7 ms·

But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift. There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror.

by xwolfi 3y ago

lusus_naturae 3y ago
I know this is the prevailing narrative (and I am guilty of it as well), I have just one question then: why are reasonable and intelligent academics/engineers working on things like MetaGov, https://metagov.org https://metagov.org? These people are not grifting, as far as I can tell.
- BoxFour 3y ago
  I can't comment on these specific individuals, but it's worth noting that both academics and engineers are fully capable, and at times even driven, to engage in grifting. Off the top of my head: There was recently a fairly famous instance of an academic at Harvard who was suspended for falsifying data.
  - lusus_naturae 3y ago
    That's an understandable stance, I am aware of the Harvard/Gino controversy as well. But I think the reason why communities, organizations, and institutions are still effective and able to achieve work with undeniable intellectual or social impact (e.g., full self-driving in certain conditions or reducing the transmission rate of COVID during the pandemic) is because people still act in good faith and harbor good will because they believe that others are doing the same. I think this two-way trust ensures the rate of progress, which is why it is such a target for disinformation campaigns (i.e., all your values are lies or all your institutions hate you/want to abuse you etc.). So I think given a large group of academics/engineers and looking at the way people in groups behave, I am not inclined to believe that a large proportion of such academics/engineers are grifting, but it is easier to believe that perhaps there is deception in the upper echelons of such a community/organization that is imperceptible to collaborators lower in the hierarchy. I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or deception unless you establish people like the academics who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of that?
    - BoxFour 3y ago
      There's scant evidence to suggest that modern academics uphold more stringent standards than any other group of professionals. If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you? It’s similarly persuasive to me no matter which group you use in your original statement (attorneys or academics). Which is to say - not very.
      - lusus_naturae 3y ago
        > If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you? It would, but that's because I am assuming that physical, natural or societal constraints are likely to bound behavior and so deviation from ethical norms despite any number of agents acting purely on self-interest, regardless of their group. You can't grift someone to believe you created improved semiconductor node technology because of the physical constraints of the universe, or you can't grift someone to believe that gun ownership will inherently lead to violence because of decades of data that proves otherwise, or you can't grift someone to believe that X drug will cause X effect it doesn't because of natural constraints imposed by the body. My point is that grifting has its limits, and reasonable self-interested agents understand they operate under the constraints of those limits regardless of their group membership. So the question I was trying to ask was what is that people are hoping to achieve in the long-term by associating with a particular grift after they've made a quick buck and the thing in exposed as a lie. So as someone said the nature of the grift has to keep changing. I guess I can reason about the behavior of people who hang on (like people who work in MetaGov) as possibly people who are dreamers or hopefuls, or maybe have sunk costs.
        BoxFour 3y ago
        Your interpretation of 'grifting' seems rather narrow and may not align with its applicability to either the article or the broader understanding. Grifting extends beyond merely making quick profits or even publishing fabricated findings--though these are extreme and evident instances. Even portraying oneself as an 'expert' in a domain despite having limited expertise can be considered a form of grifting: It is, in fact, the focus of the article's opening paragraph. To draw a more specific connection to the present example, even if Metagov were to falter and fail entirely for whatever reason, these academics now have the opportunity to assert their involvement in a 'groundbreaking web3 governance model.' Consequently, they are likely to generate a substantial volume of academic papers stemming from this involvement, a key metric used to evaluate academics. There is certainly motive for academic grifters to be involved. Particularly considering the historical context of web3, there are many valid reasons to suspect that certain individuals with grifting tendencies might be engaged in such a project.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Whatever system you're in, you have to do a little grift from time to time, and the promise of crypto is a huge reward for very little work. That's how SBF's parents, respected academics one of whom is an ethics professor, got caught up in a multibillion dollar fraud. It's simply too hard to turn down. https://slate.com/technology/2023/09/sam-bankman-fried-parents-joseph-barbara-ftx-collapse-lawsuit-trial.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/09/sam-bankman-fried-paren...
  - 15457345234 3y ago
    > It's simply too hard to turn down. It's actually not at all hard to 'turn down' the decision to simply start defrauding people on an industrial scale.
meiraleal 3y ago
> But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift. There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror. Meanwhile, Central Banks all around the world are rolling blockchain-based systems to use as the future infrastructure of all their transactions, bypassing external middlemen like Visa and Mastercard. There is real tech coming from web3 and P2P computing will take over cloud computing sooner or later.
- ahamm 3y ago
  Evidence?
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    "Harnessing the power of blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), DREX will facilitate peer-to-peer transactions without the need for an intermediary, leveraging smart contracts for the automatic execution of transactions." https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-said-to-improve-financial-accessibility-amid-centralization-concerns/ https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-s...
- otp209 3y ago
  Centralization is just the natural order. No one actually wants to "be their own bank" or credit union. Who needs the headache? It's like how libertarians are constantly surprised in the rare instances that they get what they supposedly want that it turns out they didn't want it at all, but rather their idealized version. Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Which is why it does end up being centralized, just around the management of a handful of resource collectives.
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit. > Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Let the cryptobros be wrong. Decentralized computing isn't about crypto, it is about reusing idle resource to create something bigger than big tech. BitTorrent is real, fediverse is real, IPFS...
envsubst 3y ago
I am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting, but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil. Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? I would rather have fast and cheap online payments than a chat bot I have to twist around until I can talk to customer service.
- mattmcknight 3y ago
  > fast and cheap online payments but proof of work / crypto isn't fast, and nothing makes it particularly cheap. If we are talking fast and cheap online payments, micropayments instead of subscriptions, let's go. Too much of crypto is a solution looking for a problem (and finding ones that don't fit).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? PoW only addresses a single problematic aspect of this stuff (and only reduces it, doesn't actually resolve it). It does nothing about all the other problematic aspects.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? Sure, but we had that with SETI@home, and then Folding@home, and they were doing something useful with their work rather than just finding which random numbers hashed a certain way in order to get a token whose primary economic value was the assumption that "remove trust" is a useful thing in economics. We also had a blockchain of sorts before bitcoin, and still regularly use it: it's called "git". And we already have fast and cheap online payments. In my case this was initially in the form of paypal, then my banks got good at it more directly; in Kenya since 2005, and now more countries in the region, there's a thing called M-PESA which does much the same but works with pre-feature-phones: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100_20120430.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100...
- notsurenymore 3y ago
  > am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting, but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil I mean.. it’s a site associated with a notable VC organization.

But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift. There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror.

by xwolfi 3y ago

But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift. There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror.

lusus_naturae 3y ago

I know this is the prevailing narrative (and I am guilty of it as well), I have just one question then: why are reasonable and intelligent academics/engineers working on things like MetaGov, https://metagov.org https://metagov.org? These people are not grifting, as far as I can tell.

BoxFour 3y ago
I can't comment on these specific individuals, but it's worth noting that both academics and engineers are fully capable, and at times even driven, to engage in grifting. Off the top of my head: There was recently a fairly famous instance of an academic at Harvard who was suspended for falsifying data.
- lusus_naturae 3y ago
  That's an understandable stance, I am aware of the Harvard/Gino controversy as well. But I think the reason why communities, organizations, and institutions are still effective and able to achieve work with undeniable intellectual or social impact (e.g., full self-driving in certain conditions or reducing the transmission rate of COVID during the pandemic) is because people still act in good faith and harbor good will because they believe that others are doing the same. I think this two-way trust ensures the rate of progress, which is why it is such a target for disinformation campaigns (i.e., all your values are lies or all your institutions hate you/want to abuse you etc.). So I think given a large group of academics/engineers and looking at the way people in groups behave, I am not inclined to believe that a large proportion of such academics/engineers are grifting, but it is easier to believe that perhaps there is deception in the upper echelons of such a community/organization that is imperceptible to collaborators lower in the hierarchy. I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or deception unless you establish people like the academics who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of that?
  - BoxFour 3y ago
    There's scant evidence to suggest that modern academics uphold more stringent standards than any other group of professionals. If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you? It’s similarly persuasive to me no matter which group you use in your original statement (attorneys or academics). Which is to say - not very.
    - lusus_naturae 3y ago
      > If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you? It would, but that's because I am assuming that physical, natural or societal constraints are likely to bound behavior and so deviation from ethical norms despite any number of agents acting purely on self-interest, regardless of their group. You can't grift someone to believe you created improved semiconductor node technology because of the physical constraints of the universe, or you can't grift someone to believe that gun ownership will inherently lead to violence because of decades of data that proves otherwise, or you can't grift someone to believe that X drug will cause X effect it doesn't because of natural constraints imposed by the body. My point is that grifting has its limits, and reasonable self-interested agents understand they operate under the constraints of those limits regardless of their group membership. So the question I was trying to ask was what is that people are hoping to achieve in the long-term by associating with a particular grift after they've made a quick buck and the thing in exposed as a lie. So as someone said the nature of the grift has to keep changing. I guess I can reason about the behavior of people who hang on (like people who work in MetaGov) as possibly people who are dreamers or hopefuls, or maybe have sunk costs.
      - BoxFour 3y ago
        Your interpretation of 'grifting' seems rather narrow and may not align with its applicability to either the article or the broader understanding. Grifting extends beyond merely making quick profits or even publishing fabricated findings--though these are extreme and evident instances. Even portraying oneself as an 'expert' in a domain despite having limited expertise can be considered a form of grifting: It is, in fact, the focus of the article's opening paragraph. To draw a more specific connection to the present example, even if Metagov were to falter and fail entirely for whatever reason, these academics now have the opportunity to assert their involvement in a 'groundbreaking web3 governance model.' Consequently, they are likely to generate a substantial volume of academic papers stemming from this involvement, a key metric used to evaluate academics. There is certainly motive for academic grifters to be involved. Particularly considering the historical context of web3, there are many valid reasons to suspect that certain individuals with grifting tendencies might be engaged in such a project.
pjc50 3y ago
Whatever system you're in, you have to do a little grift from time to time, and the promise of crypto is a huge reward for very little work. That's how SBF's parents, respected academics one of whom is an ethics professor, got caught up in a multibillion dollar fraud. It's simply too hard to turn down. https://slate.com/technology/2023/09/sam-bankman-fried-parents-joseph-barbara-ftx-collapse-lawsuit-trial.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/09/sam-bankman-fried-paren...
- 15457345234 3y ago
  > It's simply too hard to turn down. It's actually not at all hard to 'turn down' the decision to simply start defrauding people on an industrial scale.

meiraleal 3y ago

> But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift. There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror. Meanwhile, Central Banks all around the world are rolling blockchain-based systems to use as the future infrastructure of all their transactions, bypassing external middlemen like Visa and Mastercard. There is real tech coming from web3 and P2P computing will take over cloud computing sooner or later.

ahamm 3y ago
Evidence?
- meiraleal 3y ago
  "Harnessing the power of blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), DREX will facilitate peer-to-peer transactions without the need for an intermediary, leveraging smart contracts for the automatic execution of transactions." https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-said-to-improve-financial-accessibility-amid-centralization-concerns/ https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-s...
otp209 3y ago
Centralization is just the natural order. No one actually wants to "be their own bank" or credit union. Who needs the headache? It's like how libertarians are constantly surprised in the rare instances that they get what they supposedly want that it turns out they didn't want it at all, but rather their idealized version. Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Which is why it does end up being centralized, just around the management of a handful of resource collectives.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit. > Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Let the cryptobros be wrong. Decentralized computing isn't about crypto, it is about reusing idle resource to create something bigger than big tech. BitTorrent is real, fediverse is real, IPFS...

envsubst 3y ago

I am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting, but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil. Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? I would rather have fast and cheap online payments than a chat bot I have to twist around until I can talk to customer service.

mattmcknight 3y ago
> fast and cheap online payments but proof of work / crypto isn't fast, and nothing makes it particularly cheap. If we are talking fast and cheap online payments, micropayments instead of subscriptions, let's go. Too much of crypto is a solution looking for a problem (and finding ones that don't fit).
JohnFen 3y ago
> Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? PoW only addresses a single problematic aspect of this stuff (and only reduces it, doesn't actually resolve it). It does nothing about all the other problematic aspects.
ben_w 3y ago
> Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? Sure, but we had that with SETI@home, and then Folding@home, and they were doing something useful with their work rather than just finding which random numbers hashed a certain way in order to get a token whose primary economic value was the assumption that "remove trust" is a useful thing in economics. We also had a blockchain of sorts before bitcoin, and still regularly use it: it's called "git". And we already have fast and cheap online payments. In my case this was initially in the form of paypal, then my banks got good at it more directly; in Kenya since 2005, and now more countries in the region, there's a thing called M-PESA which does much the same but works with pre-feature-phones: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100_20120430.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100...
notsurenymore 3y ago
> am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting, but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil I mean.. it’s a site associated with a notable VC organization.