Technology

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.

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.

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??

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.

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.

Let's ignore crypto for a second...

People in the USA loose around $10.000.000.000 per year to scams according to FTC...

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?

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.

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.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
• https://ethereum.org/en/web3/