There's a limit to how deeply I'm going to nest a thread with someone who seems to have already made up their mind: after 15 years on this site, I'm starting to get it into my head that "winning" an HN fight might be fun in the moment, but as my grandma used to say: ain't no money in it.
And I think we agree about the failure of what used to be called "Web 3": it was an experiment that became a hype cycle that got hijacked by the unscrupulous and my bet is that history will mark the spectacular collapse of FTX last fall as the "end of Web 3".
But behind all the headlines and scandals and shit, a lot of serious distributed systems pros were doing real research and writing real code, and that stuff represents a bunch of tools in our toolbox as engineers that we didn't have 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I think it's foolish to throw the baby (tools) out with the bathwater (exit scam scandals).
All you have to do is pick up a newspaper on either side of the blood/crip political knife fight and you'll see a bunch of problems that the Internet created directly or indirectly and haven't solved yet, and many if not most of them are related to "proving things".
- We're having arguments about vote tallies, and who "double spent" their vote
- We're having arguments about who created a piece of IP that got vacuumed up by a big AI model
- We're having arguments about who should be able to post their views on the Internet (i.e. at all) and how to prevent political grand mal seizures from censoring dissenting opinion
- The story on international remittances is still a nightmare, and wildly impacts some of the most vulnerable members of our global community
- USDC or something is still the only way I know about to get paid by an overseas employer in any kind of timely way without a nightmare set of bank interactions and also be totally above-board regarding e.g. taxes and stuff
The list goes on, and while I don't think this is totally demonstrated yet, as a long-time distributed systems guy, I think it's at least plausible demonstrably (and in my opinion even pretty likely) that some of the tools that went in the toolbox in the last 10 years (and got inadvertently funded by token scam assholes: win) are pretty friggin adjacent to any solution I can think of to any of these.
And I think we agree about the failure of what used to be called "Web 3": it was an experiment that became a hype cycle that got hijacked by the unscrupulous and my bet is that history will mark the spectacular collapse of FTX last fall as the "end of Web 3".
But behind all the headlines and scandals and shit, a lot of serious distributed systems pros were doing real research and writing real code, and that stuff represents a bunch of tools in our toolbox as engineers that we didn't have 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I think it's foolish to throw the baby (tools) out with the bathwater (exit scam scandals).
All you have to do is pick up a newspaper on either side of the blood/crip political knife fight and you'll see a bunch of problems that the Internet created directly or indirectly and haven't solved yet, and many if not most of them are related to "proving things".
- We're having arguments about vote tallies, and who "double spent" their vote - We're having arguments about who created a piece of IP that got vacuumed up by a big AI model - We're having arguments about who should be able to post their views on the Internet (i.e. at all) and how to prevent political grand mal seizures from censoring dissenting opinion - The story on international remittances is still a nightmare, and wildly impacts some of the most vulnerable members of our global community - USDC or something is still the only way I know about to get paid by an overseas employer in any kind of timely way without a nightmare set of bank interactions and also be totally above-board regarding e.g. taxes and stuff
The list goes on, and while I don't think this is totally demonstrated yet, as a long-time distributed systems guy, I think it's at least plausible demonstrably (and in my opinion even pretty likely) that some of the tools that went in the toolbox in the last 10 years (and got inadvertently funded by token scam assholes: win) are pretty friggin adjacent to any solution I can think of to any of these.