15 ms·

In 2022, Web3 went just great

254 points by rpgbr 4y ago

nelson2k 4y ago
Bullshit!
LeeroyWasHere 4y ago
Are we going to pretend there's any industry that isn't filled with scams? L
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Other industries are also filled with things that aren't scams.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    You laugh now but when these JPEGs increase in value for some reason I'll be rich and you'll wish you were me! Buy my JPEGs now before they explode in price! /s
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  So should they remove protections in other industries because there's still going to be scams, or should they regulate to close those gaps?
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
I would estimate 95% of those are inside jobs. Very very very few people have the ability and wherewithal to hack a smart contract or bridge, they are extremely convoluted, ugly and difficult to understand.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  There have to be North Korean hackers whose full time job it is to study these contracts.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  "Convoluted, ugly, and difficult to understand" is for crackers like throwing Brer Rabbit into the Brer patch.
  - meindnoch 4y ago
    *briar patch https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/briar-patch https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/briar-patch
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      This says it is Br'er https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%27er_Rabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%27er_Rabbit
      - rsstack 4y ago
        Br'er / Brother is the name of the rabbit, who is thrown into the briar patch.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    I believe the idiom you’re looking for here when trying to warn them is “singing Ol’ Dan Tucker to a hurricane”
- klntsky 4y ago
  The code is open source at least part of the time, and the attack vectors are well studied now (at least for EVM-based chains).
- bluesign 4y ago
  Don’t forget, also very few of those people want to be blackhat.
  - w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
    I read once blackhat and whitehat are just buzz words and most of real hackers (not script kiddies or pentesters) are more like greyhats. That being said, I uncovered once a security hole (in reality it should be called an open door) in the admin password of the now disappeared bbox2, the official router for the belgian company called Proximus. How did I discovered it ? I wanted to watch ip addresses going through the router because I knew the owner of the box was up to something about me... But almost immediatelly I discovered the admin password field was like an 'universal lock', meaning any key could open it... in other word word, any string entered in the password field allowed to access admin pages of the box. After a few google searches, I discovered the software (the OS) was the last version, dating a few years back, and the box producer didn't pushed anymore update, not even security update. (Look at synology NAS scandal where Synology dropped software update for one of its older hardware to have an idea of the kind of thing it means for hardware facing internet access). I immediatly reported the security hole to the federal cybersecurity unit, and after that, kept my mouth shut because there wasn't any way to fix this security issue except replacing the hardware itself. At that time, between 1/6 to 1/4 of routers in belgium were bbox2. I never heard anything from the federal cybersecurity unit (except a mere thank you by mail) or Proximus, but 1 year and a half later, bbox2 where nowhere to be found anymore in belgium. The only thing I have left from that is the mail I sent to the cybersecurity unit with screenshots of the bbox2 admin pages. Why did I report it and shut my mouth without taking credentials for it (that's the kind of things which can launch a career in security field) ? Because it's one thing to try to snoop on an accointance browsing activity, it's another to let a security hole of this magnitude in the open, and a far worse thing to disclose it to the public while there is no fix for it. And that's another level to sell it on dark market or to the chinese or russian ambassy (I'm not in the hacking business but I'm pretty sure they would have dropped a big pile of cash for that). Just to say, Bruxelles is also home of numerous european institutions... Maybe that's why the european parlement voted for mandotary code review for everything facing the internet in EU ?
- ethanbond 4y ago
  What? This is exactly the type of thing that you'd have highly motivated, highly competent attackers target. It's directly attached to money; it's technically convoluted, ugly, and difficult to understand also for the people programming them; once you steal it, it's yours; the source code is right there; the people who wrote the code are usually available to talk to/inspect their other code; it's not even exactly clear that this is theft per se and there's no jurisdiction that's really going to chase you down for it; so on and so on and so on. I'm not sure you could create a more compelling target if you tried.
londons_explore 4y ago
And how much of that money is 'double counted' - ie. the exact same dollars are stolen twice in the year? The same money can even be stolen multiple times in the same hack, if it is deposited with some exchange, who then loans it out to someone who desposists it with the exchange again. If the exchange is hacked, it's the same original dollar being double-stolen. There are rumours that some money on exchanges might be being counted hundreds or thousands of times...
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  And how much of it has actually been realized as dollars?
colesantiago 4y ago
I urge lawmakers to completely regulate this so called 'crypto industry' before this number goes to $14B or higher in 2023. Crypto, NFTs, Blockchain and the rest of this nonsense should never have existed in the first place. And yet we enter another year where there is still no legitimate usecase for all of this whatsoever.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Or we could spend less money on an ad campaign to explain what crypto actually is, and what it's good use cases are, and what it's not good for. Rather than, you know, binding it up in vague and obnoxious legalese.
  - sumeno 4y ago
    An ad campaign for buying drugs and avoiding sanctions isn't going to go over very well
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      RT might take you up on it.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
    The "not good for" list is "practically everything." The "good use cases" effectively don't exist. Every crypto solution falls into one or more of these buckets... - Has substantial centralized elements, could be done vastly more efficiently with a DB - "Decentralized" but still requires some central authority to provide critical features (particularly any form of conflict resolution) - Depends on one or more smart contracts to effectively be perfect code with no bugs or unintended behaviors - Primarily used for illicit goods and services I'd prefer my tax dollars to not be spend advertising negligible positives. Now an ad campaign focused on crypto's problems? That I could get behind, would have far less peripheral damage potential.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
Eisenstein 4y ago
I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going to really hurt themselves and that the 2 feet of shallow water is not deep enough to buffer the fall, and them telling me I just don't understand and they use a new measuring system and the pool depth is in feet which is a made up measurement too so their measurement is just as valid and they can make it any depth they want to because they believe it and everyone else around does too. Then they jump feet first and break their legs. A friend behind them says it is their own fault for going in feet first and dives head first and breaks his neck. Another friend says 'bad luck, but you know how many people break their neck walking to swimming pools measured in feet?' and jumps sideways and breaks his collarbone. At that point 'welp, I tried'.
- _8j50 4y ago
  You can say the same about options traders who got wiped during the tech stock decimation last year or plain old gamblers. Ultimately they are making a prediction and many have gotten rich over crypto but just like stocks you buy in a downturn like now not when it is all hyped up. Even a dollar would have lost use ~20% loss over the past few years just sitting in a bank. The best place to store wealth is in assets not currency. People who stored their wealth in crypto are as silly as people who put savings in a bank except with more volatility like this. Crypto isn't a fad that has gone away, there is still demand for it except now all the exchange crashes will introduce regulation that will make it a safer bet than before. Trial by fire and all I guess. You shouldn't bet or risk money either in stocks or crypto that you aren't prepared to lose. That's like the first-ish rule of investment isn't it?
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    And retail traders should not trade options. It is a terribly stupid thing to do and is almost guaranteed to lose them money. If a sophisticated financial actor wants to trade in options or crypto, then I don't think it is terribly productive but that is their business. There are also people who fly airplanes and cliff dive, but if my acquaintance Joe the whitecollar sales associate who lives two houses down from me starts telling me he is going to go solo flying or cliff diving for the first time with no experience, I will warn him off it in no uncertain terms. As well, if he is talking about how much he is making on the side doing options trading, do you think I wouldn't tell him that it is a bad idea and he is going to end up most likely losing a great deal of money? People who make these comparisons like you have are acting as if crypto is being marketed to wall street and not people like Joe.
AndrewStephens 4y ago
I would love to know how much of that is real money, as in actually dollars. So much of the cryptocurrency world is based on terribly inflated prices and it has always been unclear to me how much money was actually put in by real people who aren't just self-dealing and wash trading. I am sure the answer is in the billions but I'll bet that it is much lower than some people would have you believe. Luckily crypto is still fairly well firewalled from the economy at large.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Where do you draw the line? For the clown that paid $2.9 million for the first tweet, do you care if it was 300,000 that he invested into bitcoin and cashed for the 2.9 million? If it bubble money too, does it "count"?
  - coldpie 4y ago
    > For the clown that paid $2.9 million for the first tweet He didn't pay for the first tweet, he paid for someone to create a hash of the URL of the first tweet. The distinction matters: the NFT scam works by tricking people into thinking they own the thing, instead of just a copy of a pointer someone made to the thing, which is what they actually "own."
    - TimJRobinson 4y ago
      "He didn't pay for that Picasso, he just paid for some canvas and paint!" 99.9% of people don't care about the technicalities of how NFT's work, they buy them because they are valuable to them and everyone else believes they are valuable. Every single digital item anyone has ever bought, from Ebooks, to in-game items, to movies, is just a pointer to some bytes on a disk.
      - Eisenstein 4y ago
        But none of the things you mention besides NFTs are considered investments.
rvz 4y ago
That's it? I was expecting hundreds of billions; quite far significantly smaller than expected out of the $13+ trillions in transaction volume in crypto [0]. Nothing but a microscopic amount, when compared to the tens of trillions of illicit funds being processed by banks in dollars and left unchecked. [1] [2] Looks like this newsletter is another plain old side grift by Molly with the rest of the high profile extreme skeptics who are just as bad as the maximalists selling 'quality' rushed books riddled with typos and spelling errors pointed out by readers and crypto bros on Twitter [3] [4] [5]. Oh dear. [0] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-report-introduction/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor... [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-files-financial-scandal-criminal-networks https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-fil... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-suspicious-activity-reports-buzzfeed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-sus... [3] https://twitter.com/AlgoArcade/status/1554662257790943232 https://twitter.com/AlgoArcade/status/1554662257790943232 [4] https://twitter.com/NeddyPott/status/1547413083034947585 https://twitter.com/NeddyPott/status/1547413083034947585 [5] https://twitter.com/Gazoche1/status/1555757395259031552 https://twitter.com/Gazoche1/status/1555757395259031552
- scifibestfi 4y ago
  "A huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins." Wow. This is the first I've heard of that, but I've heard of crypto shenanigans endlessly. It's a distraction in comparison.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Probably because e.g. SWIFT, a small portion of the traditional western financial system, moves $5 trillion per day. But also yeah, the crypto stuff is a distraction. Think of how much media, regulatory, financial, and technical mindshare has been consumed by this (as of now) hobbyist technology. It's pretty obscene.
  - 4y ago
timdaub 4y ago
Considering the amount of damage that the international central banking cartel has done through excessive quantitative easing over the last decade and unreasonable money printing during the global pandemic, the recent inflation numbers and the absolute amount of ordinary people's money it de-valuated out of existence, $4.27B seems like no big deal at all. Also: funding wars.
simplify 4y ago
I'd be curious to see the source on those numbers and how they're broken down. For example, Terra/Luna was a spectacular crypto failure. FTX, on the other hand, was just plain old fraud, not really related to crypto itself.
- NeutralForest 4y ago
  The (lack of) infrastructure around crypto made the FTX fraud possible.
- agdasdigonio 4y ago
  >FTX, on the other hand, was just plain old fraud, not really related to crypto itself. The fact that it's not related should tell you something. Cryptocurrency is designed to solve exactly the problems FTX had. It is designed to enable trustless finance. Why didn't cryptocurrency prevent that problem? Because FTX wasn't using cryptocurrency, because cryptocurrency is unworkable.
  - simplify 4y ago
    A proper use of cryptocurrency could have prevented the problem, but FTX and users mutually agreed to give FTX more trust by giving FTX custody of user funds. That's really all it was. Not very interesting.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      Ah, the good old “communism would work perfectly but the Soviet Union was doing it all wrong” style argument. Blind faith in an economic theory against all empirical evidence is a dead end.
      - simplify 4y ago
        Blind faith how so? I merely stated a technical fact. Blockchain is programmable money; they could have programmed a system such that FTX could not run away with user funds – there are defi systems that do this already. But they didn't. Instead, FTX used crypto as a means to transfer funds into their own, centralized custody. Not much different from a bank wire. This isn't a "communism would work perfectly" style argument at all. I'm really not sure of what you're getting at, or if you understand how crypto works beyond surface level articles.
ojr 4y ago
web2 scams are not web3, web3 involves bitcoin which current price is respectable the boom bust cycly in 20-21 was heavily macro related. Web3 also involves ipfs, you can search for any book currently and the data lives on the blockchain. If you don't see the benefits by now, it is whatever, blockchain is just a data structure, some people will never be convinced, postgres and procedural statements is all they want. The same people who will argue vehemently against NoSQL, is not the people who should be writing web3 is trash articles.
- bccdee 4y ago
  Hey, don't slander ipfs like this. It's is a perfectly good technology and it is not based on blockchain. Also, bold of you to bring up NoSQL seeing as how the sun has kind of set on that whole era. The new databases I'm seeing these days are all relational. Turns out Postgres was all we really needed.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > Web3 also involves ipfs, you can search for any book currently and the data lives on the blockchain. AFAICT the limiting factors for something like libgen are harddisk space and the speed of one's internet connection. If those aren't a factor then one could go grab the entire thing with no friction whatsoever. Blockchain does not help the user with either of those limiting factors. Further-- while I don't understand the economics/incentives of private trackers like what.cd or redacted, it appears that they've addressed the availability problem wrt rare files. I.e., bittorrent does a great job replicating the most popular files, and a poor job replicating the least popular ones. But on these trackers the user can select any file from the index and essentially be guaranteed fastest possible download time from any nodes that have the file. AFAICT blockchain is not used in any way, shape, or form in this scheme. Blockchain is indirectly used by sci-hub for receiving Bitcoin donations. That's not nothing, but it's also not new. Finally-- in the entire time that sci-hub has existed, has any innovation in blockchain made a significant, positive difference in sci-hub's ability to do their work? If so, I'd love to read about it. If not, it appears they only use it because literally every other donation method is unavailable to them. From reading pro-blockchain comments on HN for awhile, it appears that blockchain is a technology that slurps up attention and refocuses it on how to make blockchain a better blockchain, so that more blockchain devs can get involved in blockchain. It would be like if 99% of emacs developers hacked on emacs to the exclusion of literally any other project, forever. But the improvements they were making to emacs somehow only ever increased productivity for other emacs developers who work only on emacs, and no one else. That emacs in reality is less insular than blockchain should really snap you back into reality on web3.
timdaub 4y ago
posters in this thread believe that there are obviously really bad people using and working with crypto currencies. these same posters, however, don't have an inch of skepticism that there could be equally bad people sitting in powerful western financial institutions.
- ranger207 4y ago
  posters in this thread also believe that there are bad people in western financial institutions but that 1) the laws and regulations in place ensure that the system is at least usable by normal people to do useful work, as evidenced by the bajillions of dollars of money made by selling products and services that are not stolen from their bank accounts; and 2) that western financial institutions will not in general repeat the same mistakes as they committed in the past that resulted in things like the Great Depression, and in particular will not last long enough to collect billions of dollars based entirely on hype and become a critical cornerstone of the entire market, as certain centralized exchanges this past year had
  - timdaub 4y ago
    we'll see how this "don't repeat prior mistakes' thing will play out with maxed out inflation, raging corruption in western democracies, moral wars in Ukraine, rising distrust in media and a laissez-faire approach to white collar crime after the financial crisis in 2008.
    - spamizbad 4y ago
      Crypto solves none of those problems because those are social and political problems. You can not free your self from oppression by changing the brand on the boot.
    - sharkbot 4y ago
      I won’t comment about your other topics, but I’ll point out that current inflation is far from “maxed out”, at least in mature Western democracies with their own central bank and currency. ~9% is high historically, but inflation has run hotter in the not-so-distant past. 2% inflation is not a natural state of affairs, it’s a target that’s considered the “appropriate” amount of inflation.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
"The collector who dropped $2.9 million on an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet found himself in a bind in April, when he tried to resell the NFT and wound up with a top bid of… $280." Hahaha, wow. You couldn't even take a 2.899 million dollar write off loss on your taxes too! Just straight vaporizing nearly 3 million bucks.
- jacquesc 4y ago
  I always figured buying that NFT was sort of a way to just donate to one of Jack's charities. I hope the buyer wasn't trying to make a long term investment with it.
- recursive 4y ago
  Honest question: why not? I don't really understand the nuance of taxes. I just use a tax app and answer the questions.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    In the US, capital losses can offset capital gains to arbitrarily large numbers, but only $3,000 of capital losses can offset ordinary income. So if you lose $3M in one year and happen to have $3M in other capital gains then hooray - they offset and you pay no taxes on them. But if you lose $3M in one year and made $300k in income, you are still paying income tax on everything minus $3,000. You get to keep carrying it over so you can apply $3,000 every year - but if you've got losses in the millions they'll never be exhausted in this manner.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      But if all of your losses are in crypto coins and not USD it's moot and you can't claim a loss on anything. Not until you convert to cash, and even then I'm not entirely sure it's clear cut.
- TedShiller 4y ago
  The most shocking part for me was that someone was willing to pay $280
onebot 4y ago
The problem I have with articles like these is that my definition of Web3 is quite a bit different. I tend to lump "crypto" more with NFTs, wild speculation, scams, heavily VC backed "decentralized" tokens, etc. But on the other hand, I want social networks not owned by businesses, I want other major utilities also not owned by major companies (I think gmail is used for 8bn addresses). I think the fediverse is nice start, but still not decentralized enough (a single mastadon server admin can kill it anytime they want or change the rules). In my opinion the definition of web3 is: "Web3 represents a fundamental evolution of the internet built upon blockchain architectures. Moving from centralized control and capitalization to a decentralized network where the capital is distributed between the operators and consumers." I feel like the definition of Web3 is hijacked by pundits. Probably because it has become yet another buzzword and being so tightly associated with Crypto maybe has it tainted forever?
- rpgbr 4y ago
  Web3 is an attempt to paint scammy technologies (crypto assets) as something useful (decentralized tech). The truth is: you don't need crypto stuff to have a decentralized internet, as ActivityPub is handsomely showing and, let's be real here, the web itself is showing for the last decades. I'm still to see a Web3 business that doesn't smell, looks, and behaves like it's a grift.
- rcoder 4y ago
  What you're describing sounds like the (now unfashionably old and un-hyped as a category) `dWeb` ecosystem. As far as I've seen, 'web3' has meant "websites that use crypto wallets for login and store data in a blockchain and/or IPFS." The difference between the two isn't necessarily technical; rather it's the requirement that you "join the crypto economy" and start buying up whatever shitcoin -- or CDS-style derivative of multiple coins -- is being used for that one website...and somehow that means "SSO is easy now!" and "anyone can make micropayments anywhere!" etc., etc. The latter only makes sense in a world of free money from VCs that lets people spend tens of millions of dollars building a *login form* that they charge other websites to use. Their business model seemingly ignores the fact that no serious enterprise[^1] is going to run their internal authN/Z and IdM on a global blockchain. [^1]: actually, I'm sure several companies have/will tried this, and equally certain the net result was a flaky service that was effectively just querying a Postgres table that cached the on-chain identity for a user and checking their presented token against that. I.e., yet another Postgres instance masquerading as "web3 infrastructure".
dayvid 4y ago
I'm kinda happy with the way things turned out. For a moment, my understanding of reality was upside down with how many mediocre and clearly pointless projects were generating so much money. With every crypto hype cycle, I actually go through the motions and create a smart contract project and become completely disillusioned with the hype. I thought ERC20 tokens were bullshit when I realized it's just updating keys in a hashtable. I worked in Solana and was surprised to find out that a developer can update a program at will. No one is really talking about this and this seems like a disastrously shaky foundation to put your money in, along with programs being difficult to audit. There are some NFTs by amazing artists which no one cares about. The ones with the most popularity are modern-day clip art pieces, with copy-paste scripts and marketing strategies. I think web3/crypto will have mass adoption, but when it does, it will be much more boring and seamless with what we have today, with large companies managing blockchains and governments issuing their own coins.
- stemlord 4y ago
  >There are some NFTs by amazing artists which no one cares about. The ones with the most popularity are modern-day clip art pieces, with copy-paste scripts and marketing strategies. I've only witnessed almost every amazing digital artist on my twitter feed quickly devolve into an obnoxious NFT shill and drastically reduce the quality of their practice to maximize their output. I'm glad they are finding ways to some meager financial gains but the ideological mystique around their practice was shattered in the process
- LouisSayers 4y ago
  > and governments issuing their own coins. ... in which case they could just create a standard centralised system and avoid all the overhead of blockchain - or am I missing something here? I don't see the point in mining coins when you could simply run a for loop generating uuids followed by perhaps signing transactions with public key cryptography. I feel like we'll look back at "web3" as a wild west of cryptomania. Perhaps we all need to start thinking along the lines of "Generation GPT" - this seems to be the next evolution of the Web if you ask me.
- JeremyNT 4y ago
Gonzalez07 4y ago
[dead]
pornel 4y ago
> Topping the charts is the March 29 hack of the bridge used by the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity — a hack that saw $625 million taken and funneled to the North Korean Lazarus cybercrime group. If it was a movie, I'd think the plot is just too stupid: a dictatorship funded their nuclear missile program by hacking an angry-birds-styled JRPG game. An yet here were are. This demonstrates that playing with cryptocurrencies is dangerous, even seemingly benign or useless applications.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  It does sound similar (and less sophisticated) to a real book plot : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State (2007)
aww_dang 4y ago
Here's an inflammatory post from an inflammatory domain on the inflammatory topic of cryptocurrency. I wonder what kind of discussion will follow?
- voz_ 4y ago
  Its not inflammatory, its a true and honest recap of a massive technological space that is entirely built on lies and scams.
  - aww_dang 4y ago
    Surely there's more to it than that. Promoting intellectual curiosity indeed. The entire thread is a celebration of toxicity. A narrow view resulting in the widest possible generalization.
abetusk 4y ago
I would like to remind people, yet again, that things like "fuckedcompany.com" existed [0] and there was also a lot of hate for dot-com era startups during the late 1990s to 2000s. From the article: """ $4.27 billion was stolen in various hacks and scams this year alone, although that is a very conservative estimate ... """ One source claims $5 trillion lost during the dot-com crash as of 2002 [1]. I believe being critical of new technology and holding scammers accountable is great but I want more critical analysis of what's going on, not just a snarky middle finger against cryptocurrency and it's surrounding technology. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company [1] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/equities/dotcom-bubble/ https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/equities/dot...
- voz_ 4y ago
  If your point is that oft-cited-never-correct "this is early days / this is like the early dot com era" notion - I want to dispel that myth for you. There has been no real value, product, or worth created here. With the rise of public internet spaces in the 1990s, online shopping, web search, and more - the value was immediate and apparent. Of course there were bad ideas, scams, etc, but the major difference between that and crypto is that Web3 crypto is 100% bull. There is no value here. I have yet to see a single worthwhile crypto product out there, anywhere. Do you know why? Because the decentralization it offers is a mix of a myth and meaningless - in cases where you can get it, you don't need it. Everywhere else, its actually just a different centralization. Oh and the protocol is just giant inefficient linked list, poorly distributed.
  - abetusk 4y ago
    People forget how hyped the internet was circa 1996-2000. During the early days, one of the most popular sites was a web cam pointed at a coffee mug [0] and a webcam pointed at a "lifecaster" showing her everyday life [1]. Email was confusing and misunderstood [2]. Startups were laughed at when they said you would buy pet food online [3] or pay your parking tickets online [4]. Both are so commonplace now as to barely be worth mentioning. You absolutely could be right. Maybe cryptocurrency and the surrounding technology is a fad or hype without any substance but you're making an assumption that the rollout of cryptocurrency adoption should follow the same schedule as dot.com startups. For a point of reference, Linux was created circa 1991 [5] with the GNU project started in 1983, giving about a decade or two, depending on where you start, from "widespread" Linux/FOSS adoption. You're stating that "there has been no real value, produce, or worth created here" bluntly without really backing it up. There are plenty of products and use cases, just none that you would consider valid. People use cryptocurrency to purchase goods and services, just not the ones you might find valid. People use cryptocurrency to support organizations they favor, just not organizations you might favor. People are using cryptocurrency to explore different social media models, just not models you would find valid. My plea is in line with the HN terms of service. Please have curious conversation. Molly White has valid things to say and, as far as I can tell, does research the claims she makes. I don't like the tenor so I feel like I need to push back here and elsewhere to put things in context. Your casual, snarky, dismissiveness doesn't add a lot to the conversation. Would it add anything to the conversation if I said "XML is a poorly designed LaTeX, improperly implemented"? Or "Javascript is a poor attempt at a Lisp implementation"? "Twitter is public text messaging, just done poorly"? The reductions gloss over the complexities of the ecosystem and utility. It should be a red flag that there may be something you don't understand if you're so quick to cite idiocy. To your points: Decentralization means different things to different people. In the context of Bitcoin, or many other cryptocurrencies, it means that anyone can participate given the resources, without the need to apply for credentials. Miners can join and participate in the network by standing up hardware. Contrast this with starting a business, pushing an app on the apple store, publishing a game on steam, etc. Note that this is how the internet was also designed. Anyone wanting to participate in the network ostensibly could. I think to dismiss Bitcoin as an "inefficient linked list, poorly distributed" is to dismiss a lot of good ideas and research ideas. Bitcoin may have some flaws, maybe critically so, but it sits at the middle of theoretical computer science, economics and finance in a novel way that responds to a lot of shortcomings of attempts before it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com#Legacy [4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/?ref_=ttls_li_tt https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/?ref_=ttls_li_tt [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#History
jrmg 4y ago
“Right now, apes are going for a mere $80,000 on the low end“ This is wild to me. It’s like an entire industry driven by sunk cost fallacy.
gigatexal 4y ago
This website should be called crypto schadenfruede -- it's been hilarious and I love reading it.
abalashov 4y ago
There's a point of view out there that crypto has been beneficial in that it has somewhat de-risked finance, by taking a good chunk of the speculative / get-rich-quick / frat bro transactions out of real money and giving those types imaginary money to play with instead. Seems mostly plausible to me, though of course a bit simplistic, and occasionally wrong, when more traditional institutions and funds pile in and their losses create more systemic issues. Thankfully, they seem to be mostly over crypto for a while now--at least, that's my read?
bitcoin_anon 4y ago
When sentiment is low, I remind myself that for the price to remain where its been for the past three months or so, people have been purchasing the 900 Bitcoins mined a day, paying $16,000 each, or $14 million a day. This is the best use for these dollars that these people can come up with: swapping them for digital property, a slice of 21 million. Thankfully (for us all), it seems that this story is not over! Our ancestors will look back on this absurd period of soft money and wonder what we were thinking entrusting something as critical as money, the lifeblood of civilization, to politicians. May it be brief!
Vanit 4y ago
Molly, you keep an amazing website that's brought me much joy over the last year; keep it up!
bArray 4y ago
If they think that is bad, wait to see what 2023 brings. When the recession fully hits (and it will), a significant number of smaller FOMO investors will look to withdraw in favour of traditional liquid to cover basic bills (rent, utilities, food, travel, etc). The slow bleed of big crypto names since the peak a few years ago will not attract large new investors and there is nothing currently that indicates it is a good hedge against inflation (see BTC.X over SPX for example). Once the larger crypto assets lose value, the liquid (crypto) the stable coins hold in cold wallets will of course devalue. The only liquid they hold of value will be traditional hard to liquidate assets, which will simple be used to pay off the big players in the bankruptcy. Expect this entire thing to collapse pretty quickly when it gets going. We are yet to see real contagion in this space. A lot of people will be left holding worthless coins like every crypto coin bankruptcy so far. That said, traditional money is no good to you either. Thanks to fractional reserve banking [1] no currency actually has any value any more. It's difficult to suggest where to suggest to invest, but I don't want to get caught holding monopoly money once the game ends [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [2] https://coffeespace.org.uk/blogs/crypto-monopoly.html https://coffeespace.org.uk/blogs/crypto-monopoly.html
gatkinso 4y ago
people like to forget that this exact same thing happened in 2017/18 and will probably happen again in a year or 2.

254 points by rpgbr 4y ago

nelson2k 4y ago

Bullshit!

LeeroyWasHere 4y ago

Are we going to pretend there's any industry that isn't filled with scams? L

PaulHoule 4y ago
Other industries are also filled with things that aren't scams.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  You laugh now but when these JPEGs increase in value for some reason I'll be rich and you'll wish you were me! Buy my JPEGs now before they explode in price! /s
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
So should they remove protections in other industries because there's still going to be scams, or should they regulate to close those gaps?

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

I would estimate 95% of those are inside jobs. Very very very few people have the ability and wherewithal to hack a smart contract or bridge, they are extremely convoluted, ugly and difficult to understand.

cactusplant7374 4y ago
There have to be North Korean hackers whose full time job it is to study these contracts.
PaulHoule 4y ago
"Convoluted, ugly, and difficult to understand" is for crackers like throwing Brer Rabbit into the Brer patch.
- meindnoch 4y ago
  *briar patch https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/briar-patch https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/briar-patch
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    This says it is Br'er https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%27er_Rabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%27er_Rabbit
    - rsstack 4y ago
      Br'er / Brother is the name of the rabbit, who is thrown into the briar patch.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  I believe the idiom you’re looking for here when trying to warn them is “singing Ol’ Dan Tucker to a hurricane”
klntsky 4y ago
The code is open source at least part of the time, and the attack vectors are well studied now (at least for EVM-based chains).
bluesign 4y ago
Don’t forget, also very few of those people want to be blackhat.
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
  I read once blackhat and whitehat are just buzz words and most of real hackers (not script kiddies or pentesters) are more like greyhats. That being said, I uncovered once a security hole (in reality it should be called an open door) in the admin password of the now disappeared bbox2, the official router for the belgian company called Proximus. How did I discovered it ? I wanted to watch ip addresses going through the router because I knew the owner of the box was up to something about me... But almost immediatelly I discovered the admin password field was like an 'universal lock', meaning any key could open it... in other word word, any string entered in the password field allowed to access admin pages of the box. After a few google searches, I discovered the software (the OS) was the last version, dating a few years back, and the box producer didn't pushed anymore update, not even security update. (Look at synology NAS scandal where Synology dropped software update for one of its older hardware to have an idea of the kind of thing it means for hardware facing internet access). I immediatly reported the security hole to the federal cybersecurity unit, and after that, kept my mouth shut because there wasn't any way to fix this security issue except replacing the hardware itself. At that time, between 1/6 to 1/4 of routers in belgium were bbox2. I never heard anything from the federal cybersecurity unit (except a mere thank you by mail) or Proximus, but 1 year and a half later, bbox2 where nowhere to be found anymore in belgium. The only thing I have left from that is the mail I sent to the cybersecurity unit with screenshots of the bbox2 admin pages. Why did I report it and shut my mouth without taking credentials for it (that's the kind of things which can launch a career in security field) ? Because it's one thing to try to snoop on an accointance browsing activity, it's another to let a security hole of this magnitude in the open, and a far worse thing to disclose it to the public while there is no fix for it. And that's another level to sell it on dark market or to the chinese or russian ambassy (I'm not in the hacking business but I'm pretty sure they would have dropped a big pile of cash for that). Just to say, Bruxelles is also home of numerous european institutions... Maybe that's why the european parlement voted for mandotary code review for everything facing the internet in EU ?
ethanbond 4y ago
What? This is exactly the type of thing that you'd have highly motivated, highly competent attackers target. It's directly attached to money; it's technically convoluted, ugly, and difficult to understand also for the people programming them; once you steal it, it's yours; the source code is right there; the people who wrote the code are usually available to talk to/inspect their other code; it's not even exactly clear that this is theft per se and there's no jurisdiction that's really going to chase you down for it; so on and so on and so on. I'm not sure you could create a more compelling target if you tried.

londons_explore 4y ago

And how much of that money is 'double counted' - ie. the exact same dollars are stolen twice in the year? The same money can even be stolen multiple times in the same hack, if it is deposited with some exchange, who then loans it out to someone who desposists it with the exchange again. If the exchange is hacked, it's the same original dollar being double-stolen. There are rumours that some money on exchanges might be being counted hundreds or thousands of times...

Waterluvian 4y ago
And how much of it has actually been realized as dollars?

colesantiago 4y ago

I urge lawmakers to completely regulate this so called 'crypto industry' before this number goes to $14B or higher in 2023. Crypto, NFTs, Blockchain and the rest of this nonsense should never have existed in the first place. And yet we enter another year where there is still no legitimate usecase for all of this whatsoever.

seanw444 4y ago
Or we could spend less money on an ad campaign to explain what crypto actually is, and what it's good use cases are, and what it's not good for. Rather than, you know, binding it up in vague and obnoxious legalese.
- sumeno 4y ago
  An ad campaign for buying drugs and avoiding sanctions isn't going to go over very well
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    RT might take you up on it.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
  The "not good for" list is "practically everything." The "good use cases" effectively don't exist. Every crypto solution falls into one or more of these buckets... - Has substantial centralized elements, could be done vastly more efficiently with a DB - "Decentralized" but still requires some central authority to provide critical features (particularly any form of conflict resolution) - Depends on one or more smart contracts to effectively be perfect code with no bugs or unintended behaviors - Primarily used for illicit goods and services I'd prefer my tax dollars to not be spend advertising negligible positives. Now an ad campaign focused on crypto's problems? That I could get behind, would have far less peripheral damage potential.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago

Eisenstein 4y ago

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going to really hurt themselves and that the 2 feet of shallow water is not deep enough to buffer the fall, and them telling me I just don't understand and they use a new measuring system and the pool depth is in feet which is a made up measurement too so their measurement is just as valid and they can make it any depth they want to because they believe it and everyone else around does too. Then they jump feet first and break their legs. A friend behind them says it is their own fault for going in feet first and dives head first and breaks his neck. Another friend says 'bad luck, but you know how many people break their neck walking to swimming pools measured in feet?' and jumps sideways and breaks his collarbone. At that point 'welp, I tried'.

_8j50 4y ago
You can say the same about options traders who got wiped during the tech stock decimation last year or plain old gamblers. Ultimately they are making a prediction and many have gotten rich over crypto but just like stocks you buy in a downturn like now not when it is all hyped up. Even a dollar would have lost use ~20% loss over the past few years just sitting in a bank. The best place to store wealth is in assets not currency. People who stored their wealth in crypto are as silly as people who put savings in a bank except with more volatility like this. Crypto isn't a fad that has gone away, there is still demand for it except now all the exchange crashes will introduce regulation that will make it a safer bet than before. Trial by fire and all I guess. You shouldn't bet or risk money either in stocks or crypto that you aren't prepared to lose. That's like the first-ish rule of investment isn't it?
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  And retail traders should not trade options. It is a terribly stupid thing to do and is almost guaranteed to lose them money. If a sophisticated financial actor wants to trade in options or crypto, then I don't think it is terribly productive but that is their business. There are also people who fly airplanes and cliff dive, but if my acquaintance Joe the whitecollar sales associate who lives two houses down from me starts telling me he is going to go solo flying or cliff diving for the first time with no experience, I will warn him off it in no uncertain terms. As well, if he is talking about how much he is making on the side doing options trading, do you think I wouldn't tell him that it is a bad idea and he is going to end up most likely losing a great deal of money? People who make these comparisons like you have are acting as if crypto is being marketed to wall street and not people like Joe.

AndrewStephens 4y ago

I would love to know how much of that is real money, as in actually dollars. So much of the cryptocurrency world is based on terribly inflated prices and it has always been unclear to me how much money was actually put in by real people who aren't just self-dealing and wash trading. I am sure the answer is in the billions but I'll bet that it is much lower than some people would have you believe. Luckily crypto is still fairly well firewalled from the economy at large.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
Where do you draw the line? For the clown that paid $2.9 million for the first tweet, do you care if it was 300,000 that he invested into bitcoin and cashed for the 2.9 million? If it bubble money too, does it "count"?
- coldpie 4y ago
  > For the clown that paid $2.9 million for the first tweet He didn't pay for the first tweet, he paid for someone to create a hash of the URL of the first tweet. The distinction matters: the NFT scam works by tricking people into thinking they own the thing, instead of just a copy of a pointer someone made to the thing, which is what they actually "own."
  - TimJRobinson 4y ago
    "He didn't pay for that Picasso, he just paid for some canvas and paint!" 99.9% of people don't care about the technicalities of how NFT's work, they buy them because they are valuable to them and everyone else believes they are valuable. Every single digital item anyone has ever bought, from Ebooks, to in-game items, to movies, is just a pointer to some bytes on a disk.
    - Eisenstein 4y ago
      But none of the things you mention besides NFTs are considered investments.

rvz 4y ago

That's it? I was expecting hundreds of billions; quite far significantly smaller than expected out of the $13+ trillions in transaction volume in crypto [0]. Nothing but a microscopic amount, when compared to the tens of trillions of illicit funds being processed by banks in dollars and left unchecked. [1] [2] Looks like this newsletter is another plain old side grift by Molly with the rest of the high profile extreme skeptics who are just as bad as the maximalists selling 'quality' rushed books riddled with typos and spelling errors pointed out by readers and crypto bros on Twitter [3] [4] [5]. Oh dear. [0] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-report-introduction/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor... [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-files-financial-scandal-criminal-networks https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-fil... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-suspicious-activity-reports-buzzfeed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-sus... [3] https://twitter.com/AlgoArcade/status/1554662257790943232 https://twitter.com/AlgoArcade/status/1554662257790943232 [4] https://twitter.com/NeddyPott/status/1547413083034947585 https://twitter.com/NeddyPott/status/1547413083034947585 [5] https://twitter.com/Gazoche1/status/1555757395259031552 https://twitter.com/Gazoche1/status/1555757395259031552

scifibestfi 4y ago
"A huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins." Wow. This is the first I've heard of that, but I've heard of crypto shenanigans endlessly. It's a distraction in comparison.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Probably because e.g. SWIFT, a small portion of the traditional western financial system, moves $5 trillion per day. But also yeah, the crypto stuff is a distraction. Think of how much media, regulatory, financial, and technical mindshare has been consumed by this (as of now) hobbyist technology. It's pretty obscene.
- 4y ago

timdaub 4y ago

Considering the amount of damage that the international central banking cartel has done through excessive quantitative easing over the last decade and unreasonable money printing during the global pandemic, the recent inflation numbers and the absolute amount of ordinary people's money it de-valuated out of existence, $4.27B seems like no big deal at all. Also: funding wars.

simplify 4y ago

I'd be curious to see the source on those numbers and how they're broken down. For example, Terra/Luna was a spectacular crypto failure. FTX, on the other hand, was just plain old fraud, not really related to crypto itself.

NeutralForest 4y ago
The (lack of) infrastructure around crypto made the FTX fraud possible.
agdasdigonio 4y ago
>FTX, on the other hand, was just plain old fraud, not really related to crypto itself. The fact that it's not related should tell you something. Cryptocurrency is designed to solve exactly the problems FTX had. It is designed to enable trustless finance. Why didn't cryptocurrency prevent that problem? Because FTX wasn't using cryptocurrency, because cryptocurrency is unworkable.
- simplify 4y ago
  A proper use of cryptocurrency could have prevented the problem, but FTX and users mutually agreed to give FTX more trust by giving FTX custody of user funds. That's really all it was. Not very interesting.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Ah, the good old “communism would work perfectly but the Soviet Union was doing it all wrong” style argument. Blind faith in an economic theory against all empirical evidence is a dead end.
    - simplify 4y ago
      Blind faith how so? I merely stated a technical fact. Blockchain is programmable money; they could have programmed a system such that FTX could not run away with user funds – there are defi systems that do this already. But they didn't. Instead, FTX used crypto as a means to transfer funds into their own, centralized custody. Not much different from a bank wire. This isn't a "communism would work perfectly" style argument at all. I'm really not sure of what you're getting at, or if you understand how crypto works beyond surface level articles.

ojr 4y ago

web2 scams are not web3, web3 involves bitcoin which current price is respectable the boom bust cycly in 20-21 was heavily macro related. Web3 also involves ipfs, you can search for any book currently and the data lives on the blockchain. If you don't see the benefits by now, it is whatever, blockchain is just a data structure, some people will never be convinced, postgres and procedural statements is all they want. The same people who will argue vehemently against NoSQL, is not the people who should be writing web3 is trash articles.

bccdee 4y ago
Hey, don't slander ipfs like this. It's is a perfectly good technology and it is not based on blockchain. Also, bold of you to bring up NoSQL seeing as how the sun has kind of set on that whole era. The new databases I'm seeing these days are all relational. Turns out Postgres was all we really needed.
jancsika 4y ago
> Web3 also involves ipfs, you can search for any book currently and the data lives on the blockchain. AFAICT the limiting factors for something like libgen are harddisk space and the speed of one's internet connection. If those aren't a factor then one could go grab the entire thing with no friction whatsoever. Blockchain does not help the user with either of those limiting factors. Further-- while I don't understand the economics/incentives of private trackers like what.cd or redacted, it appears that they've addressed the availability problem wrt rare files. I.e., bittorrent does a great job replicating the most popular files, and a poor job replicating the least popular ones. But on these trackers the user can select any file from the index and essentially be guaranteed fastest possible download time from any nodes that have the file. AFAICT blockchain is not used in any way, shape, or form in this scheme. Blockchain is indirectly used by sci-hub for receiving Bitcoin donations. That's not nothing, but it's also not new. Finally-- in the entire time that sci-hub has existed, has any innovation in blockchain made a significant, positive difference in sci-hub's ability to do their work? If so, I'd love to read about it. If not, it appears they only use it because literally every other donation method is unavailable to them. From reading pro-blockchain comments on HN for awhile, it appears that blockchain is a technology that slurps up attention and refocuses it on how to make blockchain a better blockchain, so that more blockchain devs can get involved in blockchain. It would be like if 99% of emacs developers hacked on emacs to the exclusion of literally any other project, forever. But the improvements they were making to emacs somehow only ever increased productivity for other emacs developers who work only on emacs, and no one else. That emacs in reality is less insular than blockchain should really snap you back into reality on web3.

timdaub 4y ago

posters in this thread believe that there are obviously really bad people using and working with crypto currencies. these same posters, however, don't have an inch of skepticism that there could be equally bad people sitting in powerful western financial institutions.

ranger207 4y ago
posters in this thread also believe that there are bad people in western financial institutions but that 1) the laws and regulations in place ensure that the system is at least usable by normal people to do useful work, as evidenced by the bajillions of dollars of money made by selling products and services that are not stolen from their bank accounts; and 2) that western financial institutions will not in general repeat the same mistakes as they committed in the past that resulted in things like the Great Depression, and in particular will not last long enough to collect billions of dollars based entirely on hype and become a critical cornerstone of the entire market, as certain centralized exchanges this past year had
- timdaub 4y ago
  we'll see how this "don't repeat prior mistakes' thing will play out with maxed out inflation, raging corruption in western democracies, moral wars in Ukraine, rising distrust in media and a laissez-faire approach to white collar crime after the financial crisis in 2008.
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    Crypto solves none of those problems because those are social and political problems. You can not free your self from oppression by changing the brand on the boot.
  - sharkbot 4y ago
    I won’t comment about your other topics, but I’ll point out that current inflation is far from “maxed out”, at least in mature Western democracies with their own central bank and currency. ~9% is high historically, but inflation has run hotter in the not-so-distant past. 2% inflation is not a natural state of affairs, it’s a target that’s considered the “appropriate” amount of inflation.

qbasic_forever 4y ago

"The collector who dropped $2.9 million on an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet found himself in a bind in April, when he tried to resell the NFT and wound up with a top bid of… $280." Hahaha, wow. You couldn't even take a 2.899 million dollar write off loss on your taxes too! Just straight vaporizing nearly 3 million bucks.

jacquesc 4y ago
I always figured buying that NFT was sort of a way to just donate to one of Jack's charities. I hope the buyer wasn't trying to make a long term investment with it.
recursive 4y ago
Honest question: why not? I don't really understand the nuance of taxes. I just use a tax app and answer the questions.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  In the US, capital losses can offset capital gains to arbitrarily large numbers, but only $3,000 of capital losses can offset ordinary income. So if you lose $3M in one year and happen to have $3M in other capital gains then hooray - they offset and you pay no taxes on them. But if you lose $3M in one year and made $300k in income, you are still paying income tax on everything minus $3,000. You get to keep carrying it over so you can apply $3,000 every year - but if you've got losses in the millions they'll never be exhausted in this manner.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    But if all of your losses are in crypto coins and not USD it's moot and you can't claim a loss on anything. Not until you convert to cash, and even then I'm not entirely sure it's clear cut.
TedShiller 4y ago
The most shocking part for me was that someone was willing to pay $280

onebot 4y ago

The problem I have with articles like these is that my definition of Web3 is quite a bit different. I tend to lump "crypto" more with NFTs, wild speculation, scams, heavily VC backed "decentralized" tokens, etc. But on the other hand, I want social networks not owned by businesses, I want other major utilities also not owned by major companies (I think gmail is used for 8bn addresses). I think the fediverse is nice start, but still not decentralized enough (a single mastadon server admin can kill it anytime they want or change the rules). In my opinion the definition of web3 is: "Web3 represents a fundamental evolution of the internet built upon blockchain architectures. Moving from centralized control and capitalization to a decentralized network where the capital is distributed between the operators and consumers." I feel like the definition of Web3 is hijacked by pundits. Probably because it has become yet another buzzword and being so tightly associated with Crypto maybe has it tainted forever?

rpgbr 4y ago
Web3 is an attempt to paint scammy technologies (crypto assets) as something useful (decentralized tech). The truth is: you don't need crypto stuff to have a decentralized internet, as ActivityPub is handsomely showing and, let's be real here, the web itself is showing for the last decades. I'm still to see a Web3 business that doesn't smell, looks, and behaves like it's a grift.
rcoder 4y ago
What you're describing sounds like the (now unfashionably old and un-hyped as a category) `dWeb` ecosystem. As far as I've seen, 'web3' has meant "websites that use crypto wallets for login and store data in a blockchain and/or IPFS." The difference between the two isn't necessarily technical; rather it's the requirement that you "join the crypto economy" and start buying up whatever shitcoin -- or CDS-style derivative of multiple coins -- is being used for that one website...and somehow that means "SSO is easy now!" and "anyone can make micropayments anywhere!" etc., etc. The latter only makes sense in a world of free money from VCs that lets people spend tens of millions of dollars building a *login form* that they charge other websites to use. Their business model seemingly ignores the fact that no serious enterprise[^1] is going to run their internal authN/Z and IdM on a global blockchain. [^1]: actually, I'm sure several companies have/will tried this, and equally certain the net result was a flaky service that was effectively just querying a Postgres table that cached the on-chain identity for a user and checking their presented token against that. I.e., yet another Postgres instance masquerading as "web3 infrastructure".

dayvid 4y ago

I'm kinda happy with the way things turned out. For a moment, my understanding of reality was upside down with how many mediocre and clearly pointless projects were generating so much money. With every crypto hype cycle, I actually go through the motions and create a smart contract project and become completely disillusioned with the hype. I thought ERC20 tokens were bullshit when I realized it's just updating keys in a hashtable. I worked in Solana and was surprised to find out that a developer can update a program at will. No one is really talking about this and this seems like a disastrously shaky foundation to put your money in, along with programs being difficult to audit. There are some NFTs by amazing artists which no one cares about. The ones with the most popularity are modern-day clip art pieces, with copy-paste scripts and marketing strategies. I think web3/crypto will have mass adoption, but when it does, it will be much more boring and seamless with what we have today, with large companies managing blockchains and governments issuing their own coins.

stemlord 4y ago
>There are some NFTs by amazing artists which no one cares about. The ones with the most popularity are modern-day clip art pieces, with copy-paste scripts and marketing strategies. I've only witnessed almost every amazing digital artist on my twitter feed quickly devolve into an obnoxious NFT shill and drastically reduce the quality of their practice to maximize their output. I'm glad they are finding ways to some meager financial gains but the ideological mystique around their practice was shattered in the process
LouisSayers 4y ago
> and governments issuing their own coins. ... in which case they could just create a standard centralised system and avoid all the overhead of blockchain - or am I missing something here? I don't see the point in mining coins when you could simply run a for loop generating uuids followed by perhaps signing transactions with public key cryptography. I feel like we'll look back at "web3" as a wild west of cryptomania. Perhaps we all need to start thinking along the lines of "Generation GPT" - this seems to be the next evolution of the Web if you ask me.
JeremyNT 4y ago

Gonzalez07 4y ago

[dead]

pornel 4y ago

> Topping the charts is the March 29 hack of the bridge used by the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity — a hack that saw $625 million taken and funneled to the North Korean Lazarus cybercrime group. If it was a movie, I'd think the plot is just too stupid: a dictatorship funded their nuclear missile program by hacking an angry-birds-styled JRPG game. An yet here were are. This demonstrates that playing with cryptocurrencies is dangerous, even seemingly benign or useless applications.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
It does sound similar (and less sophisticated) to a real book plot : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State (2007)

aww_dang 4y ago

Here's an inflammatory post from an inflammatory domain on the inflammatory topic of cryptocurrency. I wonder what kind of discussion will follow?

voz_ 4y ago
Its not inflammatory, its a true and honest recap of a massive technological space that is entirely built on lies and scams.
- aww_dang 4y ago
  Surely there's more to it than that. Promoting intellectual curiosity indeed. The entire thread is a celebration of toxicity. A narrow view resulting in the widest possible generalization.

abetusk 4y ago

I would like to remind people, yet again, that things like "fuckedcompany.com" existed [0] and there was also a lot of hate for dot-com era startups during the late 1990s to 2000s. From the article: """ $4.27 billion was stolen in various hacks and scams this year alone, although that is a very conservative estimate ... """ One source claims $5 trillion lost during the dot-com crash as of 2002 [1]. I believe being critical of new technology and holding scammers accountable is great but I want more critical analysis of what's going on, not just a snarky middle finger against cryptocurrency and it's surrounding technology. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company [1] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/equities/dotcom-bubble/ https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/equities/dot...

voz_ 4y ago
If your point is that oft-cited-never-correct "this is early days / this is like the early dot com era" notion - I want to dispel that myth for you. There has been no real value, product, or worth created here. With the rise of public internet spaces in the 1990s, online shopping, web search, and more - the value was immediate and apparent. Of course there were bad ideas, scams, etc, but the major difference between that and crypto is that Web3 crypto is 100% bull. There is no value here. I have yet to see a single worthwhile crypto product out there, anywhere. Do you know why? Because the decentralization it offers is a mix of a myth and meaningless - in cases where you can get it, you don't need it. Everywhere else, its actually just a different centralization. Oh and the protocol is just giant inefficient linked list, poorly distributed.
- abetusk 4y ago
  People forget how hyped the internet was circa 1996-2000. During the early days, one of the most popular sites was a web cam pointed at a coffee mug [0] and a webcam pointed at a "lifecaster" showing her everyday life [1]. Email was confusing and misunderstood [2]. Startups were laughed at when they said you would buy pet food online [3] or pay your parking tickets online [4]. Both are so commonplace now as to barely be worth mentioning. You absolutely could be right. Maybe cryptocurrency and the surrounding technology is a fad or hype without any substance but you're making an assumption that the rollout of cryptocurrency adoption should follow the same schedule as dot.com startups. For a point of reference, Linux was created circa 1991 [5] with the GNU project started in 1983, giving about a decade or two, depending on where you start, from "widespread" Linux/FOSS adoption. You're stating that "there has been no real value, produce, or worth created here" bluntly without really backing it up. There are plenty of products and use cases, just none that you would consider valid. People use cryptocurrency to purchase goods and services, just not the ones you might find valid. People use cryptocurrency to support organizations they favor, just not organizations you might favor. People are using cryptocurrency to explore different social media models, just not models you would find valid. My plea is in line with the HN terms of service. Please have curious conversation. Molly White has valid things to say and, as far as I can tell, does research the claims she makes. I don't like the tenor so I feel like I need to push back here and elsewhere to put things in context. Your casual, snarky, dismissiveness doesn't add a lot to the conversation. Would it add anything to the conversation if I said "XML is a poorly designed LaTeX, improperly implemented"? Or "Javascript is a poor attempt at a Lisp implementation"? "Twitter is public text messaging, just done poorly"? The reductions gloss over the complexities of the ecosystem and utility. It should be a red flag that there may be something you don't understand if you're so quick to cite idiocy. To your points: Decentralization means different things to different people. In the context of Bitcoin, or many other cryptocurrencies, it means that anyone can participate given the resources, without the need to apply for credentials. Miners can join and participate in the network by standing up hardware. Contrast this with starting a business, pushing an app on the apple store, publishing a game on steam, etc. Note that this is how the internet was also designed. Anyone wanting to participate in the network ostensibly could. I think to dismiss Bitcoin as an "inefficient linked list, poorly distributed" is to dismiss a lot of good ideas and research ideas. Bitcoin may have some flaws, maybe critically so, but it sits at the middle of theoretical computer science, economics and finance in a novel way that responds to a lot of shortcomings of attempts before it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com#Legacy [4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/?ref_=ttls_li_tt https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/?ref_=ttls_li_tt [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#History

jrmg 4y ago

“Right now, apes are going for a mere $80,000 on the low end“ This is wild to me. It’s like an entire industry driven by sunk cost fallacy.

gigatexal 4y ago

This website should be called crypto schadenfruede -- it's been hilarious and I love reading it.

abalashov 4y ago

There's a point of view out there that crypto has been beneficial in that it has somewhat de-risked finance, by taking a good chunk of the speculative / get-rich-quick / frat bro transactions out of real money and giving those types imaginary money to play with instead. Seems mostly plausible to me, though of course a bit simplistic, and occasionally wrong, when more traditional institutions and funds pile in and their losses create more systemic issues. Thankfully, they seem to be mostly over crypto for a while now--at least, that's my read?

bitcoin_anon 4y ago

When sentiment is low, I remind myself that for the price to remain where its been for the past three months or so, people have been purchasing the 900 Bitcoins mined a day, paying $16,000 each, or $14 million a day. This is the best use for these dollars that these people can come up with: swapping them for digital property, a slice of 21 million. Thankfully (for us all), it seems that this story is not over! Our ancestors will look back on this absurd period of soft money and wonder what we were thinking entrusting something as critical as money, the lifeblood of civilization, to politicians. May it be brief!

Vanit 4y ago

Molly, you keep an amazing website that's brought me much joy over the last year; keep it up!

bArray 4y ago

If they think that is bad, wait to see what 2023 brings. When the recession fully hits (and it will), a significant number of smaller FOMO investors will look to withdraw in favour of traditional liquid to cover basic bills (rent, utilities, food, travel, etc). The slow bleed of big crypto names since the peak a few years ago will not attract large new investors and there is nothing currently that indicates it is a good hedge against inflation (see BTC.X over SPX for example). Once the larger crypto assets lose value, the liquid (crypto) the stable coins hold in cold wallets will of course devalue. The only liquid they hold of value will be traditional hard to liquidate assets, which will simple be used to pay off the big players in the bankruptcy. Expect this entire thing to collapse pretty quickly when it gets going. We are yet to see real contagion in this space. A lot of people will be left holding worthless coins like every crypto coin bankruptcy so far. That said, traditional money is no good to you either. Thanks to fractional reserve banking [1] no currency actually has any value any more. It's difficult to suggest where to suggest to invest, but I don't want to get caught holding monopoly money once the game ends [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [2] https://coffeespace.org.uk/blogs/crypto-monopoly.html https://coffeespace.org.uk/blogs/crypto-monopoly.html

gatkinso 4y ago

people like to forget that this exact same thing happened in 2017/18 and will probably happen again in a year or 2.