I am just curious regarding everyone’s views concerning eventually moving everything on the web to blockchain/web3. Yay or nay, and why do you hold your view?
Personally, while I can see the advantages of doing so insofar as security and convenience are concerned, at the same time, it also strikes me as being Orwellian, like we are slowly being corralled, and our freedom of movement limited, or at the very least, being more closely monitored. I mean, let’s face it, more security and convenience can be a trap. Just look at what is happening in our nation along these same lines.
The big thing that bothers me about blockchain hype is that the only things anybody seems to want to do with blockchain is make money fast. (Exhibit A: the NFT bubble.) There are a lot of exciting possibilities that aren’t manifesting because venture capitalists don’t see a way to get a return on their investment.
I think the collapses of both FTX and the NFT market have really squashed a lot of the enthusiasm for blockchain and Web3. When the biggest news about the tech is about massive fraud and plummeting market value, people quickly recoil from even the most deservedly hyped new thing.
Myself, I totally ignore all of that crap. In fact, I will honestly say that I don’t even fully understand it. I don’t know how old you are, Marquelle, but I remember the days when the Internet was not commercialized like the way it is today. Now, everywhere you go, it is money, money, money. And don’t get me going about when software subscriptions were first introduced. Thank you Adobe. Not! 
But, I bite the bullet when it comes to Adobe, because Adobe Photoshop is an essential part of my daily workflow.
It’s important to distinguish between blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain is a really fascinating technology for broadly-distributed databases. And several big companies, like IBM, are investing heavily in the tech for use in a wide variety of enterprise and data center products.
These are completely separate from various cryptocurrencies and NFTs, which are fundamentally just applications based on blockchain. These apps are all going to fall by the wayside and be footnotes in history, while I believe blockchain tech itself will become a critical tool used behind the scenes for applications where many mutually-untrusted parties need read/write access to a common global database.
Some popular examples include real-estate records and supply-chain parts tracking. Things that will make no headlines, will not make anybody overnight millionaires, but will greatly improve the way we currently do business.
2 Likes
And that’s a big part of the problem: most media outlets don’t distinguish between them, and all you hear about is the stuff meant to make money. All the truly interesting possibilities are virtually invisible unless you follow tech company press releases, and those are always to be taken with a grain of salt (sometimes the whole shaker).
Blockchain is a truly revolutionary technology, and the only things most people know about it are little more than investment bubbles. This makes it harder for companies doing truly useful applications of the technology to get any attention, especially the ones that don’t already have deep pockets like IBM and need outside investment to get off the ground.
Not as old as you, I suspect, but I’m firmly in the “Older Than Apple” category. I cut my large-scale network teeth on CompuServe in the early '80s (and smaller-scale on local BBSs in the same time period). I too miss the days before everything on the Internet was about making money and/or manipulating people’s opinions. I sometimes wish I could go back to early 1990s Usenet (before the advent of Eternal September).
My sense is that because they’re broadly distributed, you’re seldom going to get high performance from them, so they’ll mostly be used in specific instances where tracking is key.
Marquelle, I too ran a Mac Classic-based BBS up until about two decades ago, maybe even a little longer than that. It was based on Hermes II software. In fact, to my knowledge, I was the very last Sysop running a Macintosh-based BBS.
I took it as far as I possibly could as Mac OS continued to advance, and the Internet began to crowd out BBSing and FidoNet. During my last run with my BBS, I ran Sheepshaver on Mac OS X Mountain Lion, if I recall correctly. Within Sheepshaver, I ran Mac Classic 9.0.2, I believe it was, where Hermes II resided. But all things eventually come to an end.
While I no longer run my BBS, I still do have my old school cgi-based messageboard running since over two decades ago. It is Christian-oriented, and is more for nostalgia sake than anything else. It’s been dead for a while, although I do advertise it now and then in the hope that it can still be revived.