4 ms·

Web3 Onboarding Was a Flop – and Thank Goodness

16 points by solumos 1y ago

geekodour 1y ago
Absolutely not a crypto person but I've been following this team called noice.so, so far I think they've been doing the right thing in the space, pretty new and think they are operating at the right level of abstraction.
- solumos 1y ago
  This is actually a good example of what I'm railing against. Giving your users airdrops is almost always a perverse incentive, and trying to figure out how to onboard to Farcaster as "Step 1" in your product journey is extremely limiting.
rasengan 1y ago
There are things that people want and, yet, can’t know they want, until much later in their lives; often times, too late. Not an endorsement for “web3,” which seems to be a sort of centralization of the decentralized technologies at this point in time, unfortunately.
- solumos 1y ago
  There's an argument that the only truly decentralized money is Bitcoin. I don't necessarily disagree with that. Centralization has its perks though. A lot of things are priced in dollars, and it's somewhat convenient to not have to worry about rampant speculation and boom/bust cycles affecting the medium of value transfer. There may be a future where rather than a claim on fiat, there are tokens that provide a claim on some underlying stable-priced commodity or similar asset that isn't tied to a specific government. I think that would be a step in the right direction. But yeah — "Web3" was a buzzword, and thinking that a peer-to-peer programmable payment network was the next version of the internet was a bit misguided.
- kragen 1y ago
  Never mind that. Give Freenode back to the people you stole it from. Every day you hold onto it you are worsening the lives of tens of thousands of people.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
This article is here to tell us that stablecoins give us what we wanted all along: a faster, more convenient, and more secure value transfer experience. Those things are nice I guess, but if you had asked me in 2021 what people wanted out of Web3, I'd not have listed those things. We wanted an economy based in types of value which better align with our values than fiat does. Stablecoins are just a fresh coat of paint on the same problem as before: Money that is issued by a select few in furtherance of schemes that will make that few richer, with no reason to expect that those schemes will benefit the masses--masses who are expected to value that money just because we're told to.
- nine_k 1y ago
  People prefer widely accepted tokens of value, which are the few strongest currencies (USD, EUR, RMB, JPY, CHF, not much more). BTC has made enough inroads to be considered semi-widely accepted, and be useful as is in certain circumstances, but that's about it. Blockchain is a useful technology, but, it appears, mostly not for carrying fancy coins.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    What exactly is blockchain useful for?
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      Being a single source of truth which changes only according to certain rules, and not at the whims of some administrator. In short: accounting. It solves a lot of headaches compared to having each stakeholder maintain their own database and then do pairwise syncs in hopes of convergence.
      - dehrmann 1y ago
        Isn't an issue with Bitcoin that it's actually controlled by the miners, so they could collude to change some of the issuance rules?
gregmac 1y ago
Am I the only one struggling to decipher this? I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing. There is not a mention of that in the article. Is it actually supposed to just be microtranscations paid with cryptocurrency? Where's the "decentralized" part of that? Anyway, instead the best I can see this article seems to be talking about how it turns out people aren't using blockchain for buying things, and makes the (apparently) shocking conclusion "the one thing people always wanted: money that just works."
- aurareturn 1y ago
  I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing. Web3 is a rebrand of crypto scams. The 20018 crash exposed the crypto industry to how wide spread its scams were. So the industry rebranded to "web3". Nothing changed. The scam message was that so many people got rich investing in web2.0 companies like Facebook. You can get rich too by investing in web3 (shitcoins & NFTs).
- solumos 1y ago
  Not exactly. Internet Computer or Akash Network would be more closely aligned with "decentralized compute" — smart contracts in the EVM world aren't really meant to decentralize "general" compute, but they do provide primitives for programmable transactions. Those transactions can include a "token" as well as abstractions on top of tokens (e.g. a vault)
- jowea 1y ago
  Web3 was quite a cryptoassets sector buzzword, but the decentralized part of that is "cryptocurrency". If we take the buzzword seriously, yes there was more to it than microtransactions with cryptocurrency, but without personal wallets on the blockchain capable of those transactions the rest of the ideas like NFT tickets, Decentralized Finance etc are impossible.
Animats 1y ago
Stablecoins can, when interest rates are reasonably above zero, support themselves with the interest on the money. That could potentially work. The industry tradition, however, is the promoters stealing the money.[1] Usually by investing it in something risky, with the intent of keeping the excess profits but dumping any losses on the stablecoin holder. Trump has a stablecoin, "USD1". It's partly backed by Trump's memecoin, "TRUMP" Really.[2] What could possibly go wrong?[3] [1] https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ [2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/usd1-the-cryptocurrency-behind-the-trump-familys-wealth-surge/ar-AA1HTSup https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/usd1-the-cryptocur... [3] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/
- solumos 1y ago
  I would be very surprised if any of USDC, PYUSD or USDG followed in that tradition given their attestations. But you are certainly correct that there is no shortage of bad actors in this industry.
since7 1y ago
The article brings some valid points. There's a lot to talk about in Web3 UX (as well as AI UX) and this is where the hatchet is buried. Having said that, to me this article seems written with the help of ChatGPT. That is not bad per se but I feel it should be mentioned (eg. Venkatesh Rao's Sloptraptions)
snvzz 1y ago
Next is Web5. Disregard HTML, CSS, JS and other nonsense; Embrace RISC-V machine code.

16 points by solumos 1y ago

Absolutely not a crypto person but I've been following this team called noice.so, so far I think they've been doing the right thing in the space, pretty new and think they are operating at the right level of abstraction.

solumos 1y ago
This is actually a good example of what I'm railing against. Giving your users airdrops is almost always a perverse incentive, and trying to figure out how to onboard to Farcaster as "Step 1" in your product journey is extremely limiting.

rasengan 1y ago

There are things that people want and, yet, can’t know they want, until much later in their lives; often times, too late. Not an endorsement for “web3,” which seems to be a sort of centralization of the decentralized technologies at this point in time, unfortunately.

solumos 1y ago
There's an argument that the only truly decentralized money is Bitcoin. I don't necessarily disagree with that. Centralization has its perks though. A lot of things are priced in dollars, and it's somewhat convenient to not have to worry about rampant speculation and boom/bust cycles affecting the medium of value transfer. There may be a future where rather than a claim on fiat, there are tokens that provide a claim on some underlying stable-priced commodity or similar asset that isn't tied to a specific government. I think that would be a step in the right direction. But yeah — "Web3" was a buzzword, and thinking that a peer-to-peer programmable payment network was the next version of the internet was a bit misguided.
kragen 1y ago
Never mind that. Give Freenode back to the people you stole it from. Every day you hold onto it you are worsening the lives of tens of thousands of people.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

This article is here to tell us that stablecoins give us what we wanted all along: a faster, more convenient, and more secure value transfer experience. Those things are nice I guess, but if you had asked me in 2021 what people wanted out of Web3, I'd not have listed those things. We wanted an economy based in types of value which better align with our values than fiat does. Stablecoins are just a fresh coat of paint on the same problem as before: Money that is issued by a select few in furtherance of schemes that will make that few richer, with no reason to expect that those schemes will benefit the masses--masses who are expected to value that money just because we're told to.

nine_k 1y ago
People prefer widely accepted tokens of value, which are the few strongest currencies (USD, EUR, RMB, JPY, CHF, not much more). BTC has made enough inroads to be considered semi-widely accepted, and be useful as is in certain circumstances, but that's about it. Blockchain is a useful technology, but, it appears, mostly not for carrying fancy coins.
- XorNot 1y ago
  What exactly is blockchain useful for?
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    Being a single source of truth which changes only according to certain rules, and not at the whims of some administrator. In short: accounting. It solves a lot of headaches compared to having each stakeholder maintain their own database and then do pairwise syncs in hopes of convergence.
    - dehrmann 1y ago
      Isn't an issue with Bitcoin that it's actually controlled by the miners, so they could collude to change some of the issuance rules?

gregmac 1y ago

Am I the only one struggling to decipher this? I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing. There is not a mention of that in the article. Is it actually supposed to just be microtranscations paid with cryptocurrency? Where's the "decentralized" part of that? Anyway, instead the best I can see this article seems to be talking about how it turns out people aren't using blockchain for buying things, and makes the (apparently) shocking conclusion "the one thing people always wanted: money that just works."

aurareturn 1y ago
I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing. Web3 is a rebrand of crypto scams. The 20018 crash exposed the crypto industry to how wide spread its scams were. So the industry rebranded to "web3". Nothing changed. The scam message was that so many people got rich investing in web2.0 companies like Facebook. You can get rich too by investing in web3 (shitcoins & NFTs).
solumos 1y ago
Not exactly. Internet Computer or Akash Network would be more closely aligned with "decentralized compute" — smart contracts in the EVM world aren't really meant to decentralize "general" compute, but they do provide primitives for programmable transactions. Those transactions can include a "token" as well as abstractions on top of tokens (e.g. a vault)
jowea 1y ago
Web3 was quite a cryptoassets sector buzzword, but the decentralized part of that is "cryptocurrency". If we take the buzzword seriously, yes there was more to it than microtransactions with cryptocurrency, but without personal wallets on the blockchain capable of those transactions the rest of the ideas like NFT tickets, Decentralized Finance etc are impossible.

Animats 1y ago

Stablecoins can, when interest rates are reasonably above zero, support themselves with the interest on the money. That could potentially work. The industry tradition, however, is the promoters stealing the money.[1] Usually by investing it in something risky, with the intent of keeping the excess profits but dumping any losses on the stablecoin holder. Trump has a stablecoin, "USD1". It's partly backed by Trump's memecoin, "TRUMP" Really.[2] What could possibly go wrong?[3] [1] https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ [2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/usd1-the-cryptocurrency-behind-the-trump-familys-wealth-surge/ar-AA1HTSup https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/usd1-the-cryptocur... [3] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/

solumos 1y ago
I would be very surprised if any of USDC, PYUSD or USDG followed in that tradition given their attestations. But you are certainly correct that there is no shortage of bad actors in this industry.

since7 1y ago

The article brings some valid points. There's a lot to talk about in Web3 UX (as well as AI UX) and this is where the hatchet is buried. Having said that, to me this article seems written with the help of ChatGPT. That is not bad per se but I feel it should be mentioned (eg. Venkatesh Rao's Sloptraptions)

snvzz 1y ago

Next is Web5. Disregard HTML, CSS, JS and other nonsense; Embrace RISC-V machine code.