Author: Casey Newton

Original source: platformer

This article is from Lao Yupi (ID: laoyapi), reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

This past weekend, it felt like everyone I knew was sending me the same link."Canadian media critic Dan Olson's long-form video commentary "The Problem with NFTs" has been swiping in all corners of the tech world since it was uploaded last Friday. (In 138 minutes of meticulous research, Olsen traces the history of the 2008 financial crisis, the birth of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the rise of NFTs and DAOs, and concludes what we call"web3 "What is practically irreparable: the technology is too broken, its creators are too indifferent to its failure, and it will never live up to the promises of its most passionate backers.

Olsen’s criticism is a bit corny, and on my Twitter timeline this week, I’ve seen many crypto enthusiasts dismiss his views. Few of those working in this space are surprised to believe that Web3 is riddled with myths; that current blockchains are energy inefficient and expensive; or that digital wallets are difficult to use and fraught with risk. Many web3 builders will also be upset by Olson's tone, which is the smug and reprimanding tone of a typical YouTube video critic; his audience is not people working on cryptocurrencies, but people he believes should be afraid of them .

However, the provocative nature of Olson's argument is enormous. His essay explains the rise of cryptocurrencies through the lens of: rising inequality; isolation and loneliness in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic; left-handed and right-handed venture capitalists; and the hopelessness of young strivers that the future will only get smaller . These points are particularly timely given the plunge in cryptocurrency prices this week.

As an independent interpretation of cryptocurrencies, I find Olson's point incomplete. He left out a lot, including all the people who have dramatically improved their financial situation through cryptocurrency investments. Even so, many viewers will find these points to be a much-needed wrap-up commentary on the multi-year hype cycle of cryptocurrencies, with every new corporate NFT release, celebrity revelations about Materialman Yacht Club NFT purchases and surprise surprises. Token airdrops seem to be accelerating every day.

All of these points are to say: You should take a hard look and think for yourself about cryptocurrencies. (If you're already familiar with the Bitcoin story, the video is broken into chapters; if you have no further questions, you can skip to Olson's three-minute conclusion). For our purposes today, if you're someone who believes in the future of cryptocurrencies, you should give some serious thought, too.

Because whatever you think about Olson or his overall argument, there's no denying that web3 is a real mess today -- and not just"we haven't finished building yet"that way. Web3 is a mess that could take five years or more to untangle, and that's assuming the revamp begins soon.

The thing is... I'm just not sure if people are working on these things. I read funding announcements, I talk to product people, I follow Twitter timelines. The other day I read a long article in which an investor talked about"What to watch for in cryptocurrencies in 2022", which sounds like what we should be looking at in 2021: music NFTs! The DAO is disrupting things!". The new model DAO is creating!"Web3 is still in the infrastructure construction stage"。

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Make cryptocurrency transactions safe, reliable, and accessible to ordinary people

Here is a story about blockchain. One day, some people discovered that some high-priced NFTs listed on the trading platform OpenSea have been listed many times, and some prices are only a fraction of today's value. These people take advantage of this fact to buy and then immediately resell these NFTs for hundreds of thousands of dollars without the seller ever realizing what happened.

In a good marketplace, you can only let a product sell once, and at the price you intend to sell it for. But in OpenSea, multiple listings can be made. And blockchain-based transactions are irreversible. So, like many things in cryptocurrency, the losers here are at the mercy of the platforms, which in the end do compensate them. However, I am impressed by what OpenSea said to CoinDesk on the subject.

A spokesperson for OpenSea told CoinDesk via email,", but", but"Problems due to the nature of blockchain"。

Try to imagine that you just lost a few thousand dollars because it turns out that you inadvertently listed the same product twice for vastly different prices. Then imagine calling the market to complain and the person on the other end of the line saying:"Good news, this is not a bug or bug. This is just a problem that arises because of the nature of the blockchain."

I can't imagine you will do business with this company again. More importantly, I can't imagine the average person not doing business with this kind of company at all. In the early days of the Internet, I used to think that people who refused to give credit card information to e-commerce sites were a bit paranoid. On web3, paranoia is a must for doing any kind of business.

smart contract"smart contract"It's all a bug bounty. The OpenSea story is a vivid example. However, despite"in the past ten years"scam"almost became"synonymous with cryptocurrencies, yet surprisingly little progress has been made in getting the masses to fully trust cryptocurrencies. Crazy new scams keep popping up; some hackers even send users free tokens as a way to scam them of their entire wallet private keys.

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Make a Moderately Efficient Blockchain"computer"

free"free"Facebook account, and for $75 every time you want to post something, you can get a feel for what it’s like to participate in a social network on the blockchain today.

Ethereum is in the midst of a transformation aimed at making it more efficient -- that is, faster, cheaper, and less energy-wasting. At the same time, technologists regularly show up, announcing that they have built a more efficient blockchain. Solana, for example, is a company that raised $314 million last year to build what it says"The fastest blockchain in the world"。

With that in mind, let's take a look at how the world's fastest blockchain performed on Sunday, when the aforementioned cryptocurrency crash saw many people using it to buy and sell assets. Below is Frank Chaparro reporting from The Block.

As prices for cryptocurrencies slumped across the board during Friday's trading session, traders large and small found themselves unable to execute trades on Solana's blockchain -- the protocol backed for its scalability and fast transaction speeds Those touted. Transactions per second (tps) dropped significantly.

These problems spilled over into Saturday. Meanwhile, Solana’s official status twitter account noted that the blockchain has been",and",and"Too many repeat transactions"related.

So, it seems, Solana is the fastest blockchain in the world until a lot of people want to use it at the same time, at which point it behaves like every other blockchain, which is to say badly.

I don't know, maybe it's just a matter of Moore's Law, and in the future, our quantum computers will verify new entries on blockchain ledgers effortlessly, in fractions of a second. However, if web3 is to be widely used, it cannot be so slow, expensive and wasteful of energy.

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Develop technologies to mitigate harassment and abuse

Today, keeping people safe on platforms depends on assumptions we take for granted: that our posts, purchases, and other activity are mostly private; that offending material can be removed; and that by logging phone numbers, IP addresses, and other signals, bad actors can be prevented. Actors evade prohibition.

On the blockchain, none of this is true. Transactions are public; transactions are immutable; and regaining access to a platform is as simple as creating a new wallet. In his video, Olson speculates about how corporations or governments can scan blockchain transactions and use them for shady purposes; this is one of his points, and it is the most important one for me.

A day after Olson’s video, software engineer Molly White laid out the potential for blockchain abuse in an excellent blog post. She wrote:

privacy"privacy". AA bills from all your previous Tinder dates, monthly transfers to your therapist, are you in debt, are you donating to charities, are you setting aside some retirement money, that corner next to your apartment The location of the store, even how often you go to grab a pint of ice cream at 10pm...

This will all be seen not only by that one-time Tinder dater, but also by your ex-partner, your estranged family members, your potential employer. When you're ready to leave them, an abusive partner may see you pump funds into an account they don't control. As for the marketing machines and predictive algorithms, they're currently sucking in every bit of data to determine what ad to show you, or assessing whether you're a good candidate for a mortgage, or trying to predict whether you're going to commit a crime? Well, they did just learn all about you.

On Twitter, I asked who might be working on these issues; so far, I haven't heard anything back. It’s hard to imagine anything holding back the mass adoption of blockchain technology more than a lack of basic trust and security features, but so far we’ve seen very little.

It seems very likely that, to the extent that any of the above problems are solved, it will not be solved by decentralized computer networks, but by centralized platforms that incorporate these costs into their business models. At this point, web3 will look like a mirror image of what Olson calls Web2.0.

All that said, I'm keeping an open mind on blockchain technology, simply because there's a ton of talent and money working on it right now. (Also, I find relentless negativity both heartbreaking and tedious.) None of the problems here seem impossible to fix, though I suspect it may be a fortnight or more before the industry starts to address them .

But now is the time to start. The rapid growth of web3 will bring increasingly astute critics like Olson and Marlinspike into the field, whose views cannot be dismissed as "sour grapes" for haters and reckless. Blockchain technology can no longer really be said to be new technology, yet the answers to many fundamental questions are still proving elusive.

By the end of the year, we hope that web3 will have more performance.

elsewhere in the blockchain. Like Twitter before it, Reddit is testing verified NFT profile pictures. And these people are using NFTs to get your IP address.