this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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[–] hark@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Web3" was supposed to enrich a bunch of assholes. It was never meant to do anything else.

[–] dx1@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Hard disagree, "web3" (defi) is meant to provide a decentralized alternative to our modern economic infrastructure, that doesn't have huge institutional points of failure like central banks or investment banks. The only reason people piled into these speculative projects, centralized exchanges etc. is because probably > 60% of the population is into the idea of getting-rich-quick while < 1% of the population is into trying to build a better future with tech, or even just getting their head around how the technology work in the first place & what kind of potential it actually has.

I've been watching blockchain since Bitcoin was under a dollar and it really blows my mind how much people love to spout off about it without understanding anything about the space. You've got teams of hundreds, thousands of people working for years to solve all the problems in the space like PoS or scalability or contract security, but the general public is all just talking trash about the entire space because of NFTs.

Even this article, "Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid"? Who said that? "A key feature of NFTs has completely broken?" No one who knew anything about NFTs ever said there was some universal "guarantee an artist would get paid", particularly not if a contract to purchase an NFT didn't guarantee that directly. If a given contract guaranteed that (or at least, the party creating the NFT on-chain), then it still does. If it didn't, then it didn't. Anyone actually learned Solidity and read a smart contract for themselves? Cause I'll tell you, any smart contract where some institution has "god controls" over the state of the contract, that's against the entire point of "web3"/"defi".

[–] Astroturfed@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (36 children)

Bunch of words about people working hard on a ponzi scheme doesn't make it not functionally a ponzi scheme.

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[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

I think the Trump NFTs were my first time hearing of perpetual trade royalties. Most of the NFTs I own are tied to games though... maybe it's more common in the art space and chains I don't frequent.

I was into BTC before anyone really had a good place even check the value and would waste them on side projects and also gamble them away randomly like they were Chuck E Cheese tickets. It does not keep me up at night, in fact everyone constantly checking the price of crypto is almost the antithesis to Crypto in my opinion. The investing mindset is kind of nauseating, you can't talk about any project without price being brought up.

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[–] benoit@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

It sure sounds like that wasn't a feature of NFTs, but a feature of OpenSea

Who could have seen this coming? Who could have foreseen that all of Web3 was a ponzi scheme that would say anything to get people to pretend hashes on a blockchain is worth 100s of 1000s of dollars. Who? WHO?

[–] GenBlob@lemm.ee 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How is this Web3 scam still a thing? I thought I would finally stop hearing it after the crash but it just keeps coming back. The only people who will get rich from this are the scammers themselves.

[–] anlumo@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago

It’s a mindset. Once you know that the solution is Blockchain, all you need to do is to find a question that fits this answer to get filthily rich.

Casinos are also a known scam, but that hasn’t stopped them.

[–] HerrBeter@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Mastodon and fediverse is more web3 than web2 (lest I've misunderstood). The problem has been shitty implementation.

I.e In reality, nothing is more valuable than the ground work it stands on. So just because it's an NFT doesn't mean it should've been worth anything. It has to provide meaning and value to the consumer. Like if all of steam would put their marketplace on a blockchain, those items would still be just as valuable as before. The value comes from the item implementation, not the "storage" technology

[–] Kazumara@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

To me that whole royalties spiel was always just marketing to bait non-technical people into adopting the NFT system.

I've never seen anyone build and use an enforcable mechanism for a multi transaction chain to pay out to one original address repeatedly. I think at the very least you would always have to hold the NFT in a multi sig wallet between the artist and the current owner, for the artist to have a mechanism to keep enforcing their royalty claims. That would also require involvement of the artist in every further transaction.

Maybe I'm missing something like a smart contract that can fabricate new multi sig transactions on demand with pre-approval of the artist somehow... If anyone knows of something like that I'd be interested in the technical details.

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

It could theoretically be done by implementing a covenant system in contracts, but it never got built despite all the talk about it (probably because of the extra complexity it requires in validating new transactions). Otherwise, like you said, multisig is needed so one side can simply demand the new transaction to be signed use the same contract before agreeing on transferring. Which requires this second signer to anyways be available online...

[–] InternetTubes@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

It's what you get when you invest in glorified digital receipts being used in a confidence game. The real legality is behind whatever the purchase and license agreements say, and a digital receipt may matter shit to it, specially if the the transaction is largely absent of any other value.

[–] pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I thought the whole point of NFTs and the blockchain is that it's decentralized, and you can use "smart contracts" for things like this. How is one company able to decide to change it?

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[–] mojo@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

That was just many parts of the grift. Also when that feature was very rarely used, it was ironically a regular web 2.0 feature that was pushed between participating centralized MFT marketplaces. You know, because it was never actually decentralized.

[–] JungleGeorge@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The whole "web3" bs has always just been a shabby scam, and people fell for it

[–] CarlsIII@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even the name “web3” is stupid. Isn’t it supposed to be the next step after “web 2.0?” Shouldn’t it then be “web 3.0?” They couldn’t even include a space between web and 3!

There actually is a Web 3.0, and it predates the cryptocurrency-oriented conceptualisation of "Web3" by quite some time.

Web 3.0 is otherwise known as the Semantic Web, a set of standards developed by the W3C for formally representing (meta)data and relationships between entities on the internet, and for facilitating the machine-reading and exchange thereof.

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (14 children)

A. I don't actually feel bad for anyone because if you're involved in NFTs in any way, you're begging to be scammed. There is no legitimate use for NFTs.

B. This seems like blatant illegal fraud. You can't just advertise "get this cut of all transactions forever" to get people to join, then say "just kidding" once they include their "art" in your shitty scam. They're entitled to their shitty cut of your shitty transaction, and you can't hand wave it away by pointing to fine print when you sold the product very clearly making that claim.

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[–] jray4559@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

pfffffffffffffffff

I want to be sympathetic, but honestly, I'm just not.

Web3 was a mistake from the beginning.

[–] HerrBeter@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Because web2 centralization worked out fine. Meta owns half the web and everything feels dead

[–] HulkSmashBurgers@reddthat.com 3 points 1 year ago

This is the funniest use of NFTs I've ever read about:

As a self-described “fartpreneur,” however, Matto may have girlbossed a little too close to the sun. On Christmas, she says, she went to the ER with what she describes as heart attack-esque symptoms, which doctors promptly diagnosed as severe gas pain as a result of her diet. Matto’s visit to the ER, which she recounted to a journalist from the U.K. outlet Jam Press, was aggregated across news outlets across the globe, prompting fervent social media debate as to whether Matto’s fart-selling enterprise was a savvy business move or a cultural death rattle resounding from the bowels of late-stage capitalism (pun very much intended). Yet Matto is unruffled by such critiques, and has harnessed her newfound virality into promoting her newest venture: selling fart jar NFTs for 0.05 ETH (a little less than $200) each, though she has significantly reduced sales of her physical fart jars following her ER visit.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/fart-jar-tiktok-stephanie-matto-interview-1280395/

[–] Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is now a recurring feature of tech vaporware. Claiming something that is clearly shit is okay because it does some good, or something that is uselesslt frivolous and speculative will have and important function and use-case in the future.

My condolences to those that have been made fools by this - we all need to keep an eye out for these patterns going forward.

I wanna add: prosecute and sue these thieves. Sue the people who took money to promote these lies. They all deserve to have those ill-gotten funds ripped away.

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