The original promise of the Internet and Web 2.0 had clear use cases, where you could understand and appreciate the improvements to every day life. There’s no denying that there were grifters there, and the whole thing got a little hot with dot com bubble. But, on the whole, the potential could be seen.
Just as calculators made lives better in the 70s and 80s, spreadsheet as well, there was a natural and relatable drive to incorporating more technology. I don’t see any of that with the web three.
In those early days where it was pretty much just irc and bbs's it was pretty hard to see any kind of value for most people.
I also remember a time when people would essentially complain about ".com" do you remember this? "Commercials. Billboards. Everybody has a dot com now!" That feels a bit like the complaining about Blockchain now to me and I tend to see it as a pretty good sign.
I don't actually know very much about blockchain / smart contract stuff. I've been digging into it lately because it seems like there could be something interesting there. If there is, I haven't really found it just yet.
This is compounded by the fact that the people who promote Bitcoin the most in my personal circles are known to be experts in wishful thinking and outlandish claims about the world in general.
Having said that, smart contracts are actually really cool. In practice a bank is probably just as good in the developed world but — darn it, I want to make clever money programs too. Also, there are alt coins that have much better privacy preserving properties and superior (energy efficient) consensus algorithms so there are still reasons to be hyped. It’s just that most of the web3 stuff doesn’t seem to touch the actually interesting possibilities in favor of ‘go blockchain, Bitcoin to the moon!’
I don't agree that it was hard to understand the value of services like electronic mail, forums or text chat. People may have been confused about how these services worked, or how they could personally use such services. But in a world where the best way to contact someone far away was an expensive telephone call, it was easy to spend two minutes talking to someone and have them understand the value of cheap, near-instant text-based communication.
It's really hard to explain the value of "web3" in a two minute conversation because almost everything it lets you do is either i) something most people don't actually want to do, or ii) something people can already do in a much easier and user-friendly way
Blockchain does not do too much to eliminate scalpers. One could easily make thousands of wallets, buy the tickets and then resell them. What stops scalpers is tickets tied to personal identity, and blockchain can't really tie wallets to personal identity without a central physical authority.
> Visa and Mastercard will most likely be replaced
Visa and Mastercard won't be replaced as long as cryptocurrencies do not provide fraud protection or chargebacks (that seems a little bit impossible given the irreversibility of crypto transactions) or credit lines that require less than 100% collateral.
For Visa: Smart contracts that hold the money for 30 days and a real-world interface for customer service (new companies will be borth to offer this I bet) will mean lower fees.
Except for the fans that couldn’t get a ticket because it’s the first time they do and they go to the back of the line, or the ones that sold a ticket because they couldn’t attend and now they can’t buy tickets.
> Smart contracts that hold the money for 30 days and a real-world interface for customer service (new companies will be borth to offer this I bet) will mean lower fees.
Which means a 30-day payment lag for everyone and is far more prone to abuse if the client can unilaterally charge back any transaction. Also doesn’t help when credentials are stolen.
For the payment lag, that's what we have now with Visa/MC. No difference.
The most obvious/safe method is also the most cumbersome: Require name/DOB when buying the tickets, do not allow changing it, and check everyone’s ID at the gate.
Further, it is probably in the interest of both the performer and Ticketmaster to allow “safe” scalping (like Ticketmaster Resale).
(Fixing Ticketmaster with Web3 is like fixing DRM on Steam with NFT’s…)
I guess, except that it's centralized. So one can only build "reputation" with that one saas at a time. If I can show I'm a fan of XYZ band, any ticketing service can see that and treat me differently.
Why is this better?
Receipts on the blockchain is just another push toward purchases being "renting access" instead of "owning stuff I can resell anonymously."
I can think of very few transactions that I want permanent and signed and public. The fewer the better imo.
For sure. That's a problem with public blockchains that we'll wrestle with soon enough. They are presented as being more private when in fact they are more public, and certainly once some big exchange is compromised someday.
I think we'll see more from private currencies like Monero, since they're kind of what bitcoin was marketed as. Cheap, private digital currency.
Let people decide for themselves where to pay attention to? I remember "Internet" receiving a lot of hype in 1998 when most of the people didn't have any clue about what that actually entailed.
> The original promise of the Internet and Web 2.0 had clear use cases, where you could understand and appreciate the improvements to every day life
Hahaha, but no. Where I was in 1998, hardly anyone had any idea what Internet was about and yet there was a lot of hype. In the early days, I remember using it only for porn, random email forwards and chats. The way I use it now (searching for anything and everything, buying majority of the stuff I need, payments of all kinds, investments, ...) was unimagined.
> I don’t see any of that with the web three.
Have you ever considered that you could be wrong and that in a couple of decades, there might be something really interesting out of Crypto / Web3?
How is an international currency (or currencies) allowing direct peer-to-peer transactions without the need of middlemen or central authorities not a clear use case with a potential to improve at least some people's everyday lives? What's more everyday than money?
Most web3 stuff runs on Ethereum, which is the second-biggest energy consumer in crypto. Bitcoin is the biggest and has no plans to move to proof-of-stake, but isn't really involved in web3.
Ethereum's proof-of-stake protocol has been running in parallel for a year with billions of dollars in real ETH deposited, and for the merged system there's a multi-client testnet running.
There's a big difference between "we have a design worked out and think it will take this long" and "we've been running the new system in production for a year, merging it with the old system is relatively easy, and we've got all the clients running the merge together on a public test network." Historically, anything they've gotten to the point of a multi-client testnet has taken well under a year to go live.
2018, it's been 18 months away since 2014.
It's been delayed before, but hopefully it happens this time. I don't own any, but it would be nice for GPU prices to normalize and the environmental cost would go down substantially.
When we're talking about web3, we're generally talking about Ethereum: https://web3js.readthedocs.io
> Is most of it a scam? Sure.
I appreciate your honesty, but HN is not just about tech. We are humans first of all. If a new tech is used mostly to scam people, you can't be surprised most people here won't appreciate it, whether it's fresh or not.
Also, the aspect of novelty fades in time. XML was a novel thing back in the day, too. But scams do have real, negative consequences on people's lives.
Is blockchain-related projects actually "mostly" used to scam people though? When the internet first appeared, plenty of people made claims that the internet would just be used for crime and scams, but eventually came to realize the value of it, as the use-cases grew month by month.
Same for me. I'm programming Web3 and Solidity contract interactions. It's just refreshing to have a new aspect (contracts and money) that you can easily interact with now.
I agree with the comments condemning the resource consumption. I also see big problems with the resulting loss of control over currencies that governments could face. I'm trying to be a part of this development because if it doesn't go away, these systems could be a defining part of the future. But if I'm honest, I'd like crypto in most of its current form to go away - it's very likely that it can damage democracies and we're currently already busy saving our democratic processes from social media, inequality and manipulation. Maybe crypto has a solution to these problems, but currently I'm not convinced. I've talked to founders of the biggest crypto currencies and the vision of most of them is highly anarchistic and idealistic (a DAO as a government replacement, taxes will be paid in a voluntary form or something like that) which makes me deeply sceptical. But maybe that's just me being uncomfortable that a multi-billionaire is explaining to me how he wants to change how the world is governed.
I agree. This is something that I'm not sure people who go into crypto fully understand with the resulting consequences. The FED is basically printing money and I can understand people who don't agree with the inflationary mechanism that is built into fiat currencies - this is one of the main criticisms of the fiat system because it's debt-based.
On the other hand, having no means to get taxes (because of anonymous currencies like Monero and anonymous wallets) and having no control over the currency is a safe way to a plutocracy. Some would argue that we're already living in a plutocracy, but currently we have democratic ways to intercept (although we're currently not good at exercising that power). But if it's technologically impossible to intervene, there's not a lot of ways to fix this.
Good article about this [1].
[1]: https://medium.com/@dionyziz/blockchains-are-inherently-plut...
But now, they can hide enormous wealth in an untraceable way on many wallets. It's not entirely new - tax evasion is as old as taxes - but it's easier and accessible now for large wealth that was more difficult to hide in the past. If crypto stays legal, you can't control this aspect.
> buying things directly with crypto will become more widespread
I'm expecting this to be the case if adoption happens.
Then what is Web3? Cryptocurrency has been a thing for a little while now, surely Web3 isn't just that but with a new name. I think the idea is that applications can in some way utilize the blockchain to form a new type of application for the web, but I've yet to see any useful application ideas that truly benefit from a blockchain.
The runners-up can just launch their own $hitcoins and be kings in their own domains.
And I don’t really care if any of it takes off. I have no interest in crypto or the politics surrounding all of this.
For me, it’s something new and interesting. It’s like the Wild West. It has some energy behind it.
Is most of it a scam? Sure. But will we learn anything from it? Hopefully. I think of it like Product Hunt. 99% of the projects will fail, but 100% of the people probably learned something useful.