Not an endorsement for “web3,” which seems to be a sort of centralization of the decentralized technologies at this point in time, unfortunately.
Centralization has its perks though. A lot of things are priced in dollars, and it's somewhat convenient to not have to worry about rampant speculation and boom/bust cycles affecting the medium of value transfer.
There may be a future where rather than a claim on fiat, there are tokens that provide a claim on some underlying stable-priced commodity or similar asset that isn't tied to a specific government. I think that would be a step in the right direction.
But yeah — "Web3" was a buzzword, and thinking that a peer-to-peer programmable payment network was the next version of the internet was a bit misguided.
Those things are nice I guess, but if you had asked me in 2021 what people wanted out of Web3, I'd not have listed those things. We wanted an economy based in types of value which better align with our values than fiat does.
Stablecoins are just a fresh coat of paint on the same problem as before: Money that is issued by a select few in furtherance of schemes that will make that few richer, with no reason to expect that those schemes will benefit the masses--masses who are expected to value that money just because we're told to.
Blockchain is a useful technology, but, it appears, mostly not for carrying fancy coins.
It solves a lot of headaches compared to having each stakeholder maintain their own database and then do pairwise syncs in hopes of convergence.
Bitcoin's problem is that, since it's controlled by the miners, they're unlikely to change the issuance rules. Adequate security can be had at a far lower cost, but that's a change that would damage their investment in mining hardware, so the miners will never do it.
I hope one day we start valuing abstractions based on the desirability of their externalities. After such a shift, bitcoin will look pretty silly--who would want use waste-electricity-coin when they could instead use capture-carbon-coin or go-to-mars-coin? But it would seem that we're not there yet.
Asic miners outperform GPU's though, so it would have to be an awful large pile of GPU's.
Just a few weeks ago Fiserv launched a stablecoin on Solana: https://investors.fiserv.com/newsroom/detail/2848/fiserv-lau... I doubt they listened to me, probably just came to the conclusion independently.
So I'd say that it has caught on, just in a way that doesn't involve the users' preferences as much as I'd like. Because it's not like Fiserv is going to let their end users transact with any of the other assets on Solana. They'll wrap it in an interface that just calls it "$" and the user will be none the wiser.
Those widely accepted tokens of value are the result of somebody violently imposing that widespread acceptance, usually because they won a war and now they want to continue bossing the losers around without having to remain combat-ready all the time. The only people who benefit from using widely accepted tokens of value are those who have a hand in issuing them. To the rest of us they represent a disadvantage.
For a long time this was a stable configuration because densely connected networks of interpersonal debt become computationally burdensome to work with at the scale of the empires created by those wars. But if our money can be programmable, then maybe a new way can be found which better respects the needs of all of its users, rather than just the few at the top. I don't know what such a thing would look like, but it would look nothing like a stablecoin.
I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing.
There is not a mention of that in the article.
Is it actually supposed to just be microtranscations paid with cryptocurrency? Where's the "decentralized" part of that?
Anyway, instead the best I can see this article seems to be talking about how it turns out people aren't using blockchain for buying things, and makes the (apparently) shocking conclusion "the one thing people always wanted: money that just works."
I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing.
The scam message was that so many people got rich investing in web2.0 companies like Facebook. You can get rich too by investing in web3 (shitcoins & NFTs).
If we take the buzzword seriously, yes there was more to it than microtransactions with cryptocurrency, but without personal wallets on the blockchain capable of those transactions the rest of the ideas like NFT tickets, Decentralized Finance etc are impossible.
Stablecoins operate using decentralized ledgers on e.g. Ethereum which use decentralized compute. This isn't mentioned explicitly because the target audience knows this already.
Stablecoins transferred $27 trillion in 2024 - more than Visa and Mastercard combined. This is right in the article.
And by now we have seen many cases of stablecoins predictably crashing when trust in that backing authority dissolves. Most famously UST/Luna but it’s a long list.
I suppose they are useful for covert transfers, and the actual transfer mechanism is decentralized. But they are strictly worse than normal currencies for storing wealth, since the backing authority is a private company with virtually no oversight. And the utility for transactions would vanish if you were not confident that you can exchange it back and forth with cash immediately before and after the transfer.
Visa / Mastercard have such large fees that they're mainly used for commercial payments like a coffee or couch.
If most of the Stablecoin transactions were for buying a coffee, I think it'd be fair, but the vast majority of stablecoin transactions are for shuffling money around, i.e. to buy and speculate on bitcoin, or to move money to an exchange to liquidate some crypto into cash.
I think the current use of stablecoin transfers is closer to a wire transfer.
SWIFT apparently deals with about $1.25 quadrillion/year, so ~50x the claimed amount for stablecoins in the article... though there's more than just SWIFT out there too.
idk, I don't really have a point, I'm both amazed stablecoins are such a big number, but also feel like the comparison the article's making with VISA is misleading for how they're currently used.
There is no real compute happening on the actual blockchain. The more instructions you have to execute, the higher the gas, the larger the fee the user will have to pay. The blockchain is used more as a database which the Web3 app can then query (for free) and use as a source of truth. It's not just currencies and microtransactions - game stats, property ownership, a users notes or todo list, anything you want. But you are definitely not doing any kind of major compute.
Web3 now refers to web apps that interact with a blockchain instead of a server API. They are mostly built with modern web technologies (React, Vue, etc.) Many are opensource and lots of communities participate in developing standards and in participating bodies. Uniswap, for example, is a website and underlying protocol for changing one coin into another, is now on v3 (UniswapV3) and many other projects and companies (SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, etc) take this frontend and the blockchain contracts to implement their own compatible offerings.
These API call's go through your wallet (usually a browser extension or app) which injects the JS needed into the website or handles it itself. The wallet will usually perform an RPC to a remote server to perform the actual blockchain communication. Most chains have default free RPC servers but you can also pay for a more premium/less latency/higher uptime RPC services. You can also run your own RPC infrastructure and handle that yourself.
User identities are tied to wallets. You do not have to sign up or join any Web3 app, you just "Connect" your wallet which is a free action which basically consists of signing a pre-generated message vouching you are joining which the Web3 app can verify.
Many standards have developed like Uniswap mentioned earlier. Interfaces for NFT's, delegated spending (to condense transactions and save gas fees), notifications, chat. Because all contracts are on a chain and every frontend is just a webapp, and many services ensure transparency by posting the source code for their contracts, it enables seamless integration of other APIs.
For example, another layer has been abstracted on top of UniswapV3. Since there is hundreds of swaps all supporting UniswapV3, you then had the development of apps called "routers" which would check all the swap sites and find you the cheapest rate. These routers can even swap between multiple token chains and assets to arrive at your end coins.
One more way this is more decentralized. If any of these web frontend's were to go away, the contract still exists and you can manually call it's functions to achieve your goal like withdrawing money, reassigning an NFT, or evolving your pet.
Furthermore, since all Web3 apps are just really calling contract's behind the scenes, it's easy to just send these actions yourself in a program. You can turn 20 clicks in some UI into a script that does the same interfacing with the blockchain directly.
One last point, but all this data is being stored on chain and is exportable and backed up forever by millions. I have personally had trouble with losing devices and having poor backup discipline. So, I have stored my personal notes and todo list in a custom (encrypted) contract I wrote a few years ago. I can lose access to every device or password I know and can still access it anywhere in the world because I have memorized my 12 word wallet mnemonic and every node has a copy.
Trump has a stablecoin, "USD1". It's partly backed by Trump's memecoin, "TRUMP" Really.[2] What could possibly go wrong?[3]
[1] https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/usd1-the-cryptocur...
But you are certainly correct that there is no shortage of bad actors in this industry.
Having said that, to me this article seems written with the help of ChatGPT. That is not bad per se but I feel it should be mentioned (eg. Venkatesh Rao's Sloptraptions)
geekodour•2h ago
solumos•2h ago
Giving your users airdrops is almost always a perverse incentive, and trying to figure out how to onboard to Farcaster as "Step 1" in your product journey is extremely limiting.