MadeThisToReply

Privacy isn't the same thing as secrecy.

I know what you're doing in the bathroom, but you still close the door.

It didn't.

The whole point of crypto is that it's not regulated. As soon as the regulators take real action on crypto, the entire promise of crypto will vanish in a puff of smoke.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I struggle to envision what a tightly-regulated crypto market would look like that wouldn't defy the entire point of crypto.

"Ponzi scheme" has become completely divorced from its original meaning. It's supposed to refer to a specific type of scam where you pay "investors" using the money you received from previous investors, but nowadays it's basically just used now to mean "anything crypto-related in which people might lose or have lost their money."

This was my main lesson. I lost some money on Terra/Luna - thankfully much less than $5k, but still enough to sting. Looking back, I can see that I really had no idea what I was getting myself into and it was mostly just FOMO.

Obviously I'd rather still have the money I lost, but in a sense I feel lucky. If Luna had waited an extra six months to collapse I would have become confident enough to put more money in, i.e. I'd have ended up losing even more. And I'll definitely be putting much, much more thought into any kind of crypto "investments" I make in future. The money I lost was a small price to pay for the lesson I've learned.

> Jack Dorsey just launched “Web5”, a buzzwordy project focused on decentralized identity

Woah, hold on, I thought we were still on "Web3"? Actually I'm not convinced that we've even moved past Web 2.0, since Web3 is still mostly just bullshit, scams, vaporware and monkey jpegs.

Did "Web4" get swallowed up by the same beast that made us skip IPv5?

> Your ability to obtain credit is based on the past several years of income, with a penalty for instances over the past ~7 years in which you didn't pay back debts.

Okay, and using these inputs, what function is applied to determine whether or not to grant the loan? How does that system differ from a "credit scoring" system, apart from that your perceived ability to repay isn't explicitly mapped to a single variable?

Is he wrong? What is "Web3", except a trendy marketing term to make the old seem like it's new? All I hear about Web3 is that it's the future, it's the next big thing, it's blowing up, it's coming soon - but they were saying the same things five years ago about "blockchain", and none of those promises came true.

The only thing that seems to have materially changed since 2017 is that "blockchain" is now rebranded as "Web3", meaning its enthusiasts can recycle the same old promises about how this stuff is definitely the next big thing and hope that no-one will say "hold on, haven't you been saying this for five years now without a single thing to show for it?"

I think the important question is: why would we need to?

> Technically, web3 is merely authentication with a public key.

I thought "web3" meant "something, something, blockchain"?

What's the potential of web3, and how does it solve the problems of web2?

Eh, I have a 90 minute commute and I don't mind because I go by train. Three hours a day to read! I love it.

Granted I wfh 2/3 days a week; if I had this commute every day I'd probably feel differently.

I don't play videogames and know very little about crypto mining, but isn't the mining being done on specialised hardware these days and not GPUs? Are GPUs still being wasted on crypto nonsense?

"Web3" is just a new label to make it seem like the same old bullshit is somehow novel and revolutionary.

First "blockchain" was the future, it was the next big thing, it was a revolution, it was going to change everything, you'd be a fool not to get involved. Sure, there might not be a lot there yet, but it's like the Internet in 1994 - this is only the beginning!

If they were still saying the same things about "blockchain" then people would notice that these lofty promises have delivered nothing for ten years. But give it a sexy new name like "Web3" and now it feels new again, even though nothing has changed, and they can continue to entice people in with the same old promises. Sure, Web3 doesn't seem to have produced much yet, but this is only the beginning. It's like the Internet in 1994!