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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

“Search isn’t a business!”

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.

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> Who remembers the silly <BLINK> and <MARQUEE> tags?

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.

> The network is owned by the participants and no shareholder class to extract rents.

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.

I mean, who owns Uniswap for instance? What can they do — start collegting the extra 0.3% fee? That’s about it. The people own the network, and they all rely on the same code.

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 labs owns the GitHub repo, domain name, and discord servers. If their domain, discord, etc disappears, the project would struggle because their smart contracts are difficult to use without the web apps and it would damage the trust in the project.

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.

So what you're saying is that we need a front-end layer with content-addressable hashes?

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.

Yes. I said in my first comment that you can use other tools to access smart contracts.

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.

While its worth considering the power structures behind a project, and what would happen for example if Uniswap Labs decides to put their weight behind a particular fork, or proposes a new version - the protocols can and d function without centralized leadership.

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.

DHTs arent centralized.

As I said there needs fo be a front end that is based on DHT. Freenet. Beaker Browser. IPFS. Why not?

> But that doesn’t mean it’s not capable of being so much more.

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 because you don't see the progress doesn't mean it's not there.

Just to pick one random thing from this month: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/03/01/ethereum-activates-...

AI also suffers front the grey goo and paperclip maximizing issues too.

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