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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> But if you really want to see the “immune system” shine, mention web3 and smart contracts, and watch the downvotes pour in

I'm all for distributed / P2P social media, but crypto is full of some of the most scammy and downright shameful behavior I've ever seen in my life. Pump and dumps, rug pulls, money laundering. There is a real reason people hate crypto.

To tip it off, crypto is one of the least meritocratic things there is. The longer you've been in it, the more people you've scammed, the more you hype, the "wealthier" you are.

Crypto smells like a shit and vomit sandwich and people immediately turn their noses.

Build P2P social without the crypto angle and you have my attention. I've been wanting p2p (not federated) social media since the 200Xs and the decline of the indie web. Social and news should work like email and BitTorrent, not Facebook or "federated Twitter".

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> I'm all for distributed / P2P social media, but crypto is full of some of the most scammy and downright shameful behavior I've ever seen in my life. Pump and dumps, rug pulls, money laundering.

The SEC's answer no questions, sue first, approach to crypto in general made legitimate players afriad to operate, so the space became dominated by those that didn't care about the law.

Many on HN don’t believe there ARE any legitimate uses of crypto in the first place.

Here are some:

https://intercoin.org/applications

But most comments I get are “I stopped reading 2 seconds in when I saw the word Web5.”

(We started using it when Jack who founded Twitter, started bluesky, promoted nostr started using it).

Here is a graphical presentation that can drive it home:

https://intercoin.app/investors.pdf

I looked at your links and I still don't get it. I do want to understand. Where is the problem stated, clearly and concisely? What is the solution and why does it require crypto?

I say that as someone who read the Bitcoin paper in 2012 and was pretty excited back then.

Meanwhile online scams are a bigger industry than the illegal drug trade and bigger than the Australian economy. There are thousands of modern day slaves in call centers in Myanmar and the Philippines with fake social media profiles running pig butchering scams. That industry runs on crypto 100%. I guess that's one "problem" crypto solved.

You need some pretty convincing arguments at this point to convince me (and many others) that getting rid of this stuff wouldn't be a big win for humanity.

The problem is relative to WHOM.

Here is the problem statement and solution for community leaders, the same class of decision makers who exited “AOL Keyword NYTimes” in favor of “nytimes.com” on this newfangled protocol called HTTP, with its servers and clients called browsers that people were downloading

intercoin.org/currencies.pdf

When they asked for a clear and concise description of your problem and solution, they are probably looking for a problem statement: a focused, 1 or 2 sentence explanation of the problem you intend to solve. You then present your proposed solution in the same form.

Hypothetical example problem statement: We want to promote ycombinator to everyone that could benefit, but banner ads make us look chintzy, directly engaging in the feral discourse on Slashdot would inevitably look unprofessional, and engaging directly through dozens of purpose-built blogs and websites is too onerous.

Hypothetical example solution statement: We should create our own simple, well-designed news site built on user submissions, and include threaded discussion capability with moderation built in at both the community and company level to keep things relatively civil. Then our audience will come looking for us.

What you offered is not a problem statement. It is a sales deck offering a, frankly, convoluted explanation of how starting a currency will solve a largely unrelated problem backed up by an unsupported assertion about the least representative sample in the world— Donald Trump.

Or, you could actually read the deck and it explains the problem.

At this point, I think this is just performative

I read it all. It's apparently supposed to be a way for celebrities to extract money from their audience by having them buy into their currency.

If you're satisfied with calling that useful, okay, I guess - to me it's deeply alarming that this is presented as a good example of a useful application of crypto.

In the broader context of crypto demand being driven essentially by digital crime and gambling, there would need to be some seriously glowing example of something good that can be done with it to shift my judgment.

For example, in the early days of Ethereum, I thought it'd be possible at some point to build truly open source, decentralized SaaS, where the deployment happens to the blockchain, and that this in turn would enable open source projects to finance themselves.

I've yet to see an example of this where the crypto aspect isn't a figleaf.

I'm very concerned that people arguing for exciting applications of crypto are involuntarily legitimizing the online crime ecosystem. Crypto in practice seems to lead to a massive transfer of assets to criminals. To an extent where that may end up destabilizing whole countries, given the market cap trajectory.

It doesn’t explain anything. It asserts a lot. Sorry I took the time to critique and give examples as a freelance business communication designer. Effective business communication requires frank feedback, and mine usually isn’t cheap, but if protecting your ego is the goal here, just keep assuming you’re doing everything right and it’s everybody else’s fault it’s not landing.

> We started using it when Jack who founded Twitter, started bluesky, promoted nostr started using it

Jack Dorsey is certifiably insane. His obsession with cryptocurrency is a warning to anyone that throws away success to live as a crypto maxi. You will lose the only things that matter to you in life, your business will be taken away from you by shareholders if you own one. Your control will be hated by users that accuse you of trying to ruin the internet with NFT profile pictures and crypto tickers. Many users outright left as a consequence, others would leave after the takeover. But Dorsey set the stage for the enshittification of Twitter, and anyone that's forgotten that should face the music.

Web5, no matter who utters it, is a phrase that means nothing. A person walking on the street would not be able to define it for you. Me, a programmer, cannot define it for you or even explain what it looks like. It is a marketing term as applied to Free Software, which will alienate Free Software users and disgust/confuse common people. If you cannot find a better phrase to describe your philosophy then people will forever associate you with the myriad grifters that shared your "Web(n)" branding.

I defined it very clearly

  Web2 (community) +
  Web3 (blockchain)

We need to combine the two. Web3 by itself is lame, Web2 by itself is blind.

> The SEC's answer no questions, sue first

This isn't true, and last time someone tried to prove it was, they cited .. a huge PDF of all the questions the SEC had been asking crypto firms prior to action.

Besides, the rules are over now. The US President ran a pump and dump. Can't get more legitimacy than that.

I have been building it, in fact.

https://qbix.com/ecosystem

Do I have your attention now?

Ten years and $1 million dollars later, it’s free to use, but we haven’t started promoting it yet, still testing with paying clients:

https://github.com/Qbix

Here are some ideas:

https://qbix.com/community.pdf

https://qbix.com/alumni.pdf

This is interesting, but it feels too platformy for my use. I'd really like to see something 100% like BitTorrent.

Instead of trying to build a "you.com" (as in your pdf example), I want a place we're all just a simple disposable signed hash address (that you can change, make public, keep pseudonymous, etc.) - easy and disposable if needed, but also possible to use as the building block of an online presence or brand if your hash becomes well known. Kind of like email, in that sense.

The platform doesn't need real time streaming video or video calls. Just text and images to start. P2P Reddit or Twitter.

It shouldn't be about building a platform where you attract others to your brand. That can come later. It should be about participating in a swarm and building up a mass of people. An exchange of ideas and information, but where it feels like being in public. Like BitTorrent. Once network effects kick in, you can find the nodes (people, topics, etc.) you care about and want to prioritize in your interest graph.

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