astoor

11 ms·

61.
by astoor 5y ago
Yes, but gold hasn't been explicitly designed to require ever increasing amounts of energy to extract ever diminishing quantities, and gold does have some practical use (approx 8% of annual production is used in mobile phones, televisi
62.
by astoor 5y ago
IndieAuth[0] is an open standard decentralised authentication protocol which doesn't need blockchain or cryptocurrency. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieAuth and https://indieweb.org/IndieAut
63.
by astoor 5y ago
- Hype around web3.0 will die down when people realise (i) most of what is promised isn't actually technically possible, and (ii) the limited applications that are actually delivered are so user-unfriendly that they get no traction out
64.
by astoor 5y ago
How would web3 and "tokenomics" solve search? If the underlying problem is that spamdexers are given a profit incentive to game search engine results with low effort and low quality content, does it make a difference whether the p
65.
by astoor 5y ago
There are still bits of the original web around if you know where to look. That's why I used the terms "last vestiges" and "existential struggle". Web3 would be the stake through the heart.
66.
by astoor 5y ago
In my view web3 is socialist in the same way that the national socialists were, i.e. claiming to support social ownership while really being bankrolled by big business. There's nothing that gives capitalism a worse name than burning 5%
67.
by astoor 5y ago
It is incredible how divisive web3 has made people. I don't think I recall anything quite like it. I think it is because: 1. It is primarily about politics rather than technology. Those in favour of web3 typically come from the right-l
68.
by astoor 5y ago
> I thought the whole point was to be trustless? No, it is not trustless, it simply shifts trust from central authorities to more nebulous entities such as anonymous developers, shady mining cartels, unregulated exchanges, and even you
69.
by astoor 5y ago
You don't want to run uncontrolled and high risk experiments in large cities first, given the number of people who would be negatively impacted if things go wrong. And in this case, with cryptocurrencies involved, it is more a case of
70.
by astoor 5y ago
This is another intractable problem with blockchain and cryptocurrencies, known as "the oracle problem" - in order to do something useful in the real world, it has to interact with the real world in some way. There are various sch
71.
by astoor 5y ago
There are countless cases of anonymous developers spending several years building positive reputations on Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub etc. before disappearing with >$10M USD of other people's cryptocurrency. Whether they set out to
72.
Miami is banking on cryptocurrency and New York wants in(bbc.co.uk)
22 points by astoor 5y ago|10 comments
73.
by astoor 5y ago
Furthermore "Blockstream first proposed the volcano bonds ... issued as tokenized securities on Blockstream's proprietary Liquid blockchain. Samson Mow of Blockstream assured Bloomberg that all the numbers would work out, under Mo
74.
by astoor 5y ago
I'd also add that one of the big fallacies/deceits of blockchain is that it does not allow trustless transactions as the article author suggests, it simply shifts the trust. In the author's example of gathering funds to renov
75.
by astoor 5y ago
Fiat can be used pretty widely, whereas casino tokens can only be used in casinos and cryptocurrency can only be used within the cryptocurrency ecosystem (noting that casinos and the cryptocurrency ecosystem both need fiat on and off ramps
76.
by astoor 5y ago
I sometimes liken cryptocurrency coins and tokens to casino chips. They have no intrinsic value, but they do serve a purpose for some people, and drive a multi-billion industry. There are even some people who collect casino chips (exonumism
77.
by astoor 5y ago
And anti-virus and VPN industry problems don't pose a systemic risk to the Western economy (I say Western because China etc. have cracked down on cryptocurrency schemes).
78.
by astoor 5y ago
Given the blockchain trilemma (decentralised, scalable, secure - pick 2), the majority of users will prefer scalable + secure and drop decentralised. We've seen it over and over again - users want the least friction, and decentralised
79.
by astoor 5y ago
Failing to take additional steps before a loss is conceptually very different from being able to take additional steps after a loss. You might as well list a whole bunch of additional things he could have done before throwing away the h
80.
by astoor 5y ago
The thing is, if you lost your share certificate, but could still prove to the registrar that you were the legitimate owner of those shares, there's a good chance you would get them back. Likewise, if you accidentally burned a bunch of
81.
Jack Dorsey’s ditched Twitter for Bitcoin. Has the social media bubble burst?(theguardian.com)
5 points by astoor 5y ago|2 comments
82.
by astoor 5y ago
> "Fools eventually will no longer be created at a rate sufficient enough to sustain current prices." The world population has been increasing by between 1.05% and 2.2% per year over the past 50 years[0]. Remember also that f
83.
by astoor 5y ago
As long as the chain of technologies that began with Bitcoin doesn't hasten the end of human civilization (cryptocurrency mining is consuming ever more and more of the world's resources, pyramid scheme collapses have led to war in
84.
by astoor 5y ago
For venture capitalists like the article author, the primary objective isn't fixing problems or making things better, it is about making money. He even makes this explicit in the article: "cryptonetworks align network participants
85.
by astoor 5y ago
web3.js has been around for at least 5 years. Think how much the WWW evolved in that amount of time.
86.
by astoor 5y ago
Putting monetisation before use case, rather than the traditional use case before monetisation, leads to several perversions: - It turns practitioners into "relentless door-to-door salesmen" as you put it, fanatical commission-bas
87.
by astoor 5y ago
The underlying issue is hinted at towards the end: "cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is a relatively recent development ... that may or may not survive". It is not just that it is being confused with something else, but that it
88.
by astoor 5y ago
> "they have good intentions of keeping an important document out of private collector hands" Well, out of other private collector hands, into their own private collector hands. As other commenters have pointed out, the mem
89.
by astoor 5y ago
> "On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. " Centralised "web2" solutions like bandcamp.com give the artist 80-90%. You don't need "web3" to be fairer to artists.
90.
by astoor 5y ago
Well Web 3.0 was originally the semantic web[0]. It began to become the decentralized web, or "re-decentralized web" as Tim Berners-Lee used to prefer, after interest in the semantic web began to fade. The cryptocurrency interest

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