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:
decentralized transactions are useless when so much of our economy leverages centralized transactions built around existing payment systems.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
** 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.
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?
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.
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”
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
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.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
