains are actually just completely useless. It's been 13 years and still every single person I've ever seen who says they're useful can't name a single actual use case that you can't do better with just a normal database. Even you're getting sucked into this trap. Like, I get people's reluctance to seem biased, but how long are we going to let this charade continue? How long before we can say enough is enough? "Enterprise blockchain" is a marketing buzzword. Nobody actually wants them except to tick a box on a checklist. They never gained any real traction, because they're useless. They have to be managed by a centralized admin anyway, so what's the point? There just isn't one. Part of this is intentional confusion on the part of promoters, people labeling anything that uses paxos or merkle trees as "blockchain" for marketing reasons, but I hope people also start pushing back against that for what they are: obvious attempts to cash in on the crypto hype by using the word blockchain.
zeroclip 4y ago
Why don't you write an article about Web3 technology instead of Bitcoin or vacuous crypto-influencer statements? If all of Web3 is a con, then you should have no trouble dismantling the usefulness of ENS, Aave, DAI, and Uniswap. Spending time talking about Bitcoin, Proof of Work, Bitconnect, and other unrelated issues detracts from your essay.
- only_human 4y ago
  Those defi projects don't require much to dismantle. The entire point of them is to accumulate more crypto. That's it. And since crypto is useless, they also serve no useful purpose. The only exception you mentioned is ENS, but there isn't anything special about that. It's just a DNS system but centralized into a smart contract instead, and because it's on ethereum you have to pay gas fees in addition to the registrar fess. No actual benefit to using it versus real DNS.
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    I think you misunderstand DAI. Saying the point of DAI is to accumulate crypto is like saying the point of a car is to accumulate oil. People use oil, or ETH as the gas token in this example, to drive the car, or drive the DeFi apps. You can hold DAI without holding any more ETH than is needed for transfers. “Centralized into a [decentralized] protocol” is an oxymoron. The benefit of ENS over DNS is that there is no centralized actor that can control, censor and manipulate the namespace.
    - only_human 4y ago
      >I think you misunderstand DAI. Saying the point of DAI is to accumulate crypto is like saying the point of a car is to accumulate oil. No, I understand it perfectly. The only purpose of stablecoins is to provide liquidity in the crypto markets for these defi apps where all the trading action happens. They don't have any other purpose and there isn't any other reason to hold them. If it wasn't for the crypto markets you would just be using USD and trading against that directly. Seriously, if you go to the DAI website and you click the big "Use DAI" button it literally just takes you to another crypto investing app. In the future please avoid falling for this trap that web3 tech pushers set. They claim there is "innovation" in the space but almost all of it is just clones of existing financial services with crypto instead of real money. The fact that there's even something call "stablecoins" should demonstrate to you how bogus this all is. The rest of cryptos are so volatile the only way they can make anything resembling a market out of it is by pegging other cryptos to the USD and doing all their trading against that. It's just adding more middlemen to reach the ultimate goal which, as always, is to eventually cash out into USD. Because everybody knows cryptos by themselves are useless for anything besides speculative gambling. >“Centralized into a [decentralized] protocol” is an oxymoron. The benefit of ENS over DNS is that there is no centralized actor that can control, censor and manipulate the namespace. Nope, you're wrong about this in the context of most things implemented in smart contracts. You should be extremely wary of anyone making these claims. Since the "smart contract" is actually just a piece of code, typically the smart contract will have an update mechanism that only a centralized actor can use to upload patches and updates to the code. IIRC this is still how ENS works last time I checked. Like almost everything in crypto, it's a centralized service that the authors lie about and masquerade it as decentralized. Sometimes they'll do an even worse thing by having "governance tokens" that grant you powers to update the smart contract, and someone with a lot of money can just come in and buy all the tokens and take it over. So these "smart contracts" are not really decentralized in any sense. If anyone says "we are making this thing that can't be controlled, censored or manipulated" then that's a massive red flag. There's also the question of why anyone actually wants that. What other industry would this be ok in? If someone had a company that made self-driving cars advertised as being "uncontrollable and uncensorable by driving laws", nobody would want that. We'd recognize that company is actually just selling unstoppable killing machines. So why do people for some bizarre reason think this is a good thing in financial markets where the super-rich already have extreme power consolidation? It makes absolutely no sense at all.

only_human 4y ago

I disagree with the comment you're responding to. Please be more aggressive about dismissing crypto and blockchains as a fraud. It's actually shameful how reluctant some engineers are to do this. This isn't just about using them as a currency. They're bad at literally everything else too. There are no actual niche use cases. More software engineers need to be honest and up front about this before the scams continue. The irrational levels of hype must end. Crypto and blockchains are actually just completely useless. It's been 13 years and still every single person I've ever seen who says they're useful can't name a single actual use case that you can't do better with just a normal database. Even you're getting sucked into this trap. Like, I get people's reluctance to seem biased, but how long are we going to let this charade continue? How long before we can say enough is enough? "Enterprise blockchain" is a marketing buzzword. Nobody actually wants them except to tick a box on a checklist. They never gained any real traction, because they're useless. They have to be managed by a centralized admin anyway, so what's the point? There just isn't one. Part of this is intentional confusion on the part of promoters, people labeling anything that uses paxos or merkle trees as "blockchain" for marketing reasons, but I hope people also start pushing back against that for what they are: obvious attempts to cash in on the crypto hype by using the word blockchain.

zeroclip 4y ago

Why don't you write an article about Web3 technology instead of Bitcoin or vacuous crypto-influencer statements? If all of Web3 is a con, then you should have no trouble dismantling the usefulness of ENS, Aave, DAI, and Uniswap. Spending time talking about Bitcoin, Proof of Work, Bitconnect, and other unrelated issues detracts from your essay.

only_human 4y ago
Those defi projects don't require much to dismantle. The entire point of them is to accumulate more crypto. That's it. And since crypto is useless, they also serve no useful purpose. The only exception you mentioned is ENS, but there isn't anything special about that. It's just a DNS system but centralized into a smart contract instead, and because it's on ethereum you have to pay gas fees in addition to the registrar fess. No actual benefit to using it versus real DNS.
- zeroclip 4y ago
  I think you misunderstand DAI. Saying the point of DAI is to accumulate crypto is like saying the point of a car is to accumulate oil. People use oil, or ETH as the gas token in this example, to drive the car, or drive the DeFi apps. You can hold DAI without holding any more ETH than is needed for transfers. “Centralized into a [decentralized] protocol” is an oxymoron. The benefit of ENS over DNS is that there is no centralized actor that can control, censor and manipulate the namespace.
  - only_human 4y ago
    >I think you misunderstand DAI. Saying the point of DAI is to accumulate crypto is like saying the point of a car is to accumulate oil. No, I understand it perfectly. The only purpose of stablecoins is to provide liquidity in the crypto markets for these defi apps where all the trading action happens. They don't have any other purpose and there isn't any other reason to hold them. If it wasn't for the crypto markets you would just be using USD and trading against that directly. Seriously, if you go to the DAI website and you click the big "Use DAI" button it literally just takes you to another crypto investing app. In the future please avoid falling for this trap that web3 tech pushers set. They claim there is "innovation" in the space but almost all of it is just clones of existing financial services with crypto instead of real money. The fact that there's even something call "stablecoins" should demonstrate to you how bogus this all is. The rest of cryptos are so volatile the only way they can make anything resembling a market out of it is by pegging other cryptos to the USD and doing all their trading against that. It's just adding more middlemen to reach the ultimate goal which, as always, is to eventually cash out into USD. Because everybody knows cryptos by themselves are useless for anything besides speculative gambling. >“Centralized into a [decentralized] protocol” is an oxymoron. The benefit of ENS over DNS is that there is no centralized actor that can control, censor and manipulate the namespace. Nope, you're wrong about this in the context of most things implemented in smart contracts. You should be extremely wary of anyone making these claims. Since the "smart contract" is actually just a piece of code, typically the smart contract will have an update mechanism that only a centralized actor can use to upload patches and updates to the code. IIRC this is still how ENS works last time I checked. Like almost everything in crypto, it's a centralized service that the authors lie about and masquerade it as decentralized. Sometimes they'll do an even worse thing by having "governance tokens" that grant you powers to update the smart contract, and someone with a lot of money can just come in and buy all the tokens and take it over. So these "smart contracts" are not really decentralized in any sense. If anyone says "we are making this thing that can't be controlled, censored or manipulated" then that's a massive red flag. There's also the question of why anyone actually wants that. What other industry would this be ok in? If someone had a company that made self-driving cars advertised as being "uncontrollable and uncensorable by driving laws", nobody would want that. We'd recognize that company is actually just selling unstoppable killing machines. So why do people for some bizarre reason think this is a good thing in financial markets where the super-rich already have extreme power consolidation? It makes absolutely no sense at all.