Comment by i_hate_pigeons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by i_hate_pigeons | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think web3 is just competing with traditional finance, or at least not in the restricted sense of investing/especulation. Also web3 is not replacing anything that already exists, just like "web2" didn't (and to be frank web2 was as much as hyped term than anything else)

I see it more as retaining ownership some of the content we produce and happily give to twitter, youtube, facebook etc to monetise and have some more control over it

Things as being able to:

* remove access to site to display my content but still be published somewhere else if I wish to do so

* be able to serve my content to people that prefer to use another tools without relying on twitter to have a public API as long as I granted them access

* get the person getting hits and making money of ads to share some of that with me, or maybe pay my gas fees

* not be shut down because a given site or state decides my content is not worthy of it, they are still allowed to do this, but I could still continue via another "frontend" and people can choose

There are more use cases around this, and there are many gaps yet around the economics of it to make it accessible/free, make it desirable, legality, liability etc which I believe remain to be solved

Ownership of "content" requires intellectual property laws, which are enforced by courts of justice, and we already have these. A blockchain cannot enforce intellectual property rights because it lacks coercive power. If your goal is to "retain ownership" of the content that you produce, a blockchain is not going to help you AT ALL with that.

I wasn't talking about it as in copyright / legal sense, and more in the I can allow others to access a snapshot of it at a given time and/or remove access to it for future content if I wish to do so.

Now the relationship is the reverse, I give content to some org and they can do as they wish with it; I'm surrending it for them to use in exchange of them allowing me to use their platform for free.

e.g. from Twitter's terms of use:

> By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating).

If the content was hosted somewhere else and then displayed on twitter instead, this would not be the case or I could revoke it in the future but still be able to distribute such content via other means

Now, if I want to use another site then I need to duplicate the content myself.

Since all that they really offer is the userbase/community, its very hard for competitors to come into play and offer better terms or capabilities. In fact, they can change these terms at anypoint and I can do very little about it aside of deleting my account (if they even allow you to do that!)

A blockchain is publicly-accessible, append-only database, so again I don't know how an append-only data structure can help you revoke access to some content. Not to mention that Twitter can always choose to not display your tweets unless you grant them a license, regardless of where these tweets are hosted.

even if you could update state* once you gave access to anything it's out of your control as it might be cached somewhere else. This is why I mentioned for future changes rather than what you already allowed.

And you are right twitter can still have that clause, and they can cause they have somethign to offer (i.e. a userbase) but if the content of everyone would be somewhere else other competiors would be able to offer it and then competiion for users would tend to make those terms more accessible to those that care enough to read them.

* you can by doing it as in an event sourcing system. After all blockchains+smart contracts are similar to a giant state machine

> And you are right twitter can still have that clause, and they can cause they have somethign to offer (i.e. a userbase) but if the content of everyone would be somewhere else other competiors would be able to offer it and then competiion for users would tend to make those terms more accessible to those that care enough to read them.

This seems incompatible with the goal of control: instead of giving Twitter free rein to reproduce your content however, you’re giving everyone on the internet the ability to do what they want with it, completely unrestricted.

(Yes, you could DMCA then but then the blockchain is useless)

> or I could revoke it in the future

Unless whatever service accessed the tweet/image/text/whatever made a local copy and is displaying that once the "blockchain service" no longer allows access.

An NFT doesn't confer access control. Its a certificate of ownership, the asset itself is infinitely reproducible.

NFTs represent something else completely, I'm talking of other use cases that are enabled by the same underlying tech - with the disclaimer I mentioned above of pending issues to be resolved, particulaly gas fees

if you are not aware of how something like what I described could work maybe have a read around on some simple smart contracts where there is hidden state (like guess the answer or contracts that implement role access/control for certain features)

Regardless of what relationship a piece of data has to some blockchain technology: As soon as it is publicly accessible, even once, it's scarcity can no longer be guaranteed, because by their very nature, digital assets are infinitely reproducible.

This is the classic "but I can already do all that with rsync" dropbox criticism. Yes, the traditional legal system is still required. Crypto does not make it go away, and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. What it does do is change the UX around transacting with these things.

Right now buying IP rights is a bespoke process involving lawyers. It has very high transaction costs in the Coasean sense. Tokenizing and standardizing these things, and standardizing the way revenue across directly to the rights holder in a way that is agnostic to who the owner is.

This is the value of the decentralized economy. It has the ability to shrink the domain of responsibility for the traditional legal system, and standardize things in a way that simplifies entry for entities that are less legally fluent.

I think an appropriate analogy here would be between the private and public markets. Buying stocks on the public market is easy and simple, because the process is standardized. You don't have to read complex legal agreements or study cap tables. You just click buy. The token economy has similar properties, although all the details of what the best ways to standardize, and what should and shouldn't be standardized, are not yet flushed out.

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