I don’t understand why blockchain is treated as some holy grail technology? Do most developers support this blockchain everywhere idea? I am start to feel like a conservative because I really don’t like cryptocurrency in the way people are using it currently at least.

I think we could find some uses of blockchain, and cryptocurrency that are much more useful then just having a bunch of get rich schemes.

  • Speaker [e/em/eir]
    ·
    3 years ago

    web3 is a marketing term invented by crypto metaverse vampires. No serious person talks about or cares about this nonsense except to deride it or to loudly remind people that it is building a tomb of nonfungible gold.

  • commiecapybara [he/him, e/em/eir]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Most developers either don't care about crypto-nonsense, or they absolutely hate it with a raging passion. The only function it has in the real world is to destroy the environment.

  • spectre [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    It's existed for a decade+ now, and we don't really have a "killer app" besides using it as a vehicle for speculation and as black market currency. The closest mostly-above-board use case it has "paying remittances across borders tax and restriction free", but the fees, instability and complexity are so high that it doesn't seem to have broken through there at all.

    Anyway "passive income" is super important to American liberals, especially conservatives. They fucking love the stock market, talking about buying rental/airbnb properties, flipping houses etc etc... so crypto hype including "web 3" is the same shit with a techy aesthetic. Another way to get some free monies.

    Blockchain stuff could be incredibly useful if you assume that everything is "trustless", and some people would like to somehow apply it to "smart contracts" on a commercial/industrial scale. The real world is not "trustless" at all at that scale though, since you can have a regular old contract and reasonably expect the US/EU/PRC government to enforce it for you.

    The brainworms come from corporate propaganda about "freedom from the government" when they really mean "deregulation from the government, but leave things like military, subsidies, and whatever else acts it my interest intact". Libs (especially conservative ones) are dweebs and can't read between the lines and think that corporations are as distrustful of the government as they are. That's why the only use for blockchain outside of cryptocurrency speculation is in the "trustless fringe" of society like the black market, and under the table international transactions.

    There is a lot of capital in the tech space, and if there isn't a solid use case for blockchain by now, there won't ever be (been saying that the whole time myself, but we're still here so I guess people haven't learned)

  • star_wraith [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Remember when Grimes said the blockchain would be a more powerful force for societal change than socialism?

  • OutrageousHairdo [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Cryptocurrency is just an inherently useless idea. You can't have something decentralized and secure that doesn't use a boatload of energy or computing power. If you didn't have those extreme costs, there'd be very little stopping a bad actor from just flooding your currency network with false information (since financial transactions are made through a consensus of network participants). Like I hate to be that guy, but the only way for digital currency to make sense is if it's based on centralized systems.

      • OutrageousHairdo [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        I'm not saying crypto can't be more efficient than it is now, but even stuff like Solana is still way more power than you would be using if you just transferred money over fucking Wells Fargo or whatever. Centralized systems are just inherently less resource consuming. Decentralization doesn't really bring enough benefits to justify the price. Its use case is either as a way to avoid government regulation, be it to buy illegal products and services, get around taxation, avoid paperwork, or w/e or just as a boneheaded investment. I can't see anyone using it to buy and sell stuff the way they use a credit card.

  • raven [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I thought web3 was going to be a voluntary distributed web like ipfs. Now they're bringing their "profit motive" into my utopian dream :cri:

  • Hoyt [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    lol musk and zuckerberg think crypto is super neat, and they've got a hundred billion between them, so its going to happen. we'll all get dragged kicking and screaming towards their "future" because they read Ready Player One and thought it was a utopia.

    • Owl [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      a computer can’t enforce a contract that has any real-world component

      Adding - this is why the metaverse is a thing. The technology can't possibly work in the real world, so they need to build a fake world where it can work. Because "cryptocurrency is useless" is not a conclusion that the libertarians and ponzi scammers want to allow.

  • BigLadKarlLiebknecht [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The real Web 3.0 was a beautiful, useful, positive vision of the Internet for humanity. Sadly we live in hell, so get rich schemes based on very slow linked lists that quietly force libertarian ideology on everyone is what the next 20 years of technology is going to look like.

  • ennuid [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    It's literally just the creation of new markets wherein you can own digital "goods" across multiple platforms.

  • culpritus [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    :geordi-no: crypto tech in service of individual wealth accumulation

    :geordi-yes: crypto tech in service of project cybersyn style social cooperation

      • culpritus [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        ya, not 'blockchain' or cryptocurrencies as currently understood, but the cryptographic distributed computing networks

        just look at how effective non-profit projects like Folding@Home became, if that kind of tech could be harnessed in socially cooperative ways etc, there is so much potential

        Alas any tech being hyped by anarcho-caps is just hierarchy reinforcing BS