Turns out the one thing Blockchain is good at, building out decentralized strings of commonly agreed upon immutable transactions, is actually not that useful. For small items we need an “undo” button because people make sloppy mistakes or get scammed, for large items we want the government to act as enforcer of the property (house, dollars, car) in question so it doesn’t actually help us to decentralize.
I was originally interested in crypto because I wanted to know how it managed to make truly decentralized, permissionless, peer-to-peer transactions possible. After I learned about how it did all that, I also learned three things:
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decentralized transactions are useless when so much of our economy leverages centralized transactions built around existing payment systems.
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permissionless transactions are useless when governments are ultimately in control of payments, and have the right to restrict certain payments regardless of how they are made.
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peer-to-peer transactions are useless when the currency is in so much investment demand that the price spikes, and nobody wants to spend it because it’s a StOrE oF vAlUe (and because of the tax implications)
So the crypto movement demonstrated it is possible to make a platform to transact on that is free of any reliance on any intermediary, but in practice so much of our existing commerce relies on intermediaries that removing all of them causes more problems.
The way I view it is that to eliminate that one con, you have to willingly give up on all the pros. Which is a ridiculous proposition in any scenario.
I honestly think that if the price of Crypto weren’t so darn high, a better ecosystem would have developed around it and it would at least still be useful for payments. But since it is so high, anyone who has any crypto would be nuts to spend it.
Some people hold up the pizzas bought with 10000 BTC as some sort of cautionary tale, because if the guy had held on to the BTC he would have hundreds of millions of dollars right now. But not only was 10000 BTC only worth the price of two pizzas then, nobody back then really knew where the project was going. Certainly no one thought one BTC would ever be worth even $1000 unless BTC transaction adoption really took off. But here we are.
(Plus, I doubt the guy spent his only Bitcoin on pizza for someone else. Someone who had 10K BTC to spare in 2010 likely had a lot more, too. He is probably not eating instant ramen unless he wants to.)
To be fair, there are some services you can get with crypto (I have used those myself), and people (especially Monero community) are promoting a sorta-circular economy with it.
Monero has the additional draw for people who want their transactions really private, not just pseudonymously private. And the fact that some of those private uses may be unseemly I think keeps the VC money out of it. Which is a good thing.
You are much more likely to spend Monero because nobody expects it to get to $1000 or higher unless all of crypto goes up as well. So it is much more likely to get a robust transaction infrastructure.
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It’s good for certificate revocation lists. But “Web 3.0” was utter bullshit from the start.
I can’t think of one time it was brought up where I couldn’t answer, “I can do the same thing with web 2.0 + federation and/or self-hosting”.
Exactly, web3 is such crap honestly
No, it turns out that a lot of people have jumped on this particular bandwagon and most of it is crap. I’d be surprised if this is much different than the distribution of non-blockchain and non-web3 websites, most of them get very few visitors.
This has nothing to do with blockchain as a technology, but copycats being cheap enough to create that a lot of people create them.
Well, it would be a way for government to gain trust again through proofed transparency after they fucked up. Given the people under that government understand how blockchains work, I guess
But either the government blockchain can get forked/modified by people with enough resources, in which case it’s not reliable, or it is certifiably controlled by the government in which case there’s no point to it being blockchain.
Only if you make a system with POW and miners. With a DAG it should be possible to create a network where for example every person that issues a transaction (saving stuff into chain) validates two or more previous transactions on their device (or node if you run your own) using either PoW or PoS depending on what you want to achieve.
I don’t think I understand the use case you just described. Can you explain further?
Like a way to make whole democratic government digital to achieve a more efficient political system. In my country we have a democracy but it is sooo slow, every decision needs years and like a ton of paper, which seems not very sustainable to me.
You can add undo buttons and use escrows, reputation systems, etc.
Obligatory www.web3isgoinggreat.com - catalogues all of the grifts, hacks and thefts, with a running $$$ total.
Scrolling through that website is just “Hmm, I think I see a pattern here” every time it comes up. Also I rediscovered the term “disgorgement” so that’s also a win.
This is amazing, how have I never heard about this before??
I guess most people know a scam when they see one. More than I thought
Even if you were extremely generous and didn’t factor in the scams in your analysis, the reality is that a Blockchain solves problems 99.9% of people will never face. This breaks the whole imagined model, when your product is ultra niche but relies on mass adoption for its security.
I still hope that it can be used to make efficient transparent democracy somehow 😂😅
There’s no benefit there that would be useful to anyone. If you need a public ledger then you can just do that and skip the crypto BS
Yea, I was talking about a public ledger where the people ruled by the government host nodes and verify that laws and other stuff decided by the government are all stored there to make it harder for politicians to lie because everyone has the truth and can verify it.
Well something like this, I am not an expert in this, but I can imagine it having a use case there
I am an expert in this and cryptographic chaining of a public ledger is like large language models, interesting but ultimately useless.
I would not say that LLM are useless, just a bit overhyped
I am way more efficient in learning to code having this text bot give me explanations e.g. what which kernel API does
But you have to check to make sure the chatbot isn’t hallucinating the answers it gives you, so you could be even more efficient by just looking it up in the first place and skipping the extra step.
Even if you were extremely generous and didn’t factor in the scams in your analysis, the reality is that a Blockchain solves problems 99.9% of people will never face. This breaks the whole imagined model, when your product is ultra niche but relies on mass adoption for its security.
It’s lile 5 years and I still have not seen one good use case for blockchain except cryptocurrencies.
Even that use case seems almost meaningless, as most people store their crypto in centralised exchanges.
the security of a blockchain in directly tied to the number of users actively participating. You need to incentivize users to keep participating indefinitely. You do this by rewarding them with something that they value. As the number of users dwindles, so does the network’s security. So how can a blockchain work on anything that isn’t a cryptocurrency? If it’s not a currency, then it can’t be used to motivate people to participate in the network. After all, you are spending real money to pay for the electricity to mine. If there’s nothing to pay you back with, that’s just money out of your own pocket. Who the hell would accept such a deal?
0.95% of these companies, which is only 64 in total, pull in a massive 461 million visits a month combined. In comparison, the vast majority, the other 99.05%, only get a total of 87 million visits. This huge difference highlights how a small number of companies dominate web traffic in the blockchain sector.
So much for decentralization
So what makes a site “web3” in the first place?
That you can connect wallets and buy some NFT 🌚(/s)
Your description is accurate. No need for that /s
What a surprise!
Maybe I’m too jaded but I couldn’t have imagined a different future for blockchain tech. It’s just so… Profoundly meaningless and inefficient.
One of the rare things I admire about cryptobros is how ambitious and optimistic they remain despite absolutely no one using their “revolutionary” web3 product
i mean i guess thats one way to put it
