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.)
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.
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.
Crypto actually is really useful for evading the law, yes, and so it’s good for donating to underground organizations (or to buy drugs or illegal services)
But that’s about the only real use-case as far as I can tell
Crypto actually is really useful for evading the law
That’s the only use case I’ve heard that makes sense. To be clear, sometimes it’s moral to break the law, but still…
This came up in an episode of Cartoon Avatars and the specifics were basically, “I’m fleeing from my country and want to bring all my wealth with me over state boundaries without the possibility of it being stolen en route”.
Yes, sometimes it is good to evade the law, because the law might be immoral, for one reason or another, and ranging in severity from not being able to buy weed that helps you, to not being able to flee from a country that might kill you
So there is some legit and morally acceptable use-cases for crypto, but still, it’s not much
I agree that it’s not much. That was my attempt at steel manning crypto’s use case. The single one I know of that makes even a little sense. 99% of it is bullshit.
with Monero there’s also the use case of just, paying for things. it’s like cash but digital because it can’t be tracked. The issue with Monero is that it uses a lot of energy per transaction, a lot less than Bitcoin but still a lot. This would go down if more people adopt it tho iirc
Well, there are countries like Turkey with a currency that lost 95% of its value during the last 10 years. In such countries, Bitcoin is a way to have a currency that does not have a guarantee to ruin you. When your country has 60% inflation like Turkey, the deflation currency might be seen as a gift. So, this might be a legal use case…
Alternative monetary systems that allow local communities to create elastic money based on trust or assets.
If you can rally a local community behind you, it’s better to look beyond the limitations and negative influences of money
Well that’s what an alternative monetary systems are.
Like local exchange trading systems with a local currency.
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??
Damn all the comments seem to be heavily downvoted for some reason. Interesting. What advantages can blockchain bring you, other than crypto?
Cryptobros are mad people have realized they’re full of shit
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.
I can’t help but throw this down here:
FUCKING STOP LIMITING DIGITAL ASSETS WITH LICENSES.
Digital is the only realm where you can make FREE* copies of EVERYTHING**. Why do people argue for making additional limitations of such capabilities is beyond me.
I know why companies and rich people want to create artificial scarcity even in the digital world. And I guess some poor shmucks think they can get richer, but it’s not true.
So stop with the ‘dEcEnTrAlIzEd OwNeRsHiP lOdGeR’ bullshit, and enjoy the FREE* copies of everything we have.
- Copies take space and (usually) internet traffic, so they incur costs. But those are negligible, as we use those anyway. I’m not going to elaborate on how to support the creators, and crypto won’t solve it
** Fuck DRM, avoid shit that comes with it, even Steam if possible
I buy a short $5 indie game. I give it away afterwards digitally to a friend. The next guy does the same thing. And the next guy.
Now the developer has to primarily make money by selling merch or ingame ads. No thanks. If the game is good, people will buy it.
You could argue people did this with physical media. But it was not nearly as impactful; I couldn’t click a few buttons in seconds and hand the game away.
So you opened another can of worms.
I would be very glad if we would stop with game sales altogether. Instead, add option to support the developer and platform. Completely unrelated to the amount of people and hours played.
Just download the game (ideally through P2P), enjoy it, ‘donate’ if you like it, however much you like.
For online games, you have a pool for keeping servers alive, if it runs out, open-source it, and let users with the maintenance.
Like I would have donated much more to Terraria than to Devil May Cry 5.
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?
To sell a crap game to degen crypto bros, I guess
why would we want to pay a tax to resell shit?
Why would they want residuals on digital resales?
Is that a serious question?
Yes, that is a serious question. Why should they want a resale if they can just sell a new license
Incentives already exist within NFT communities, would be trivial to add them into new game sales.
Question: What incentives are there?
Answer: The incentives already exist!
Why would they want resales?
Profits?
So you’re telling me a company would rather take one sale and two resales than 3 sales?
There’s no profits in this.
PGP can also do that, properly implemented, a PGP key with a large web of trust, can be just as effective at making immutable certified statements without having this weird cash based speech thing that crypto has going for it.
The fact that every single action you do with crypto involves spending money is ridiculous. I don’t mean the scams and stuff, I mean, every single thing, every transaction, every smart contract, every interaction, who wants to play around with a system that just pilfers your cash from you just for the privilege of exploring it.
At least with aws I can run code locally before they rob me.
The fact that every single action you do with
cryptocapitalism involves spending money is ridiculous.Yes, absolutely.
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
Public ledgers are “crypto BS”.
Public ledgers predate crypto BS by decades and are not improved by cryptographic chaining between entries.
And what about ledger that use DAG instead of blockchain, did they exist pre crypto BS?
Giving your cryptographic chaining a pointless acronym doesn’t make it useful.
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.
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.
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
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)
Your description is accurate. No need for that /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”
I thought we were on the web4.0?
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
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.
