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Comment by pezzana | Hacker News Reader

> It’s possible you have, in recent months, seen people writing with excitement (or curiosity, or consternation) about “Web3”. The term imagines the transition of many internet services to a model built around cryptographic tokens, such that ownership and/or control of those services might be divided between their token-holders, a group that might include their users. The tokens would also have exchange value, so, as a user, you could always: cash out.

Except in 99% of cases there is no technical reason for those tokens to exist. Everything they claim to do can be done with Bitcoin by itself.

Look, there's nothing wrong with harvesting money from digital rubes. But let's not fool ourselves into believing what's going on has anything to do with turning the world into a digital Chuck E Cheese.

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I mostly agree with one caveat. The bitcoin signature "dumb contract" is intentionally a form of automata just shy of Turing completeness. Therefore there's no way to hack in any arbitrary feature (like NFTs) without having a fork. Granted NFTs don't do anything computationally complex, so all it would take is modifying bitcoins stack machine with a single additional op code for minting Chuck E Cheese tokens (I propose 0xCEC). Now we just need to get all the miners to agree to a hard fork adding this one mundane feature that honestly shouldn't upset anyone and you can just ignore if you don't like it. In other words, it will never happen.

I'm not sure if you've seen Script before, but you might be surprised at what it can do.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

As for NFTs they are little more than OP_RETURN, which has been part of Bitcoin since 2014.

There's this persistent and incredibly ignorant view out there that Ethereum's contracts are "smart" and Bitcoin, well, it doesn't do smart contracts. Even a cursory glance at the link shows this is not true.

Proof is in the pudding. There's this persistent effort to list the technicality that BTC can do "something" in terms of smart contracts, but the disparity in the real world usage of smart contracts between ETH, ETH compatible VMs and BTC would imply something is missing. Does not the Taproot update aim to solve this non trivial disparity in capabilities?

>incredibly ignorant

I don't think it's ignorant at all. Over-emphasizing BTC smart contracts in my opinion is pedantic. Where is BTC Defi? That is a multi hundred billion-$ industry in terms of value locked in contracts. If BTC doesn't have the equivalent, then its "smart contract" capabilities are not equivalent. Simple as that.

> Look, there's nothing wrong with harvesting money from digital rubes.

Yes there is. I won't go so far as to say it's stealing, but for smart people who could be using their talents to build something actually valuable it's at least a misallocation of resources.

In a society where making as much money as possible is the end goal, it isn't.

Sure but that's basically tautological. In a society where the end goal is making as much money as possible, a lot of undesirable things will happen.

I'd suggest the end goal is to create value, not simply make as much money as possible.

>Everything they claim to do can be done with Bitcoin by itself.

Can you hold stable coins on BTC? How about lending them for yield? Depositing into pools/vaults that aggregate yield, harvest farmed coins, and other strategies?

How about taking the LP tokens from above, and borrowing against them to increase capital efficiency, even in some cases achieving self-paying loans from the yield derived from the LP tokens [0]?

[0] https://abracadabra.money/

To say BTC can "do all of this" is absurd. Where is it? Who cares if the "can do" is theoretical at best. In practice, the amount of things you can do with ETH and similar dwarf what is available with BTC. BTC is a great finite store of value. But why pretend it does things it doesn't actually do? Why over-state it's capabilities in comparison to other cryptocurrencies?

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