[GlassKingdom]

It’s not emotionality, it’s rationalism. web3 is a naked pyramid grift, and most people promoting it are hoping to get rich from the “greater sucker” or have been subsumed into a cult-type mindset.

HackerNews is a high-quality rational discussion medium. The problem is not with this community, it is with the propaganda bubble of web3.

[Hendrikto]

Claims like

> web3 is a naked pyramid grift

are not fostering an intellectually honest and objective debate.

Sure, there are countless speculators. Agreed, many things are overhyped.

The underlying technology is still innovative and enables novel solutions.

[HideousKojima]

>The underlying technology is still innovative and enables novel solutions.

The only situations where blockchain provides novel solutions is where you need something to be absolutely trustless, and even then the trustlessness is limited to things that happen on the blockchain. The moment the blockchain has to interact with the real world outside of the blockchain you get back to problems of trust.

The range of problems that such technology is capable of solving is incredibly small. 99% of problems that I see people claiming are "solved" by blockchain were already solved by a boring old normal database like Postgres, or a distributed database like CockroachDB, or a distributed consensus algorithm like Raft. All of which are several orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than using a trustless, distributed blockchain.

Please name a single real-world problem that you believe blockchain "solves."

[fleddr]

Even the speculation part, which admittedly is the vast majority of crypto activity, is not that easily dismissed.

The use case for speculation is making money. Making money is a pretty compelling use case. Most crypto traders are perfectly aware of the risks and play the game anyway.

I mean, the owners of this very site fund a thousand startups only to see 10 succeed. Pure speculation.

[guerrilla]

Yes, let's have an intellectualky honest and objevtive debate about if the world is flat. No, stop wasting people's time and energy with your obvious pyramid scheme.

[jeremyjh]

We don't need a debate. We know shit from shinola when we see it.

[fleddr]

You just proved that it's low quality as well as irrational.

On a complex topic with an enormous scope, you claim to have an absolute and extreme answer, and present it as factual. That's pretty much impossible on any topic of high complexity.

You present zero evidence to justify such extreme conclusion. That's low quality and irrational.

To come to a high confidence conclusion on the whole of web3, one would have to actually read hundreds of articles at least, and spent significant time actually using the many products. I would doubt that you did so, and couldn't even pass the most basic test.

So you have zero evidence and presumably zero knowledge or experience. And you're the rational one?

[polygamous_bat]

> To come to a high confidence conclusion on the whole of web3, one would have to actually read hundreds of articles at least, and spent significant time actually using the many products. I would doubt that you did so, and couldn't even pass the most basic test.

But then, above,

> Further, when you use Stephen Diehl as a source, you already lost. This guy has an unhealthy obsession with hating crypto fueled by his own crypto startup failure.

Please get your story straight; all I am getting is ad hominems. If we are going that route, please provide me with enough reason to not believe that you are one of the hordes of bagholders who bought into a pyramid scheme covered in layers of jargon in 2021 and are now trembling with fear after losing half of your gambling money that you were promised will double in no time; and are now desperately trying to draw in new marks for your decentralized MLM by advertising and name calling on hackernews.

See how it works both ways?

[danShumway]

Do you see any sense of irony here when looking at some of the crypto-proponents on this page arguing that the entire history of currency is bunk and can be discarded without knock-on effects?

> On a complex topic with an enormous scope, you claim to have an absolute and extreme answer, and present it as factual. That's pretty much impossible on any topic of high complexity.

This, on its own, is a pretty good reason not to trust a community that regularly messes up pegging stablecoins. I do not buy that purposefully making something complex is the same thing as making it robust. If anything, it's the opposite, complex systems are more likely to have fundamental flaws and are more likely to fall down and blow up than simple systems.

But if we are looking at complexity, current fiat currencies are already unbelievably complicated and multi-faceted. The way that inflation works, the way that currencies get issued, how trust in currencies grows, how countries coordinate and handle currency exchanges and debt, you could get multiple doctorates in every one of those areas. So if you're saying that GP is telling on themselves by dismissing cryptocurrencies out of hand because the math being hard means that quick dismissal of the social impact isn't allowed, how do you not immediately get really large red flags when you look at crypto-communities talking about how those economists are all just obviously wrong and crypto prices aren't tied to overall market effects, or that inflationary assets are just bad design, or that everyone's energy criticisms are just overstated, or that digital artists that hate NFTs just don't understand them, or that stock markets are exactly the same as cryptocurrency speculation, and so on and so on?

The idea of cryptocurrency proponents saying, "wait a second, this system is complex, we can't just dismiss it out of hand" just seems like it's missing a tiny bit of self awareness. Cryptocurrency by and large is a dismissal of complex systems and was primarily made and popularized by people who looked at economic/currency theory and thought, "yeah, I can do that, how hard could it possibly be?"

[FargaColora]

web3 is being hailed as changing the world. So far all it has done is create countless scams.

However I am open to change my mind. Could you provide a single example of a popular and useful project that has been done using the revolutionary technology of web3?

[shkkmo]

Given the long and blemished history of failure, grifts and outright lies coming out of the cryptocurrency community, that is a ridiculous position.

Please stop wasting your time trying to defend cryptocurrency. At this point nothing you say will be believe because cryptocurrency bros have a long history of hype that goes nowhere. If you want to show the world that cryptocurrency is useful, go figure out a way to make it useful that doesn't involve breaking laws or wouldn't be better solved by using a DB instead of the block chain.