Eric Schmidt Says He's Invested 'a Little Bit' in Crypto, More Interested in Future of Web3 (cnbc.com) 31
Ex-Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt says he's invested "a little bit" of money into cryptocurrencies -- but for him, the most interesting part of blockchain isn't virtual currency. It's Web3. From a report: "A new model [of the internet] where you as an individual [can] control your identity, and where you don't have a centralized manager, is very powerful. It's very seductive and it's very decentralized," Schmidt, 67, tells CNBC Make It. "I remember that feeling when I was 25 that decentralized would be everything."
[...] Schmidt says his interest in Web3 involves a concept called "tokenomics," which refers to the specific supply and demand characteristics of cryptocurrencies. Schmidt also notes that Web3 could come with new models for content ownership and new ways of compensating people. "[Web3's] economics are interesting. The platforms are interesting and the use patterns are interesting," Schmidt says. "[It] doesn't work yet, but it will." For Schmidt, part of the problem with today's blockchain technology -- specifically referencing bitcoin as an example -- is that the majority of time people spend on those systems is dedicated to "making sure that nobody's attacking them ... they're incredibly wasteful."
[...] Schmidt says his interest in Web3 involves a concept called "tokenomics," which refers to the specific supply and demand characteristics of cryptocurrencies. Schmidt also notes that Web3 could come with new models for content ownership and new ways of compensating people. "[Web3's] economics are interesting. The platforms are interesting and the use patterns are interesting," Schmidt says. "[It] doesn't work yet, but it will." For Schmidt, part of the problem with today's blockchain technology -- specifically referencing bitcoin as an example -- is that the majority of time people spend on those systems is dedicated to "making sure that nobody's attacking them ... they're incredibly wasteful."
"[It] doesn't work yet, but it will." (Score:4, Interesting)
Sums it all up. Wishful thinking in my opinion.
Ownership is a legal concept, when the rubber meets the road you need an overriding authority with the ability to enforce contracts and a monopoly use of force to "own" anything outside of what you can physically defend at any given moment. All the digital tokens in the world won't make up for that simple fact.
Some actual trademark and copyright reform will do miles more work than anything "web3" can offer.
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It sorta works for some actually useful non-cryptocurrency/NFT uses, trusted timestamping etc. As long as billions of dollar of greater fool money keep flowing in you can free ride for when you need a very hard/expensive to change timestamped public record.
Once the greater fools stop coming the free ride ends, but for now it sorta works.
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It does. Sorta. Unfortunately, "sorta" is not enough for anything trusted. It also has low performance, abysmally slow answering times and is a lot more expensive to use than traditional solutions. So more like an early prototype that shows it could maybe work, but does not really work by itself. Also, revision-proof storage is not that expensive and these days offered in several levels from the cloud providers.
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Ownership is a legal concept, when the rubber meets the road you need an overriding authority with the ability to enforce contracts and a monopoly use of force to "own" anything outside of what you can physically defend at any given moment.
That's not true. Start by imagining a secure lockbox with a key in your possession -- that's a way for you to own something without having to physically be present and defend it, although it's vulnerable to someone who gets hold of the box and can force it open. Next, imagine a secure lockbox with a self-destruct-on-tamper trigger -- that's a slightly stronger form of ownership which stops even someone who gets hold of the box. Next, imagine the secure lockbox where the key is a prime factor or other crypto
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I see where you are coming from but everything is vulnerable to force. If you want whats in the box there has to be a way to open it. That way can always be forced, whether by cutting of your finger, threating a family member or threatening the owner itself to open it. Somebody with more force can get what they want, just about everytime.
The force to attack a person is the force to enforce ownership. You don't have to conflate them, they are one in the same. Society works because we all agree to give t
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I see where you are coming from but everything is vulnerable to force. If you want whats in the box there has to be a way to open it. That way can always be forced, whether by cutting of your finger, threating a family member or threatening the owner itself to open it.
Imagine you received the cryptographic key to something that's universally available online, and all trace of how you received that key has been destroyed/killed. I don't see a vulnerability to force in this situation. This is why I think that there's a new form of ownership.
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If everyone has access to the thing in question nobody is going to need to steal it as it were, or have a declared owner at all really.
If someone values the thing for themselves they need a way to keep others from having it. A piece of art, a piece of land, a crypto key to a wallet, doesn't matter. Either the owner gives it up or the owner is dead at which point if the item is locked forever then it ceases to be owned at all.
If all trace as to how they aquired it is gone, how does anyone even declare them
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If everyone has access to the thing in question nobody is going to need to steal it as it were, or have a declared owner at all really. If someone values the thing for themselves they need a way to keep others from having it. A piece of art, a piece of land, a crypto key to a wallet, doesn't matter. Either the owner gives it up or the owner is dead at which point if the item is locked forever then it ceases to be owned at all. If all trace as to how they aquired it is gone, how does anyone even declare themselves the owner to begin with? This isn't really a technology question, it's a philosophical one.
It is a technological question. It's the *lockbox* that everyone has access to, but the *key* remains in the possession of one person. This very article is talking about these cases. Here are two examples of such lockboxes+keys.
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In your first example there is no sole "owner" though, at that point the files are not "property" that someone can leverage for their own gain. It's interesting but it's a different version of the self stamped, confirmed devliery envelope type of thing for copyright. It's a workaround to a specific problem but not an area of what we would call property rights.
Bitcoin is the exact issue with this though. Someone can point a gun at my head and take my wallet keys. At that point what is my recourse if the
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Ownership is not natural law, it didn't come down from tablets from a higher power. We made it up.
Indeed. This idea is not accessible for many people though. Too complex.
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Indeed. Disconnected from reality. "Web3" is nothing more than a scam derived from the original crypto-"currency" scam.
This guy has no shame (Score:5, Insightful)
A new model [of the internet] where you as an individual [can] control your identity, and where you don't have a centralized manager, is very powerful
This coming from the former Google head honcho... That's rich.
Kindly go fuck yourself Mr. Schmidt. You helped foist the disgusting corporate surveillance society we have today on the people, and as such, you have no right to an opinion on how we should be able to control our personal information.
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Sounds like he's that arms dealer who suddenly realized he could manufacture an "other side" to sell to, for Google-like profits that cut all out middlemen.
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Kindly go fuck yourself Mr. Schmidt. You helped foist the disgusting corporate surveillance society we have today on the people, and as such, you have no right to an opinion on how we should be able to control our personal information.
Agreed - Schmidt is the guy that was "adult supervision" while Google was "growing up"; given how Google turned out, he was most definitively a shitty "parent".
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Seriously. Never once do these guys do the 'right' thing while they are working at these places, when they have the ability to affect meaningful change. Only after they have left, vacuuming up their millions of pieces of silver do they opine on how things 'should' be. Only after the risk to any fraction of their personal fortune is reduced to zero to they stand up 'bravely' with grandiose visions of the future. Schmidt is a total, 100% A-hole.
And veering into off-topic, but for all of his faults/complex
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I agree with your assessment. But whether he buys it or not, his self promotion, distasteful as it is, still falls under the category of free speech. "...willing to defend to the death your right to say it." and so forth.
My biggest hope is that a Musk-owned Twitter will truly attack the bot problem, and enforce some version of real identity on the social network. I've gone 180 degrees on anonymity. Yes there are real questions about dissidents, persecuted persons, etc. But IMHO those are resolvable in
A little bit? (Score:3)
Can you ball-park that for me? 'Cause I think we might have different definitions for "a little bit". From TFA:
Currently, Schmidt has a net worth of $20.3 billion, making him the world's 80th-richest person, according to Forbes. [forbes.com]
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It means the opposite in this case... like when my 5 year old does something wrong it's not "I did something wrong" it's "I did something a little-bitty-wrong".
It's called minimizing. And you only do it when guilty about something that you want to appear smaller.
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Having been responsible for things at Google for a longer time, he may also be just plain evil...
Good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
Schmidt says his interest in Web3 involves a concept called "tokenomics," which refers to the specific supply and demand characteristics of cryptocurrencies. Schmidt also notes that Web3 could come with new models for content ownership and new ways of compensating people.
If a site expects me to buy some cryptocurrency for micro-payments, it can get bent. As it is, the second I hit a paywall, I'm out.
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His comments show how little he understands the technical side of the world.
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Indeed. But there is this phenomenon among really rich people that they start to think they understand how things actually work, because that must be why they got rich. Does not work that way in actual reality, of course, there are many rich people that have no clue how things work.
Next up, Hitler happy to find a place to be free (Score:3)
Next up, Hitler is happy to find a place to be free.
These people have NO FLIPPING CLUE what they-themselves directly caused.
This fucker worked directly with the government, talked about supporting decryption of peoples affects, and essentially directly operated a big apparatus of the state.
Now he is happy to find a way for people to take control and get away from "managers".
YOU MEAN LIKE YOU?
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Congratulations! You just Godwin'd the thread.
Centralization IS what we want (Score:5, Insightful)
If you control your identity, then it has centralized control - you.
Whether the implementation is centralized or decentralized is really of secondary importance.
If data about you can be utilized without going through you each time, with your knowledge of what it is being used for, then you do not control it. Having to click a Consent button once to lose control over the data in perpetuity certainly does not constitute control.
For example, it was recently (re)affirmed that web scraping public profiles is legal:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/04... [techcrunch.com]
So, clearly, anything you post publicly, you lose control over. Obviously, right? But then people find out their face is being used as training input to a recognition and get upset. So, not so obviously after all?
Little bit (Score:3)
His definition of little bit probably surpasses most people's lifetime earnings.
Tokenomics are (Score:2)
Schmidt is a class 1 a-hole (Score:2)