But this technology does enable something novel. Digital self-custody of scarce assets is a new thing. A thing that nobody could do before this stuff. And if that has utility, then the infrastructure for trading, lending, and all the rest related to those things has value.
Even if you don't personally find it valuable, it should be clear that it is a thing that people could, in principle, legitimately prefer to traditional systems.
That being said, a huge percentage of what's happening in the space is bullshit, an outright scam or an "essentially scam" project. All those things deserve heaps of scorn and criticism. Investigate Tether, regulate ICOs, do all the things. But don't go so far as to deny that there's anything there, or say ridiculous things like "Web3 is more centralized". Even if it's true that web3 is more centralized than the internet, that isn't the basis of comparison here. Web3 isn't competing with the internet, it's competing with traditional finance. And there should be no question that Web3 is substantially more decentralized than that.
Yet, only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer about all the scams, hype, vaporware, fraud, waste, hacks, speculation, crime and other insanity before proceeding to make an appeal to the nebulous hope of future possibilities, as if cryptocurrency isn't older than instagram....
It's a bit goofy to make the comparison you made - I mean you didn't even finish your thought, you just painted a vague yet intense picture you expect people finish for you with the worst possible outlook. You aren't getting rid of crypto, so you'd do more to actually find out what's wrong with it and offer solutions rather than winging about it and praying for authoritarianism.
In my country, this also describes the day to day situation. You can't trust doctors because they make up diagnoses, people pay taxes but it never shows up in infrastructure, schools or anywhere; daily alerts by banks warning against some new clever form of fraud, until recently there was a fair chance new banks would vanish with customer money (I still only trust a few reputable banks), actual family destroying pyramid schemes, ransoms attached to child kidnappings not data, politicians stealing from their constituents, police not trusted because of lack of transparency and corruption, bribes as a defacto tax.
The combination of high levels of poverty and lack of regulation is what leads to the proliferation of scams and dishonest behaviors. Poverty lowers the threshold of criminality, lack of regulation and lack of an enforced justice system enables its flourishing. Poverty also catalyzes more susceptible victims of such crimes.
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> only in the cryptocurrency debate do defenders have to offer up a disclaimer
Financial activity in crypto lacks regulation, which attracts predators, who create scams that attract the poor who are not necessarily gullible, just gambles from desperation.
> Android or iPhone
In Android vs iPhone or Windows vs Mac, people do argue about vulnerability to malware and the merits and demerits of locked down platforms.
I'd also argue your examples are not appropriate, they're more clashes of belief systems and less people freely interacting in market like scenarios. Consider that kickstarter is rife with vaporware, hype and scams. Scams, fraud and hacks in Roblox and Entropia. Crime, speculation and hacks in Habbo Hotel. Western financial systems discriminate against certain professions and citizens of entire countries due to some cost benefit calculations related to fraud.
If you have a system where money can exchange hands, you'll find psychopaths preying on the poor and careless. Oh and this isn't just poor countries and virtual markets, psychopaths preying on the poor and desperate also occurs for developed countries too (you just give them fancy names like debt bubbles and mortgage crises).
This might sound far-fetched to outsiders, but not so far-fetched to those who have worked inside the industry and seen the waste. I've seen obvious shitcoins repeatedly succeed while legitimate tokens never get any attention. In this industry, you can feel the unlimited currency coming straight off the money printers. It's just like Wall Street Bets in reverse except it's worth over a $ trillion and they're going after regular people instead of big hedge funds.
But in general, a shitcoin is a poorly designed project (or just a clone of an existing project) where the founder sells a lot of their tokens and quits immediately after the initial ITO/ICO sale.
But what really are the "scarce assets" that Web3 is enabling self-custody for? A token on a blockchain that has metadata pointing to a digital file that anyone can view and reproduce? By definition, every NFT is scarce in that each one is non-fungible. But this scarcity doesn't mean there's any meaningful value. An NFT alone doesn't inherently give you ownership of or rights to anything except the token itself.
The minute you want to attach some meaningful rights to an NFT, like legal ownership of the digital or physical asset the NFT points to, or the rights to an income stream produced by such, you have to enter the world of our traditional legal and financial systems.
So while these digital deeds don't seem to have much connection to the analog world, they may not need to, if digital governance comes about.
That being said, I wonder if the main challenge with digital governance is not so much the digital part but the cross-border part. In other words, governments have jurisdiction over physical land and digital interactions transcend those boundaries. I wonder if many of the things people are trying to solve with crypto would be solved if we had more global governance. Global property deeds (right now, typically at most nation-state level, but also can be very local to city level), global currency (de facto USD right now but no official one), global company registration (at most nation-state level, but also lower as well), and global governance (the UN is there and many other standards bodies, but governance of many things still at most at nation-state level).
So, it says to me there's a desire for more global (read: physical borderless) ways to interact, own, and regulate all of that and that much of crypto seems to be the skirting of nation-state laws and almost reinventing governance from scratch.
These unique tokens almost always point to digital files that are accessible to everyone and anyone, and that can be viewed, downloaded and reproduced by everyone and anyone.
To the extent that a person might consider these files are "assets" at all, the bigger issue is that ownership of a non-fungible token is still just ownership of a non-fungible token. It doesn't on its own convey any ownership of or economic interest in the "asset" it points to. If you want the token to convey ownership or economic rights, you're back to the traditional legal and financial worlds Web3 is supposed to be supplanting.
To the extent that a person might consider the NFT itself to be an "asset", the question is where the value is derived if the NFT is merely a pointer to a digital file that you don't have ownership of or an economic interest in.
And that is orthogonal to whether the content is mutable or not. It just means that mutation is deliberate and obvious.
However, theoretically, you could tokenize other assets, like real estate, or intellectual property, and then trade them in a more liquid, global manner than is currently possible. The NFT ecosystem is one of the least developed parts of crypto, though.
If you want an example of tokenized value, just look at stablecoins. Stablecoins are literally tokenized dollars. They allow you to self-custody large amounts of, what is effectively digital cash. That is something you couldn't do before. If you didn't trust banks, you either had to store physical dollars in your home, which is extremely dangerous for a number of reasons, or you had to suck it up and trust them anyway. Crypto gives you a third option.
Possession of a token itself doesn't create legal ownership of a separate asset unless there is a legally-binding instrument that conveys ownership of that asset through possession of the token. To turn tokens into legally-binding instruments of ownership, you're back into the real world of laws, lawyers, financial regulations, etc.
> However, theoretically, you could tokenize other assets, like real estate, or intellectual property, and then trade them in a more liquid, global manner than is currently possible.
This simply isn't true though. Tons of real estate assets are securitized and traded in liquid, global markets. Even average investors can access these markets through REITs.
More esoteric assets, such as music royalty rights, have exchanges like Royalty Exchange[1].
You could of course use the blockchain for these types of things, but just using tokens doesn't absolve you from having to comply with securities regulations. Unfortunately, from what I see, a lot of the people trying to create crypto-based solutions seem to believe that the use of tokens is a "get out of regulation jail free" card.
> If you want an example of tokenized value, just look at stablecoins. Stablecoins are literally tokenized dollars. They allow you to self-custody large amounts of, what is effectively digital cash. That is something you couldn't do before. If you didn't trust banks, you either had to store physical dollars in your home, which is extremely dangerous for a number of reasons, or you had to suck it up and trust them anyway.
Stablecoins claim to allow self-custody of large amounts of basically digital cash. But there are a lot of red flags with stablecoins and I'd humbly suggest that anyone who doesn't trust banks but is willing to trust stablecoins is missing the plot.
Either way, your cash, in whatever form it takes, is at greatest risk because of central bank policy, not how and where your cash is stored. If the USD loses its reserve status, you're going to feel the effects whether you're holding physical dollars or Tether.
There’s a “mind-virus” doing the rounds on the crypto space, the idea that scarce = valuable.
How so?
This is how "web1" operated all the time: People have a cool idea and fire up a webserver to host it. Self-Custody in its purest form.
Sure, others could copy it, but they can also do that with whatever someone generates an NFT for "digital assets" (the certificate cannot be copied, the thing it certifies ownership for can).
As for "scarcity": Digital assets are either shared or scarce, there is no in-between. Distributed Ledgers allowing NFTs make the certificate of ownership scarce, not the asset itself.
Web1 assets are not scarce, that's the difference.
> Sure, others could copy it, but they can also do that with whatever someone generates an NFT for "digital assets" (the certificate cannot be copied, the thing it certifies ownership for can).
Forget NFTs. Go print yourself $1000 USDC and try to exchange it for dollars. The thing that prevents you from doing that - that's decentralized digital scarcity. There is no equivalent on web1.
Of course there is. If the service offered is not just access to some data, but things like computational power, access to a game server, food delivered, etc. I put up a payment system, and unless its used there is no access to the asset.
What form that payment system has, and what tokens it accepts USD, EUR, BTC, Seashells or Sliced Bread, is completely irrelevant.
And someone, somewhere, has the root pwd for that server. There is still a central authority.
That someone decides if the server is up, what code it runs, and how it interacts with voting, contracts, tokens, etc. on the ledger. The only thing in such an environment that is "dezentralized", is the public ledger (aka. the "Blockchain"), where the current state of the tokens, settings, etc. are stored.
If the people running the service decide that whatever is written in that ledger no longer applies to them, it no longer applies, period.
... It gives you a receipt.
A digital receipt. That points to a URL that may or may not exist in 10 years?
Not like a hash would be much better, as changing one pixel would give you a different hash, but at least it would represent a specific version of an image, a URL could change to anything tomorrow.
Proof of provenance is valuable in many, many applications. But anyways, that isn't the point. The type of digital self custody i'm referring to is for things like stablecoins. Stablecoins allow you to self-custody dollars in a way that was not possible before cryptocurrency.
That, doesn't seem very decentralized if it has to pinned to something controlled by one entity?
Ok, so self-custody is that you've not got an account with a bank (a "vault" to keep all your money in) that they ultimately control, you're walking around with a wallet, one with a very secure clasp.
That argument kind of makes sense? But a central authority can still squeeze on you just as much, by targeting who you would trade with though, right? The ledger is public, they know who you traded with, they can make life difficult for them until you're not a customer.
> Why is everyone here so focused on NFTs?
Because that's all we here of {$coinname}Coin and blockchain currently, it is the cultural zeitgeist and the face of the tech to the broad public.
Noone's giving a simple explanation that makes sense and gives the killer app features. It's all marketing hype or five dollar words. It took me a good while to realize that "Stablecoins allow you to self-custody dollars" means "bank can't lock me out of my account"
Ya, it doesn't make you totally immune from squeezing. It just changes the dynamics of how that squeezing works. Essentially, it becomes much less feasible to squeeze people in a scalable way for centralized entities.
> Noone's giving a simple explanation that makes sense and gives the killer app features. It's all marketing hype or five dollar words. It took me a good while to realize that "Stablecoins allow you to self-custody dollars" means "bank can't lock me out of my account"
Ya, I certainly admit the hype and everything else that goes with it around all this stuff is terrible. Crypto is nowhere near as useful as its boosters will tell you. But I do think there is a kernel of something very cool and interesting there.
Self executing and self-enforcing contracts and self custody is a real innovation, especially for people that live under less than stable governments, or have less than stable currencies. People that say this stuff is going to replace the legal system are idiots. It can never do that. But it can take a few superficial legal structures that are currently expensive and messy, and make them a little cleaner, more transparent, and fairer, I think.
If that’s even possible, is it to a single organization with 1:1 reserves in US treasury paper?
If so, how is that more “self-custody” than a bank?
It's unfortunately also pretty much pointless. Digital assets aren't scarce, and physical assets mean leaving the system and losing the properties of it.
I realise there are hypothetical advantages to NFTs over in-game items, but I am not yet sure they will be worth it in the long term.
I see it more as retaining ownership some of the content we produce and happily give to twitter, youtube, facebook etc to monetise and have some more control over it
Things as being able to:
* remove access to site to display my content but still be published somewhere else if I wish to do so
* be able to serve my content to people that prefer to use another tools without relying on twitter to have a public API as long as I granted them access
* get the person getting hits and making money of ads to share some of that with me, or maybe pay my gas fees
* not be shut down because a given site or state decides my content is not worthy of it, they are still allowed to do this, but I could still continue via another "frontend" and people can choose
There are more use cases around this, and there are many gaps yet around the economics of it to make it accessible/free, make it desirable, legality, liability etc which I believe remain to be solved
Right now buying IP rights is a bespoke process involving lawyers. It has very high transaction costs in the Coasean sense. Tokenizing and standardizing these things, and standardizing the way revenue across directly to the rights holder in a way that is agnostic to who the owner is.
This is the value of the decentralized economy. It has the ability to shrink the domain of responsibility for the traditional legal system, and standardize things in a way that simplifies entry for entities that are less legally fluent.
I think an appropriate analogy here would be between the private and public markets. Buying stocks on the public market is easy and simple, because the process is standardized. You don't have to read complex legal agreements or study cap tables. You just click buy. The token economy has similar properties, although all the details of what the best ways to standardize, and what should and shouldn't be standardized, are not yet flushed out.
Now the relationship is the reverse, I give content to some org and they can do as they wish with it; I'm surrending it for them to use in exchange of them allowing me to use their platform for free.
e.g. from Twitter's terms of use:
> By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating).
If the content was hosted somewhere else and then displayed on twitter instead, this would not be the case or I could revoke it in the future but still be able to distribute such content via other means
Now, if I want to use another site then I need to duplicate the content myself.
Since all that they really offer is the userbase/community, its very hard for competitors to come into play and offer better terms or capabilities. In fact, they can change these terms at anypoint and I can do very little about it aside of deleting my account (if they even allow you to do that!)
And you are right twitter can still have that clause, and they can cause they have somethign to offer (i.e. a userbase) but if the content of everyone would be somewhere else other competiors would be able to offer it and then competiion for users would tend to make those terms more accessible to those that care enough to read them.
* you can by doing it as in an event sourcing system. After all blockchains+smart contracts are similar to a giant state machine
This seems incompatible with the goal of control: instead of giving Twitter free rein to reproduce your content however, you’re giving everyone on the internet the ability to do what they want with it, completely unrestricted.
(Yes, you could DMCA then but then the blockchain is useless)
Unless whatever service accessed the tweet/image/text/whatever made a local copy and is displaying that once the "blockchain service" no longer allows access.
An NFT doesn't confer access control. Its a certificate of ownership, the asset itself is infinitely reproducible.
if you are not aware of how something like what I described could work maybe have a read around on some simple smart contracts where there is hidden state (like guess the answer or contracts that implement role access/control for certain features)
Investments happen because people want to make money, end of story. Not to help other people, because that is called charity.
BUT, that doesn't mean that investing is all about scamming people. It is clear at this point that the best investments are the ones that provide actual value to a lot of people.
To conclude: most things are about money, but that doesn't invalidate the value behind it.
And just like the OP, I agree that on HN these discussions always end up nowhere.
"It's all about money, not technology", and when you talk about technology: "It's technology looking for a problem", and then you talk about use-cases: "A centralized system is more efficient".
Question: does being old enough to have lost money* - and having done so** - back in the .com bubble correlate with whether you're positive or negative about Web3 ?
"This Time Is Different" has been said by sales types since at least the year 1637
* Full disclosure: yes, I am
** Full disclosure: yes, I did .. not enough to have mattered, but enough to [still] remember
very curious.
Plus all NFTs are a hilarious game of what marketplace it is published on. Give it 6 months, there will be massive fragmentation of the marketplaces and you'll see "NFT Artists" listing the "Original" on 50 marketplaces at the same time.
That kind of proves that there is no substance behind Web3, other than a hype train, saying that the technology will be useful someday. "get in now before it is too late."
I personally wouldn't know where to point you, and sadly its more likely you too will run into disillusioning use cases from your own exploration (or wind up in a cult to bolster an implementation that is going nowhere). For me, it's been more interesting to accept that no state of the these technologies is set in stone, that I can influence the future state, and that the monetary incentives to build and influence the future state are phenomenal. Better option than smugly exploiting myself at an adtech conglomerate, for less money.
There is room for more specific things to be discussed, like if you look at the frontpage right now, there is a thread about "Deserializing JSON fast" or "A comparison of Rust and Zig". There could just as easily be discussions about "Solidity vs Vyper" or a thread every time a new version of one of those languages used in Ethereum Virtual Machines is out. Or node technology and processing transactions faster. Things that can inspire, but instead we just get these broad think pieces from wannabe angel investors and some influential VCs. As this is what makes it, it shows that this isn't the community to expect a deeper discussion right now.
But the majority of people interested in crypto don’t care about the technology, they are in it to get rich. Articles talking about the new technologies underpinning crypto do exist and get submitted, it’s just that to a rough approximation nobody cares about the actual technology.
Look at the level of discussion bitcoin had when it wasn’t realistically exchangeable for USD. That’s the equivalent level of interest from a pure technology perspective.
All of the noise today (including this article) are about the societal implications of disrupting this or that or enabling some other business/grift that wasn’t possible before. The technology is almost irrelevant at this point.
There I disagree, my news feeds in other places are heavily populated by development discussion, and word travels fast in the crypto-sphere. So aside from noticing that HN consensus is distinctly not part of it, it would be hard for me to agree less or disagree more. But people are here, they just arent the active contributors and arent coordinated to elevate their posts and comments.
For example, I just had the realization that I could learn a new programming language to write smart contracts solely because I dont need to market myself to out-of-touch recruiters and hiring managers. Deploying stuff onchain is lucrative enough. This changes the entire incentive model of a software engineer, or even a founder’s new venture, as both would otherwise need to optimize for new and shiny web 2.0 frameworks just to attract talent or be attractive to the next company.
I’m not saying that you can’t get good RSS feeds, small communities, etc. I’m saying that any discussions about crypto are going to be completely dominated by the people that love/hate crypto fighting over the non-technical aspects.
This isn’t special to hackernews or crypto, it just happens with anything that becomes disruptive in a good and/or bad way to vocal segments of society.
The same thing happens if discussions were to come up about effective mask technology, better abortion methods, gun improvements, etc. The people actually interested and capable of discussing the technology are dwarfed by the people who have feelings they feel compelled to share.
That seems very interesting! But how does deploying stuff on-chain change the calculus? An unknown person with no Twitter following who's not a member of a Yacht Club/other NFT gang can deploy a contract, but getting people to want to use the contract seems to be a problem for a lone-wolf developer.
Or am I only seeing the tip of the iceberg for the ecosystem?
Getting people to use it is not as hard as you think, unless it’s an entirely new concept. Do more of what works and improves people’s experience, undercut fees from existing contracts. Or make a premium version for that audience segment.
AMMs
Farming
Bridges
Wrapping services
Zapping services (wrapping + amm lp + farming in one transaction)
Yield optimizers (slightly solving issue with LP farming and AMMs)
And if you create a token it advertises itself, bots watch for LPs on AMMs to interact and humans notice the interaction, but another area you can compete is based on how community minded the token is, versus obvious self enrichment
I intentionally chose not to make this a primer on all the acronyms
I also scan the blockchains for certain method signatures of previously popular, which appear when they are invoked. So I find copycat contracts this way, which helps me know about new projects and communities.
Either way to your original question: The time to market is extremely short, the funnel is nearly non-existent with crypto natives, and the overhead costs are lower if you can code - all compared to SaaS deployment or being employed by a SaaS service
"But the majority of people interested in TikTok don't care about the technology, they are on it to watch people dance and laugh."
The majority of people on the planet don't care about technology except what it can do for them. Having nuanced discussions about technology usually only interesting to a small subset of people. For many other technologies, HN is a place to have that discussion. But it hasn't been for crypto.
> Look at the level of discussion bitcoin had when it wasn’t realistically exchangeable for USD.
Bitcoin's first block was January 3, 2009. 10,000 bitcoin were famously exchanged for two Papa John's pizzas on May 22, 2010. The first bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, was launched July 18, 2010. So you're talking about a year and a half window since it was first conceived to have such discussion, less than 12% of the entire time bitcoin has been in existence.
And considering the name of the bitcoin paper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", there was probably some talk about it eventually being exchanged for USD right from the start.
> nobody cares about the actual technology
Yeah that's not true. On HN that may be more or less true (although I care about the tech and I'm on HN), but there's plenty of people that care about the tech and are discussing it in other channels.
It's crazy, I've had much deeper discussions about the tech with people who can't even program on channels on Discord than I've had on HN, ever, about this space. I'm still desperately trying to play catchup, they keep dropping articles and talking about things and concepts I haven't heard of before. And intelligently, too, not just "I like the web3 makes me money go fast moon please." like it seems everyone on HN assumes these people think.
There are people legitimately trying to do new and interesting (to me anyway) things with the space, and donating their time and energy and cash to try to build it and make it happen.
It doesn’t matter. My point is that was the only time the discussion was actually dominated by people interested in the technology. It’s a reference to a point in time and the tone of discussion around then. I was in security academia at the time and discussions were level-headed about bitcoin, hash cash, and other digital currencies.
> there was probably some talk about it eventually being exchanged for USD right from the start.
There was, but that wasn’t the technology talk that dominated the discussion. There is a reason it sat around for so long until the famous pizza purchase. It was about the technology at the start.
> Yeah that's not true. On HN that may be more or less true (although I care about the tech and I'm on HN), but there's plenty of people that care about the tech and are discussing it in other channels.
To a rough approximation, it’s about 0% of the people interested in crypto though. There are maybe a few thousand actual active crypto developers (and that’s being generous). The number of people who buy crypto to invest/gamble is now in the millions. The conversations are always going to be dominated by topics surrounding the latter because it’s so controversial.
The only way to get to technical discussions is to weed out the people who don’t like it, so you basically have to stay off any general technology forums (HN, chunks of Reddit, etc).
> And intelligently, too, not just "I like the web3 makes me money go fast moon please." like it seems everyone on HN assumes these people think.
That’s a strawman of crypto detractors. It doesn’t help you to model opposing arguments that way.
> There are people legitimately trying to do new and interesting (to me anyway) things with the space, and donating their time and energy and cash to try to build it and make it happen.
Sure, but pretending to invent an entire new generation of the internet (“web3”) is overly grandiose and the better discussions happen around specific technologies.
So too are the majority of investors in anything there to make money; you think they care about 'The Project' past its profits for shareholders? Developers who are only in it to make money is another thing, but even that group has nuance - some of them understand that the best way to make money long term is to build something valuable, and don't expect to get rich in one month.
As I wrote, I’m acutely aware of the signals for consensus formation, it is important for other people to know what kind of conversation is possible
He says blockchain is logically centralized, which is what this post here is essentially talking about.
https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...
That said, the hype seems a little bit overblown. When people are so focused on "overthrowing Big Tech" as to why web3 will be the next wave, it just seems like hype over substance.
I forgot what the name of it was, but I tried to sign up to some web3 social media site. In order to even post, you had to drop $80 on the relevant crypto to post on the site. I understand the justification but that made me immediately just lost interest in the web3 space. Seems kinda like a pyramid scheme. The people who are already in get richer while the newcomers just get magic beans.
If you go further, the content doesn't need to be a simple url, it could be data of any type. People get stuck on "who needs to pay for url, when I can copy the contents freely", but you're not buying simple url, you're buying a multidimensional point in the current manifestation of what we think as web3/metaverse. This point is the intersection of your private key, Blockchain used and the content(url). This is valuable because none can claim the same point, and it is guaranteed not to change.
But this is useless. The video is available with or without the blockchain. If you have DRM on the video, then you don't even need the blockchain. The blockchain can't actually do anything outside itself, and if you are trusting Metaverse.inc to enforce ownership, why can't you trust them to store it too?
Exciting for who though?
The only party who benefits from resale royalties is the creator of the NFT and/or the beneficiaries they designate. But what value do they offer the buyer and seller to earn this? In almost all cases, the creators of the NFTs aren't conveying any rights beyond ownership of the token itself. They're not even selling ownership of or rights to the digital assets (GIF, etc.) their tokens point to.
When you buy and sell an asset, you might very well pay a fee to a party who facilitates the transaction, like a broker. The fee is to compensate the broker for the value they provided in facilitating a deal. These middlemen are often maligned for the fees they charge even when the facilitation they provide seems minimal but that doesn't mean that giving creators of an asset a perpetual royalty every time the asset is resold is any better.
To me NFT resale royalties are actually one of those things that look worse than traditional finance. Imagine if a company sold stock to the public and as part of the deal, stipulated that each time a share was sold, it would receive a royalty of 10% of the new share price. Would buyers and sellers see that as a benefit or predation? And at least in the case of company stock, your share would give you actual ownership of a piece of the company and rights that come along with ownership.
With NFTs, you just get a token with a pointer to a digital asset that isn't yours. And for that, you might get to pay the NFT creator a "royalty". I haven't seen any articulation of why this is a good thing.
I don't want a "pro-crypto" echo chamber, but I also don't want what hn devolves into whenever these topics are brought up.
If you manage to find this reasonable place, please, please post it here as reply to your comment. I've favorited your comment and will check any replies to it for a month or two.
What a pity :(
When there is literal money involved with <insert any topic> I think it's basically impossible to have a forum that is unbiased. Good luck.
My two favorites are:
helium where they build IoT global network, I use a helium GPS-alternative tracker for my moto which costs 10 times less than GPS tracker.
scPrime (although there are other storage alternatives) which build global S3-compatible storage using available disk space on HDs. There is a lot of real estate that is sitting right now that can be harvested for money easily with networks like this.
It essentially operates as a unregistered and unregulated ISP and that isn’t something to be taken lightly. It does that by pushing all legal and regulatory liability to operators. There’s also a lot of scams with operators faking their signal etc.
Running a node also likely violates your ISPs ToS - can you contractually resell bandwidth?, so it has similar concerns as what AirBnB etc for the housing market.
There’s nothing stopping something large ISPs from blocking Helium traffic and/or suspending customers for running a node. Alternatively, if this gets big enough, you’ll see ISPs offer LORA hotspots of their own.
Ultimately, it is a very much VC-funded company running regulatory arbitrage on a global scale by using crypto instead. It’s the same if Uber decided to pay drivers in UberBucks a decade ago - that doesn’t change the offering, it just makes it easier to scale while pushing off any regulatory liabilities (including taxation).
As far as I can see there are currently 19 approved device manufacturers [0].
> It essentially operates as a unregistered and unregulated ISP and that isn’t something to be taken lightly. It does that by pushing all legal and regulatory liability to operators. There’s also a lot of scams with operators faking their signal etc.
Scams faking their signal will only help improve the robustness of the network on the long run as these are fixable issues.
Regulation seems to be spurring on every web3 conversation. I believe regulation is lagging behind user adoption and is a pending conversation. As for the exact scenario (LORA network) what kind of regulation do we __want__ the network to have? I don't think blocking user traffic is something we want to have, as an example you mentioned with current ISPs.
This isn’t about Web3 though - Starlink for eg started accepted beta signups in India without a ISP license and was forced to go back on that. This is exactly kind of regulatory questions that Uber brought with it and it deserves the same level of scrutiny. Uber for eg, was forced to get a Taxi license in various jurisdictions.
Nice to see that they have more manufacturers though.
The ethereum developers mailing list or something, I'd expect? I agree with your sentiment, I find the cutoff is "programming crypto stuff" vs "not doing that".
Actually I find the same is true of AI, if you don't know how to train a classifier or what a vector space is, your comment about AI is probably dumb.
Everyone's got opinions I guess, I just find builders have more varied, interesting things to say.
If crypto is a thing, then I'm really wondering what happened in 2018 - 2020.
When it went from 20 k to 4,5k.
Everyone always seems to be forgetting this.
It took a pandemic to get crypto interest back up.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
Ps. With crypto, i just think we are in a loop where the end result is failure. And the news flow/discussions are literally the same as in 2017 but with more buzzwords that even techies don't understand it anymore without spending ( significant) time investigating it. The average population doesn't really care and i need more arguments than "i think it's a thing".
Just like in 2017, one of the main problems is that the people vested in crypto want to convince people that don't care. And because of their money involved, they can't let it go.
Eg. The surreal spectacle of a president 'fixing' his country by shouting: "bought the dip" on Twitter every month.
Also for the web 3, i don't really see a reason for it. They claim decentralization, but if you look at eg. OpenSea, the power is not with the "people" and it's really expensive to "mint".
But yet the money continues to flow in. People who know nothing about technology in general are now investing in companies specializing in this technology. Why? Clearly, there's something there. Or maybe there really isn't. And this is the biggest grift ever seen. All led by ridiculous marketing.
I really do think this is all going to collapse. There's no way this clown car just continues endlessly without some repercussions.
When there is just so much on a flawed concept, you cannot expect discussion to keep rehearsing the same old "Web3 is a scam" talk, and seeing its promoters discourages further from any healthy discussion.
> Eschew flamebait.
People that don't have money to lose have massive FOMO.
Thus, two very split sides.
Personally I have to fight my own rising blood temperature to even discuss it as being “a thing”, because people have such fundamentally different views on what that thing is, and I believe the argument is made in bad faith (not by you or your comment by the way, just in general).
Adherents would have you believe that the current price, whatever it is at a given point, must mean some variant of “can all these people really be wrong? That’s ridiculous”. It’s not a reasonable starting point for a discussion, and then it immediately breaks down again.
The tldr of it is that to have a discussion we’d need to agree a common set of facts as a starting point.
To me, it’s a collection of distributed ponzi schemes based on signed linked lists, but it seems the whole world wants to agree that regardless of whether or not cryptocurrency is the future of money, blockchain is a really transformative and revolutionary breakthrough without any evidence to support that claim.
Also stop trying to make fetch happen.
But it is reasonable to dismiss the whole field because you think it's a scam? Please read what you write before you post, as this is meaningless and illogical.
What I wrote is absolutely logical as best I can tell. I didn’t say it’s a scam (although that community is riddled with those too). I said it’s a collection of ponzi schemes (for which there is far more evidence to support than it being a financial revolution).
Charles Ponzi genuinely believed he had revolutionised finance, too.
All you’ve essentially said here is “Lots of people hyping on social media, therefore no scam, shut up fool”.
I do not believe the majority of people in the cryptocurrency space are attempting to harm anyone.
To your question, I like https://www.rekt.news/
I’d start there.
The latest buzz, like Ethereum is on NFTs. Not a fan myself. I hold hbars, but wanted to share one example.
https://medium.com/hashgraph/formal-methods-the-importance-o...
It's a pity because I'd love to hear quality thought on the space.
My personal view is that crypto and Web3 "are a thing" (Mean Girls) and will continue to be a thing. But the sector is very very new, and supercharged by capital, leading to tumerous horrors. People get burnt, robbed, and jealous, and it leads to nasty feelings.
I find the space interesting and exciting, over all. Also massively frustrating of course. But I try to judge all things not by the worst cases of them (Daniel Dennet - I.e. cars are often good, they aren't always murder boxes). Looking at good examples also gives perspective on what work still needs to be done in the rest.
Can someone recommend places to read or be involved in non partisan discussion about these topics?