These technologies have mindshare and will be part of our world’s future. As an engineer, where can I read about these technologies discussed regularly, so I can learn & understand through exposure? Is HN that venue? (If not, why not? What are the boundaries of our bubble here). I’m interested in the tech/practical applications, as opposed to the hype/emotion.
Twitter seems to be the go-to place for these discussions. Partly because many of the web3 participants are actively trying to build communities around themselves that they can leverage in their crypto activities. There isn’t much interest in anonymous discussions. Frankly, there’s not really any interest in honest discussions because the participants have all realized that telling people exactly what they want to hear and hinting that they can get rich is a golden way to collect a lot of Twitter followers right now. Many of the big personalities are launching expensive crypto courses or NFTs and they need a lot of true believer followers to sell to.
The challenge with web3 is that almost nobody is actually using web3 for anything other than doing more web3 speculation. That makes this virtually impossible to find this:
> I’m interested in the tech/practical applications, as opposed to the hype/emotion.
Even the people discussing the potential practical applications aren’t the people who are using it. The people talking about it are the people trying to sell it or speculate on it.
> I’m interested in the tech/practical applications
I've studied this for about ten years, and came to the conclusion there is none, other than crazy financial structures and mechanisms that make the 2008 subprime mortgage scandal look like a Fischer-Price toy. If you find an interesting, practical application for anything blockchain or cryptocurrency, please let me know as well.
> If you find an interesting, practical application for anything blockchain or cryptocurrency, please let me know as well.
The interesting application looks something like this.
You have an internet connection, a Raspberry Pi and a USB hard drive. You get paid in cryptocurrency to host some data for the decentralized web. Now you have it and can use it to pay for things over the internet, anonymously. Having an anonymous digital payment system that regular people could use for small transactions would be a big advantage. No more Amazon keeping track of what books you read on your Kindle and having to worry about getting put on a list. It also provides funding for decentralized content hosting.
The current problem with this is that existing popular blockchains have high transaction fees and low transaction volumes. That's a technical problem that could be solved in the future, but right now it's an impediment.
The current solution is to use third party custodial services, which can handle arbitrary transaction volumes and have low fees because they're just rearranging numbers in their own private database. But then they're subject to KYC regulations and that's a blocker because people are going to get to the point where some shady internet company they've never heard of wants their social security number and say "hell no" and that's the end of it. Also, this erases the privacy benefit.
So to be useful we need one of two things. Either solve that technical problem, or get regulatory changes that waive KYC requirements for small transaction amounts, e.g. for accounts with less than a $1000 balance.
You get cryptocurrency, you spend cryptocurrency, you're anonymous. The person you bought something from, if they want cash instead of cryptocurrency, isn't anonymous.
Or they exchange their cryptocurrency for cash in some place or context without KYC rules. The seller could be anywhere in the world.
> Immutable public ledgers, despite their widespread use for online drug markets, are not famous for their anonymizing properties.
You know that some public key had some amount of cryptocurrency and then it went somewhere else, possibly into a cryptocurrency tumbler. You don't know the identity of the person holding it and as soon as they have enough to buy something they can stop using that now-empty wallet.
Also, Monero solves this more robustly, doesn't it?
> The IRS is likewise not famous for its laxity with tax fraud.
Who said anything about tax fraud? You can report the income on your tax return without specifying how you spent the money.
How do you think it works with physical cash? The advantage here is that it can happen over the internet.
“Future generations of computer scientists will be jealous of your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this new area—analogous to getting into the Internet and the Web in the early 1990s. I cannot overstate the opportunities available to someone who masters the material covered in this course—current demand is much, much bigger than supply.”
I wrote off blockchains after a cursory investigation into applications in supply chains about 4 years ago. I’m planning to take a second look after seeing so many accomplished people gush about it like TR here.
Not practical and not what you are looking for, but an interesting take: if you view today's NFTs through the lens of Gamification (or the desire to amass Fake Internet Points) or through an entertainment/celebrity lens then these things provide a sense of status to others that also give credence to that idea.
Kind of like sports: the winner of a sporting event doesn't practically matter, it's just entertainment, but fans can feel extreme emotion from a win or loss, and many people form part of their identity around a team.
That said, entertainment itself is practical and necessary, and had been around longer than our modern financial systems, so maybe it does answer your request !
I do still think crypto will eat the world in every way it can, even if it shouldn't.
The magic of torrents is that you download music or movies or whatever. And they did that the first year the Bittorrent protocol was released. Note that at the time, all peer coordination was centralized through trackers, the DHT wouldn't arrive for another five years after.
By comparison, Bitcoin has existed for ten years and hasn't let anybody do anything yet, because a slow time stamping algorithm (proof of work) turns out not to be that practical for many important applications.
> Bitcoin has existed for ten years and hasn't let anybody do anything yet ..
Bitcoin created a scarce digital good, modeled after gold in many ways, that promised a sound money for the internet, digital cash, a reserve currency powered by proof of work. A currency that unlike fiat, could never be debased no matter how tempting it might be for a politician. I could see how one might not value these things as an individual but I think it's a bit much to boldly claim that "it hasn't let anybody do anything yet."
After all, it's made many people rich, particularly those curious souls who went down the rabbit hole to investigate it early and were therefore rewarded. Growing wealth, providing a savings vehicle that beats inflation over time, or making the owner rich - are all valuable outcomes for a new technology designed to offer a new type of monetary asset.
Bitcoin is incorruptible money with a fixed and predictable inflation rate and monetary policy that cannot be manipulated by any politician or central bank - no matter how tempting it may be. There is value in that, even if not everyone can see it.
what were the first protocols? are these really comparable situations in your mind or are you grasping at straws here? genuinely curious if you can make an argument that they're similar
That's fair. People with needs outside of the current financial system, like paying for drugs or murderers or illegal pornography might enjoy using cryptocurrency. Let's keep just one cryptocurrency for that and stop talking about Web3, then.
> other than crazy financial structures and mechanisms that make the 2008 subprime mortgage scandal look like a Fischer-Price toy.
Funny, my impression is the opposite. Blockchain and DeFi are still quite limited in what they can do relative to what’s going on Wall St. It’s the blockchain stuff that’s still a toy. A novel and fun toy, but still comparatively a toy.
Also fwiw, so far cryptocurrency is a debtless financial system, since without identity you can’t have credit ratings or any way of enforcing repayment. So a 2008-style credit collapse is impossible. It’s highly volatile of course, but at least not subject to a GFC or Great Depression style credit collapse.
(There are flash loans, but those loans are made and repaid instantly in the same smart contract, and if they can’t repaid then the smart contract fails and the loan was never made. I don’t think a buildup of risk similar 2008 can happen with those)
I should clarify, I don’t consider stablecoins to be decentralized nor cryptocurrency. So when I say “cryptocurrency is a debtless financial system”, I’m not referring to stablecoins, but only to the decentralized and trustless components of the overall ecosystem.
Most stablecoins are run by a centralized, trusted third party maintaining a dubious peg to the centralized USD and will probably get taken down by some Soros breaking-the-pound style attack eventually.
But Bitcoin and most other major cryptocurrencies predate stablecoins, and will survive them.
Additionally, most of the collateralized DeFi leverage schemes you reference require over-collateralization. Since no identity makes margin calls impossible, effectively the margin call is done up front as a contingency in the form of over-collateralization.
A debtless, over-collateralized financial system is an interesting case study in financial in/stability. It’s certainly a different beast from the traditional financial system.
Yeah...but you have to lock up crypto assets, usually with a value significantly over the stablecoins you get in return. And if the value of your assets fall, they're liquidated and the loan is repaid. It's risky for the borrower, but very low-risk for the lender: rarely do lenders have 150% collateral, literally locked in place and ready to sell at a moment's notice. So far I don't see any major systemic risks, except maybe to the reputation of the whole DeFi enterprise if positions start getting liquidated in a crash.
I think it would be good to find an alternative to "proof of work" (bitcoin) and "proof of stake" (ethereum). It should be called "proof of traffic", basically a crypto coin which anonymizes internet traffic for everyone. If such technology is possible, it would merge the ideas of TOR and Bitcoin, while rendering VPN providers obsolete. It would also have societal benefit through anonymity.
The fact that you can find little on this subject on HN speaks for itself.
There are many clever minds here and I have followed by far the most witty discussions on various topics on this platform. Whenever the topic of cryptocurrencies comes up, substantial concerns are expressed about the technology and its added value for society and the financial system.
At the same time, I don't get the sense that this is unfounded reluctance. Rather, fundamental questions reveal themselves upon closer examination. And the participants in the discussion are in best of company. Many smart people have expressed concerns about crypto currencies in the past (e.g. Bjarne Stroustrup or Waren Buffet to name a few).
I have the feeling that the vast majority of cryptocurrency advocates have no idea about the matter themselves. They are simply spreading slogans on Reddit and Twitter proclaiming the next big hype. I think that's one of the reasons why you can find so little neutral and highly qualitative information on the subject - there is none.
The same logic applied to the vast, often contradictory, purportedly science-based quantity of diet tips and the ilk, such as the health benefits of red wine and chocolate, would lead you to believe we know nothing about what a human body needs to survive.
Online public discussions of cryptocurrency never get past the stage of "is crypto even real?", so it's no wonder that discussions have moved to private Discords and invite-only subreddits. If, every time you tried to ask an in-depth question that would get an informational, insightful, and highly qualitative answer, and the majority of replies are of the level "hurr durr your question is teh stupids and you're an idiot for thinking about this", wouldn't you move away from the public eye?
Questions like: how does Bitcoin need to change in order to operate on an interplanetary scale (aka Mars' transmission delay)? or How best can a proof of work system be designed to be resilient to quantum computing?
Both those questions are actively being worked on and have interesting answers, though they are few and far between, but that doesn't mean they aren't being worked on. The people doing the work are too busy doing the work to talk about it, and the dilettantes are too busy repeating half-truths to each other for there to be the answers you seek on Twitter.
Are you aware of any such sources where practical applications of crypto, for earth, are discussed?
I'd like to expand my understanding without getting involved in the right/wrong debate.
For the same reason questioning the "virtue" passed down from previous generation that sitting at your desk for 45 hours a week being indicative of a hard worker, or effort.
Crypto for me has become the opposite of the fun hack and try ethos. It's the opposite of most open source in that it is pay to play. I can't clone a repo and play around with something. I almost always need to buy some token. It's the commodification of hacking and it isn't fun so I don't participate.
It's a great forum, but it's wayyyy more technical than HN. Anyone just trying to keep up with what's being built will get lost in casual zero knowledge math very quickly.
I think there is no such thing as HN for a lot of different domains. Apart from the technical aspect, also politically and philosophically the discussions here are on a very high level I have not been exposed to anywhere else on the internet.
However, HN seems to be in large anti-crypto, so I think you will not be exposed here to anything "bleeding edge", more like major news. Also I have not seen any Show HN or similar of people developing applications for the crypto space.
So I have been asking myself the same question as you. There are a lot of websites with great resources for crypto (similar to the regular finance world, the amount of free websites with good information is substantial). There are also some really good substack newsletters (however, some of the writers are invested, so I take their information with a grain of salt).
But there is no forum or similar venue that I know of where actual users or contributors discuss or share experiences (except for some discord servers maybe).
Philosophically and politically, there's some really great discussion on LessWrong, though it definitely leans hard into the rationalist/AI-philosophy realm. Check it out and see if it tickles the same fancy as HN, though I'll admit that in my case, absolutely no community beats this site.
Honestly, most of us are on Twitter right now, that's the best place to see discussions at the moment. I try to optimize for higher signal rather than hype, feel free to look at who I follow and build out from there: https://twitter.com/the_carlosdp/following .
HN isn't going to be that venue at the moment, seems pretty hostile to web3/crypto. That'll change eventually, but for now you gotta look elsewhere.
> HN isn't going to be that venue at the moment, seems pretty hostile to web3/crypto.
I actually don't think HN is hostile to web3/crypto specifically. I think HN is suspicious of hype, and the hype level around those things is pretty insane.
I see a lot of skeptical comments that boil down to "but what is it actually good for?", and there's never really a good answer posted to that question. To me, that's an indication that there's more hype than substance. But who knows? That could change in the future.
What are elections good for in a country of 350mm people?
Crypto is a social movement, they are much more massive and powerful than technological ones. They also provide huge returns when you embrace that you are making a social-movement type bet.
When Soros bankrupted the Bank of England it was a social bet on the various cogwheels falling in place for the short-selling to work.
The profit of that short is real money, even though it was not a bet on technology.
There are many ways to skin a cat, people have to understand that betting on technological trends is kind of a new thing, for our whole history as a specie we only bet on social movements
And also there is almost no technological bet that is purely that.
For example, people betting on Microsoft in 1994 were not only betting on the company, but also making social-science type bet that people would fall in love with the computer via a GUI, in a way that didn't happen up to then via the command interface.
OK, but HN is primarily a technical forum, and so cryptocurrency is typically viewed mostly with that filter.
Presenting it as a social movement makes it immediately more in the political realm -- and that only raises more questions and potential problems. It also brings in the potential for genuine controversy without clarifying much.
Maybe there wasn't a sense of rage from the masses towards the few people who could use a computer (via a Command line interface) but the end result is the same as the aims of cryptocurrency movement.
Moving from a world where a very few % of the population is able to use a particular tool towards a world where everybody can do it.
Reverse repos, loans off appreciating assets and so forth are only availible to few.
I think that perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "social movement". To me, a "social movement" is a large group of people trying to change society to be closer to a political ideal they believe in.
> Before win95 it was a small club of elites, after it was everybody
I don't think I fully agree with this assertion, either, but I do understand what you're getting at here. Even if this assertion is entirely true, though, I wouldn't call it a social movement.
> To me, a "social movement" is a large group of people trying to change society to be closer to a political ideal they believe in.
Once you remove the libertarian component of crypto and people who don't want to pay taxes and people who hate the Federal Reserve...you are left with people who'd love to be able to do reverse repos and getting loans off their appreciating assets, and other complex operations which are not availible to retail.
Is the unavailibility [of complex financial operations] to the general public due to a political and social stance that society has?
Or is it lack of understanding of the market by the existing financial players?
Because if it's the latter then it's not that different than companies trying to force feeding Command line interface to people before Microsoft decided to go full GUI and ship Win95
I work in crypto as well (Consensys) but find that I enjoy the minor hostility towards crypto here on HN, as crypto Twitter sometimes looks like one giant circle jerk (or pub brawl if you find yourself on the "{insert-cryptocurrency-flavor-here} maximalist" side of the camp).
> as crypto Twitter sometimes looks like one giant circle jerk (or pub brawl if you find yourself on the "{insert-cryptocurrency-flavor-here} maximalist" side of the camp).
Strongly agree. It’s hard to find anyone honestly discussing crypto things on Twitter because any mention of a project or currency becomes a magnet for low-effort pump efforts. Saying anything negative results in weird, low-effort pile ons and attacks.
It’s also just plain boring. Everyone is posting “how NFTs will change _____” threads now that don’t even make sense. That’s because they’re not interested in actually using NFTs, they’re only interested in collecting followers and “selling shovels” in the latest iteration of the crypto gold rush.
I used to as well, but these days I find sorting through optimism much more useful than sorting through pessimism when building in the space.
It's much more fruitful to talk down someone buying too much hype and learning the one component that maybe isn't hype than arguing with someone on HN that is stuck in 2017 and still thinks there's absolutely no value in web3/crypto tech.
I don't find the hostility on HN useful at all. It's the same negative comments recycled over and over and over and over and over and over.
Crypto twitter certainly suffers from hype and flavor-of-the-day profit chasing, but it's also got thoughtful discussion of real problems. Twitter isn't the ideal format for a lot of it, but it's what we have today.
Not to be rude but i tried to go through a fair number of the twitter accounts you follow and i still see mostly self congratulations for being in early hyping self or hyping friends products...
Gonna try starting with only following the core devs of the top projects and see how that goes
Tech forums on the internet have heavily declined in quality. Reddit took up a lot of communities that would have been independent otherwise, and over time the original mods of those communities gave control to heavily unqualified individuals whom abuse their positions for pleasure and profit.
I would imagine where Bitcoin started would be one of them, perhaps there's references to other communities there. Sometimes discords are good but still suffer from bad management.
> Tech forums on the internet have heavily declined in quality.
it's true. Nowadays all websites you're supposed to visit daily are "background-color: white" and owned by Facebook. From its wild days, the internet has become pretty boring.
On reddit, r/ethfinance is a good, well moderated resource from the user perspective. From there once you find a particular protocol niche you are interested in, the community discords for each app are also frequently quite informative and helpful.
As for HN, the conversations here bring in a lot of folks that have a very low opinion of crypto assets in general, so that makes it harder to have more detailed conversations about the underlying technology.
It's less that the positives are not represented it's that it's difficult to get into the finer details of a protocol if (just as an example) you are hung up arguing whether proof is stake is good or not.
I don't think there is anything else quite like HN. I sometimes wish I knew how to better find certain things here or something.
I don't really want tags or silos. I'm not great at searching the site. Given how often questions exactly like this post show up here, I'm clearly not the only one who wishes they could find HN-like discussion for a specific subject area.
I'm bothering to make this comment in hopes that one of two things will happen:
1. Someone will give me a solution for how to more readily find what I want on HN.
2. Someone will create some kind of tech solution in response to seeing this observation.
I'm not sure this is exactly what you're looking for, or possibly you already know about this, but I always use algolia when searching hackernews (make sure to select search by comment if you want discussion).
I'm familiar with it. One of my interests is medical information. You can't put "medical" into it and have the latest "premium" articles come up.
I would love an easy way to readily find recent active discussions and articles with high karma for medical topics. But you have to search on words that were actually used in the title.
And that's kind of a variation of the question in this post. If there was an easy way to find "crypto related articles and discussion" right here on HN then you wouldn't need to ask "What other forum can I go to?"
I've been on HN more than a decade. It's bigger than it used to be and a lot happens here. It's easy to miss out on a lot of things pertinent to your interests.
If you are an optimist, HN is not the right place to have a "pro" discussion imo. I will outline products that i'm most excited about or use regularly .
2. Stablecoins, especially USDC. I get paid for my consulting in USD from US to India with a tx fee of $0.00025 on Solana. I'm saving a lot compared to using PP/Payoneer.
3. Supporting artists I love with NFT on foundation/ opensea/magic eden(for some reason I never did this before although there are web2 sites for it).
4. Generate yield on your stable coins. I wont mention apps here since they are new and have some smart contract risks to it, DYOR.
5. Creator monetisation using unlock-protocol.com and mirror.xyz.
6. Play to earn models in games(Axie infinity and Aurory).
7. Internet native experiments on inclusive sybil resistant identities(proofofhumanity.id)
HN has a hateboner for cryptos, which most of the time is based on purely illogical assumptions of tech they have no understanding of.
Reddit is fine, but it heavily depends on what you want. r/ethdev is good if you're interested in creating something, and r/ethfinance for quality discussion focused on what you can do on Ethereum.
There's a common assumption among crypto-apologists that critics just don't understand cryptocurrency. I don't think that's true. With Bitcoin for example, I could whiteboard out how it works and explain it with some technical depth. As a hobby project I once wrote a script to parse the blockchain blocks to get details about specific wallets I was interested in. There are certainly implementation level aspects I don't understand (or know about), but I bet I understand it as well or better than 90+ percent of pro-bitcoin people.
My understanding of Bitcoin doesn't change the fact that it's pretty obviously a Ponzi Scheme. The only way to make money with Bitcoin is selling it to a greater fool. Bitcoin is largely not used for real transactions because it's slow and expensive to transact with. For the typical user, who is concerned with risks like losing their keys, being hacked, or being scammed, Bitcoin is vastly less secure than established banking solutions.
It sounds like you have a good understanding of the tech, but I’m not sure that’s common on HN. Imo HN mostly dismisses anything new until it’s obviously dominant (sometimes even then).
Bitcoin aside, what do you know about Web3, smart contracts, defi, and decentralized applications?
I'm actually in agreement that bitcoin is overvalued, and therefore largely a bubble with ponzi-like elements at this point. But I think the other things mentioned are incredibly nascent emerging technologies whose potential is still largely untapped.
It's not that - it's that a lot of us remember the time the bubble burst in 2000 and cryptocurrencies are in a very similar place right now.
There are also a lot of us who are strongly against Proof of Work because it is not only extremely inefficient, it is also extremely irresponsible in the face of Climate Change. PoS will solve that - but like nuclear fusion, it is always a year away.
Yep, seconded. I would find cryptocurrency and NFTs merely amusing or maybe even interesting, if it weren't doing the environmental equivalent of dumping out N gallons of gasoline per transaction and setting it on fire
I agree about the energy use of PoW. On Ethereum, the PoS beacon chain has been live for almost a year now [1], with the merging of the PoW and PoS networks happening next year.
We're now at the point where the specs for the merge transition are ready [2], clients are already being modified to target the release-spec [3], and the first long-lived testnet will go live by December. I'd personally expect the Merge to happen by May.
> HN has a hateboner for cryptos, which most of the time is based on purely illogical assumptions of tech they have no understanding of.
Basically all online communities have hatred towards cryptos. Not because of understanding or assumptions, but because the shill army of shitcoiners that try to pump their shitcoins in every possible community there is. And of course the numerous spampots and scammers who also spread the negative image for cryptocurrencies.
That can't be what's being talked about in this post. Otherwise this post wouldn't make sense. Those are fundamental tech topics. The term crypto seems overloaded
It's very overloaded, which is increasingly a problem for those of us who work with cryptography. I have started to have to be careful to stop saying "crypto" when I mean cryptography.
Even though "crypto" has been short for "cryptography" since before cryptocurrency existed, increasingly people interpret it to mean "cryptocurrency" instead. It's a bit like the linguistic fight over the redefinition of the term "hacker": it's a lost battle.
Well, since GP said "other than coins", I interpreted it to mean "uses of cryptography other than cryptocurrency (coins)". But, well, I'm getting downvoted, so probably not.
HN has collectively decided not to be that venue. I doubt that's going to change any time soon.
It's a newsletter blurb-and-link format, but Week In Ethereum is a great resource for keeping up with a lot of what's happening. From the core ethereum development to defi and nft techs to some broader social and legal issues, that newsletter keeps you up to date.
Twitter is extremely important in the crypto industry.
But, twitter isn't just the "HN" of crypto. r/ethereum may be closer to the HN of crypto.
In crypto, Twitter is the town square, the watering hole, the stadium, the newspaper, the social club, and so much more. It's very hard to overstate the importance of twitter to the crypto industry.
I share your quest for finding the HN of "Web3". I've long been on CryptoTwitter but I've decided that I don't want to spent a lot of time on Twitter anymore.
Since then, I've tried to understand where there could be a technical and philosophical community of tech+crypto people on the internet.
- HN is full of haters, sadly
- everything on reddit is slightly too non-technical and hype mentality
- I haven't found a low noise Discord server
- I haven't found a good hacker news clone either.
- CT is too self-important
I don't strictly want to have this totally crypto-biased community either. I'm in the camp of "'yes' to crypto but I'm critical".
For the last year or so, I've simply started to foster my own community. I write a blog on crypto that you may like: https://timdaub.github.io/
My headlines are kinda clickbaity but I think they're legitbait :) Check it!
I'd be up for starting a proper crypto community. I even have reserved a name for it: neoactuary.com. I checked out the lobster code base and I think it'd be a good fit too. But those things take ages to get established: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
Hey Tim - I checked out your blog. Your writing is solid.
NeoActuary sounds interesting - I like the name. What’s needed to make it reality? When someone we admire expresses their goals and needs, other people feel subconsciously driven to help them. You could try it out here…
I'm tacking on to this thread, because otherwise, it'd get buried. But I've found that the Ethereum Research forums to be akin to what you're looking for.
I think there's super interesting conversations to be had on e.g. how crypto currencies could influence our society. They're dramatically mind blowing. Even if you're not into the technology, I think simply from a rhetoric point of view, it'd be interesting to take a deeper dive into the space and explore topics not widely discussed elsewhere. Case in point
I just read the Blockchains Never Forget article. Fascinating, thanks for sharing that.
The philosophy articles are interesting because you can get a sense what people are manifesting towards as they imagine, build, & use these technologies.
You keep changing your set of links by editing the comment (mutability sure is convenient, huh!), so I can't easily respond to all of them, but I just read that first link, the "Blockchains never forget" one, and hoo boy, I really wish I spent my time doing anything else. Want to have an honest conversation about it?
Let's start with my summary: techbro discovers the concept of paying people for their time, and also keeping records about it, and waxes philosophically about that whole idea for way too long. Techbros really need to get out of their bubble once in a while......
The problem with your comment is that you're not being fair to both sides of the argument. So I'm not sure what to really respond...
You're also calling that author a "techbro" which I guess they don't fully deserve. I don't know them or if they're a "techbro". I appreciate that they put so much time into writing a free public blog.
Anyways, I still believe that there's an interesting and respectful conversation to be had.
The author of that post didn't really give me a central argument or thesis to discuss. It was more of an extended diatribe on the possibilities of the future, and my only response is "These are not new ideas, please read up on history". If you don't believe that's respectful or interesting, then I'm sorry, but I just don't feel it's very good conversation fodder. Feel free to strike up a conversation and let me know how it goes.
Great question. I recently created a decentralized website to help spread best security practices in this space. I have a lot of information to share, but I'm trying to figure out how to publish the content, as I haven't done a lot of web development yet.
I look at this aggregator https://cryptopanic.com/ daily to see a bit of the blockchain buzz. Rather basic, but there is a decent bit of discussion and a variety of sources I don't get from reddit/twitter or MSM sites.
Twitter is going to be the best resource to discover projects, and DYOR Wiki (https://dyor-crypto.fandom.com/) is really good to get plain english understanding and history of various projects. To understand technically, you'll need to read docs or code.
I'd really like this as well, I haven't been able to find anything besides discord, cryptopanic, and subreddits. And there's a lot more noise to cut through in the space than on Hacker News
The only communities that are "like" HN seem to be HN and rationalist ones, like Astral Codex, LessWrong, etc. At least as far as I've found.
/r/medicine is also pretty interesting, albeit more diffuse.
You have to be a certain kind of person and a certain kind of commenter to benefit from the kinds of rules and norms we have here. We reward curiosity and heavily penalize single-layer jokes and memes. But unlike heavily moderated subreddits, we also value quality asides and off-topic branches, so long as, again, they reflect curiosity.
Perhaps the biggest blocker to HN-like communities for other fields is we're allowed to be wrong on the internet. And we're allowed to point it out, correct each other, and gratefully accept corrections.
HN & Rationalist groups can accept and integrate new information, and we can accept that some people are misinformed or having a bad day, and that they're not malicious or trolls.
Whereas in most online communities you can be either "right" or you can be gone.
I am much more interested in DAS, Decentralized Account Systems where the web would no longer requires a signup before anything to work. It should just "work".
And it seems Shopify, Stripe and even Cloudflare are all hiring a team on Web3. I dont understand Crypto, NFT or DeFi, but I see DAS as an important piece of puzzle on the web.
The challenge with web3 is that almost nobody is actually using web3 for anything other than doing more web3 speculation. That makes this virtually impossible to find this:
> I’m interested in the tech/practical applications, as opposed to the hype/emotion.
Even the people discussing the potential practical applications aren’t the people who are using it. The people talking about it are the people trying to sell it or speculate on it.