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I keep reading over and over again that Ethereum's real value is in the "platform" and in the "smart contracts". I'll say it again, you're deluding yourselves, Etherum's raise has come because it's extremely easy to mine using GPU's and people have been buying graphics cards in bulk, right now it's extremely hard to find AMD GPUs in stock because for the last months miners have been purchasing them all.<br />
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Miners don't give a damn about the potential of Ethereum (or any other blockchain technology) they just want to make money out of thin air and when mining stops being profitable they'll switch to the next big thing, which may very well be Monero or ZCash (they're already talking about which will be the next goldmine), or sell all their graphics cards, which is expected to be really soon because mining difficulty grows exponentially.<br />
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What are the benefits of using blockchain technologies? It's decentralized and safe, right?<br />
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Well, Ethereum was hacked and thousands of ETH were stolen, which is the reason why ETH and ETC are now different currencies. There's no certainty that this could happen again in the future, and then what, another hard fork?<br />
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And as I've said in my earlier posts, decentralized means shared, if you don't have enough nodes to share the entire blockchain it doesn't work or it works slowly. When miners stop making money with ETH they'll disappear and with them a huge chunk of the computational power.<br />
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Seriously, except for making easy money there is no reason why companies need any blockchain technology.<br />
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A Lamborghini, being a car, can be used to drive around the mountain. But why would you use a sports car when you can use a 4x4 vehicle specifically designed for that?<br />
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In other words, just because you can use Ethereum for some things it doesn't mean that you should. And we already have dedicated technology for those things that Ethereum is (supposedly) capable of.<br />
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I still have no idea why some are connecting blockchain technology with a supposed to come Web 3.0. If it's going to be a Web 3.0 it's going to be built on top of Web 2.0 standarized API technologies and languages and IPv6. If you need extra layers of security we already have very robust encryption systems and VPN services.<br />
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I've read that Ethereum would be great for cloud computing/hosting. Why would you use Ethereum for that when there already are specific dedicated and 100% proven technologies?<br />
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Just to be clear, if you're making money out of this I'm more than fine with that, I'm not against people making money out of thin air, I think it's pretty awesome in fact. I'm just trying to make you aware that Ethereum may very well burst in the future and go to hell and that blockchain technology may very well be just an overhyped piece of work that's irrelevant out of the context of cryptocurrencies. After all, we've had blockchains for almost a decade and there's no one out there using them outside of virtual money.<br />
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Now, back on the Web 3.0 thing, if I had to put my money on something it would be Virtual/Augmented Reality mixed with Web 2.0. I think V/AR are natural extensions of what we already have, the Internet is kind of a virtual world anyway but with HMDs we can create 3D virtual paralel worlds. Several developers are already speaking about the Metaverse and its posibilities.<br />
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Right now with your smartphone you can take pictures and make videos about the real world and share them with other people, a Web 3.0 would be similar but from something that's just digital content.<br />
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I can tell we're going in that direction because you see it all the time in every tech convention.<br />
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I wouldn't call it Web 3.0 though, but I'll leave it here for posterity and see what happens in a couple of years.
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Clifford Stoll, is that you?<br />
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