web3 is bullshit.
NFTs are bullshit.
Crypto is bullshit.
DAOs are bullshit.
That's it. There's nothing more to say. It's time to move on.
Don't bother arguing about this or demanding an explanation from me. You either get this or you don't. If you don't, you might be one of the lucky ones who gets rich before the whole Jenga tower of bullshit collapses. But probably not.
The end is nigh, eh?
Thank God I sank my life savings into tulip bulbs.
Wah my fancy Rembrandt tulips that I planted in fall 2020 did not repeat this year. They mimic the look of those infamous tulips. The Darwin tulips I have all over have come back year after year.
Most tulips need a prolonged cold spell to bloom again. Here in California, you either have to dig up the bulbs and put them in the refrigerator for a few weeks or buy new ones. FUN FACT: the original Rembrandt tulips were striped because of a virus.
DAO sounds a lot like the utopian world that Anarchists wrote about and chased after, during the Occupy Wall Street period, and again during the BLM protests.
An aside, they describe the perfectly horizontal company, which of course, does not exist, but it is an idea that I find intriguing. In most cases, the CEO is barely more important than the collective will to follow her/his direction.
Another aside: NFTs don't have to exist on the back of a cryptocurrency blockchain. Christie's, for instance, could create its own blockchain solely for the purpose of tracking art transactions while acting as a clearinghouse for all art that passes through its blockchain. Don't forget to credit me with the idea, Christie's.
But why would Christie's need to do that. They are ALREADY the clearinghouse for art that passes through them. They can already validate transactions with respect to physical art.
exactly. sure, there are things that can be done with blockchain, but there are already much better ways in place to do all those things.
I'm so out of the loop that when I read DAO my first thought was "What's wrong with Data Access Objects. Seems like a reasonable way to structure an application to me". Obviously we need to break the tyranny of the 3 letter contraction.
As long as you don't confuse your DAOs with your DTOs.
My favorite backronym: PCMCIA = People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
That's the one I can never remember.
Probably why they changed it to PCCARD...:)
People Can't Complain About Reviving Data?
Make it so.
Anybody who lived through the dot-com bubble probably agrees with Kevin
I sure do.
Yeah, that whole internet thing really never panned out. Tech companies are just worthless these days.
But to be fair Pets.com was a good idea just too soon given the success of Chewy.
Blockchain has long been a solution looking for a problem. Maybe someday it will find one it actually solves.
Chain, chain, chain....
Chain of foo-oo-ools
😄
Off-hand, the only thing I can think of is as a layer in a medium of exchange for STL interstellar colonies. Who engage in material trade with one another.
So yeah, pretty far down the turnpike.
That doesn't make any sense. How are distant colonies in the future any different than distant colonies in the past? How would blockchain tech help at all? There's no there there, but people over and over just believe the hype and don't ask questions.
DAO is bullshit. The others are just pyramid schemes.
Were you triggered by this? https://www.axios.com/free-speech-decentralized-web-3-twitter-elon-musk-13ac517e-6685-4ab7-99d3-7b73498e4475.html
Triggered? No. It's just another example of what Kevin is talking about: bullshit. In the 21st century, we don't need another cesspool of lies. Insisting on truth and honesty isn't the thought police, although the liars and grifters want you to believe that.
What a load of garbage?
Think of it this way: Right now, Twitter decides if former President Trump can post on its platform, and whether to delete a post about vaccines if it and most scientists deem the post misinformation.
In a decentralized web, you would decide if Trump appears on the web3 equivalent of your Twitter feed — and set your own thresholds on vaccine information providers.
The "decentralized web" they're talking about it was we call ... the internet! Donald Trump can post anything he wants on the internet and nobody is going to stop him. Anyone who wants can see what he has to say. Likewise, any company can create a website on the internet for people to gather and share posts, and those companies can create their own rules for who they allow to participate, or not. No one is forcing them to change their rules. No one is stopping competing companies from creating a like service with different rules. Isn't that the model of what the "free speech" people say they want?
Not sure if Axios is dumb enough to believe the hype about web3 or they think we're dumb enough to believe it. But bullshit is a good word for it.
99.9% agree.
However, based on discussions where I've taken the same position on Hacker News, there is one small wrinkle.
Both hosting companies and IP (internet) providers have shown some proclivity for terms of service that would in fact ban certains of contents from being on their servers or passing through their tubes^H^H^H^H^Hwires.
If you want to do something online that violates the ToS of let's say, the 5 major IP providers, you are likely to be unable to do what you want. Even if you can find a way, it will be difficult, and may fail in the future as the ToS clauses expand to whoever you found that would let you connect.
This is why net neutrality and laws releasing IP providers from any liability for material passing over their networks are so important: it means that they be consistently and sensibly pressured from having ToS that are completely non-exclusionary, thus leaving people to do whatever they want "on the internet".
Power abhors a vacuum.
Is that why dogs hate roombas?
Exactly.
Just think--if the computational power used to "mine" bitcoin were put to something useful, how many more drug candidates would we have to treat diseases?
It really never ceases to amaze me. Still waiting for one person to tell me the value of block chain- without all the BS attached. As someone said above at best- a solution looking for a problem.
It helps criminal launder their money. That is what drives it.
Exactly. Blockchain currencies are a terrible place to put your savings, since they have no backing value and are of course quite volatile.
But there is one group of people who are happy to take occasional random 10% haircuts with no warning, in return for relative anonymity -- criminals.
And the market for untraceable funds for ransomware and the like provides enough buoyancy to the market that it looks like a halfway decent speculative investment to randoms. But without criminal inflows, it would collapse. And as more and more governments ban cryptocurrencies, that downward pressure will intensify.
Distributed source control systems like "git" do something pretty similar to blockchain so there might be some applications akin to that, but if I knew what they were I would be out looking for VC money instead of wasting my time here. Blockchain for digital currency is a waste of time and resources since we have effectively had digital currency ever since the first bank was created.
I have a good friend who is a smart guy and by no means some goldbug weirdo. He's all about up and coming companies using blockchain tech to solve real-world problems, mostly to help the poor and unbanked. Apparently there is at least one company out there using blockchain tech as a way for immigrant workers to send money home that is much cheaper than Western Union and the like.
"Apparently there is at least one company out there using blockchain tech as a way for immigrant workers to send money home that is much cheaper than Western Union and the like."
What's keeping the price of remittances up? The inability to track each and every unit of currency? Hell no. The blockchain doesn't solve any problem at all. The blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
Today, immigrants have lots of cheap digital ways of sending money home that have nothing to do with crypto. It's a matter of companies charging less for transfers.
I heard about "diamond hands" while listening to Ezra Klein's April 5, podcast interview with Dan Olson, who is a critic of Crypto.
So many other things are also bullshit, it's a whole alt-universe.
But human monkeys need bullshit to distract them from things that really matter.
I'm withholding judgment on crypto. It starting to seem like it has some legs. If people keep believing, then it lives! Kind of like Santa's sleigh in the move Elf.
The rest, I agree, is BS.
It will continue to live because criminal money goes into it. Only regulation that stops that will put it in its real value for society (which is probably negative, because of large energy usage without much gains in productivity).
Crypto is the dumbest one of all.
The value of a currency is in its stability. All forms of crypto so far utterly fail in that regard. Even when compared to 8% inflation, the US dollar is far superior in that it is far more stable.
You need human beings managing a currency in order to keep a currency stable. Leaving it up to miners and buyers who don't even know what they're buying (but they think they're going to make a quick buck) is plain stupid. You need human beings who 1) are independent of government, so they act on their own will, and 2) have a clear mandate (such as: keep inflation around 2%), and 3) have the ability to make or destroy money. Crypto fails on all three counts; and even if it didn't, it doesn't add anything positive to the mix.
Crypto will NEVER replace traditional currency. It's in the very nature of it.
What about the Metaverse?
Why doesn't the government do something about crypto? Like regulate it at a minimum. Are the feds keeping track of the money that goes into it in any way?
They might establish or regulate exchanges, or something like that. (See the White House executive order from earlier this year.) Might prevent some of the most unsavory behavior. Otherwise, this is more complex than just fraud. It's a lot of dumb people piling into something they don't understand for shallow ideological reasons and greed. "Regulation" alone isn't going to stop that, IMHO. People are always going to be dumb and stupid.
'U.S. 'Intelligence' Says Its 'Intelligence' Is Bullshit'
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/04/us-intelligence-says-its-intelligence-is-bullshit.html#more
Bullshit, Kevin? Or horseshit?
I mean, they all really seem to believe in it, and they all really, really want everyone else to believe in it, and those are two of Frankfurt's defining points, IIRC (I really gotta read the book one of these days...)
Granted, they both stink to high heaven, especially in summer...
I caught a story on crypto & Miami yesterday on CNBC. It was indistinguishable from a extended video promotion of crypto. The reporter & anchor repeated crypto claims, without challenge or caveat. It featured Miami's mayor unveiling a crypto bull to mimic Wall Street's bull. They highlighted a DAO of young rich guys playing basketball, though the relationship between crypto & basketball was never really mentioned. Overall, an enthusiastic endorsement of crypto as the coolest thing since the invention of the internet.
Has this post been vetted by Harry G. Frankfurt, author of the renowned tome "On Bullshit"? While I'm at it, I thin we need to implement grades of bullshit just to help keep things in scale.
Back in the day we would say "That is some Grade A bullshit." You know, like grades of maple syrup.
These days the grading would have to encompass a really large range, which makes it much more difficult. You don't want to end up with something like the Richter Scale where no one understands how much violence is compressed into a small range of numbers. But if you do something like "Trumpian" as a measure then you have a level of bullshit that goes way past 11 on the dial. Indeed, "to infinity and beyond."
I fear that the 21st century has unleashed levels of bullshit that we'll never be able to adequately measure.
the latest ezra klein podcast on it was quite good. and cleared up a lot of things where i thought i must be missing SOMETHING, but i wasn't. it's all just a con, and every supposed use case ranges from stupid and pointless to disastrous and dangerous. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-dan-olson.html
God, it's so frustrating talking to people about this. I completely understand KD's exasperation.
The blockchain is BS. We've had it for 20 years and we've done nothing useful with it. There's nothing we can't do with the blockchain that we can't do with generous platform policies, high-quality certification (such as making copies of contracts and notarizing them) and simply checking one's receipts. Plus, there's all the utter BS about crytpo "currencies," which just showcases how money policy needs to be organized by human beings who understand monetary policy, have clear mandates and are independent of government. Crypto can never be a serious currency.
Amazing how easily impressed people are.