MadeThisToReply's comments

Privacy isn't the same thing as secrecy.

I know what you're doing in the bathroom, but you still close the door.

It didn't.

The whole point of crypto is that it's not regulated. As soon as the regulators take real action on crypto, the entire promise of crypto will vanish in a puff of smoke.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I struggle to envision what a tightly-regulated crypto market would look like that wouldn't defy the entire point of crypto.

"Ponzi scheme" has become completely divorced from its original meaning. It's supposed to refer to a specific type of scam where you pay "investors" using the money you received from previous investors, but nowadays it's basically just used now to mean "anything crypto-related in which people might lose or have lost their money."

This was my main lesson. I lost some money on Terra/Luna - thankfully much less than $5k, but still enough to sting. Looking back, I can see that I really had no idea what I was getting myself into and it was mostly just FOMO.

Obviously I'd rather still have the money I lost, but in a sense I feel lucky. If Luna had waited an extra six months to collapse I would have become confident enough to put more money in, i.e. I'd have ended up losing even more. And I'll definitely be putting much, much more thought into any kind of crypto "investments" I make in future. The money I lost was a small price to pay for the lesson I've learned.

> Jack Dorsey just launched “Web5”, a buzzwordy project focused on decentralized identity

Woah, hold on, I thought we were still on "Web3"? Actually I'm not convinced that we've even moved past Web 2.0, since Web3 is still mostly just bullshit, scams, vaporware and monkey jpegs.

Did "Web4" get swallowed up by the same beast that made us skip IPv5?

> Your ability to obtain credit is based on the past several years of income, with a penalty for instances over the past ~7 years in which you didn't pay back debts.

Okay, and using these inputs, what function is applied to determine whether or not to grant the loan? How does that system differ from a "credit scoring" system, apart from that your perceived ability to repay isn't explicitly mapped to a single variable?

Is he wrong? What is "Web3", except a trendy marketing term to make the old seem like it's new? All I hear about Web3 is that it's the future, it's the next big thing, it's blowing up, it's coming soon - but they were saying the same things five years ago about "blockchain", and none of those promises came true.

The only thing that seems to have materially changed since 2017 is that "blockchain" is now rebranded as "Web3", meaning its enthusiasts can recycle the same old promises about how this stuff is definitely the next big thing and hope that no-one will say "hold on, haven't you been saying this for five years now without a single thing to show for it?"

I think the important question is: why would we need to?

> Technically, web3 is merely authentication with a public key.

I thought "web3" meant "something, something, blockchain"?

What's the potential of web3, and how does it solve the problems of web2?

Eh, I have a 90 minute commute and I don't mind because I go by train. Three hours a day to read! I love it.

Granted I wfh 2/3 days a week; if I had this commute every day I'd probably feel differently.

I don't play videogames and know very little about crypto mining, but isn't the mining being done on specialised hardware these days and not GPUs? Are GPUs still being wasted on crypto nonsense?

"Web3" is just a new label to make it seem like the same old bullshit is somehow novel and revolutionary.

First "blockchain" was the future, it was the next big thing, it was a revolution, it was going to change everything, you'd be a fool not to get involved. Sure, there might not be a lot there yet, but it's like the Internet in 1994 - this is only the beginning!

If they were still saying the same things about "blockchain" then people would notice that these lofty promises have delivered nothing for ten years. But give it a sexy new name like "Web3" and now it feels new again, even though nothing has changed, and they can continue to entice people in with the same old promises. Sure, Web3 doesn't seem to have produced much yet, but this is only the beginning. It's like the Internet in 1994!

No

Why would web3 be capable of anything else? Satoshi invented the blockchain to solve one specific problem: creating a decentralised currency. It was never supposed to be some kind of universal "truth machine" applicable to any other kind of real-world problem. How would it? The existence of data on a blockchain doesn't prove anything except that some data was added to a blockchain. The idea that this has practical applications for anything other than a currency (e.g. supply chain management, concert tickets, property deeds, all the other classic examples that cryptoheads have been citing for years without a single successful example in real life) is absurd, in fact it's so laughably absurd that I question the intelligence of anyone who can say it with a straight face.

Basically, I think that everything in the crypto space is bullshit, with the possible exception of Bitcoin itself, but I'm still agnostic on that front. I hope I'm wrong - it's appealing to think that we're on the cusp of another technological revolution that will make everything better, especially if it gives me a chance to get rich! - but for fuck's sake, it's been five years since this classic article and still nothing has fundamentally changed: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

What do you think about when it comes it Web3, crypto and DeFi?

I'm pretty sure "Web3" is just a term that crypto-enthusiasts have invented to mask the fact that crypto has completely failed to live up to any of its promises.

No-one can tell me anything about Web3 except that it's the future, it's the next wave, everyone is investing in it, everyone is moving into the space, it's going to be huge, you'd be a fool to miss out. But ask for details, or for a single example (just one) of a Web3 application that's unequivocally proved itself or that can't be better served by an existing pre-blockchain technology and... crickets.

Replace "Web3" with simply "blockchain" and I could have written the exact same paragraph five years ago. It's hard to keep the hype train going when you've been saying the same thing for five years and the "future" still hasn't arrived, but rename "blockchain" to "web3" and suddenly it sounds like you having something new and the hype cycle can repeat.

Give it another five years and I expect the cryptoheads will be pumping another trendy new term to mask the lack of innovation. It's the future, you've got to believe me! It's going to blow up! Any day now.

Every now and then I'll be shopping and the security device by the door will beep as I'm walking out, even though I haven't stolen anything. I always just assume there's been a mistake, e.g. the cashier forgot to deactivate my security tag, and walk straight on out; I'm not going to waste my time being searched when I know I haven't done anything wrong.

This doesn't happen very often but as far as I can remember I've never been challenged when I do it.

But what I find really interesting is: based on what I've written above, isn't it trivially easy to guess my skin color?

An aside, but is it a standard thing to write # to mean "pound" when you're talking about pounds as a unit of weight? Like as opposed to "800lb"? I knew what you meant, it's just I've never seen that notation before so I'm wondering if you just made it up or if I'm out of the loop somehow.