The relentless number of anti-crypto and anti-web3 articles on HN is tiring. Nobody is forcing anyone to partake in this new technology. Skepticism is healthy, but criticism without being constructive is not.<p>There are clearly _some_ novel ideas in the crypto space, even if you think the state of the community today is not healthy. Thousands of teams are exploring ideas on many different fronts (e.g. L1s, L2s, NFTs). Most of them will fail and be forgotten, but there is a chance that _some_ of them will create genuinely novel and interesting products. Isn't that what Hacker News should be about?
Crypto has only existed during the greatest and longest bull market of all time. Jury is still out on whether it can survive a prolonged bear market.<p>Web3 consequently is also bound by this. If people are still interested in Web3 when crypto goes down 10% YoY forever then maybe there’s some inherent value there.
Serious question: What problem does web3 or decentralization fix?<p>- Oligopoly of the hyperscalers -> rent server from small provider like ovh/hetzner/netcup (there is plenty).<p>The reason AWS, Azure and GCP are so popular is because people don't care.<p>- Privavy intrusions -> Adblocker/DNS Blocker/Turn off JS/Use browser settings<p>This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist because there is a demand.<p>So what is being fixed?
The evidence to support the claim is pretty weak, basically there's some more anti-crypto blogposts and documentaries out. I could easily make an article with the reverse claim and point out the pro-crypto blogposts and documentaries.
It’s pretty cool that I can send $1M to someone without a bank intervening, not to mention that nobody can stop the transaction from happening. And then they can print that out onto a sheet a paper and put it into a vault.<p>Crypto is really great if you’re a drug dealer or some other kind of criminal.
I highly recommend Dan Olsen's documentary mentioned in the article. You'll have far more situational awareness after watching it.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g</a>
Pretty sure this is because markets are going down. if/when prices go up again headlines will be skepticism disappears as people get into crypto again.
Help me out here…<p>Does it matter?<p>It feels like most web3 discussion is just discussion and none of the core parts exist at all…. and some folks just threw nfts and crypto currency into the bucket to have something concrete to point to.<p>I don’t have a problem with discussion about meta discussion but I’m also skeptical that it matters/ that this is just meta about meta …. with nobody doing any of this web3 stuff.
Free markets and network effects leads to the accumulation of wealth and power by the few. Piketty did the hard work of documenting this. Getting away from theory and into business strategy, network effects are an often discussed strategy in start-up culture to become a "unicorn". What is a unicorn? Usually the winner of a battle to seize a market leveraging "disruption" brought on by new technology.<p>A truly decentralized, unregulated network will therefore lead to more power being seized by fewer. That is, a decentralized financial network will tend to lead towards the centralization of the value represented within that network. Without the ability for democracy to step in and regulate that network.<p>Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are an inherently anti-government project, through placing all governments in a single authoritarian perspective and insisting that they must be decentralized; "crypto" is fundamentally anti-democratic. Throwing the baby out with the bath water.
On this note. This recent video is probably the most detailed and incisive critique of cryptocurrency and NFTs that I've seen: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g</a><p>It not only covers the technical limitations, but also the ideological flaws.
If anything the equity collapse happening in real time and in crypto might allow for the hype to deflate and something valuable to grow. Think of it like the regrowth in a forest. Hopefully all the hucksters will be so burnt that they won't touch the space again allowing space for those projects people deem to be valuable to grow. It sounds naive, but maybe thats the way forward.<p><i>that's my hopefully take</i>
People like sdiehl and molly white are getting 100x their normal engagement sharing unresearched crypto hitpieces in the same way NFT bros are making 3 mill for a low effort monkey picture. its just the thing that all these people attach themselves to right now.
A simple maxim: web3 cannot succeed when the underlying currency is a good investment.<p>Actual web3 users, if they exist, have to convert IRL money to coin to power a dApp. Thus, the price of coin rising against IRL money represents inflation in the cost of using the dApp.<p>In this fashion, web3 is similar to housing. The enthusiasts want it to be a great investment, but to be best for fulfilling human needs it should be a poor investment. The only difference is you can’t opt out of needing shelter.
The article ends with:<p>>>Even with the increased amplification of skepticism, the crypto and Web3 space continue to grow rapidly. Only time will tell if we will have a new decentralized blockchain-based utopia or if the skeptics were correct all along.<p>So basically, this is now just falling off the "Peak Of Inflated Expectations" into the "Trough of Disillusionment" on the Gartner Technology Hype Cycle graph[0][1].<p>Perhaps notable that it is going through the cycle so quickly. I expected a more substantive analysis, but it seems to be merely pointing to the name-calling ("a solution in search of a problem". "con job") of a few skeptics.<p>Actually I now recall lasers being called "a solution in search of a problem" for several decades, but now they are ubiquitous, although it does mean that the initial laser manufacturers were not necessarily the big winners.<p>[0] <a href="https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/research/images/illustrations/researchmethodology-illustration-hype-cycle.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/research/image...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle" rel="nofollow">https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...</a>
My vague understanding is Web3 will be distributed assets being loaded by people who have wallets that can receive small funds for distributing them and users that have wallets that can receive a split of the proceeds from providers that are orchestrating ideas+assets into user data that is valuable for marketers.<p>I don't actually see why people are skeptical of this, people who don't care about "data ownership", "distributed web", etc have incentive by some "free" money, decent amount of political incentive for some people to move to less "centralized" authorities of discussion and online socializing, and a growing political incentive for "privacy and ownership of your own data".<p>Whether you care or agree that it's a problem, or if it's solving any of the issues and arguments has very little bearing on actual adoption of this stuff when being able to get "paid" (even in shitcoins) for seeing ads/seeding assets/doing computations when AFK, is alluring and marketable to a lot of people and I think there are enough smart folks that want to figure out a way to get a more distributed web along with a profit model that I don't know if i'm as bearish on this iteration of "web3" as the comments on HN tend to portray.
I disagree with the article.<p>> [...] as crypto becomes more mainstream and people experience its downsides, critics' warnings are starting to be heard.<p>I'm not sure that public sentiment is actually being measured or is shown to be changing, or at least there's no evidence presented here.<p>The biggest thing happening right now is the selloff, and I think that's happening due to the economic headwinds that face all asset classes. Look at the stock market - it's not doing any better.<p>It looks like we're in for an extremely rough 2022, and people are selling off their crypto (and everything they can) to prepare for the storm. 7% inflation on cash is nothing compared to the loss in equity valuations. Now is the time to hold cash.<p>(I'm a crypto skeptic, so don't take this as a defense of crypto.)
Yet another friendly reminder that only Bitcoin is real decentralized and freedom empowering finance.<p>Saying that you cannot participate is reaching the same level of saying that you cannot participate in the use of the internet. In ten years or so, you'll likely be having to use Bitcoin whether you stand against it now or not. Just as someone that said the internet was a scam or a fad back in 1999-2003 era of the web.<p>People who are anti-cryptocurrency often like to conflate Bitcoin with all these other scam coins. It's true that all of them are a scam besides bitcoin and that none of them have security or decentralization. There is only Bitcoin. It does not matter what is agreed upon, only the truth matters. Only the math matters. Only code matters.
I like crypto, at least it's interesting. But what still annoys me is that I have to pay so much for sending money. It's hilarious, SEPA and other methods are cheaper. I bet Western Union is cheaper, and they have airport prices...
A healthy criticism of things is great, however, I feel context needs to be brought to the table too. What is this Bitcoin being compared against?<p>We need to understand the current fiat system, how is fiat money is made? How exactly is the USD brought into the world?<p>Many of you might be quite shocked on how the current system works, all based on debt, or just arbitrary printed to suite the needs of big government. Its quite interesting. Did you know 40% of all USD in existence was create last year based on nothing for instance?<p>Fiat, and crypto have their merits, and failures. Some obvious issues, others underlying, and needing to be addressed.
I would separate the crypto craze from Web3 to be honest. On its face it doesn't really have to do with crypto currency at all. A centralization is otherwise no really desirable for many users.
Web3 is distributed DNS. You own a pointer to an asset, and you can sell that pointer to other people.<p>The DNS was a pretty big deal. There are some people who think that web3 is a pretty big deal as well.
Diehl regularly neglects disclosing his conflict of interest when railing on crypto - he is CTO of a centralized block chain company that will be selling to governments and central banks.
Is it possible to have a decentralized country?<p>Take the united states... people are basically free to sneak in, without becoming residents, without "downloading the American OS into their brains" aka citizenship.<p>Now, what if all countries allowed this? Or, what if a "decrentralized country" offered citizenship with no actual geographic location?<p>Does American citizenship offer people benefits overseas? For example hostage situations? What if there was a better, decentralized country, that would come to your aid?
I am confident that people's concerns about crypto's impact on the environment is simply jealousy masked by virtue. What they are saying when they say "ban crypto" is actually - let's bankrupt these bastards who made all this money off crypto. Jealousy is a powerful force.
The part I don't understand about the crypto fear-uncertainty-doubt crowd is how binary they think the outcomes are going to be<p>NFTs - yes you can right click and save as. No they haven't figured out at scale how to attach the image / work to the ledger. Yes hype and pyramiding is a fucking disaster and people would go to prison trying those antics in any other industry. But digital art, music, & culture has a real deficit in ownership, provenance, etc.<p>Cryptocurrency - Yes there is pyramiding and wash trading galore. Maybe tether has inflated the entire market by a million percent. Yes proof of work uses too much energy. But gov't money printing, censorship, property rights, transfer complexity etc has left a vaccum for something that even resembles a currency that serves the individual.<p>As others have noted many times over we are very early, it is unlikely that we've yet seen what will be a broadly used solution but there is real product market fit here already illustrating massive demand.<p>On HN in particular how do you build something to serve to that end?
The whole point of crypto is putting back trading in the hands of the people, rather than let banks, funds and other institutions be in control.<p>In practice it results in one of the biggest retail markets. That's good for everyone involved.
This is why we launched leatherboundledger.com if NFTs have value on their own their should be appetite too store their ownership the old fashioned way.
All this FUD is some ludite commie nonsense.. its one thing to see articles and stuff like this written by the bbc or something but tech people? Really?<p>You guys don't see how solving byzantines general problem is ground breaking?
You guys don't see any potential in decentralised networks resistant to sybil attacks?
No value in being able to "own" things in the digital world?
You guys couldn't imagine any uses for something like Zero Knowledge Proofs?<p>Its just stupid. Most of you guys are over payed dorks who lack any sort of vision or imagination..<p>You don't need to be genius to see that we are in a euphoric bubble when jpegs of apes as selling for millions and its pretty cool to point out/warn people of the scammers and charlatans in this space.. but to dismiss the cambrian explosion of innovation happening here..<p>I mean.. I'm baffled.. tech people? I know this sounds harsh but the sheer stupidity in a phrase like "blockhains are a solution in search of a problem"...