If I sold shovels and meth users liked to dig swimming pools in their back yards at 3:00 am I might say my shovels weren't doing anything good for humanity, but I'd be happy to sell them shovels.
Like if industrious meth users were buying up all the bulldozers so nobody else could get their socially-productive stuff built, and measurably increasing the national consumption of fuel, then yeah, probably something would be done about that after like, the third or fourth multi-year meth-construction wave.
"oh but it's renewable" yeah not always, like that investment group that bought a shuttered coal-fired power plant in new york (Greenidge) and brought it back online to use it to mine crypto. After their permits were denied, another group went and tried to buy an operating powerplant (Fortistar).
https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2023/01/uncertain-fate...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558705/new-york-crypto-...
And even if it's renewable that energy could be offsetting carbon somewhere else on the grid, or stored, or doing literally anything productive (aluminum manufacturing, etc) instead of just generating random nonces and seeing whether they'll validate.
Even in best-case scenario, where the energy is literally going unused: why would we want to build a crypto farm to soak up excess hydro energy or whatever instead of an aluminum plant? it's socially maladaptive behavior brought on by speculative fervor and socially irresponsible misallocation/incentives/lack of regulation.
Building a Pollution Machine that turns coal into random numbers you sell for money is a Captain Planet villain plot.
"Sorry, it's out of season. It's not fresh."
"Why do you sell it out of season?"
"People still buy it."
Blockchain and Web3 ended up mostly being zero sum games. But that doesn’t mean it’s not capable of being so much more. Who remembers the silly <BLINK> and <MARQUEE> tags? The Web has come a long way. And personally, for all its faults, I find Web3 better than Web2 in terms of economics - rather than giant server farms and Big Tech monopolies, we have UniSwap and Aave Marketplace and Filecoin etc. The network is owned by the participants and no shareholder class to extract rents.
Well, ironically AI can be a far bigger negative for society than blockchain.
AI can literally destroy all our systems. Its upside may be far lower than its downside.
Yet HN loves AI and hates blockchain. Predictable this will be silently downvoted into oblivion because it challenges that narrative, but I would have definitely preferred actual substantive discussion.
I remember them.
I don't understand why you're referring to them.
Is it because we replaced them with auto-play videos and javascript carousels?
> Well, ironically AI can be a far bigger negative for society than blockchain.
> AI can literally destroy all our systems. Its upside may be far lower than its downside.
"Can"? "May"? Yes, of course. Because, unlike crypto it actually does stuff beyond just turning energy into maths, and that stuff can be used for evil.
Cryptocurrency, despite being an interesting idea, has mostly only been the combination of all that's bad about fiat money with all that's bad about commodity money. I remain open to the idea that smart contracts have uses.
And in reverse, AI "can" help us invent all the cool scifi tech we want that's within the laws of physics, and "may" help us build a Dyson swarm around every star we can reach.
I recommend against letting either word become load-bearing.
Dumb question. But if the network is owned by the participants, then why do all the networks have a centralized authority managing them? The participants rarely have autonomy.
Web3 protocols at their best are like that. By contrast, FTX and Binance are “crypto-adjacent”, they aren’t decentralized or onchain at all.
Uniswap owners can shut down their website. They can introduce a 100% fee. They can deactivate their contracts.
Yes, people can still use their smart contracts in 5 years, but the adoption of those contracts will quickly decline without uniswap labs.
Like Beaker Browser with Dat, or like IPFS gateways?
And then we have a truly decentralized ecosystem in which billions of dollars are invested and trading. And no one owns it!
They can't introduce a 100% fee or deactivate their contracts. I read the code. It is impossible.
My point is, all of these tools have central leadership and centralized auxiliary services (DNS, discord, etc). Without the centralized leadership or centralized services, these protocols can’t function.
Even today, every wallet's swap feature is already an aggregator across multiple DEXes - neither theU Uniswap website nor their discord nor their leadership team are required for the protocol to continue to function.
Reminder: TornadoCash is still up and running and actively used.
As I said there needs fo be a front end that is based on DHT. Freenet. Beaker Browser. IPFS. Why not?
No, the enormous amount of wasted investment and energy with no progress means that it's not capable of being much more. Crypto somehow managed to start at its best and most productive, and got worse day by day. Buying pizzas or drugs with Bitcoin was so much funner than what crypto developed into.
Just to pick one random thing from this month: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/03/01/ethereum-activates-...