I don’t refuse to counter-question “do we even need it?” I have written articles at length why we need smart contracts, and I linked to it in the original comment (answer to Moxie). You just ignored it in your rush to ascend your soapbox!

I know that Upton Sinclair quote. Who pays my salary?

I could say the same about you. I realize who pays the salary of many of the startups that go through YC. The venture CAPITALISTS do. The Web2 ecosystem that banks at the same bank (Silicon Valley) and had a bank run on that bank kicked off by Peter “build a monopoly” Thiel. You support that ecosystem, and therefore are against any decentralized alternatives. Do you support Palantir and precrime as well?

Perhaps the above doesn’t describe you, only a bunch of tech bros like you in the very shareholder-based ecosystem that has led to the Big Tech oligopoly and is the subject of “boiling the frog” we are talking about. But then again, you are doing the same to me, assuming things based on whatever “Web3” means to you.

First you trot out incoherent strawmen about proof of work and shitcoins. Then, when I point out the issues with what you say, you do an adhominem.

You continue to be deluded. I just got through criticizinf hyper-capitalism like Thiel’s that would make many capitalists blush. Then I proceeded to advocate alternatives that fit the dictionary definition of “libertarian socialism”. You turn around and call that hyper-capitalism.

Well, how about this… in your system, you have monopolies and hardly any competition. It’s digital Feudalism. You are like the slaves supporting the system because the slavemasters were kinda good to you. In the system I advocate, everyone is competing to provide better infrastructure (hosting, security, storage etc) and you are not locked in. There is redundancy, no single point of failure. And no one can usurp power easily.

>All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing.

Sigh. You sound like you’re in 2013. Are you talking about Bitcoin? Because I had the same criticisms of it since before you were in crypto. I made them publicly in ArsTechnica and was covered in the BBC, Newsweek, etc back in 2018. We actually experimented with allowing people to do Monero mining as a way to pay for our apps, and the whole thing went bad pretty quickly and we removed it for precisely this reason. I called out the incentives publicly 5 years ago:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there...

You seem to ignore that every other coin besides Bitcoin and Monero doesnt fit your description, let alone the other distributed systems…

> And in every case, the whole network is actually run by a quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of "decentralized" arent even defensible.

Really? “The whole network” of Dat/Hypercore and Bittorrent and IPFS and safenet are run “by a quorum”? You should read up a bit more on what distributed hash tables are before spouting such nonsense.

Your response is to throw shade and FUD it without engaging in anything approaching substantive, intellectually honest discussion. I back up everything I say with myriad examples that illustrate general patterns. I have arrived at this position by battle-testing my ideas and being open to changing my mind. Are you?

Saying “you’re wrong and deluded” and declaring “it aint” unilaterally isn’t actual substantive argument. It’s just asserting bias.