RailsConf Removes Web3 Track | Hacker News Reader

RailsConf Removes Web3 Track

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36 pointsmagicjosh15 comments

Shoot. I was interested in this track. I'm also not loud on twitter or even aware there was an outcry. Bummer.

I dislike Web3. Mostly because people talk about Web3 are no different to crypto, in that they cant explain it like I am five. The constant rambling of ideology and invention of new terminology makes JS front end development looks childish in comparison.

But I dont hate Web3 or Blockchain the tech itself. In fact I sort of wish someone could explain it in a simple, easy to understand and practical manner. And conference are perfect for these sort of things because I expect those slides to be well prepared. Instead the whole community just treat Web3 as scam. Didn't even give them one chance. And it is just one track out of many. Why cancel it?

And then I remember this https://web.archive.org/web/20130617203033/http://rubydrama....

For the context, Rails (or Ruby) is not one of the popular languages in blockchain, DeFi and Web3 development. Most of the projects are written in TypeScript (frontend/backend) or Python (backend/automation).

Interesting. I couldn’t help but notice a lot of animosity towards Web3 and blockchain in developers’ circles, including Rust community (Terra and Solana smart contracts are written in Rust) and including HN comments. Why is that? Please let’s keep emotions out of this discussion, if possible.

My humble opinion is that the tech is cool, but those community are rigged with scammers and cryptobro shills. It is tiring in the long run.

Just my personal confirmation bias at work is that whenever I read 1. web3 2. blockchain 3. Crypto

I see 1. marketing phrases without substance 2. unnecessary bloat (goal could be reached with existing boring tech) 3. scam

As said, this is just my personal bubble and confirmation bias at work. But I have yet to see a use case for these buzzwords that is valid, efficient, can't be done with existing tech or isn't blown out of proportion by marketing speak. I feel massively reminded of the worst things of the bubble in the late 90ies.

YMMW.

Because blockchain and web3's only uses so far have been for grifting and scamming: creating artificial scarcity by fiat (e.g. "cryptocurrency" and web3) or beanie baby style bubbles (e.g. bitcoin), and then usually ending with a rug pull (examples too numerous to list). Coupled with the disastrous environmental impact and the constant ponzi touting, it's pretty reasonable to expect that most sensible developers would have a strong negative reaction.

I've heard good things about filecoin, but i haven't looked into it much.

From what I've read, you get paid filecoin for reliability storing and serving files on the network (Dropbox but decentralised)

Case in point.

Building a storage provider for filecoing isn't as easy as it sounds.

Minimum req is 8+ cores, 128Gb++ RAM + 256Gb++ NVME, and on top of that you need to buy filecoin in order to start providing storage as you'll need to stake it or something like that.

Their block history or whatever they call it is alone around 100Tb which you also need to be storing.

https://docs.filecoin.io/storage-provider/hardware-requireme...

1. It's a squat of a name by outsiders who have no moral right to use it. It has nothing to do with the actual Web, and merely wants to ride the popularity and goodwill built around the Web. It's like branding crude oil "CocaCola2". The Web connection is usually justified with some story like "Facebook is bad, therefore we must use Blockchain", but that's suuuch a stretch and non-sequitur. BTW: the naming is off-by-one. Web 2.0 was collaborative and decentralized, and ended roughly when Google Reader was shut down. The monetized hellscape we have now is what has replaced Web 2.0 already, and we don't really want it monetized even harder.

2. There's a massive gap between how "web3" is advertised as an ideology/manifesto (decentralize, democratize, and other nice things), and what it actually turns out to be: NFT grifters, automated piracy, cults of superstonker discords with monkey avatars, a bunch of VC-backed moat-building services for unregulated amateur stock market.

3. It's a disaster for energy use and GPU availability. ETH switching to PoS is as imminent as Tesla having FSD. Meanwhile it's a fertilizer for ransomware, endless pump and dump scams, DAOs of rugpulls, and a great tool for bypassing anti-terrorism and anti-war sanctions.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com

It's because most peoples exposure to crypto is through scams in their Facebook feeds (anecdotally my Facebook feed advertisements are 75% crypto/nfts), and crypto being pushed on them in places they don't want it like video games and trading cards.

See video on YouTube: "Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs" by Folding Ideas

Thank you, I will watch that. I personally don't fully understand NFTs. But when I watch The Pawn Stars videos on FB, I realize that people in the US have completely different relationship to collectibles and are willing to pay a lot of money for things that are seemingly worthless for europeans.

I agree with everyone above, the space is polluted with scammers and ponzi schemes. The signal to noise ratio is really bad. But those precious few interesting use cases are pretty fascinating. My personal favourite is "money streaming" - i.e. transferring money in realtime continuous flows, rather than discrete one-off transactions.

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