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.
Yes, a point of crypto is to remove the state control that’s been increasing inequality, fueling injustice, destroying the planet, etc.
But no, crypto holders aren’t upset that their holdings are worth so much that they don’t want to spend them.
. . . increasing inequality, fueling injustice, destroying the planet, etc.
This is such an astute and accurate description of crypto and mining. You are a textbook example of projection.
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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.
And for donations to Wikileaks, we don’t want the government to be able to reverse or block them. That’s what PayPal did with then before Bitcoin was invented.
I don’t think that Bitcoin can or should replace the current system, but it can be an addition for rarer cases.
But yes: Most of the other blockchain stuff is just completely useless and therefore not used.
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 😂😅
Let’s ignore crypto for a second…
People in the USA loose around $10.000.000.000 per year to scams according to FTC…
That number would be even higher if everyone used untraceable and non-reversible crypto transactions.
That’s probably true, but just to highlight this: Bitcoin is not untraceable
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.
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
There is literally no bar to people making a web3 website. It’s like complaining that geocities websites didn’t get the traffic of google.
So what makes a site “web3” in the first place?
That you can connect wallets and buy some NFT 🌚(/s)
A website is web3 if it’s enabled to handle crypto(s) and usually crypto contracts.
From the Wikipedia entry:
Specific visions for Web3 differ, and the term has been described by Olga Kharif as “hazy”, but they revolve around the idea of decentralization and often incorporate blockchain technologies, such as various cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).[5] Kharif has described Web3 as an idea that “would build financial assets, in the form of tokens, into the inner workings of almost anything you do online”.
I don’t want financial assets to be created from almost everything I do online!
So it’s not an official standard. It’s a buzz phrase used by people who wanted to make others think “crypto was next gen”
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
Obligatory www.web3isgoinggreat.com - catalogues all of the grifts, hacks and thefts, with a running $$$ total.
Damn all the comments seem to be heavily downvoted for some reason. Interesting. What advantages can blockchain bring you, other than crypto?
It’s pretty good at proving digital chain of custody. You could, for example, handle public records on a block chain.
I’ve been hoping for a game platform that tokenizes game licenses so that we can sell or gift them to others when we’re done with them - basically steam but you own your copy of the game and can sell it on. This is incredibly unlikely to happen though, a secondary market for digital licenses would eviscerate profits.
This is incredibly unlikely to happen though, a secondary market for digital licenses would eviscerate profits.
Licenses as NFTs could have the method youre looking for. When resold, the original creator of the license gets a small cut, usually about 5% of sale price. The vendor website gets tx fees and the seller gets 90-95% of the sale price.
Its a strong model imo.
Why would a game developer want that?
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