Palaukite, kas vėl yra „blokų grandinė“?
Kodėl „Web3“ pradeda veikti dabar?
Kiek Web3 yra ažiotažas ar sukčiavimas?
Jei be galingų tarpininkų, veiksmui vykstant tik blokų grandinėje, išeina pigiau, tiek mokant mūsų pinigais, tiek mokant mūsų asmenine informacija, bei yra sukuriama daugiau vertės, nes didžiulės monopolijos negali taip lengvai, kaip iki šiol, užspausti mažus konkurentus, tai Web3, be abejonių, išstumia Web2. Na, o kas nespėjo (Kinija?), tas pavėlavo.
It’s a still-nascent, fuzzy idea, but if you squint, you can see it intruding more and more upon mainstream culture. Matt Damon is filming ads for Crypto.com. Gwyneth Paltrow is giving out $500,000 worth of Bitcoin to her social media followers. And Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon can be seen talking awkwardly on “The Tonight Show” about limited-edition digital cartoon apes they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for.
Wait, what is blockchain again?
Blockchain was introduced initially as the technology behind cryptocurrency, starting with Bitcoin in 2009. “With decentralized financial exchange based on the blockchain design, like what Bitcoin uses, you don’t have to trust an authority with your money,” The Times’s Nathaniel Popper explains. “Two people are automatically matched up through software, and they make the exchange directly with one another.”
“Many NFTs can be downloaded, duplicated, ‘screenshotted’ or simply found elsewhere on the internet,” Sophie Haigney explained in The Times last year. “Buying an NFT, then, is not so much about buying something as it is buying the concept of owning a thing — which feels like the logical endpoint of a society obsessed with property rights, and finding new ways to buy and sell almost anything.”
Today, the value of all cryptocurrencies is some $2.3 trillion. Some of the biggest drivers of the crypto boom are venture capitalists, who invested more than $27 billion globally in crypto-related projects last year, more than in the previous 10 years combined.
“Every type of financial service is now being replicated in these decentralized environments,” Stephen McKeon, a cryptocurrency expert at the University of Oregon, told The Times. “This is what’s driving all the investment.”
As crypto values have soared, the rush of interest in NFTs among celebrities with extra cash to spend makes a certain kind of sense, the journalist Max Read argues. “More than anything else,” he writes, “the value of a given NFT is a function of its perceived exclusivity, coolness, and prominence, and so a halfway decent celebrity should be able to generate capital gains on their NFT holdings simply by going on a popular nightly talk show and discussing their NFT portfolio with the host.”
But what explains the interest in Web3 among the less wealthy? One theory, from Tressie McMillan Cottom, a Times Opinion writer and sociologist, is that blockchain offers the promise of unimpeachable ownership rights, an idea that might especially appeal to the historically dispossessed.
Economic anxiety inflected by FOMO — fear of missing out — fuels the fever too. “Cryptocurrency is, at the very least, now seen as a good place to park some cash,” The Times’s Erin Griffith writes. “Everyone has read the stories of teenage crypto millionaires — or the pizza bought with Bitcoin that would now be worth millions. To not get involved is, in crypto-speak, to ‘have fun staying poor.’”
Still, much of Web3’s promise remains theoretical. When it comes to NFTs, some proponents argue that it will transform not only the way art is bought and sold, but also what art and artists we value and how artists are paid. “NFTs create opportunities for new business models that didn’t exist before,” James Bowden and Edward Thomas Jones write in The Conversation. “Artists can attach stipulations to an NFT that ensures they get some of the proceeds every time it gets resold, meaning they benefit if their work increases in value.”
At the loftiest heights of Web3 discourse, the prospect of a decentralized internet is cast as a bulwark against authoritarianism. “Conceptually, Web3 is innately more beneficial to Western liberal democracies, which value democracy and personal privacy,” Anthony Vinci and Nadia Schadlow argue in The Washington Post. “China and Russia have already set up mechanisms to spy on and control the existing Web2 infrastructure through firewalls, censorship and coercion of technology platforms. Web3 would make such authoritarian controls much more difficult.”
How much of Web3 is hype — or a scam?
If there’s anything the social-media iteration of the internet made clear, Recode’s Peter Kafka believes it’s that even the most exciting technology can bring unintended consequences. “At first blush, Twitter seemed like a fun way to tell people what you had for lunch, and then for a moment like a tool that could help liberate oppressed populations,” he writes, adding, “This time around, we ought to be much more thoughtful about possible downsides.”
One downside is that cryptocurrency is a useless, even dangerous speculative investment, The Times’s Binyamin Appelbaum argues. Unstable, cumbersome and expensive to use, cryptocurrency doesn’t work as a replacement for government-backed currencies. What it does do, however, is incentivize market frenzies and use huge amounts of electricity — more than the nation of Finland.
Some commentators, like Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, have also pointed out that Web3, for all its heady promises of democratization, isn’t actually very decentralized: It still depends on centralized organizations to maintain servers, cryptocurrency wallets and websites where NFTs are stored.
For Anil Dash, who helped invent NFTs in 2014, this reliance on Web2 infrastructure frustrates much of their revolutionary potential to put power back in the hands of artists. When people buy an NFT, “they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years,” he writes. “Our dream of empowering artists hasn’t yet come true, but it has yielded a lot of commercially exploitable hype.”
And the commercially exploitable hype that celebrities are creating around NFTs is “gross,” The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull believes. “Watching two millionaires promote a mechanism of passive wealth accumulation while they unconvincingly pretend to be interested in ‘art’ or ‘community’ is viscerally revolting,” she writes. “If Hilton and Fallon and their celebrity friends are going to go out there and pump-and-dump their way to additional wealth, they could at least do the rest of us the courtesy of being a little more discreet about it. Instead, they sound like they think this is stupid, and like they think the rest of us might be stupid enough to buy in.”
In the years to come, both Web3’s boosters and its skeptics may be proven a little bit right, Charlie Warzel argues in The Atlantic. “The Web3 crowd’s ambitions must be taken seriously: It has the money and the influence and sheer marketing power to make the dream a reality,” he writes. But, he adds: “To accept the FOMO bullies’ narrative — and ignore the doubters — is to cede control of the future to a small subset of loud and powerful people. That’s just what Web3 is supposed to prevent.”
If, without powerful intermediaries, it is cheaper to operate in a blockchain, both in terms of our money and our personal information, and more value is created, because huge monopolies cannot, as hitherto, squeeze small competitors, Web3, without doubt, displaces Web2. Well, who didn’t join on time (China?) those are too late.
"Privačios kosmoso bendrovės įkūrėjas persvarstė savo plačią Marso kolonizavimo viziją, tačiau pateikė nedaug aiškių detalių apie tai, kada Starship pakils į orbitą.Tačiau 2022 m. jau čia, SpaceX dar neišbandė orbitinio Starship paleidimo.
M. Muskas teigė nematantis konflikto tarp NASA darbo ir didesnių savo svajonių.
