[HN Gopher] Why Web3?
___________________________________________________________________
Why Web3?
Author : simonebrunozzi
Score : 122 points
Date : 2021-12-29 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (avc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (avc.com)
| DJBunnies wrote:
| Web3 doesn't mean anything, it's just the adopted jargon of a
| couple of groups with different visions for what it means.
|
| I fear more posts relating to said nonsense will only legitimize
| those topics in the eyes of the uninformed.
| [deleted]
| csbartus wrote:
| The single important question about web3 is: will it be free? Can
| app devs just start building without paying the blockchain /
| network fee? The same for users; can they just use apps for free?
|
| If not, the question is: do you pay with data, and go free, or do
| you pay with real money and prices skyrocketing due to endless
| speculations?
| coffeefirst wrote:
| And second, will it be easy?
|
| Everyone forgot the key to HTML / blogs / youtube / social
| media was anyone could join and start doing stuff on a Sunday
| afternoon.
| csbartus wrote:
| The author has a famous quote: in the future you'll have to pay
| to work. His partner Albert is pushing for the universal basic
| income. This pictures me a future: a playground for those who
| willing to pay to work, for the rich, for those pursuing
| wealth. The rest should rely on the UBI.
|
| I'm ok with that. A win-win for both sides. But let's finally
| put the cards on the table.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| IMO, pay with money. End of story. Expecting services for free
| got is into this horrible advertising model that turned us into
| the product rather than customers. There are people promoting
| gasless, free to use chains. That model is flawed. Financial
| incentives is what finally made decentralized networks a real
| thing. For a good explanation as to where we're going with
| this, read "Who Owns The Future."
| corobo wrote:
| Excluding people without money sounds like the opposite
| direction the internet should be headed :(
| zzzeek wrote:
| perspective of a not terribly interested party:
|
| * two years ago: "bitcoin! bitcoin! bitcoin!" - tech community:
| "bitcoin is a pyramid scheme and also bad for the environment."
|
| * a year ago: "crypto! crypto! not bitcoin, there's others and
| also fintech loves blockchain!" - tech community: "nope, still a
| pyramid scheme, financial community goes whereever there's hype
| and $$$, they couldnt care less about 'tech'"
|
| * 6 months ago: "nfts! nfts! look there's an actual thing
| associated with it!" - tech communuty: "but you don't actually
| _own_ anything. obvious speculation scam "
|
| * 2 months ago: "web3! web3! it's vague! except it's all about
| those things above we just make it less obvious and more
| buzzwordy!" - tech community: please leave
| everfree wrote:
| It feels like something or other cryptocurrency related floats
| on the front page of Hacker News every other day, and
| discussion about it is welcomed. I would call that the opposite
| of "please leave".
| capableweb wrote:
| Want to share where I can read the unified opinion from the
| "tech community"? I'd consider myself as part of the tech
| community, but never said anything of those things, are you
| sure you can speak for everyone in the community?
| zzzeek wrote:
| > Want to share where I can read the unified opinion from the
| "tech community"?
|
| a good place to start would be the majority of replies on
| this thread
| capableweb wrote:
| HN is such a small slice of the "tech community", if we see
| the definition the same way (people who work in "tech"). I
| don't think you should take anything you read here as
| "majority of people in tech thinks like this", because the
| size is so small.
| ninkendo wrote:
| What other online tech communities are there out there
| that I can check out? If you say this is such a tiny one,
| I'd love to see the "bigger than HN" community you must
| be referring to.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| My experience is that the ratio of crypto skeptics here
| on hn more or less mirrors that of any non-crypto focused
| tech community (ex: coworkers, SIGs, etc)
| davidhariri wrote:
| > Frankly, it is all too much for me.
|
| Same. I've been actively unfollowing people on Twitter every day
| to clean my feeds of it. I'm not anti-web3 or anti-crypto, but I
| definitely don't need to read the same rhetoric from 100 people a
| day.
|
| Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time
| actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building
| it...
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Same.
|
| I actually see a lot of comparison with the "firehose of
| falsehoods", which is a known propaganda technique.
|
| I'm actually worried about people picking it up and getting
| suckered in without knowing anything on the technical side.
| tehjoker wrote:
| The phrase "stock touts" comes to mind.
| corobo wrote:
| I do keep wondering if it's worth being first on the scene with
| a new idea
|
| People pushing image NFTs will likely be keen to promote
| anything that can ding an argument against the naysayers,
| especially if they're cryptographically compensated somehow
| (whatever the web3 version of affiliate links is, is it
| airdrops?)
|
| Might be some free real estate to be had if anyone's got any
| png-less ideas
|
| Side comment I do realise I probably come off super naive to
| people who have already learned all this. I am trying! I've not
| come across a less newcomer friendly community since I started
| tinkering with Linux 20 years ago haha. "You just don't
| understand" is almost as much a web3 catchphrase as wagmi
|
| Admittedly Linux is now my sole non-mobile daily driver, maybe
| I'll get there with web3. Having had a tinker I do like the
| idea of the tech, I've just not had the "click" into how it's
| actually usable (for me) yet
|
| /blog
| duxup wrote:
| Crypto seems to attract a lot of high minded hot air as far as
| social media goes.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| As someone who's out here building a web3 site (and is a heavy
| twitter user), I agree completely. Most of the twitter talking
| heads also have no clue what they're talking about, waxing on
| about grand visions when the first set of pragmatic
| implications are already here, basically (metamask/web wallet
| login).
| corobo wrote:
| Do you have a tech blog or anything folks could keep up with?
|
| Preferably RSS based but I'd sign up to a mail list
| indigochill wrote:
| > Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much
| time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually
| building it...
|
| And the order of operations. Traditionally, you build something
| great (or an MVP) and market it. The crypto community has been
| putting the marketing before the building.
|
| It's probably uncontroversial to say although cryptocurrency
| -could- do great things, right now the bulk of trade in the
| first world is speculation. Meanwhile there are television ads
| in the US aimed at football fans telling them how they can
| trade cryptocurrency. WTF does the average football fan need
| with cryptocurrency?
| jrsj wrote:
| The reason you see this is that the entire "web3" landscape
| is controlled by VCs. Also the underlying infra this stuff is
| running on isn't very decentralized at all and with proof of
| stake it likely never will be.
|
| If you want true decentralization you're going to need a
| combination of Bitcoin/Lightning Network/side chains to
| recreate a lot of what has been built out on other more
| centralized platforms. But VCs don't want to fund this
| because there's way less potential upside for them.
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| Or just bitcoin cash!
| [deleted]
| krrrh wrote:
| This is such a good point. "Web 2.0" didn't really emerge as
| a term of art until there was a need to describe the
| widespread adoption of UGC, REST, & AJAX and blockbuster web
| applications like gmail replacing desktop applications.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I was actually thinking the opposite. I seem to recall
| talking about Web 2.0 and AJAX, SOAP, etc. before most apps
| were built using those technologies. We were using AJAX
| minimally, CSS was a thing, but UGC was still a few years
| away, from what I recall.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > Traditionally, you build something great (or an MVP) and
| market it.
|
| I don't like the Web3 hype either but generally people say
| one should market their product first then build it if
| there's enough demand, through a landing page capturing
| emails or pre-payments, or other such ways of gauging demand.
|
| It just seems that Web3 fanatics took the marketing side too
| far that they've forgotten they actually have to build a
| product ( _that solves an actual problem, not yet another
| coin_ ) for which the marketing will be used.
| aquateen wrote:
| > generally people say one should market their product
| first then build it if there's enough demand
|
| I don't agree this is the common wisdom, and it's kind of a
| surprising take to see on this website specifically.
| cercatrova wrote:
| It's what I commonly see on startup fora including HN,
| reddit, IndieHackers etc. There's books about this method
| like Lean Startup, Mom Test and so on.
|
| The advice to build first and market later is actually
| advice that is much maligned in my experience, as there
| are too many stories of engineers who build and then find
| out they can't actually sell their product because they
| focused too much on the building and not enough on
| getting people to know about it.
| lottin wrote:
| > they can't actually sell their product because they
| focused too much on the building and not enough on
| getting people to know about it
|
| Or more likely, there was no demand for their product to
| begin with.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Indeed, the worst is when they don't actually solve any
| problems whatsoever, they treat it as a way to have fun
| building the product, using new technologies, new
| architectures etc.
|
| There's nothing wrong with building to learn but the
| problem arises when engineers think building
| automatically leads to business success; the two are
| often entirely disjointed. WordPress is maligned as well
| but it's wildly successful for Automattic.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The approach to validate ideas with conversation with
| your target market when you are unsure if anyone will
| buy.
|
| But in this case you need to validate it by building it
| and proving it can be done. The market is already
| prepped.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > in this case
|
| In which case, Web3? If so, I don't think the market is
| prepped at all, I don't really see people using it for
| what proponents say it'll be used for. If some other
| case, please elucidate me, I'm not sure what you're
| referring to otherwise.
| nfw2 wrote:
| Maybe it's not common wisdom in general, but it is a
| pretty common viewpoint in the startup world. Building
| products is expensive, and startups can't afford to build
| something no one wants. It's pretty much universal advise
| that finding an initial market fit should be the first
| priority of any new startup.
|
| Literally making a sale before the product exists is the
| extreme end of that philosophy. Whether or not this is
| good advise, or even possible, probably depends a lot on
| the domain. For most domains though, there is some degree
| of market research that can and should be done before
| investing in product development.
| aquateen wrote:
| I've been on this website a long time and I suppose the
| userbase has grown quite a bit. I don't assume everyone
| has read all of Paul Graham's articles or even know who
| he is, but are you familiar with how YCombinator works?
|
| Enough money to survive on ramen for a few months and
| build a demo. Get feedback from users and iterate over
| and over.
| nfw2 wrote:
| I know multiple people personally who have been through
| YC, and I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
|
| Not every company that goes through YC are at the same
| stage. I've heard of companies joining YC despite already
| having over a million in ARR because of how valuable the
| YC network is.
|
| YC invests 125k in each team, which is certainly enough
| to last more than a few months eating ramen if you are
| building the product yourself.
|
| Also, trying to sell a product using a demo is not
| exactly the same as selling a finished product. At 0-1
| stage, you can bet the demo hides the rough edges to some
| degree.
|
| I would say selling using a demo falls somewhere on the
| sell-before-build spectrum, but one point I was trying to
| make is that it is not necessarily black-and-white.
| devin wrote:
| To be fair, it's not a bad target market. Look at FanDuel and
| PokerStars and such. For many watching, it's just a new kind
| of gambling. The decision many are likely making is to throw
| their money at bitcoin instead of placing a bet at an online
| sportsbook. The feeling of "investing" in crypto versus
| outright gambling is a nice little story to tell oneself,
| even if it's not particularly true.
| dathinab wrote:
| I read an article recently which claimed that the majority of
| transaction volume is not speculation, but scams, fraud and
| similar. Like e.g. pyramid schemes.
|
| And that is where an average football fan needs crypto, to
| provide more monetary volume for scams and speculators
| manipulating the marked to siphon of.
|
| Or at least that was the take of the article, I'm not
| completely sure in either direction.
| mediocregopher wrote:
| The difference between "speculation" and "scams, fraud, and
| similar" is in the eye of the beholder. Lots of people find
| all crypto to be a giant scam, others find all of it to be
| a potential investment (hopefully with the understanding
| that the long-tail of individual investments in the space
| will go to zero).
| acdha wrote:
| > The difference between "speculation" and "scams, fraud,
| and similar" is in the eye of the beholder.
|
| The definitions of those terms really comes down to
| intention: a scammer is selling something they _know_
| does not deliver what they're promising while a
| speculator should be making good-faith claims. This line
| gets blurry with optimism but most of the cryptocurrency
| speculation which called out is indeed misrepresentation
| of what a potential buyer would get, such as claiming
| that an NFT conveys ownership when it does not.
| irrational wrote:
| Have you seen the one with Matt Damon hawking a crypto site?
| How much must it cost to get someone of his caliber to star
| in your commercial?
| ipaddr wrote:
| To get George to do those expresso ads it costs 18 million.
|
| To get Matthew mcconaughey to drive 3 million.
|
| As for Matt Damon. cryto.com gave 1 million to water.org
| and Matt said any money he makes will go to water.org and
| that's worth millions. My guess 4-5 million on the highside
| but probably 3 to 4 million
| ThomPete wrote:
| The crypto community does what every startup should do. They
| find the customers before they start building i.e. they build
| community first and in effect build products.
|
| To say that things aren't being build in the crypto community
| is simply flat out false.
|
| It's one of the fastest developing industries and more and
| more talent are leaving their previous jobs or industries.
| unicornmama wrote:
| Talent is pouring in because free money is gushing out from
| the mother of all bubbles. Enjoy it while it lasts.
| maybecrypto wrote:
| Applies to me - leaving enterprise infrastructure for
| crypto. I think the tech is mostly useless, but the hype
| is real, the VC dollars are real. I want to try to
| capitalize on this.
| acdha wrote:
| > Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much
| time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually
| building it...
|
| This is the tell for me that most of the people promoting it
| are just trying to find buyers for their tokens: there's tons
| of marketing for things which either don't exist at all or
| offer a worse experience than the status quo, and it's very
| rare to find someone who clearly understands the problem and
| how we got there. For example, we started with a more
| decentralized web than we have now -- any conversation about
| how to go in a different direction needs to be based on the
| economic factors which produced the current state.
| CiPHPerCoder wrote:
| Their MVP is a slide deck, or a sales website.
| ehsankia wrote:
| An interesting quote I heard was something along the lines
| of: any action you take that doesn't cost fees on your wallet
| is probably not actually running on web3. A lot of stuff you
| see is just pretending to be web3 but not actually
| decentralized.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes -- between the people who only work with a handful of
| company's APIs or which are still completely dependent on
| the real web, it seems a lot less decentralized than, say,
| Tor.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Decentralized trust is another way of saying a grapevine.
| Grapevine communication (or trust) is only useful in specific
| circumstances, and is often actively detrimental.
|
| Why are so many people just going along with these concepts as
| if they make sense? It's like nobody's using their brain.
| stathibus wrote:
| There's a small number of grifters leading a very large
| number of naive tech types who genuinely believe they're
| about to make a bunch of money on this thing they don't quite
| understand but must be legit or there wouldn't be so many
| people working on it.
| brightstep wrote:
| I think there's a class of crypto believers who see "Web3" as
| a political movement, a way to dilute or break the power of
| institutions like e.g. the fed, Facebook, etc. To them, the
| grapevine is a secret sauce that will magically eliminate
| centralized power.
| jandrese wrote:
| I thought the whole web of trust concept was proven
| unworkable/unscalable with PGP?
|
| Most of crypto still seems like a solution in search of a
| problem. Or they are solving the problems that people don't
| have. The primary problem that most crypto systems seem to be
| trying to solve is "How can I make the founders as rich as
| possible?"
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's just a grift that people want you to buy into. That's why
| they're so invested in talking about it. If the technology was
| good, it'd practically sell itself.
| closetnerd wrote:
| This is often not necessarily the case. For web3 - I'm still
| waiting to figure out what problem it can solve meaningfully.
| threeseed wrote:
| > I'm still waiting to figure out what problem it can solve
| meaningfully
|
| Money laundering and other criminal behaviour.
|
| Many of the things we spent decades trying to remove from
| the financial system will come roaring back in. Of course
| it will come courtesy of young, wealthy, educated IT guys
| who are the least exposed to any financial shocks.
| Lordarminius wrote:
| If you want to hate on crypto, that's your prerogative
| but stop using the old, tired, false argument about money
| laundering. It is easier to launder money through the
| legacy financial system than through cryptocurrency.
| tehjoker wrote:
| If you want to retain your sanity and finances, unless
| someone can explain in one sentence a clear and obvious use
| for the technology, all of crypto can be explained as
| unhinged speculation and rug pulls. We're over ten years in
| at this point with insane investment and nothing has
| appeared.
|
| My guess is that this is where the next financial crash
| will come from since it's totally unregulated and the
| "shadow banks" were mostly banned after 2008. All the
| shadow money just goes to crypto.
| ehsankia wrote:
| That's more or less what the GP said. "If the technology is
| good" applies both to how well it works, but also how
| useful it is. Neither of those has a good answer yet. But
| the best way to see it being useful is to actually create
| an MVP and show it in practice, not through fancy words.
| austincheney wrote:
| Web3 is federated, not decentralized. The distinction is
| significant.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > decentralized - disparate nodes communicating directly
| using agreed upon conventions. There is no centrally managed
| network. Think in terms of snail mail, IPv6, or phone
| numbers. This could be as simple as people using an agreed
| upon application to abstract away the transmission concerns
| but that application does not route traffic through a third
| party server.
|
| This definition really doesn't sit right with me. IPv6 and
| phone numbers have central authorities. I can't just
| configure my cellphone to receive calls from a number that I
| wasn't issued by my carrier. Nor can my carrier issue me a
| number from another country's number pool. To me, the phone
| network is a great example of a federated network. IPv6 is
| similar. I think snail mail is probably the best example of
| something that is truly decentralized. Sure, there are
| authorities that chop up plots of land and give them names
| and numbers, but no one prevents me from asking a friend to
| put a letter in the mailbox of 123 Main St.
|
| Please correct me if I'm missing some key semantic
| argument(s).
| jagger27 wrote:
| Can you give a specific definition of federated in this
| context? To me, federated means that autonomous entities can
| talk to each other if they agree on a protocol. E.g. making a
| phone call between different carriers, or, uhh, the internet.
| austincheney wrote:
| Here are the definitions from an older comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640046
| verdverm wrote:
| I like this distinction, but I will note that not all web3 is
| federated or decentralized. It has been become more of a
| marketing word for projects which both do and don't adhere to
| the foundations.
| dathinab wrote:
| That's a problem I see, too.
|
| A lot of things are far less decentralized/federated in
| practice then they claim to be.
|
| It's not uncommon that some of the points why something is
| federated or even decentralized are only there in
| hypothetical scenarios (let's say in theory) which just
| don't happen in practice. Not because they technically
| can't, but because there are no marked dynamics
| insensitiveing it (probably more the opposite).
| verdverm wrote:
| Many of the protocol level 2 scaling like rollups are far
| more centrally controlled than they lead you to believe
| altdataseller wrote:
| This article is filled with absolutely 0 reasons why Web 3.0
| should be taken seriously.
|
| All it says is: Web 3.0 matters because I say so. And we will
| prove it,
|
| Yes.. and?
| riffic wrote:
| the hn crowd really needs to stop amplifying these authors with
| buzzwords in the title sort of things.
| riffic wrote:
| Matt Baer, developer / owner of Write.as, has a competing and
| differing vision of web3 (perhaps better labeled "web 3.0"):
|
| https://write.as/matt/what-would-a-real-web3-look-like
|
| It'd be preferable for users and developers to gravitate towards
| a web built on community standards, rather than one built on an
| exploitative ecosystem. Dave Winer notes "web3 is venture capital
| wanting a new bubble to inflate so they can get the kinds of
| returns they used to get."
| (https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1475876218905976843)
| nayuki wrote:
| > users can move from application to application, keeping their
| data (and their login credentials stored in their wallet) as they
| go
|
| "Keeping their login credentials in their wallet" was already
| possible a long time ago with client-side TLS/SSL certificates.
| But web developers didn't want to change from the classic
| implementation of plaintext passwords.
|
| Porting personal data from one service to another is a problem,
| so I'll give the author a point for that.
| m_ke wrote:
| Open food facts is an example of an open database that doesn't
| need snake oil to thrive. If you really want to decentralize
| access to data then the focus should be on open source and
| publicly available data dumps.
|
| https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data
| beardedman wrote:
| The people who are advocating web3 are not the people who were
| part of building web1 & web2 (whatever those even mean). They're
| people who are idealistic & seem to disregard (or are ignorant
| of) the effort in building infrastructure at scale. Building
| things is hard. Building things that scale even harder & anybody
| who has worked at a company that needs to scale knows there are
| trade-offs between security, centralisation, reliability & making
| things work for the user in a nice way. Web3 is a moot point
| until somebody actually brings something real to the party.
| Otherwise, IMO, it's a hype train.
|
| EDIT: Ironically, web3 also seems to be able to rip the
| environment a new one. Which is pretty funny given the
| demographic of its fans.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| I've been building for the Web since 1994. I advocate for Web
| 3.
| yks wrote:
| What is the name of this cognitive bias that shows up in all web3
| conversations about how internet/web2 ended up being a success
| and therefore web3 will too? If X led to Y, then Z that (we say)
| is similar to X will also lead to Y.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| false equivalence
| 58x14 wrote:
| Maybe hindsight bias?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
| ggregoire wrote:
| HN meta: funnily enough, I made an extension that highlights
| keywords on HN and I added "web3" to the list this morning after
| reading this 3-week old comment: "It feels as if 5 similar
| articles [about web3] reach the HN top page every day like this.
| The same arguments are made, the same rebuttals are made, the
| same comments are made ad nauseam, every single time, with no
| apparent conclusion. Are we officially living in a simulation?
| What's happening?" [1]. 2 hours later, I refresh the frontpage
| and here we go.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29484941
|
| Also if you looking for recent past threads about web3:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&query=web3
| [deleted]
| cableshaft wrote:
| You're not kidding. I could swear I've read some of the
| comments in here, word for word, in past web3 posts. I wasn't
| even sure it was a new post at first, the comments (and the
| replies to those comments!) have been so similar.
| scubbo wrote:
| The linked post[1], ironically, really helps to cement why I
| consider web3 to be interesting technologically but mostly
| nonsense from a product perspective.
|
| > As a first approximation all the big powerful internet
| companies are really database providers. Facebook is a database
| of people's profiles, their friend graphs and their status
| updates. Paypal is a database of people's account balances.
| Amazon is a database of SKUs, payment credentials and purchase
| histories. Google is a database of web pages and query histories.
|
| This is profoundly, naively, staggeringly wrong. The products
| that these companies provide to users[2] are not "the databases"
| - they are "the ability to do useful, meaningful, real-life
| impactful things". Facebook is not valuable as a service because
| of its database - it's valuable because I am able to interact
| with that database in ways that result in other people seeing the
| thing that I posted. PayPal is not useful to me because of those
| recorded balances - it is useful because merchants and financial
| institutions respect those balances are being equivalent to
| money. And so on - Amazon is useful because things actually show
| up at my door, Google is useful because it can use those
| links/queries to serve me the page that I was searching for.
|
| This is, ironically, why many claims of web3's supremacy fall
| flat. As this[3] long-but-very-worthwhile rant about NFTs in
| gaming makes clear, simply claiming "ownership" is almost
| meaningless for anything other than simple financial transactions
| (which, I callously suspect, is 99% of what web3 is actually
| intended for anyway). If you want to say that you "own" a video
| game gun, that's all well-and-good - but to actually use it in a
| new game, that requires implementation effort from coders and
| artists, balancing, support, etc. In fact, the pleasant-sounding
| ideal of "own your digital assets anywhere!" is nonsense - it's
| meaningless to _own_ something if you can't actually _do_
| anything with it. Ironically, it is actually _better_ for the
| customer to have their data/assets/what-have-you in a single
| database owned-and-operated by a single company - because then
| there is a reason for that company to continue to provide support
| for interactions _with_ that data.
|
| Don't get me wrong - the commodification of customer data by Big
| Tech enrages and unsettles me, too, and I feel uncomfortable with
| the fact that we mostly rent internet services rather than owning
| them. But I've yet to see a convincing argument that Web3's
| notion of "ownership" actually results in anything tangible,
| anything other than bragging rights. If there's a way of
| effecting that ownership such that you can actually _do_
| something with it (other than selling it), I'll be interested.
|
| [1]
| https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto...
|
| [2] Obviously, those databases are valuable to advertizing,
| targeting, marketing, etc. companies, but I'm focusing on the
| customer experience here. You can't build up a valuable database
| if you cannot attract customers - and, anyway, isn't one of the
| whole points of web3 that customer data _isn't_ for sale? (A
| likely story...)
|
| [3] https://t.co/0X0mMRFD2O
| minism wrote:
| Appreciated your third paragraph and 3rd link. I'm struggling
| with my own articulation about how NFTs dont intrinsically
| themselves add value and yet are being treated/described as
| such, and this helped clarify it a bit for me.
| scubbo wrote:
| Honestly, the linked article about NFTs in Video Games was
| what really helped me with my articulation. It's long, but I
| really recommend it.
|
| The situation makes me sad, because I think that
| Web3/NFTs/etc. are some really interesting technologies, and
| I really align the aims that they _claim_ to be supporting
| (whether all proponents actually _do_ support those aims, or
| are merely claiming to do so in order to make a quick buck,
| is a different question). But the implementations that exist,
| and the environmental damage that they currently cause, make
| them utterly unsupportable to me.
| ohazi wrote:
| VC: "The key innovation is this new database!"
|
| _Points to slowest / lowest throughput / most expensive database
| ever designed_
|
| Sigh.
| opendomain wrote:
| I am looking for anyone interested in the domain Web3.net
|
| I am the founder of OpenDomain- we have contributed domains worth
| millions to open source and other causes. All for Free.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| I do not understand who benefits and in what way from any of
| this?
|
| Could you help me out on this?
| selljamhere wrote:
| > financial applications have been built on top of Ethereum that
| all share the same database and users can move from application
| to application, keeping their data (and their login credentials
| stored in their wallet) as they go.
|
| Does anyone have examples of this in the wild? I often hear data
| portability listed as one of the great benefits, but I don't have
| a grasp on what that actually means.
|
| In my mind, the data needs to be structured to be useful,
| otherwise other DAPs wouldn't be able to act on it. Who defines
| the structure? And who manages changes?
| everfree wrote:
| Some examples of dApp data sharing in the wild:
|
| For example if you have Ether, you can use a decentralized
| exchange (e.g. Uniswap) to swap it to stablecoins like USDC and
| DAI, deposit that USDC and DAI into a collateralized lending
| market (e.g. Compound), then deposit your deposit tickets into
| a stable pair exchange (e.g. Curve) to earn maker fees when
| others trade against your liquidity, while ALSO earning
| interest fees that accrue to the underlying. This is possible
| because these contracts are all able to share data about token
| balances with each other.
|
| On a side note, DAI is actually a great example to illustrate
| this kind of data sharing, because behind the scenes, DAI is
| itself a synthetic asset backed by yet other assets. DAI
| backing even includes derivative assets that themselves
| represent claims on liquidity denominated in yet other assets
| in external contracts (e.g. UNIV2WBTCETH). The tangled web of
| assets backed by other assets is insane, honestly, but it's all
| made possible by contracts sharing data with each other.
|
| As a second example, you could take some bitcoin, bridge it
| onto Ethereum (using e.g. the REN network), and deposit and
| earn interest on it on a collateralized lending platform. These
| actions all require data about ETH balances and token balances
| to be portable across dApps, and in this case even portability
| across the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.
|
| A non-monetary example of data portability within Ethereum is
| the Ethereum Name Service. Like DNS, the name database is
| public and can be queried by other dApps. As a bonus, names in
| ENS also follow the ERC-721 token standard which provides a
| standard way to share data about who owns which names, so it's
| theoretically possible to write contracts that themselves write
| derivatives on name ownership, for example to give someone a
| collateralized loan backed by the value of their ENS name, or
| to have a contract that owns an ENS name but that requires a
| majority DAO vote in order to manage the name or transfer
| ownership.
|
| In summary, for the most part dApps are purposely written in
| such a way that they can be easily integrated with other dApps
| using open standards and without asking permission, which is
| why the space sometimes gets a "money legos" moniker.
|
| The data structures that allow these apps to pass data between
| each other are defined by the ERC-20 and ERC-721 token
| standards, which list standard method interfaces for smart
| contracts to store and query each others' token balances, and I
| believe were officiated as standards by the Ethereum
| Foundation. These standards are currently widely supported
| across all Ethereum smart contracts that involve tokens.
| selljamhere wrote:
| Thanks for the examples.
|
| The monetary case seems like the natural first step. The name
| service case seems more interesting. It isn't a financial
| instrument, so it demonstrates DAP utility for non-financial
| application.
|
| You referenced a few standards that the DAPs adhere to, which
| lines up with assumptions I've had about the data schema
| management. In a generalized sense, it seems that community
| members, or a governing body, will propose changes, and if
| the community accepts them, the changes will be implemented
| into the network.
|
| It seems to me the name service case has parallels to
| identity management through protocols such as SAML and LDAP.
|
| But I'm still trying to wrap my head around examples I've
| heard such as building DAP social media apps that allow users
| to move their data to another DAP social app. Thinking of the
| social media sites we have today, they all consider their
| profile structures and models proprietary, as market
| differentiators that set each one apart from their
| competitors, and make up the "secret sauce" that gives social
| value to their users.
|
| How would a DAP be able to maintain similar differentiators?
| Or is the expectation that only certain things such as basic
| profile information be stored on the blockchain, able to move
| to other DAPs, while other proprietary functionality is
| managed elsewhere?
| everfree wrote:
| Well, decentralized exchanges usually maintain their moat
| through liquidity (the catch-22 of attracting liquidity to
| a new dex without users, and attracting users without
| liquidity).
|
| Ethereum Name Service maintains their moat through
| legitimacy. You could copy paste the contract and start
| issuing .eth names of your own, but the ENS team is
| generally trusted by the community and thus their specific
| instance of the contract (at their contract address) is
| already widely integrated into products.
|
| You're right that social media dApps perhaps don't have a
| "moat" like that, which may be part of why we've seen so
| many of them blossom and fail, while none of them really
| catch on like with other types of services. Though that
| might be just as much due to the fact that social media is
| a low-value service compared to money transfer, and
| blockchains just haven't become scalable enough yet for a
| meaningful part of the social media stack to be run cost-
| efficiently on the blockchain.
|
| Personally I've always been less sold on cryptocurrency
| networks as a host for social media, as I believe
| traditional decentralized web2 schemes like ActivityPub
| (Mastodon) still have a long way to race in that regard
| before the scheme needs to be complicated with a blockchain
| integration.
|
| What I do believe will happen is similar to you explained,
| where just profile info (and maybe a profile image hash) is
| stored on the blockchain while other data is stored off-
| chain. Ethereum Name Service already acts as a profile
| service in a lot of ways as it already has records for your
| twitter handle, github handle, etc. as well as support for
| custom records. One global name standard like ENS would for
| example allow you to pick your Mastodon profile up and move
| it seamlessly to another instance, with the authorization
| of that cross-server move handled by the blockchain.
| johnpanny342 wrote:
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| I hate the name - were we not at web3.0 already? I am rooting for
| decentralized solutions, but I could barely muster the energy to
| look up what "web3" is supposed to be.
| einarfd wrote:
| I'm flabbergasted over the web3 term, and that anyone is using it
| unironical. The web2.0 term, went from something that was a bit
| awkward but ok in the beginning, to something that you want to
| laugh at people using. Then someone takes that, adds one to it,
| and thinks it's a good name for their tech?
| JaggerFoo wrote:
| I see a few ways where blockchain/token/NFT/DAO
| technology/structure makes sense for enterprises - unfortunately
| I can't elaborate.
|
| In the U.S., VC's are the only ones that can contribute and speed
| up projects, since the SEC has no safe harbors that allow smaller
| startups to innovate. So either do not innovate or try with the
| worry of the SEC killing your project. It's best for smaller
| projects to not allow any U.S. investment, but even then you may
| have a problem.
|
| It kind of seems as if the U.S. is protecting Wall Street from
| Web3 under the guise of protecting retail investors. There are a
| lot of players that are currently collecting "Economic Rent" that
| may be displaced by Web3 innovation.
|
| But there is also a lot of hype and streams of B.S. on twitter,
| where I had to unsubscribe to a few of the gurus, and wondered if
| all they did is produce fodder for the masses Aping into Crypto,
| so they can be brought to slaughter.
|
| Cheers
| cblconfederate wrote:
| The legitimacy of a worldwide database can be solved if the UN
| decides to run a MySQL instance, creates APIs for transactions
| between individuals, and agrees on a worldwide legal framework
| for transactions. In the eyes of many this would look more
| legitimate than the "network of terrorists and CP". I don't think
| that argument is enough
| malermeister wrote:
| There's already a worldwide API for transactions between
| individuals. It's called SWIFT.
| jmull wrote:
| The post this post links to a few times [1] is the more
| interesting one:
|
| https://continuations.com/post/671863718643105792/web3crypto...
|
| Still, it's unconvincing to me.
|
| It argues web3 is about permissionless data. The problem with
| that is we already have permissionless data -- you can put almost
| any kind of data you want on a server and encourage people honor
| it. What they actually want is shared data, governed by rules
| that hard for anyone to change, and use that as scaffolding to
| build systems around consequential data. That's kind of
| interesting, but what happens when the rules conflict with
| reality. E.g., when the blockchain says you own the land but the
| law says someone else does? Now you could agree to make a
| blockchain database is the authority on something, even
| contractually, which would help it harmonize with laws to a
| decent degree. But that would be an individual decision and
| doesn't preclude scams, fraud, people acting in bad faith, etc.
|
| Ultimately blockchains about data of any consequence will have to
| comport with applicable laws and regulations, just like
| everything else. The lack of flexibility likewise makes
| blockchain pretty useless for softer things, like social
| networks. (It's kind of silly to even bring up social networks in
| this context, but the post brings up Facebook.)
| tfang17 wrote:
| Wonder what Fred thinks about having a single-shared database
| (Ethereum) vs. having multiple shared databases (SOLUNAVAX).
| offbeatrock wrote:
| why not sell an existing service as a new one by swapping the
| current database for a private centrally controlled blockchain?
| Think of all the cheddar.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Let's say all crypto goes down in value 10% year after year in
| 2022 indefinitely.
|
| This shouldn't necessarily affect the value or necessity (or lack
| thereof) of Web3. Can Web3 practically succeed under these
| conditions?
|
| Unfortunately after engaging with many in person and on this
| forum, I've yet to hear a coherent strategy or purpose for Web3
| that doesn't rely on centralized entities at any part of the
| chain, or rely on crypto going up.
| christopherwxyz wrote:
| Consider that lots of companies have relatively small market
| caps relative to their profit mandate, and yet they still
| provide a crucial value to their customers.
|
| GE with a workforce of over 174,000 employees sells 75 billion
| dollars in goods and services, yet has a price to sales ratio
| of 1.37.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Can we stop talking about web3 unless we're talking about an
| actual spec, service or product?
| capableweb wrote:
| Why? Web3 is an idea/concept, much like the web itself or the
| internet (neither are "an actual spec, service or product"),
| but we can still discuss the web and the internet no?
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Sorry, there are none. Only premined ICO scams, crypto
| speculation and NFT scams/speculation.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Build something! All this talking makes me suspect this just to
| increase the hype around and price of various crypto currencies.
| jrm4 wrote:
| The thing I find perhaps the most telling is what's missing --
| namely the lack of discussion around the already-done
| implementations of the technologies that are being hyped as
| "web3" things; e.g. there is _certainly_ quite a bit that could
| be learned from Second Life slash The Sims slash Roblox slash
| Minecraft, and yet, all hype and no grownup discussion of what
| could be learned here.
| [deleted]
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| The saddest thing about all this is how much real improvement we
| could make to the world if nerd billionaires would stop chasing
| stupid ideas they don't understand.
|
| It's like rewriting a codebase. You know it's just going to be
| expensive, time-consuming, introduce tons of new bugs, and may
| not even solve the customer's problem. But it _feels good_ , so
| people bumble forward, confident in their ignorance of the real
| outcome.
| beders wrote:
| I still don't get the economics of this. Who is paying for the
| hosting and maintenance costs?
| rambambram wrote:
| Web3 is nothing but an echo chamber. A very empty echo chamber,
| so it echoes pretty nice. I'm back to the worldwide web.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| Perhaps you mean World Wide Web. ;-)
| dgudkov wrote:
| Decentralized cryptoapps may have a point, but somehow "web3"
| proponents forget that there there can be decentralization
| without crypto at all.
|
| Web2 succeeded because Web1 protocols haven't been developed to
| withstand abuse. For instance, the email protocol (Web1) hasn't
| got an extension that would enable receiving emails only from
| authorized senders. As a result, email is heavily abused by spam
| and phishing to a degree that only a handful of large email
| providers can effectively deal with it. The centralization of
| email services is typical for Web2.
|
| RSS (Web1) hasn't got an extension that would enable access
| restriction and following. As a result, centralized proprietary
| ad-driven social networks (Web2) took over.
|
| HTTP (Web1) hasn't developed a micropayment mechanism. As a
| result, the current internet is monetized through all-pervasive
| ads (Web2) with all the terrible destructive downsides that come
| from ad-driven media.
| layer8 wrote:
| Email isn't web1. It isn't web-anything.
| vinnie-io wrote:
| there are no practical use cases for blockchain outside of git
| root_axis wrote:
| I'm not convinced.
|
| People talk grand about "permissionless data" but I fail to see
| any practical applications. NFTs are a scam and are retroactively
| obsoleted by digital signatures. All of the ideas about logistics
| tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by
| the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital
| signatures minus the blockchain.
|
| DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2" is just a diplomatic
| way of saying "offchain centralization", every DeFi scheme is a
| money loser relative to just buying eth and waiting for a pump,
| "collateralized" loans where you pay coin so someone will loan
| you coin is not a valuable use-case to the vast majority of the
| population...
|
| None of this is about giving power back to individuals, it's all
| about making money on mining fees and cryptocurrency speculation.
| doomrobo wrote:
| > NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital
| signatures
|
| I'm not one to ever defend NFTs, but this is not right. Suppose
| I bought an extremely trendy natural number k [?] Z and I have
| a signature s from its inventor that says "doomrobo owns k".
| Suppose in a year the trend has passed and I'd like to sell k.
| How do I transfer ownership to someone else? Clearly sending s
| doesn't suffice, since s is public. Do I need a new signature?
|
| Ok different setup: s is actually a signature from _me_ and the
| inventor saying "the non-inventor pubkey that signed of this
| message is the owner of k". How do I transfer s now? Do I send
| my signing secret key? Who makes sure I deleted my copy of the
| signing key?
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Good questions.
|
| Let's say I create a piece of digital art and create an NFT
| out of it. The NFT somehow starts increasing in value. Then I
| copy my original digital art-asset and perhaps use a Photo-
| Shop filter to make it have a different hue. I turn that into
| another NFT. And I keep on doing this for all colors of the
| rainbow.
|
| What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or
| slightly modified underlying digital asset?
| raesene9 wrote:
| In many cases you don't even need to modify it. Ownership
| of an NFT often does not provide copyright on the original
| image (https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2021/04/articl
| e_0007.h... has some interesting details on what you do and
| don't get with an NFT). So if you made the original image,
| you can just mint a new NFT of that image and sell it.
|
| Heck you can mint as many NFTs as you like of any image you
| own the copyright of :)
| kpommerenke wrote:
| Why do I need to own the copyright to mint an NFT of the
| image?
| stathibus wrote:
| The photoshopping step is unnecessary. You can literally
| mint infinite NFTs of the same piece of digital art.
| makeee wrote:
| This isn't any different than an artist offering a limited
| run of physical prints and then going back on their word.
| There's generally some level of trust between the buyer and
| the artist and if they break that trust then they hurt
| demand for their work. I've been following the NFT space
| for years and I haven't seen this issue crop up much at
| all.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It is worse than that, there are no pixels! The NFT is a
| short string, usually a URL. It's effectively a QR code!
| You can create as many copies as you like. The "value" of
| an NFT comes in somehow convincing people you are the
| official one. This needs a lot of clout: e.g. a sale by
| Sotherbys that is well known that people can trace back the
| NFT to. In a sense its like a digital antique when there
| are easy fakes.
|
| My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1
| and smallest denomination 1.
| jandrese wrote:
| A NFT is just a digital receipt, and there's nothing that
| ties the receipt to the original creator or work except for
| a bit of text that the person creating the NFT has full
| control over. So they are effectively worthless for
| determining ownership, especially for copyright purposes.
|
| The "non-fungible" part refers only to the receipt, not the
| original work.
| corobo wrote:
| > What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or
| slightly modified underlying digital asset?
|
| That one seems like a classic supply and demand thing. Make
| too many, sell none
|
| Having said that, that does actually seem to be the
| business model in this wave. At least for the ones people
| are heavily pushing that get on on my radar. Maybe not hues
| but "accessories" (procedurally generated png layers,
| flattened)
| krrrh wrote:
| Walter Benjamin talked about this problem in 1935 [0]. It's
| particularly an issue with photography as an art form. For
| instance Jeff Wall's masters are all stored as RAW digital
| files and displayed as light boxes [1]. Theoretically he
| could produce an unlimited number of editions of each work,
| and theoretically anyone working at a record label who had
| received a copy of the hq file could do the same [2].
|
| What prevents this and maintains the value of the work is
| that there are legal and social norms enforced through a
| vast network of institutions (galleries, museums,
| collectors, art fairs) that ensure that there will never be
| more than 1 actual edition of the work, or 2 or 3, whatever
| it is the number never changes after it is set, and minting
| more editions would be professional suicide, and the
| network of institutions would never allow or recognize it
| even if an artist tried it.
|
| Lawrence Lessig's book _Code_ developed the argument that
| any combination of social norms, legal structures
| /enforcement, and code or infrastructure can function as
| law, and sanction or foster certain behaviour and markets.
| "Code is law" was a clever observation and a bit of a
| revelation, but the NFT crowd seem to believe that it's
| enough or that it has more value than the social norms and
| contract law of the existing art world. It's engineering
| mindset hubris.
|
| There's an attempt now to work social norms into the NFT
| space and enforce etiquette around "right-clicking", but
| convincing collectors of paintings that they could continue
| to collect photography was less of a challenge than
| convincing generations raised on BitTorrent, DRM wars, and
| authorless memes to introduce false scarcity into online
| digital abundance.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Ag
| e_of_... [1] https://artblart.com/tag/transparency-in-
| light-box/ [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Destroyed_Room:_B-
| Sides_an...
| root_axis wrote:
| The NFT would contain "$doomrobo_public_key owns $k as of
| $date" signed with the minter's private key. When you decide
| to sell someone the NFT you append "$new_owner_public_key
| owns $k as of $date" to the NFT and sign it with your private
| key: this establishes a secure and verifiable chain of
| ownership.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| You can send two of those assignment signatures to two
| different parties simultaneously.
|
| Is there a way in your system to avoid the double send?
| root_axis wrote:
| You can do the same thing with blockchain NFTs, just mint
| another blockchain NFT with the same content. You can say
| "well, the NFT that was minted first is the true
| original" but the same is true of the "double sent"
| digital signature NFT, one will be dated more recently
| than the other, which affords one identical guarantees of
| authenticity to the blockchain NFT.
| codesternews wrote:
| There is some project. NFT Replicas -
| https://nftreplicas.net/ Nothing is stopping any one to
| mint another NFT with same content.
| root_axis wrote:
| Indeed, but NFT enthusiasts would say that the replicas
| are not valid because they were not originally minted by
| the trusted author, of course, nothing is stopping the
| author from minting multiple NFTs of the same content so
| the point is moot.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Thats not the same thing.
| [deleted]
| root_axis wrote:
| I just explained why it is. A one line response of "nuh
| uh" is not convincing.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Its an analogy and diverts from the original point. We
| were talking about how you were going to solve double
| spends without a chain.
|
| You point about minting another is an interesting point
| but its not a double spend so we veer off the topic.
|
| If we take your point then its the same as saying anyone
| can create a new crypto and call it Bitcoin. If I have an
| OG Bitcoin and you have a fake one then you can steel my
| real one. No you cant.
|
| The reason is that people discern what Bitcoin is vs.
| other coins.
|
| NFT cooy/paste is a problem but it is a distinct and
| different problem to double spend.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _We were talking about how you were going to solve
| double spends without a chain._
|
| "Double spend" is a cryptocurrency problem, NFTs do not
| have this problem since unlike "currencies" the goal is
| to create a "non fungible" record of ownership for an
| off-chain asset; a chain of digital signatures satisfies
| this need, the double spend issue is not relevant to the
| stated use-case.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The genesis of this discussion is "NFTs are a scam and
| are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures". I
| basically said "how to avoid double spend in digital
| signatures", someone replied "but you can clone NFTs!". I
| said "yes but that is different".
|
| You are correct double spend is not a problem with NFT
| because they piggy back on crypto layers.
|
| However double spend is a problem with just digital
| signatures that "retroactively obsoleted" NFTs.
|
| Since there are multiple people commenting and steering
| the thread in different directions I feel this is being
| filibustered. So ill stop replying. Im exhausted!
| root_axis wrote:
| > _However double spend is a problem with just digital
| signatures that "retroactively obsoleted" NFTs._
|
| As I already stated, this is not true. Nobody can stop an
| author from minting two different blockchain NFTs
| pointing to the same content, there's no difference
| between that and "double spending" a digital signature
| NFT. At the end of the day, the only thing the NFT does
| is prove "the author authorized this verbal statement of
| ownership", a digitally signed text file does exactly the
| same thing.
| saurik wrote:
| The only difference between a fungible token and a non-
| fungible token is its fungibility: everything else is the
| same. The stated use case for both is "I want to know for
| certain who owns something". A chain of digital
| signatures fails to satisfy that need. Please stop being
| so assertive about something you clearly don't know
| anything about: there are tons of useful complaints about
| how people are using NFTs, but this is not one of them.
| root_axis wrote:
| A semantic distinction without an actual difference. At
| the end of the day all an NFT does is state "author X
| gives ownership of Y to Z", if you trust the public key
| of X a signed text file stating "author X gives ownership
| of Y to Z" gives you identical guarantees to a blockchain
| NFT stating the same thing. Nothing stops author X from
| minting a blockchain NFT that states "author X gives
| ownership of Y to Z" and also an additional blockchain
| NFT stating "author X gives ownership of Y to Q"... it's
| literally just a digitally signed string.
| saurik wrote:
| What blockchains provide is transaction ordering as a
| service. If Y is an NFT, what prevents that from
| happening is the code on the blockchain: the same kind of
| code (literally, on Ethereum) that prevents Y from being
| a fungible token for a cryptocurrency that they send to
| two people (aka "double spend").
|
| If Y is not an NFT, but you know the original owner X,
| and you wish to create an NFT, the same kind of
| mechanisms work: the first time you attempt to assign
| ownership is the canonical one. Which you seemed to get
| up-thread, you just failed to "do the math" to see why
| digital signatures alone don't support that as you are so
| sure cryptocurrencies have no value.
|
| If you send two digital signatures to two people claiming
| they both own something, the big issue is that the second
| person might not even know the first person exists. You
| need some kind of mechanism to invalidate the second one
| by exposing the first one in a trustless global ledger of
| events.... that's what blockchains provide.
|
| If you only care about the semantics of disputes--which
| is potentially fair for claims over a physical object: it
| acts as a kind of "second factor"--you get a long way by
| just including the entire chain back to the root whenever
| you transfer ownership, allowing people to show
| prominence over other chains they obviously dominate...
|
| ...but any time there is a _conflict_ --and not just on
| the original sale!--in your histories you can't compare
| timestamps to resolve the dispute as you _can 't trust
| them_: digital signatures _cannot_ show that one thing
| happened before the other thing as any timestamp is just
| data being signed, attached by the signer, and is
| meaningless.
|
| To resolve these conflicts you need to use your
| distributed ledger to establish that no such signature
| has been signed previously: you need a way to
| _authoritatively_ assign prominence. If you have a
| solution for this, what you have invented is a
| cryptocurrency and could be used as such (as there is no
| relevant difference between fungible and non-fungible
| tokens).
|
| (And note that this is true even if you try to solve this
| by using some complex web-of trust of a ton of random
| third-parties or overlapping sets of parties that
| different people haphazardly might choose to trust
| instead of a linear blockchain... you are just talking
| about systems like Holochain or Stellar or Avalanche
| instead of systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum.)
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| Wouldn't the author be different if you just minted a
| copy? So if the original is from a trust/known entity
| (like an IRL company or suitably famous artist) this
| doesn't work. The list of trusted entities could be
| centralized, crowd-sourced, hand-managed, or anything
| else; let people decide who they trust to make those
| determinations and let them switch between them at will.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _Wouldn 't the author be different if you just minted a
| copy?_
|
| The problem being described above is the possibility of
| the trusted author minting multiple digital signature
| NFTs for the same content. A reseller can't create a copy
| because they can't sign a message conferring ownership
| from the trusted source without their private key.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| But at least you can check the blockchain for all the
| content the author has created.
| [deleted]
| root_axis wrote:
| The author could use a unique private key for each
| blockchain NFT if they wanted to avoid that.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| The problem of how to associate a NFT with a physical
| object is a different one from the transfer/spending
| problem.
|
| I think that is the "minting" problem.
|
| An artist simply signing stuff does not even prove that a
| physical object corresponding to the token exists.
|
| I like to think of other use cases, like real estate or
| stock options. If you talk about a plot of land, it seems
| feasible to find a unique identifier (you could even
| involve the government).
|
| Edit: HN does not allow me any more replies right now, so
| I have to leave it at that. The reason why a "government
| signature on the deed" would achieve the same thing is
| because we trust on the government to keep a proper
| ledger. And the government asks for a lot of money for a
| transfer.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _I like to think of other use cases, like real estate
| or stock options. If you talk about a plot of land, it
| seems feasible to find a unique identifier (you could
| even involve the government)._
|
| A deed digitally signed by the government's private key
| satisfies this need without a blockchain.
| k-kr wrote:
| You can require edition number / total copies in the
| original signed claim. Beyond that, you take it to the
| courts, which is the same thing you would need to do if
| the same resource was reminded on blockchain. The
| blockchain may only make it easier to detect a double
| mint.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| No it doesn't, because you can simply keep selling the
| "old" version with the signature that say that you are the
| owner. It is digital, so you can make an an endless number
| of copies.
| root_axis wrote:
| You can do the exact same thing with a blockchain NFT -
| there's absolutely no difference in terms of outcome.
| Each "sale" generates a unique digital signature NFT
| because the public key of the person buying is
| incorporated as part of the cryptographic signature.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Every sale is on the blockchain, so if somebody creates
| multiple sales of the same item, it would immediately be
| visible. Of course it depends on the implementation, how
| do you identify an object?
|
| Leonardo could still create one NFT saying "this is
| ownership of my painting of the woman that always looks
| at the beholder" and another saying "this is ownership of
| my painting "Mona Lisa" and it would perhaps not be
| immediately clear that they are the same painting.
|
| Nevertheless, that is the "minting" problem and not the
| "spending" (or transfer) problem.
|
| Edit: HN does not allow me any more replies at this
| point, sorry.
| lottin wrote:
| > Every sale is on the blockchain, so if somebody creates
| multiple sales of the same item, it would immediately be
| visible.
|
| There is an infinite number of blockchains.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _Every sale is on the blockchain, so if somebody
| creates multiple sales of the same item, it would
| immediately be visible_
|
| Just use a different private key for each sale.
| andreilys wrote:
| _DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2" is just a
| diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization"_
|
| It may come as a surprise but there are other chains that
| support DeFi apps and which do not have high gas fees like
| Ethereum. For example, Avalanche and Solana.
|
| Collateralized crypto loans are the equivalent of people taking
| loans out on their equity position so they don't have to pay
| cap gains and don't need to Liquidate. So the use case is
| already demonstrated, it's just now applied in a crypto world.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| That is not why people take out loans. They do it for
| leverage and to avoid selling because they want exposure to
| ETH or BTC. There are easier ways to avoid taxes.
| nfw2 wrote:
| Do digital signatures really make the blockchain obsolete if
| they fill the same niche?
|
| Even if blockchain are technically equivalent to digital
| signatures, it seems like it has some real advantages from a
| business perspective: - it is capturing the market of people
| who want to buy "official" digital assets and is becoming the
| de facto way to do so - the market is one that should have
| strong network effects - gaining the trust of that market is
| crucial to supporting these sort of trades
|
| I still think NFTs are a bubble that will come back down to
| Earth eventually. But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors
| equally perplexing, and people don't discuss these phenomena
| with the same sort of skepticism.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| >But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally
| perplexing,
|
| People for the most part don't get rich off of stamps. Is
| more of a hobby than an investment.
| [deleted]
| jedberg wrote:
| HN wasn't around when Web2.0 became a thing, but I don't remember
| Slashdot being filled with constant articles justifying Web2.0.
| I'm am just forgetting or were we as a community a lot less
| divided about it?
| codingdave wrote:
| It was less divided, but that was at least in part because "Web
| 2.0" was about the web. This usage of "web3" to mean
| crypto/blockchain has nothing to do with the web, and therefore
| feels completely absurd to me.
| rafiki6 wrote:
| I think there was less to be divided about. Back then, the best
| the evangelist could do was create a blog and try to game SEO
| to get noticed. They could post on a few popular forums, but
| discoverability was limited and algorithms designed to pump
| engagement didn't exist because social media platforms were in
| their infancy. It's a different world today. The barrier is
| lower. Blogging influentially is as easy as posting a medium
| article and pushing it on the social media platforms. So
| specific voices which tend to be controversial are getting way
| more amplified. Then the algorithms just creates echo chambers
| to keep the users engaged to pump up the ad revenue.
|
| That being said, Web 2.0 had two primary themes and business
| value propositions. It was social media/ads, and e-commerce.
| Those were pretty clear and there was no confusion about how
| money would be made. Out of those was born what I like to call
| Web 2.5, where basically every industry was getting SaaSified
| in one form or another. Out of this was born big data and the
| emergence of the most recent ML hype due to the need to create
| these algos to maximize ad driven profit.
|
| Crypto/Decentralization/Web 3.0 has a much much more
| challenging road ahead to get mass adoption. Outside of the
| obvious scaling issues decentralization brings about,
| decentralized apps have a much less clear path to monetization.
| That's in essence why they need to create their own economies
| with tokens and crypto. Really for "Web 3.0" to be successful,
| we are looking towards a whole scale reimagining of how
| economies function. This is entirely different than using the
| internet to create analogs to real world things like stores or
| newspapers.
|
| The value proposition of social media was abundant, and the
| path to profitability was clear. Ditto for ecommerce platforms.
| Ditto for the majority of SaaS applications.
|
| I think the fundamental divide here is talking about Web 3.0,
| (or ICOs, DApps, DeFi, NFTs, or w/e the "use case" of the day
| is), generally seems to be avoiding talking about the true
| value proposition of decentralization, which will face such
| tremendous resistance from powerful world governments, that
| it's akin to a war being fought to creating a new world order
| and evolution of how human society is shaped. The stakes are
| much higher and failure is much more likely.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if all the most successful projects
| just end up being centralized layers on top of the protocols
| and all they really end up doing is usurping the place of some
| existing Web 2.0 platforms due to some network effect pushed
| forward by a few key influencers. That's essentially what
| happened with TCP/IP and HTTP. I don't see why it will be any
| different this time.
| danenania wrote:
| Web 2.0 was a label created to describe an emergent trend
| (ajax, rich ui, rounded corners, drop shadows) that was well
| underway by the time the label was popular.
|
| web3 seems to be attempting the reverse: popularize the label
| first and hope the trend follows.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| When thinking about web3 I try to maintain a mental distinction
| between the enthusiasm for new ways of building applications, and
| the technical capabilities available to do so now.
|
| To the extent there is something "there" in web3, I think it is
| mostly the former--the enthusiasm.
|
| I saw someone write that there is a whole generation that grew up
| in a web dominated by Facebook, YouTube, etc. and they are hungry
| for a new way of doing things that feels free. I grew up with the
| original implementation of the WWW so I feel a lot of empathy for
| this point of view. It felt incredibly exciting and free.
|
| That said, the "web3" technology so far seems to be a dumpster
| fire. NFTs are packed with wash-sale scammers, and smart
| contracts are super inefficient, or break in expensive ways, or
| both. Although to be fair the early Web 1.0 was largely a
| dumpster fire too. :-)
|
| I think there is a big risk that the enthusiasm gets coopted by
| "solutions" that are in fact still centralized and just the old
| rulers in new clothes. I have to say that seeing so much boosting
| from rich established VCs does not seem like a good signal in
| that regard.
|
| When I see someone whose job it is to centralize huge control and
| rewards on behalf of their investors shouting that web3 is
| freedom from control and centralization... I start to feel
| dubious.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The author struggles to make the point that Web3 has value. Isn't
| "another opportunity for grift" a source of value for grifters?
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| He's a VC, he needs to project that they invest in things that
| have value. They're part of the grift. I have 0 faith in
| _anything_ coming out of a VC 's office to be beneficial to
| society. An interesting business? Sure! But in the long run it
| will not be a good thing.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That guy usually writes some good articles and seems to have
| some sense but since the NFT grift hit it big the blockheads
| have really gone down a rabbit hole.
| creeble wrote:
| Or even mention the "value" of the many DeFi apps that are
| available on the ethereum blockchain. What do they do?
|
| My real question is: why would an investor want to put money
| into a company that doesn't "own" the data from their
| customers? Do they even _have_ customers? What is their
| business model?
|
| I know, I know - they make commissions on all those billions of
| transactions that will happen on the blockchain. Right? Is the
| value simply coming up with new ways to add cost to
| transactions?
|
| I'm lost. Even when web2 was in an eyeballs race, I understood
| that you could monetize eyeballs with advertising (in what I
| considered a worst-case model). And SaaS was an obvious model,
| even if Marc Benioff seemed to yell about it a lot.
|
| What is a web3 business model outside of currency exchange?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| On a very small scale I am working on a next-generation web
| for myself and people immediately around me.
|
| My #1 principle is cost minimization so that I don't need to
| worry about what it costs to run.
|
| Futurists circa 1970 expected that people would be getting
| their news from something like cnn.com in the Early 1980s
|
| https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/summer-reading-2013-the-
| in...
|
| In some sense it came true in that you could access the AP
| newswire on Compuserve and the Source and that there were
| teletext services in Europe.
|
| All of these faced bad economics. The cost of CompuServe was
| astronomical. The only one that came close to mass market was
| Minitel in France and that was because the phone company saw
| they could save money on directory services.
|
| The web came along because technology had progressed an order
| of magnitude past feasibility to the point where people could
| publish stuff on the web and not worry about what it costs.
| That act of closing the circle and making it financial
| sustainable really trashed it.
| todd3834 wrote:
| I wish I could separate decentralized database from volatile
| investment. I understand that it can provide an incentive to get
| paid for essentially hosting part of the database. Is your
| average person benefiting from this or did we just give most of
| the centralization to mining farms where electricity is cheaper?
|
| Is web3 crypto money? Is it peer to peer? Is it blockchain?
|
| Does the blockchain really make sense for something like a HN
| clone or an instagram?
|
| If I were trying to proselytize web3 I would be promoting tech
| demos and convincing people why it is better. Like the Rails blog
| video that blew all of our minds in the past. We all wanted to
| use Rails after that. The benefits were clear.
| rednerrus wrote:
| Every commenter in this thread should disclose their web3
| holdings as part of their comments.
|
| I have a fairly large doge holding that I mined in the very
| beginning and haven't felt like dealing with.
| wslh wrote:
| The crux of web3 is the UX, last mile, and/or listing problem:
| even if you, hypothetically, could find a decentralized solution
| for every centralized one, the last interface to this mechanism
| will be centralized.
|
| Your UI (e.g. mobile app) is centralized so the best UI will
| eventually win because most end users care about UX or will enter
| this interface because they see a well paid ad. If this UI (e.g.
| a decentralized search engine interface) wants to censor some
| content then it will win over the decentralized protocol behind
| it.
| nathias wrote:
| Why would UI need to be centralized? Even in normal SPAs the
| client is making most of the work, the UI is fairly trivial to
| decentralize and there were a few examples on hn already.
| wslh wrote:
| This is very simple: imagine you have decentralized Uber/Lyft
| so now all the logic occurs in a decentralized way.
|
| Now, Uber^2 publishes a great mobile app, the mobile app is
| obviously centralized and they can decide to use or not and
| how to use the decentralized mechanism because they are the
| winners as the UX.
|
| Isn't this obvious?
| nathias wrote:
| Oh you're thinking that centralized apps would always
| produce better UX for some reason? I think centralized apps
| are making UX necessarily worse, because they implement
| dark patterns in order to milk their users, while in a
| decentralized ones you can just make your own. For example,
| matrix vs discord, one I can customize and interact with
| however I want the other is garbage and if I change
| anything I will get banned.
| ReggieCommaRose wrote:
| The topic at hand is mainstream adoption and I think
| empirically the world disagrees with you.
| nathias wrote:
| I'm sure you believe mainstream adoption is a consequence
| of a software having good UX and being very useful, I
| don't.
| wslh wrote:
| Mainstream adoption is independent if the app is
| centralized or not. You are ignoring the people who use
| Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, etc. People care about the
| brand offering not if they are decentralized or not.
| nathias wrote:
| If you don't see the problem being solved, it's you.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| because institutions lost their influence
|
| no kids reads newspaper, nor they watch the TV, traditional
| propaganda has no effect on them
|
| web3 would be a way to centralize everything again, so propaganda
| could be better targeted, opinions controlled, and easily censor-
| able
|
| you lol'd at china and their social credit score system? don't be
| jealous, you'll have yours! but it wont be about being a good
| citizen, it'll be about being a servant consumerist
|
| i see web3.0 as a way for the establishment to regain the
| influence they lost on their people
|
| the boomers trying to stay relevant
|
| the people late to the internet party, can't have a piece of the
| cake, so they want to force their way in
|
| a way for societal scammers to keep doing what they love doing
|
| NFT people? they can't wait selling art they bought for $5 from
| fivers and pretend you own a piece of a database they rent on
| digital ocean for $5 a month
|
| lol, what a wonderful plan, definitely something China is jealous
| of, no wonder they are looking for ways to get the hell out of
| this planet and conquer the space
|
| because there is one thing that would definitely kill our
| species, if the west tries to expand its shitty society outside
| of this dying planet
|
| --
|
| i mean, people dream of meta verse, how ridiculous, therefore i
| can be ridiculous with my posts too! who cares, we not looking
| for transcending humankind, are we? my bad my bad, i mean, you
| not even trying lol
| qaq wrote:
| One thing that is confusing most loud supporters of Web3 are VCs
| and yet: "It all comes down to the database that sits behind an
| application. If that database is controlled by a single entity
| (think company, think big tech), then enormous market power
| accrues to the owner/administrator of that database.
|
| If, on the other hand, the database is an open public database
| that is not controlled and administered by a single company, but
| instead is a truly open system available to all, then that kind
| of market power cannot be built up around a data asset" So why
| are they flowing billions of dollars into this ? If there is no
| locking what will create outsized returns for them?
| fleddr wrote:
| Almost all web3 projects issue their own tokens. Before they
| allow you to buy any of these tokens, they reserve part of the
| supply to the dev team and VCs. The rest of the supply is
| issued to the community.
|
| If the project/token is successful, the monetary value of the
| token rises, which funds the development teams and helps VCs to
| get a return.
|
| So as always, big capital gets the early access, and us mortal
| do not.
|
| Still, for a serious project it's not as bad as it sounds. It
| could still end up meaning the project is 75% community owned,
| rather than the 0% in a fully central organization.
|
| You should apply scrutiny though to the "decentralized" claim.
| Most web3 projects aren't very decentralized at all.
| m_ke wrote:
| 1. Because it's a ponzi scheme and they get to get in on the
| ground floor. See:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/intangiblecoins/status/1473302581...
|
| 2. Because they're rich libertarians who see crypto as a way to
| protect their assets from the government
| jrsj wrote:
| The only thing more annoying than libertarian crypto bros is
| progressives who don't like crypto because people have made
| money off it or they see it as inherently right wing
| technology (the Soviet Union said that about computers
| originally, you can see how that worked out for them)
| inopinatus wrote:
| Maybe so, but they're not in this thread.
|
| Criticising the whole shebang as a bunch of charletans
| pitching snake oil to the gullible isn't "progressive",
| it's common sense.
| shafyy wrote:
| Perfectly summarized.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Because experienced VCs know web 1.0 also started with
| decentralized / libertarian ideals, but ultimately early
| players built walled gardens and gatekeeping around the "world
| wide web".
|
| They don't want to miss the web3 boat, and they're betting the
| web 1.0/web 2.0 playbooks still apply.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Agreed. Most of the decentralization talk is Kabuki and it's
| still about controlling the platform.
| moflome wrote:
| Upvoting for the use of kabuki in explaining the
| melodramatic pantomime of crypto hype, if only we were all
| more artisanal in building out this nascent blockchain
| tech. Imagine if tcp/ip were invented today with all this
| pre-marketing by VCs
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Indeed, a world ruled by feudal lords and corporate fiefs
| still possesses as little liberty as one ruled by a
| centralized empire.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Less liberty really as the ability of corporations to
| intervene in your life far surpasses the capacity feudal
| states had on a day-to-day basis.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Consider a few simple examples -
|
| It is possible to buy crypto purely peer to peer e.g just 2
| people posting on a forum. Yet, most people buy it on an
| exchange and pay the transaction fees.
|
| It is possible to set up a wordpress server on your home PC or
| a cheap VPS, yet most people buy it off wordpress.com
|
| It is possible to replicate an ETF with relatively low effort
| by just looking up their holdings every month and rebalancing,
| yet most people pay the ETF fees.
|
| It is possible to make great coffee at home yet people go to
| coffee shops.
|
| ---
|
| The main idea IMO is just relying on people to be willing to
| buy into whatever new thing has a lot of marketing and hype
| behind it. They consistently do. Even if web3 is a truly open
| system, people will remain too apathetic to learn how that
| system works - they will just go to the most popular platform
| and pay the fee.
|
| ---
|
| The other angle IMO is that banks and tradfi in a lot of places
| really do suck hard. They don't need to innovate at all and
| rarely do. The only reason they don't have competition is piles
| of red tape, regulation, lobbying, corruption etc. All it takes
| is someone to make a half-decent website/app that makes things
| a little better (e.g Robinhood) and crypto is a way to do that
| while getting around all the old regulation.
| ivalm wrote:
| > The main idea IMO is just relying on people to be willing
| to buy into whatever new thing has a lot of marketing and
| hype behind it. They consistently do. Even if web3 is a truly
| open system, people will remain too apathetic to learn how
| that system works - they will just go to the most popular
| platform and pay the fee
|
| Then why not do it on web2? Web2, as it relies on trusted
| authorities, is fundamentally cheaper to run than web3.
|
| > It is possible to replicate an ETF with relatively low
| effort by just looking up their holdings every month and
| rebalancing, yet most people pay the ETF fees.
|
| ETFs rebalance without incurring capital gains, which is a
| massive advantage.
| verdverm wrote:
| > Then why not do it on web2
|
| Because you need something new and abstract to attract the
| rubes
| k__ wrote:
| My theory:
|
| Some people believe that this type of decentralization could be
| a force that can't be stopped by traditional companies and want
| to get in as soon as possible so they don't end up on the
| losing side of history.
|
| Of course, rich people simply diversify their assets and crypto
| is just one of many bets they do, so it's not 100% sure this
| will happen.
| polskibus wrote:
| The locking is in the company that controls the spec of the
| protocol and its reference implementation. It's always been
| about getting as many people onboard as possible, this time the
| bait is decentralisation.
| codesternews wrote:
| but they are not company people?
|
| company does not own anything nor database?
|
| I think just coins?
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Could you explain that business model?
| z3t4 wrote:
| You do not need to make money from the product directly.
| Think for example if the Bitcoin creator would get 10 cent
| every time someone mentioned Bitcoin. Or the easiest
| business model of them all, sell ads on your org site.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Think for example if the Bitcoin creator would get 10
| cent every time someone mentioned Bitcoin
|
| Eh, how would that work exactly?
|
| > Or the easiest business model of them all, sell ads on
| your org site
|
| That's great, but I can ensure you: none of us in the
| cryptocurrency ecosystem wants anything to do with ads.
| Also, can't really build a big business by having ads on
| your website.
| z3t4 wrote:
| There are casual games that are mostly funded by
| merchandise (Angry Birds). The game makes the brand
| popular, then they sell kid toys and clothing. I don't
| know _exactly_ how you would get paid by just someone
| mentioning your trademark, but it might be your business
| innovation - as in order to reach unicorn status you
| either need to innovate in the business area, or innovate
| in the product area - you do not need to innovate in
| both! (heck it 's probably enough to copy/apply an
| already successful business model on an already
| successful/invented product, but in a combination that no
| one yet has tried)
| jasonzemos wrote:
| One company controls the specification and reference
| implementation. These gimmicks tend to be "open" so
| contributions can flow in from anywhere, but the company
| has full priority and benefits by controlling the pace and
| final result.
|
| Outsider contributions are submitted publicly, while
| features developed by the company start in secret and can
| remain secret as long as possible. The company's
| contributions are rammed through while outsiders contend
| with endless bikeshedding with no guarantee they will get
| anything they need.
|
| In the end there is no sensible reason for any other entity
| to partner with the controlling company. The partner finds
| they are prevented from innovating while being bogged down
| by the "process." The controlling party then seeks to
| cannibalize the partner's product during this time by
| shelving any of their unique features and ideas. Once the
| partner moves on, the requisite changes and fixes to the
| specification are magically pushed through.
|
| I wouldn't call this a core business model as much as an
| enhancement to one. Fundamentally it's an attention grift
| -- a bamboozle of complex rules, procedures and processes,
| cloaked in goodwill, and furnished by a large interest and
| future hope at any given time.
| lowwave wrote:
| >One company controls the specification and reference
| implementation. These gimmicks tend to be "open" so
| contributions can flow in from anywhere, but the company
| has full priority and benefits by controlling the pace
| and final result.
|
| Google Chrome for example
| darawk wrote:
| Except all these things can be trivially forked. If you
| don't like how the VC one is doing things, just fork it.
| There are a billion forks of everything in the crypto
| space, for exactly this reason.
| lowwave wrote:
| yes, when was the last time you see google chrome forked
| and adopted a large user base? That is event with big VC
| money behind it Brave for example. Open source is now
| days used a marketing scheme to attract developers to
| work for free, and attract user to think that is open.
| polskibus wrote:
| It's easy to fork the code but not the user base.
| capableweb wrote:
| Find some problem that requires a ecosystem. Create this
| ecosystem and carry a large stake in it. Have the stake be
| a part of the ecosystem somehow. In the future, once the
| problem has a solution/ecosystem, start selling parts of
| the stake.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| > If there is no locking what will create outsized returns for
| them?
|
| Controlling consensus through proof of stake would give them an
| advantage.
| pyrale wrote:
| Because coins are not regulated like stock. An IPO is not
| something you can do anyway you want.
| hughrr wrote:
| I wouldn't think too far into this. All that is required is the
| application of experience and appropriate cynicism. The tech
| isn't even relevant and neither is the reality.
|
| web3 is a marketing term and is easy to leverage hype on as it
| implies progression and a new arena of opportunity.
|
| By the time anyone has peeled off the marketing and realised
| it's the same old bullshit people will be too far in to admit
| it and death march over the horizon.
| codesternews wrote:
| What happens when I the company create a databse (let's say
| facebook) and Developer A create more compelling application
| that facebook company?
|
| 1.Where is the controlling part. 2. what facebook internal
| advantage/motivation to create and hire more engineers and give
| dopemine to more people?
|
| Saying company facebook own coin which has no value what does
| this even mean?
|
| Explain to me.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Wouldn't an open database lead to loads of ACID issues or is
| the point of blockchain to prevent that
| drawkbox wrote:
| Further, open databases will potentially make it harder for
| iterative change on that data.
|
| Structures and versioning become harder when that is
| distributed at the protocol/standard level. Right now the web
| is already distributed, the protocols/standards are open and
| versioning data/content/apps/endpoints on top of that is
| easy, but updating protocols/standards takes time. Apps are a
| second layer to that, versioning is harder as you have to
| roll out updates and the OSs/standards they are built on are
| the slower changing part, web3 is even harder as updates and
| versioning of the protocol/standards AND the data/content on
| top will need to propagate and there may be pushback and
| splits/forks as we are seeing ETH being difficult to change
| core protocols/flows. There may be innovations on this as we
| go but also turbulence until that is realized.
|
| For some areas like personal data and ledger data not
| changing much is good. For anything beyond that it makes it
| harder to change. Versioning and iterative change is already
| difficult in some cases when a company has full control over
| the structures. Getting multiple companies to agree on
| standards is harder, especially when that impacts revenues on
| those systems. The same will happen with web3 maybe more
| intensely. Right now even open standards are actively killed
| off because they share data. Right now "web2" could have
| shared databases, and there are some, but companies push away
| from that and actively look to own data which is a problem.
| However the same will happen with web3 at additional levels
| including the protocols/standards now.
|
| What may happen is APIs public facades/interfaces/signatures
| are more atomic/stable and less changing which is always nice
| to have, with the guts of the structures being more
| keyed/document data formats. I am always a fan of iterative
| change that doesn't nuke the public interfaces/facades unless
| absolutely necessary. It may lead to "cleaner" more generic
| public interfaces potentially, but it may also lead to
| stagnate iterations and infighting like current web
| standards. In a way, web3 is more about standards than what
| is built on it. Standards can be flexible or not, both with
| their pros and cons.
|
| In a way with cryptocurrency, the real goal of the investors
| of web3 is recreating the web with a sort of toll system,
| that can be good and bad but their aim is collecting on
| actions on new protocols/standards.
|
| Taking control away from companies for important data like
| personal data and shared public data may be good, but there
| is also some trouble ahead and many things to work out. The
| same type of sharks that capture that data are looking to go
| lower in the stack and control that area, and extracting
| fees/tolls on the movement in that structure even if it is an
| open database. There are pros and cons to all of this.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| > In a way with cryptocurrency, the real goal of the
| investors of web3 is recreating the web with a sort of toll
| system, that can be good and bad but their aim is
| collecting on actions on new protocols/standards.
|
| One could argue that today's web is a combination of ad-
| based revenue and tolls run by (near?) monopolies: app
| stores, marketplaces, ect... The crypto-like alternatives
| such as substack and patreon are growing though and will
| likely have a niche even if/when crypto fails. The
| centralization of those crypto-like alternatives is a risk
| though. I recall one substack author giving email-export as
| a rationale to choose substack but that's a feature that
| presumably could just be turned off whenever.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What makes these alternatives "crypto-like" other than
| being less centralized? Are they even less centralized,
| other than being platforms owned by smaller corporations
| that choose to (for now) exercise a lighter touch?
| jshen wrote:
| It's a very limited database that is very slow and scales
| poorly.
| capableweb wrote:
| The currently most popular implementation of this "open
| database" (Bitcoin) is indeed slow and scales poorly. But
| if you start looking into the new ideas, you'll find there
| are plenty of still decentralized blockchains with much
| faster confirmation times (even as low as 5 seconds) today.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Which coins have confirmation times that low with the
| volume of Bitcoin?
| capableweb wrote:
| The volume has nothing to do with the confirmation time,
| it's a constant no matter if it's 1 or 10000
| transactions. Avalanche, Algorand, Polygon and more fits
| the bill of very fast transactions, in case you're
| interested in looking into the matter further.
| jshen wrote:
| Nothing can promise constant performance at infinite
| volume. 10,000 transactions are a tiny number for most
| modern and popular products these days.
| jshen wrote:
| 5 seconds is a long time, especially when a normal modern
| tech stack can do the same things in milliseconds. I'd
| also love a reference showing that any of these chains
| can handle 100k requests per second with a latency of a
| few seconds. I've never seen it.
| kevinak wrote:
| The amount of space in a Bitcoin block is around 7 TPS.
|
| Other blockchains make decentralization tradeoffs to
| process more transactions on-chain per second. For
| example, Ethereum requires better hardware: larger
| storage, better CPU and more memory. Solana makes even
| larger tradeoffs: expensive server hardware costing up to
| $25000, making it pretty much a central service
| controlled by the few.
|
| The key innovation of Bitcoin is the decentralization;
| almost anyone can participate and no one can control it.
| Sacrificing this for negligble is not worth it.
| Especially since there are smarter ways to scale the
| system. Even if you could improve throughput by 100x by
| making the system slightly less decentralized you would
| still not reach VISA levels of TPS.
|
| The correct way to scale these systems is using off-chain
| solutions like the Lightning Network. This way you can
| process millions of transactions per second.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Not only that, but every operation would cost fees, right?
|
| Good luck convincing people that every time they logging
| into their account or literally do any action will cost
| them some fees. Refreshed the page? Oops that'll cost ya!
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| In theory, these web3 platforms would still need to function as
| a business to continue existing. Moving the platform onto a
| blockchain removes the need for centralized servers, but it
| necessitates massive amounts of distributed compute power to
| keep it going.
|
| Every blockchain project knows that they need to incentivize
| their miners somehow. This is usually a combination of fees
| from users and new tokens minted via built-in inflation (yes,
| inflation ironically powers much of the crypto space and will
| continue to do so for a long time).
|
| So I always aks:
|
| 1) What problem are these web3 platforms solving?
|
| 2) Who are they solving it for?
|
| 3) Are those people actually willing to pay the blockchain
| premium to use a web3 platform over a centralized platform?
|
| The theory, of course, is that blockchain will evolve over time
| to become less resource hungry and therefore cheap enough to
| compete with incumbents, but that's a long way away. Many
| projects have started cheating by smuggling centralization into
| their architecture but emphasizing their blockchain and hoping
| nobody cares enough about the difference.
|
| But where do VCs come into the equation? They're not setting up
| the mining operations that will power these businesses and
| collect the fees in the future. They're investing in _tokens_
| that will ostensibly be used to pay the miners in the future.
|
| The whole game is about introducing artificial tokens, quietly
| giving a huge number of those tokens to founders and early
| investors (in exchange for actual money, of course), and then
| hyping the platform to the moon so everyone can cash out their
| tokens to a new wave of speculators.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > introducing artificial tokens, quietly giving a huge number
| of those tokens to founders and early investors (in exchange
| for actual money, of course), and then hyping the platform to
| the moon so everyone can cash out their tokens to a new wave
| of speculators.
|
| In other words a Ponzi-scheme
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| It's a ponzi-scheme if there's no value behind the hype.
| it's not inherently a ponzi scheme. It's the same way in
| the current private equity start-up world just that only
| VC's and connected individuals are exposed to the all the
| risk and all the profit.
| threeseed wrote:
| > It's a ponzi-scheme if there's no value behind the hype
|
| But what's the value ?
|
| I am still after a few years now trying to understand
| what it actually is.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| As time goes on, the ever-evolving nature of the predictions
| about how crypto will change the world for the better keeps
| looking more and more like the ever-evolving nature of the
| predictions we were seeing 50 years ago about how the space
| aliens were going to come along and change the world for the
| better.
|
| Granted, crypto has a bit of an advantage over the space aliens
| in the race to realize a transformative impact on the world, by
| virtue of the fact that it actually exists. That's not the
| parallel I'm trying to draw here. It's more... it seems that
| they're both a situation where people are really just attached to
| this one amorphous romantic idea, and the specifics really don't
| matter at all. Meaning they can be freely reconfigured, at will
| and without much limit, in order to ensure we're always talking
| about something that's off in the future rather than something we
| might expect to happen now, let alone in the past. Which,
| something like that is absolutely perfect fodder for daydreaming.
|
| So then I ask myself, "Is kicking a ball through it a core part
| of the plan, or is this goalpost really just a thing that's fun
| to move around?"
|
| Perhaps my problem is that there's not really any romance in my
| soul.
| arbuge wrote:
| I read this as yet another article stating how great web3 is
| going to be and how important the decentralization aspect is,
| without making it clear exactly why this is the case, and what
| concrete examples of things we'll be able to do with it (that
| we're unable to do today) are.
|
| Web3 sounds to me like one of those soap opera startups PG talks
| about. They sound like a great idea when you propose them, but do
| people really want them in reality?
| numbsafari wrote:
| With web3, there is no deplatforming, no moderation, no
| accountability. There is no responsibility.
|
| That's what they really want. They want a system that, in their
| minds, won't be subject to regulation or social pressure.
|
| They are still mad that Reddit blocked certain groups. That
| parler got banned from public clouds.
|
| Those are the things that made them "wake up" to the need for
| web3.
|
| Deleting data and social accountability are important features
| that they find abhorrent.
| corobo wrote:
| > With web3, there is no deplatforming, no moderation, no
| accountability
|
| A collection of NFTs got deplatformed, moderated, and even
| accepted accountability yesterday
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714296
| mritchie712 wrote:
| It was "sitcom" startups[0], something like "uber for dogs". I
| guess some of web3 qualifies, but I don't think something like
| Ethereum would fit that category at all.
|
| 0 - http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
| adventured wrote:
| > If, on the other hand, the database is an open public database
| that is not controlled and administered by a single company, but
| instead is a truly open system available to all, then that kind
| of market power cannot be built up around a data asset
|
| That's just so blatantly and obviously false it's rather
| remarkable that he wrote it.
|
| Absolutely nothing stops companies from becoming the dominant
| providers - aka big tech - that utilize said database at the
| application layer. Indeed that's exactly what will happen. You
| don't need to own the database to build a big tech monopoly on
| top of it. Microsoft didn't own the primary distribution channel
| for Windows 95, and they didn't own the hardware it ran on
| either. Google (search, circa 1999) didn't own the Internet, or
| the PC, or the operating system, or the cable line, or the
| telecom infrastructure, and so on. Consumers develop preferences,
| companies develop advantages (through superior products or other
| means), and the market dominance centralizes to one or a few
| providers. That's always inevitable short of government
| intervention. You don't have to own the database to build a
| monopoly on top of it. The better products (or via other leverage
| points) will win out and dominate and will be extraordinarily
| difficult to compete with, their advantage will become entrenched
| as their product gains in complexity and capability (ie competing
| with Google in 1998 was far easier than it would have been by
| 2012, as they scaled their capabilities and made enormous
| investments globally); the cost to keep up the with the winners
| soars and few will try (see: lack of dozens or hundreds of new
| competitors to Uber and Lyft, few are even trying at this point,
| the potential competition gives up for obvious reasons).
|
| Say hello to Coinbase & Co. We've already seen this process in
| action in crypto, many times over.
| simonw wrote:
| > If, on the other hand, the database is an open public database
| that is not controlled and administered by a single company, but
| instead is a truly open system available to all, then that kind
| of market power cannot be built up around a data asset.
|
| But it's a crap database. It's incredibly slow and incredibly
| expensive. The benefits we get from using a slow, expensive
| database need to be absolutely enormous for this to turn out to
| be worthwhile.
| xrd wrote:
| If you read the post he recommends from his partner, that is
| covered in detail by comparing it to the PC, which compared
| poorly to mainframes, but was cheap. And, that Clayton
| Christenson remarked that having a singular facet that is
| unique and very different, is a good starting point for a
| revolution.
| tome wrote:
| This is not very convincing though, because the cheap, but
| otherwise poorly-specced PC could do something useful, e.g.,
| run spreadsheets. "Web3" can't do anything useful yet that's
| not already predicated on its own value, that is, sure you
| can "transfer value" with Bitcoin or Etherium, but that's
| predicated on those "tokens" actually having value. Its value
| is built on itself. The PC on the other hand had fundamental
| value.
| [deleted]
| intrasight wrote:
| In fiction, Hiro Protagonist got in early and bought some prime
| real-estate in the metaverse. Many IRL did the same with Bitcoin
| and made a killing. If you think all the lucrative web2
| properties have already been claimed, then it makes sense to
| create virgin territory in web3 and stake a claim.
| evan_ wrote:
| Hiro delivered pizzas and lived in a storage unit with a
| roommate. His metaverse "wealth" was essentially worthless to
| him in real life. Real-life real estate is valuable because
| they're not making more land. Virtual real estate does not have
| that limitation.
|
| (Also IIRC he helped create the Metaverse, he didn't simply buy
| in early.)
| intrasight wrote:
| "bought in early" by investing his time.
|
| Web3 will succeed if it succeeds in creating artificial
| scarcity - just as Bitcoin has succeeded in doing. I am
| pessimistic, but there are lots of people who think
| otherwise. I do think that it will have a "real-estate"
| aspect to it soas to have scarcity of place.
|
| Here's a thought: can we repurpose all the Bitcoin
| computation to doing something useful like rendering the
| metaverse?
| runako wrote:
| This argument is simple, but forgets that the Internet has
| essentially had permission-less databases before, notably in IRC,
| XMPP, and email. Anyone can run an IRC or XMPP node, anyone can
| run email. The protocols are open and free (as in money) to use.
| But time and again the masses of Internet users choose
| centralized alternatives.
|
| It's interesting to see this already playing out in the Web 3
| space. Users concentrate transactions on a few (< 50) sites. The
| space is considered investable by VMS because they expect
| companies to be able to create lock-in similar to what Slack did
| with chat or Facebook did with Web forums.
| leifg wrote:
| I think the argument made implicitly is that with web3 you
| could actually monetize your contribution. If you run an IRC
| server you (usually) only have cost. One part of web3 is tokens
| so you can actually earn some fake money by running an IRC
| server.
|
| I think if you look at the economics of that though I don't
| think it will turn out in your favor. You are either making
| 10ct a month from it or you'll have to heavily invest in
| hardware to (potentially) turn a profit.
|
| The reason some of that works now is because we have an
| inflated price of tokens and people are speculating on it going
| up. But that makes it not an appealing service for you to pay
| for.
|
| And all of that forgets that the vast majority of people is not
| willing to pay anything to use a service. No matter how often
| web3 people will yell "If you don't pay for it, you're the
| product".
| runako wrote:
| I remember so much of the time I spent on IRC and XMPP
| overlapped with the period in my life when I had the fewest
| financial resources. It would have been net negative for me
| if the popular chat spaces had been accompanied by any kind
| of toll.
| malermeister wrote:
| Big plus to this point. The idea behind web3 seems to be
| "the web, but everything is an attempt to gauge people for
| money now".
|
| How is that better? Who asked for more money to be involved
| everywhere? I just want an open space to hang out with
| people and share ideas and data, I don't want everything to
| become a gated community.
| tfang17 wrote:
| A lot of HN hate on Web3... is the alternative to lay down and
| let big tech win?
| undeadsushi wrote:
| Yes the marketing is annoying, but have you actually experimented
| with the world of Web3. Have you played with defi, bought in
| early any gaming tokens? The fact that all of this can happen on-
| chain where it's completely transparent is really unique. It's
| why there has been so many companies explode into the 50M-100M
| revenue range in 2021 -
| https://consensys.net/reports/web3-report-q3-2021/
| corobo wrote:
| No, can't afford it
| neurobashing wrote:
| be wary of any person talking about you're going to have this big
| distributed consensus, based on some kind of buy-in to something,
| without first finding out who has the most buy-in, and just what
| it takes to overcome their %.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I feel sad that this beautiful thing has been usurped by
| shysters, grifters and scumbags. Web3 is decentralization. Not
| crypto, not blockchain, not your shitcoin, not your mining and
| most definitely not your NFTs.
|
| We need to take it back for our children's sake.
| corobo wrote:
| I'm on board
|
| How?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| public data isn't going to keep things decentralized because data
| isn't the only thing that matters, if anything it matters less
| and less. Core part of what large internet services do is
| _process_ data and provide services built on top of a lot of
| compute.
|
| We have big internet companies because processing that amount of
| information is computationally expensive and thus centralization
| is the economic solution. Not even traditional p2p solutions have
| yet been able to compete with large entities, and 'web3' with its
| crypto solutions is substantially worse because it's
| computationally more expensive by design.
|
| Not to mention there's also the fairly obvious point that a lot
| of those companies exist by processing data that is inherently
| private because users demand it to be so. Nobody is willingly
| going to put their chat messages on the blockchain to be read by
| the public.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Enough already, flag this crap off the site.
| verdverm wrote:
| The biggest issue I see for web3 and permissionless data is the
| same issue we complain about with the Facebook debate...
|
| How do we manage the tradeoff between misinformation and
| censorship?
|
| Permissionless swings the pendulum to one extreme which would
| seem to lead to an existential dilemma.
| mark242 wrote:
| "Permissionless data" is actively harmful to people who do not
| want their data put into an immutable datastore. It smacks of
| "moderation-free content" which is simply a nonstarter.
|
| If web3 is truly about privacy and data portability, then 90% of
| the people working on DeFi should shift their efforts to making a
| better browser, possibly one that incorporates IPFS natively and
| quickly.
| 58x14 wrote:
| This reads like an obligatory post on the topic with no real
| substance. I'm on mobile so it's a good opportunity to succinctly
| express what I view as the major, near-future positives for Web3:
|
| - identity and trustless SSO via things like ENS and "sign in
| with {client such as metamask}"
|
| - data sovereignty, or at least less platform lock-in, especially
| for low/no code users
|
| - grants, crowdfunding, and other financial support for useful
| open-source projects. This may be the most provably successful
| outcome to date in Web3; I'm confident I could cite enough
| sources here with a little homework.
|
| I encourage all readers to disassociate (or rather decouple) the
| terms "cryptocurrency" and "NFT" from Web3. Web3, while still
| fairly nebulous, in my current understanding, is mostly protocol-
| level implementations of web paradigms incorporating
| decentralized technologies. Like any growing technology, there
| will be many variations, and the unscrupulous outliers should not
| overshadow the constellation of fascinating things humanity can
| speedrun with these new building blocks.
| tptacek wrote:
| The SSO thing has come up before. Trustless, decentralized,
| immutable databases are essentially the exact opposite of what
| you want in an SSO system; it's hard to think of an application
| where blockchain technology has less promise than SSO, which is
| about fine-grained policy control, out-of-band account recovery
| (the hardest problem in SSO), instantaneous revocation, and
| centralization of controls.
| Zamicol wrote:
| Anytime the ENS sign in stuff is brought up, I feel obligated
| to point out the following:
|
| Alex Van de Sande, the co-founder of ENS, posted in 2018 an
| interesting demo with UniLogin, "[Universal Logins demo for
| Ethereum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5t94cCg6XE)". [The
| project was abandoned in 2020](https://medium.com/universal-
| ethereum/out-of-gas-were-shutti...).
|
| This is a hard problem that needs a fantastic solution. I don't
| think sign in with Ethereum is better than UniLogin. UniLogin
| was good, the team was smart, and this was still too much of a
| problem for them to feel like it was worth their time to solve.
|
| Then there's the significant problem of state expiry. How do
| you log out? I don't see that they're really addressing this
| problem. Right now the EIP has the attitude to "push that
| problem down to the servers". Websites need complete solutions,
| not more problems. Others have already made progress down this
| road, and I don't see anything different from what has already
| been done before.
| balaji1 wrote:
| what's web3? -\\_(tsu)_/-
| rzzzt wrote:
| A blockchain of NFTs!
| fleddr wrote:
| Just relax and let it play out. The author is right. Web3 needs
| to deliver a killer app. Something with broad consumer appeal
| that would not be possible with web2. Something your mum would
| use.
|
| If such a thing is never delivered, skeptical you was right and
| you can have your "told you" moment. If it does get delivered,
| you were wrong, and we may be at the start of something
| drastically new.
|
| As tens of billions is flowing into these projects, either
| outcome is going to be very interesting.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I think it's really easy to be doubtful about web3, especially
| given how much BS is floating in the space, and the high amount
| of pure speculative trades having been made so far.
|
| I still believe that there's something there, but I'm not sure
| what it is. I am also unsure that the current wave of companies
| will be able to find it.
|
| The different between the early adoption of web2 and this current
| web3 cycle is that web2 brought a proper value to its users. I
| still fail to see how web3 is providing value at all.
|
| Perhaps specific aspects of crypto (e.g. NFT used for real estate
| transactions) will be the killer app?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Perhaps specific aspects of crypto (e.g. NFT used for real
| estate transactions) will be the killer app?
|
| I consider myself to be very good at security, offsite
| encrypted backups, managing private keys, and other opsec
| details.
|
| But there's _no way_ I 'd ever want the ownership of my house
| or cars or other property controlled by an NFT. If something
| happens to my private keys, am I stuck with the house forever?
| If my private keys are stolen, does someone else suddenly own
| my house because they have the NFT?
|
| In a hypothetical world where NFTs were the token of real
| estate ownership, governments would simply step in and make
| sets of laws to override and re-issue the NFTs according to
| legal outcomes. They would store the overrides and other
| information in a centralized database that they control, and
| everyone would be bound to respect the overrides in the
| centralized database. So the NFT becomes a gimmick.
| kurttheviking wrote:
| > But there's no way I'd ever want the ownership of my house
| or cars or other property controlled by an NFT.
|
| +1. My dad died in 2015 and the lawyer who held his Will had
| apparently gone out of business in the early 00s. I spent a
| lot of time in the probate courts but was eventually able to
| gain access to the assets so I could clear the estate, settle
| his debts, and put him to rest. Arbitrated reversibility and
| sanctioned transfer of title is a feature, not a bug...I feel
| that point often gets lost in the web3 debates.
| cinntaile wrote:
| In many countries real estate transactions are validated by a
| notary elite that has a lot of political clout. Technical
| superiority is not even a factor here.
| NationalPark wrote:
| Which countries?
| pphysch wrote:
| Global finance will eventually be eclipsed by large-scale
| economic planning systems. It will probably take a couple decades
| for finance to go the way of alchemy, but the signs of its
| irrelevance are there: hilarious schemes like SPACs, DeFi, NFTs.
| Totally divorced from the underlying economics.
| malermeister wrote:
| I think you are right and I think China is leading the way
| here.
| rytill wrote:
| Interesting take. I'm not sure many would agree with you. Care
| to expand or point us somewhere where your ideas are expanded?
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I'd be interested too. I've seen takes loosely along these
| lines before, but my familiarity is pretty shallow and I
| don't remember specific sources. There's a line of thought
| that traditional pro-capitalism analysis of the "economic
| calculation problem" would tell us that a massive corporate
| retailer like Walmart should be mired in inefficiency
| compared to retailers with more localized authority (e.g.
| regional or franchised chains). Since that's not what we see,
| something must be missing from the analysis. For example,
| some have proposed that technological advancements (in fields
| including telecommunications, logistics, and accounting) have
| made centralization radically cheaper and more effective
| since the 1980s or so.
| pg_bot wrote:
| I think the VCs are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It
| makes sense to invest in "web3" because of the potential power
| law returns if someone figures out how to make something useful.
| However, I think we've had enough time to evaluate enough of
| these technologies to claim that the emperor has no clothes. It
| may take a few years but I think every single web3 investment
| will have to be written off as a complete loss. There is just no
| problem being solved there that couldn't be solved more
| efficiently elsewhere.
| capableweb wrote:
| > However, I think we've had enough time to evaluate enough of
| these technologies
|
| "We" (humanity) started working on networking/the foundations
| of the internet in the 1970s, and it wasn't until late 1990s
| that it actually became mainstream and started providing a
| solution to "real" problems we had at that time. What makes you
| confident we can judge cryptocurrencies in just ~12 years
| instead of ~20 years it took for the internet to take hold?
|
| > There is just no problem being solved there that couldn't be
| solved more efficiently elsewhere.
|
| How about a network where anyone with a computer could transfer
| X amount of _something_ to someone else, without having to rely
| on a single 3rd party? You 'll say that it's not a problem in
| practice, but the same thing was said about email in the past.
| uncomputation wrote:
| The value prop here is the "without a third party" bit I
| presume? That seems more like a political or ethical
| preference rather than true value. Email allowed you to
| instantly and perfectly send a message anywhere at any time,
| and you could cut down on machine and paper/ink costs.
| Genuine value.
|
| Ironically, the crypto way of doing transactions is more like
| the fax machine to Venmo's email. The former is slow and more
| expensive, while the latter is instant and free.
|
| Edit: I'd also like to point out you still have a third party
| in crypto. It's just that the third party is the entire
| network rather than a single company.
| capableweb wrote:
| If you compare email to snailmail, the same argument could
| be made. That it's over the internet is just a preference,
| why care about email when normal mail works perfectly fine?
|
| "Without a single 3rd party" is a technical feature, one
| that allows people to transfer money anywhere, for any
| reason via any device connected to the internet, without
| having to open up a bank account. According to the last
| numbers I've read, the number of "unbanked" people is above
| 1 billion in the world, some in my family is included
| there. For them, cryptocurrencies gives them the
| opportunity of sending/receiving currency cross-border much
| easier than what Venmo/Paypal/Transferwise/WesternUnion
| ever been able to provide (and trust me, we've tried most
| platforms).
|
| The Bitcoin way of doing transactions is indeed slow and
| expensive, but there are many alternatives out there, if
| you care to look for them.
|
| > Edit: I'd also like to point out you still have a third
| party in crypto. It's just that the third party is the
| entire network rather than a single company.
|
| Yup, that's why my comment includes "single 3rd party", not
| just "any 3rd party". Everyone who understands blockchain
| understands that there are 3rd parties involved, not
| everyone seems to understand the difference between
| multiple and single 3rd parties though.
| notahacker wrote:
| If you ask "why care about email when normal mail works
| just as fine" then "because you _always_ get it quicker "
| is a much better answer for "well there are edge cases
| where an unbanked person might actually have access to a
| local cryptocurrency speculator offering them spendable
| cash for less commission than Western Union or the local
| hawala service"
| pg_bot wrote:
| "If you compare email to snailmail, the same argument
| could be made. That it's over the internet is just a
| preference, why care about email when normal mail works
| perfectly fine?"
|
| This is nonsense. Email is orders of magnitude cheaper
| and faster than snail mail. Talk to any business owner
| who made the switch from physically mailing bills to
| emailing their clients invoices and ask them how much
| time and money they saved. The value proposition for
| email is obvious.
| unicornmama wrote:
| Talk to 8 year old me who made the switch from physically
| mailing letters to my grandfather to emailing him.
| tome wrote:
| Computer networking already had value in the 1970s (and
| before)!
| pg_bot wrote:
| Even in the early days of computing, there were obvious
| benefits to networking computers. The work wasn't done for no
| reason, there was clear value in coming up with all of these
| protocols. The main reason it took so long for general
| adoption was the fact that computers were not in most family
| homes until the 1990s. The barrier to adopting the internet
| wasn't the inherent value of the protocols it was the cost of
| the machine to the average consumer.
|
| I'm confident in saying this because we are further along in
| the computing adoption cycle and we haven't really come up
| with anything useful.
|
| Your point about transferring something to someone else
| without a third party ignores transaction costs. Who cares if
| you need a third party if you are purchasing something
| legally and the cost to transact is low?
| saurik wrote:
| I mean, if I want to send you some money, and let's say you
| are just in Canada (I am in the United States), my options
| are limited and many are super expensive... and almost all
| of them take forever. The only cheap, easy, and fast way is
| PayPal (or their subsidiary Venmo), which I don't think
| anyone truly _likes_ (evidence for which is easy: find
| literally any thread on Hacker News about them that isn 't
| using their existence to defend why cryptocurrencies are
| unnecessary).
|
| Other than PayPal, Bitcoin (or Ethereum and Avalanche or
| what have you) is much easier than all of these systems,
| and while it currently may or may not be as cheap, it was
| frankly a "first draft": the subsequent protocols the
| community is using are all (incrementally) cheaper and the
| ecosystem has even been succeeding at improving the overall
| scalability. If you tell me your Bitcoin address--no matter
| where you are in this increasingly global world--I can
| reliably send you money.
| pg_bot wrote:
| The best case scenario I can see is that cryptocurrencies
| push the US banking system to adopt something like the
| British "Faster Payment Services". If anyone begins to
| gain adoption they will be outcompeted by incumbent
| banks. It has never been the case that banking has been
| limited by technology for quicker and cheaper
| transactions in the US.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rexreed wrote:
| I posted a while ago a comment that large tech companies and
| their investors are not really motivated for decentralized
| systems, but that they have to tell the markets they are.
| Otherwise they will face increasing regulatory and liability
| pressure due to how they wield control and power over their
| platforms and customers / users (products). On the one hand they
| want to be shielded from the effects of running large,
| centralized systems, but on the other hand, they don't want to
| give up their walled gardens, customer lock-in, captive audience,
| no right-to-repair benefits. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29449724
| Kiro wrote:
| I don't like how the extreme hatred toward Web3 has spiraled into
| "I see no practical application for decentralization". Crypto and
| blockchain aside, how can you not see the utility in an open
| firehose database/API without gate keepers?
|
| Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain.
| stathibus wrote:
| Web3 is like a solution in search of a problem, except worse,
| because the solution does not actually solve the problem.
| [deleted]
| moritonal wrote:
| Because the only reason I can imagine someone wanting a open
| database without gate keepers is for something the society I've
| aligned with has decided is illegal.
|
| At the end of the day, I guess I trust the goverment I vote for
| and the banks I decide on more than a distributed group of
| strangers. Do you have an example of a DB that was unfairly
| limited by a gate keeper?
| Kiro wrote:
| Facebook, Twitter or any walled garden. I can't build any app
| I want on top of those without risking it being limited,
| restricted or shut down... If they even provide an API at
| all.
| epistasis wrote:
| There's an easy counter to "I see no practical application for
| decentralization," which is to provide an example of that
| application.
|
| I'm not convinced that Bitcoin or currencies are a practical
| application that results in net gain (economic or otherwise) to
| humanity. The internet was obvious from day 1, even if the
| actual end applications ended up quite a bit different.
|
| > how can you not see the utility in an open firehose
| database/API without gate keepers?
|
| This is what I don't see. The "gate keepers" are often a
| positive, not a negative. And it's hard for me to imagine what
| sort of database is being held back because of gatekeepers.
| Kiro wrote:
| The gate keepers are preventing me from building the kind of
| apps I want. Just the other day people here reminisced about
| the days when Twitter used to have an open API and how bad it
| is that they shut it down.
|
| I want to build apps without having to worry about ever being
| restricted, limited or shut down.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I want to build apps without having to worry about ever
| being restricted, limited or shut down.
|
| So. Where's blockchain-powered Twitters and Facebooks then?
| For all the talk about gatekeeping and decentralization no
| actual apps appeared that would in any way support your
| words.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| I was thinking about this, not sure if entirely the same.
|
| For example the YT dislikes going away. What if you got
| people to install a chrome extension where it tracked urls
| with upvotes/downvotes (game system). The database is
| shared between installed apps no central db... would it
| work?
|
| I could be far off with the intent of the application but
| another example is mesh networking where it is nice to not
| have a central pipe but is it going to be as good,
| particularly the case of cross continent.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Because they keep talking and talking and all we get is get
| rich quick schemes involving blockchains and crypto.
|
| Where are the applications?
| mendyberger wrote:
| It blows my mind how many people keep dismissing
| decentralization because of problems in the NFT space.
| Jetrel wrote:
| We're not.
|
| We don't need blockchain for decentralization. That's what
| we're dismissing. Blockchain is a set of cancer cells that
| have metastasized into the existing zeitgeist surrounding
| decentralization efforts. It offers nothing, and just poisons
| our existing work.
| tootie wrote:
| The issue is that decentralization is orthogonal to the
| supposed problems to be solved.
| jandrese wrote:
| Anything "web scale" without gatekeepers is immediately
| colonized by criminals, neo-Nazis, redpill edgelords,
| pedophiles, and all other such manner of people who are always
| looking for a new place to exist after being kicked out of
| every other one.
|
| Unmoderated discussion doesn't scale. The noise floor rises
| faster than the population of the service until it collapses
| under the weight of the trolls.
| Kiro wrote:
| Moderation and filtering can happen on the user application
| layer with the underlying data still being open and
| accessible. Right now the gate keepers are Big Tech deciding
| who and when someone or something can access the data.
| jandrese wrote:
| Personal spam control has its own issues. Managing the
| filter can end up consuming all of your time on the
| platform and that effort has to be replicated for every
| user. Worse, public perception will be that your platform
| is unusable because the horrendous first impression it
| makes.
|
| So maybe you decided to make public filter lists, but then
| the people making the filters end up being the defacto
| operators of the platform and you're back to square 1.
| Kiro wrote:
| I mostly meant the app you're using to access the data
| doing the moderation for you.
|
| I don't think we would be back to square 1. We would
| still have the possibility to create new clients and
| build whatever applications we want without being under
| the mercy of Big Tech holding the data hostage. Sure,
| maybe one such app talking to the open platform would
| become dominant and the de facto operator but at least it
| wouldn't have the power to restrict, limit or shut down
| other apps.
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