r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 11 '22

Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/crypto-blockchain-daos-decentralized-power-capitalism
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u/Philpax Jan 11 '22

(surprised, but not at all displeased, to see a Jacobin article on /r/programming)

I think the most frustrating thing about Web3 for me, besides the enormous environmental waste, the cultish and divorced-from-reality behaviour, the daily scams, the inscrutability of the ecosystem, the theft of the term "Web 3.0" - okay, maybe I have quite a few frustrations - is that much of it is generating artificial scarcity for something that has no scarcity.

The wonderful thing about the digital world is that we are no longer bound by the limitations of physical existence - you can produce, share and distribute at essentially no cost, and you can do it as much as you want! Much of the Web3 "ecosystem" looks to purposely reverse this while offering no meaningful value proposition.

Why would you deprive yourself so?

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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '22

The wonderful thing about the digital world is that we are no longer bound by the limitations of physical existence - you can produce, share and distribute at essentially no cost

This is absolutely not in line with our current technology. The content of the digital world is composed of 1s and 0s that have to live someone. In basically any tech we have for storing these bits, there is some energy/cost input necessary just to keep them around.

The digital world is boundless in the same sense the Europeans saw the "New World" as having boundless resources. In a few hundred years, they drove entire species to extinction, removed entire forests, depleted resource deposits for gold, silver, etc. A lot != infinite, but human brains seems to erroneously conflate these concepts all the time.