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I'm so bothered by the decadence of the tech industry adopting something so trivially useless, just because it can used to exploit people, either by appealing t

I'm so bothered by the decadence of the tech industry adopting something so trivially useless, just because it can used to exploit people, either by appealing to their greed or need to be a part of something. Meanwhile India revolutionized digital payment without any fanfare, by making something that can be used by billions of people today. With zero hype. It just works, and it's boosting the country's GDP by at least 1%. Meanwhile meanwhile the ghouls of Silicon Valley are busy promoting inefficient solutions that don't work at all. It's like those hundreds of thousands of empty houses in China. It's all a ghost town, but we can't stop hearing how great it is. Can barely buy a pizza with cryptocurrencies, but it's the future. We reinvented music with Web3, but we have 600 users, because our tone-deaf service is unintelligible to normal people, and we are too far up on our asses to make something people want. People don't want Web3, they want to eat, watch TV, work to get paid, talk to each other, sleep, marry and fuck. Your service should address pain points in these normal activities, not make up new problems. Oh gosh darn it, the site I use to Netflix and chill with my girlfriend is not decentramalized, take all my money, I never knew it needed to be decentrifugalized while it's playing in the background. Said no one ever.

dietmtnview 4y ago
Americans fundamentally do not believe that the government can be used to make your life convenient. Average people believe technologies like the Internet and GPS were invented by private industry rather than government.
scottiebarnes 4y ago
Your mistake is thinking blockchains are a service. They aren't, they're protocols for building things on, like tcp/ip. It happens to be that a decentralized public ledger is the highest value use for it at the moment. What you're also missing out is on how the current monetary system and monetary base work, and why central banking is problematic. You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. The housing market is now impossible for average people to enter (especially in cities), as easy, low interest money has inflated home values and the house price to income ratio has gone steadily up and to the right. These are signals of broken money; this is what blockchains are looking to solve.
- Centigonal 4y ago
  > You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. The housing market is now impossible for average people to enter (especially in cities), as easy, low interest money has inflated home values and the house price to income ratio has gone steadily up and to the right. These are real pain points, and part of why I was very excited about crypto circa 2017-2018. It's been five years now, and the builders in the web3 community seem to have stagnated on this, taking a wide tangent into digital art, online clout, and ponzi schemes. The currencies themselves are limited on transaction throughput and trade like traditional risk assets, level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype, and we have come to find that decentralized, immutable currencies are problematic to work with in many situations. From my viewpoint, it doesn't look like crypto's going to break us out of the local maximum that is central banking/MMT
  - scottiebarnes 4y ago
    > the builders in the web3 community seem to have stagnated on this From my perspective, there is no "web3" community. The consequence of easy money is you get a lot of bad products that inevitably fail. This is not limited to crypto, this is the tech industry in general (social networking, big data, social commerce, location based social, etc.). Groupon, Google Wave, Foursquare, delivery service X, etc, they come and go. So I don't put much stock into the hype, there will always be fads and trends. > level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity Lightning capacity is up and to the right: this is people running nodes, risking their money on beta software. Nodes are up, channels are up. Will this be it? Who knows. I'm a patient person, laying a railway cross country takes time.
  - Comevius 4y ago
    This so much. Those are indeed massive pain points, but the solution to them turned out to be a lie.
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    > level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype Have you tried any recent ones? zkSync, Optimism, Aztec. Although they are still a work in progress; see EIP 4844 and zkEVM. Check back in a year or two if you want to avoid beta-testing and have something that meets the hype.
dogweather 4y ago
I've seen an aspect of this firsthand, working in crypto. There are now generations of college graduates with degrees / concrentrations in "blockchain" in one way or another. They nominally have computer science or software engineering degrees, but readily admit that they are bad programmers and don't like programming. So we have a growing cohort of people who are emotionally all-in on blockchain. They've planned and built their careers and reputations around it.

dietmtnview 4y ago

Americans fundamentally do not believe that the government can be used to make your life convenient. Average people believe technologies like the Internet and GPS were invented by private industry rather than government.

scottiebarnes 4y ago

Your mistake is thinking blockchains are a service. They aren't, they're protocols for building things on, like tcp/ip. It happens to be that a decentralized public ledger is the highest value use for it at the moment. What you're also missing out is on how the current monetary system and monetary base work, and why central banking is problematic. You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. The housing market is now impossible for average people to enter (especially in cities), as easy, low interest money has inflated home values and the house price to income ratio has gone steadily up and to the right. These are signals of broken money; this is what blockchains are looking to solve.

Centigonal 4y ago
> You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. The housing market is now impossible for average people to enter (especially in cities), as easy, low interest money has inflated home values and the house price to income ratio has gone steadily up and to the right. These are real pain points, and part of why I was very excited about crypto circa 2017-2018. It's been five years now, and the builders in the web3 community seem to have stagnated on this, taking a wide tangent into digital art, online clout, and ponzi schemes. The currencies themselves are limited on transaction throughput and trade like traditional risk assets, level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype, and we have come to find that decentralized, immutable currencies are problematic to work with in many situations. From my viewpoint, it doesn't look like crypto's going to break us out of the local maximum that is central banking/MMT
- scottiebarnes 4y ago
  > the builders in the web3 community seem to have stagnated on this From my perspective, there is no "web3" community. The consequence of easy money is you get a lot of bad products that inevitably fail. This is not limited to crypto, this is the tech industry in general (social networking, big data, social commerce, location based social, etc.). Groupon, Google Wave, Foursquare, delivery service X, etc, they come and go. So I don't put much stock into the hype, there will always be fads and trends. > level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity Lightning capacity is up and to the right: this is people running nodes, risking their money on beta software. Nodes are up, channels are up. Will this be it? Who knows. I'm a patient person, laying a railway cross country takes time.
- Comevius 4y ago
  This so much. Those are indeed massive pain points, but the solution to them turned out to be a lie.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  > level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype Have you tried any recent ones? zkSync, Optimism, Aztec. Although they are still a work in progress; see EIP 4844 and zkEVM. Check back in a year or two if you want to avoid beta-testing and have something that meets the hype.

dogweather 4y ago

I've seen an aspect of this firsthand, working in crypto. There are now generations of college graduates with degrees / concrentrations in "blockchain" in one way or another. They nominally have computer science or software engineering degrees, but readily admit that they are bad programmers and don't like programming. So we have a growing cohort of people who are emotionally all-in on blockchain. They've planned and built their careers and reputations around it.