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That’s cynical at best. One of the goals of Web3 is to enable direct commerce without trusted intermediaries. Anyone here like using PayPal? What if instead yo

That’s cynical at best. One of the goals of Web3 is to enable direct commerce without trusted intermediaries. Anyone here like using PayPal? What if instead you had the equivalent of cash that you could use on the internet? Web3 is attempting to create an economy decoupled from existing currencies (fiat). Unlike a country seigniorage determined ahead of time, and is publicly visible for all to see. If the idea of creating an internet native economy with its own currency and financial tools is not intellectually stimulating to you, then look elsewhere instead of completely hating on the space. Yes there are scams; no that is not why the tech was created.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> One of the goals of Web3 is to enable direct commerce without trusted intermediaries That's the sales pitch, but the implementations all require basically anonymous, unaccountable intermediaries that are trusted.
- linuxdude314 4y ago
  So let’s just stop trying all together then, since things haven’t worked out well so far. That is in effect what your statement is implying. I’ll preface this by stating: running financial experiments on retail investors is immoral and likely criminal. That being said, how many failures did Goddard have before his first successful liquid rocket? A lot! He was ridiculed in newspapers, touted as crazy, and seen as a failure by a broad community. If you’re interested, pay a visit to NASA’s Goddard Space and Flight center (named after the father of modern rocketry). Why should failures of the past (most of which were human folly or greed) inhibit us from innovating our way to the future?
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > So let’s just stop trying all together then, since things haven’t worked out well so far. Crypto isn’t actually trying; the intermediaries that need to be trusted are fundamental to the concept, despite the sales pitch. If you want to direct commerce without trusted intermediaries, just do that, it’s called barter and it works in certain circumstances. The “problem” crypto pretends to solve is that turning that in to monetary exchange that is, replacing at least one part of that direct exchange with a fungible token traded not for its own direct utility but instead optimized for use in exchange with third parties for other goods and services, makes it suddenly rely on trusting external actors and social systems, but that isn’t a solvable problem, it is unalterably inherent in the very concept of monetary exchange. All any system can do is obscure that, reducing the probability that the trust extended is warranted.
m00dy 4y ago
dude, HN is not the place to be a blockchain pro.
lottin 4y ago
Can you explain what you mean by direct commerce without intermediaries? Do you consider the retailer an intermediary? The shipping company?

dragonwriter 4y ago

> One of the goals of Web3 is to enable direct commerce without trusted intermediaries That's the sales pitch, but the implementations all require basically anonymous, unaccountable intermediaries that are trusted.

linuxdude314 4y ago
So let’s just stop trying all together then, since things haven’t worked out well so far. That is in effect what your statement is implying. I’ll preface this by stating: running financial experiments on retail investors is immoral and likely criminal. That being said, how many failures did Goddard have before his first successful liquid rocket? A lot! He was ridiculed in newspapers, touted as crazy, and seen as a failure by a broad community. If you’re interested, pay a visit to NASA’s Goddard Space and Flight center (named after the father of modern rocketry). Why should failures of the past (most of which were human folly or greed) inhibit us from innovating our way to the future?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > So let’s just stop trying all together then, since things haven’t worked out well so far. Crypto isn’t actually trying; the intermediaries that need to be trusted are fundamental to the concept, despite the sales pitch. If you want to direct commerce without trusted intermediaries, just do that, it’s called barter and it works in certain circumstances. The “problem” crypto pretends to solve is that turning that in to monetary exchange that is, replacing at least one part of that direct exchange with a fungible token traded not for its own direct utility but instead optimized for use in exchange with third parties for other goods and services, makes it suddenly rely on trusting external actors and social systems, but that isn’t a solvable problem, it is unalterably inherent in the very concept of monetary exchange. All any system can do is obscure that, reducing the probability that the trust extended is warranted.

m00dy 4y ago

dude, HN is not the place to be a blockchain pro.

lottin 4y ago

Can you explain what you mean by direct commerce without intermediaries? Do you consider the retailer an intermediary? The shipping company?