Thread by @Pinboard

I think my favorite thing about web3 tooling is how "what is one useful thing you can do with it today?" is treated as a gotcha question, beneath contempt, even though for binary search, asymmetric cryptography, Bloom filters or any other technology it was dirt simple to answer

This is why I keep getting drawn to the analogy to string theory. The grand intellectual edifice of the whole ensemble is supposed to be so compelling that pointing to the absence of any contact with reality is treated as either bad faith or sign of insurmountable ignorance

The fact is if you get deep into the tech, cryptocurrency is *impressively* stupid, in the same way it would be difficult but stupid to make a working slot machine entirely out of raisins. And the fact that this slot machine pays out real money with every pull is unsettling.

If you see a bunch of tech people losing it over cryptocurrency/NFTs/whatever, this is why. If you open the hood of the race car, there's no engine there, just a little clown riding a tricycle who honks his horn at you. And yet the race car peels out and does donuts in your yard

So as a tech person, either everything I know about distributed systems, human nature and society is wrong, or this is the most monumental scam I'll see in my lifetime. Neither answer is pleasant, but I'm putting my chips on the latter because I'm a bitter nocoiner who missed out

This is a good point! If you're one of the Old Ones, you remember a moment that drove home why this internet thing would be big. Your first time tracking a flight or package, first slow download of a set of boobs, first real-time chat. But web3 has nothing

https://twitter.com/JMEightDigits/status/1463564499634503683

Someone in a comment challenged me to point out a non-crypto asset that makes more than 0.1% interest a year, and I figured some people may not know this— you can this very moment go buy a 7.12% savings bond (in scary fiat currency) from the US treasury. treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research…

If you read tech stuff from the fifties (like the wonderful rocket fuel memoir "Ignition!"), you always find a passage about how something used to take 9 days of tedious hand calculation, and then the lab installed a huge IBM mainframe and it took only one day, and they loved it

You can find endless examples of this from the invention of the first mechanical adding machine all the way through the present, and the absence of any such stories from blockchain technologies after 12 years is what makes the current round of promises for web3 hard to credit