I just saw Kickstarter's blog post about moving over to the Blockchain. They're doing it because, uh, protocols, or something. No joke, here's a direct quote from their post:

"You may have heard of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) which helps you browse the web, or SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) which helps you send email. Protocols like these make up the unseen infrastructure of the internet. Imagine that, but for crowdfunding creative projects."

What the fuck does that even mean? The rest of the blog post is more of the same. They packed it full of every crypto buzzword they could find while also not actually providing any useful information.

Full article here, if anyone wants to read a headache-inducing pile of nonsense: https://kickstarter.com/articles/...

It was not very much real information, not even in the so called more technical post they linked to.

But in theory I thinkthe goal wouldbe that a funding campaign using this new protocol would be site independent so if more crowdfunding sites join in you would be able to run a joint campaign over multiple sites with a single shared goal to reach instead if running multiple separate campaigns.

But they do not explain enough to be certain tat this is the goal, or explain what the sites would gain from joining and that is a quite important part if this is going to be anything but a hype.

Even Celo only go as far as "we use blockchain"

Another useless fad.

I tried some web3 related things ro keep myself in a loop and to see what's the deal.

The technology is actually not that bad, the bad part IMHO is cult behind it that pushes blockchain on everything.

Decentralization of everything via blockchain is stupid. What about serverless and p2p without blockchain.

I see DeFi as single use case where that kind of technology is useful. Second being NFTs, but that's 'weird part of the internet' and I think nobody wants to talk about it including me.

Sounds to me like they just want to dump their databese on a blockchain, so they don't have to pay for it.

Even using a "carbon-negative" blockchain is dumb because it still has a larger footprint than just a normal server.

Why would you want to rigidify all your crowdfunding transactions I don't know. Could've been an Open source crowdfunding Initiative to achieve the same benefits without the complexity of hacking a whole protocol on top of a different protocol that the blockchain already uses to communicate... It's like a fucking JavaScript library. Npm install kickstarter but it also installs https, blockchain and Celo in your node folder... So instead of being good It's just mediocre. As they said "your kickstarter experience wont change" so really nothing will, except you have a shared database that takes much more power to maintain than creating a shared open database with proper Security... Cool...

oh ffs

@Hazarth just for clarification, block chain by it self does not include a protocol as such.

The concept more or less just involves a checksum and that all posts are public, meaning anyone can reverify the chain.

Without the public part its just a rolling checksum which is that each new block also contains the checksum of the former. That way no old block can change without changing all following blocks, and with the block db being shared you would need to convince more than half or all copy holders to change their copy to pull this through.

For a distributed block chain you need some way to agree on each new block, thats the “proof of work” and the bitcoin solution is to find a checksum wit a certain number of leading zeroes.

But there are alternative solutions, for a non public block chain you could just have all copy holders verify and approve each new block, and once approved it cannot then change since all would know it changed.

@Voxera i happen to know this, good explanation though