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.
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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”.
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.
I don’t think I understand the use case you just described. Can you explain further?
You can add undo buttons and use escrows, reputation systems, etc.
I guess most people know a scam when they see one. More than I thought
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
So what makes a site “web3” in the first place?
That you can connect wallets and buy some NFT 🌚(/s)
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
