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The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

(cheapskatesguide.org)
622 points ColinWright | 5 comments | 25 Jan 22 22:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.335s | source
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pavlov ◴[25 Jan 22 23:17 UTC] No.30079513[source]▶
> 'Some people use the term "Web 3.0" to refer only to decentralized blockchain-based networks without considering that all personal websites have essentially the same goals, be they on the regular Internet or on the new blockchain networks. Those who use the term "web 3.0" seem to have forgotten that self-hosted personal websites that run on home servers and are accessible over the regular Internet are inherently decentralized. Unfortunately, despite common goals, some on today's old Internet are hostile to blockchain technology. I am not sure why.'

What goals does today's crypto-token-powered "web 3" vision share with the old Internet? It's not enough to say "well it's decentralized" and do a handwave.

Consider the NFT exploration Moxie Marlinspike did recently:

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

This is essentially a system that lets you buy DRM'd metadata that points to servers owned by a corporation funded by billions of VC dollars, and transactions are recorded on a ledger that spends more power than the entire country of Finland. The only purpose of these activities is to speculate on prices of these make-believe digital assets.

None of these things have anything to with the old Internet: cargo cult DRM, billion-dollar VC funding, enormous energy waste, artificial scarcity where none is needed.

That website on dial-up was slow because of real physical constraints, not artificial constraints erected to make VCs richer at the expense of the planet's ecosystem.

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idiotsecant ◴[25 Jan 22 23:44 UTC] No.30079764[source]▶
It's worth noting that there is a core of people doing real work in crypto who are not trying to peddle NFTs or other sleight of hand rungpulls designed to separate the gullible from their money.

Ethereum, for example, is full of people building interesting things like off-chain low-cost trading using non-interactive zero knowledge proofs and actively working to make crypto less energy intensive and more useful. They don't want to sell you an NFT and it's not part of some elaborate rugpull- There are plenty of examples of people doing this important work because they legitimately believe that a world where fiat control is divorced from the levers of governmental power is a positive change.

There are also, of course, people trying to use those achievements as part of a weird shell game where the end result is giving gullible strangers nothing in exchange for something. That's sort of the human condition.

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gitfan86 ◴[25 Jan 22 23:53 UTC] No.30079836[source]▶
Yes there are people with 100% good intentions working in this space. There were also people with 100% good intentions working at Theranos.
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1. hunterb123 ◴[26 Jan 22 00:38 UTC] No.30080176[source]▶
You're proving his point, there are also people with good/bad intentions working in "web2" and everywhere for that matter.

Don't criticize the tech, criticize the individual bad actors, like you did with Theranos.

One of the main talking points "web3" critics yell is "scams!", like they don't exist elsewhere.

If you do want to criticize the tech, leave the moral crusade out of it and say technically what is wrong with it, so we can have a technical debate about the feature in question.

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2. gitfan86 ◴[26 Jan 22 00:50 UTC] No.30080255[source]▶
The tech is great. I'm a huge fan of all crypto use cases that actually exist today and are actually used by people and don't involve money laundering or accidental Ponzi schemes.
3. kravens_last ◴[26 Jan 22 00:50 UTC] No.30080256[source]▶
It's not an issue of simply having scams. The issue is that, by its very nature, the ratio of scams to legitimate functional work is likely 1 million to 1, and the entire ecosystem does not only revel in this, but actively encourages even more scam-like behavior. This all stems from blockchain as a concept's decision of baking in valuation to EVERYTHING.

It's the purest distillation of the "greater fool theory" in human history.

I'd rebuke your framing of leaving the morality of it aside. The more valid framing of a debate for new technology should be to prove that there are non scam-like applications of the technology that are superior to currently existing ones.

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4. idiotsecant ◴[27 Jan 22 01:43 UTC] No.30095009[source]▶
'blockchain' doesn't have any point of view on whether something should be 'NFT'-ized or not - it's just a technology. That's like saying FTP encourages child pornography because it can be used to transfer files.

As in most things, the culprit is not technology, it's people. It's entirely possible to ignore the clear rugpulls and scams and just focus on the technically interesting parts. Quite a lot of people are quietly doing just that while everyone else is busy trying to scam each other and/or be religiously opposed to what amounts to a distributed database synchronization mechanism.

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5. gitfan86 ◴[27 Jan 22 02:22 UTC] No.30095360{3}[source]▶
git is a distributed crypto chain technology. No one is saying it is a scam. It isn't the tech that people are calling a scam.