[HN Gopher] Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
___________________________________________________________________
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
Author : fandorin
Score : 208 points
Date : 2021-12-31 08:27 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (continuations.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (continuations.com)
| nathell wrote:
| > The canonical example here is the personal computer (PC). The
| first PCs were worse computers than every existing machine. They
| had less memory, less storage, slower CPUs, less software,
| couldn't multitask, etc. But they were better at one dimension:
| they were cheap. And for those people who didn't have a computer
| at all that mattered a great deal. It is exactly this odd
| combination that made existing computer manufacturers (making
| mainframes down to mini computers) ignore the PC.
|
| Wow. There are so many factual errors in these sentences that I'm
| not even sure where to start.
|
| I'll start by giving the author the benefit of doubt and assume
| that by ,,personal computer" they meant the IBM PC (1981) and its
| family. (Otherwise we'd have to assume that they completely
| ignore the existence of pre-PC home computers, many of which were
| both less powerful and significantly cheaper.) It's also not true
| that the PC was unable to multitask (remember Concurrent
| CP/M-86?)
|
| First, note that IBM, at the time of introducing the PC, was -
| and continued to be, well into the 21st century - _the_ major
| purveyor of mainframes. So saying that they ,,ignored the PC"
| implies that they ignored themselves, which doesn't make sense.
|
| Second, the initial PCs were just not powerful enough to compete
| with mainframes or minicomputers. The sets of usecases of ,,big"
| computers vs. PCs were almost completely disjoint until perhaps
| the 1990s. There were reasons why the PC exploded in popularity
| in the 1980s (open architecture being the #1 reason), but the
| author is silent about that.
|
| I know this is tangential, but I see a lot of handwaving in this
| post and, frankly, not much else. Why should I listen to someone
| who can't get their facts straight? Why bother, indeed?
| abraae wrote:
| The only concrete point in your rant seems to be this:
|
| > So saying that they ,,ignored the PC" implies that they
| ignored themselves, which doesn't make sense.
|
| This makes perfect sense to anyone who has seen a large
| lumbering schizophrenic beast like IBM. It's commonplace for
| one division to despise, ignore and undermine another.
| enisdenjo wrote:
| If Web3 is built on blockchain, do people (miners per se) need to
| download the whole _internet_ in order to keep it decentralized?
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| That vision of Web3, "Just put everything on the blockchain" is
| doomed to fail and I don't know anyone who ever seriously
| proposed it.
|
| Blockchains are best suited for data subject to manipulation,
| i.e. data in which there is profit to alter. If we were to
| naivly build "Web3" in theory with this in mind, then the
| majority of activity would be peer-to-peer, federated, or
| partially centralized, while the exchange of security
| credentials would take place on an efficient broadcast layer.
|
| The trick is to do as much off chain as possible - and if trust
| becomes an issue, develop a minimally on chain scheme. Its
| still early days, if you ask me how exactly this looks in 20
| years I couldn't tell you.
| enisdenjo wrote:
| How do you develop a minimal chain scheme for increasing
| trust? As in, do you first get people to your website and
| then ask them to contribute in decentralization by
| downloading the chain?
|
| Bitcoin cannot work without people noticing and liking
| Bitcoin. If it didn't get traction, it'd still be centralized
| haha - only one entity would have the whole chain.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| The way I've heard it laid out is:
|
| Web3 will handle IP address and DNS storage, sale, and search
| using basically NFTs on the blockchain. Meanwhile, HTTP content
| hosting will still be kept separate (maybe IPFS, maybe
| something centralized depending on the need).
|
| Current example: NFTs typically store metadata on the
| blockchain and the content in IPFS.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Not sure why you're downvoted because this is a legit question.
| Even if web3 is build on a large number of blockchains, you
| still need whole blockchains downloaded in order to be
| trustless. Currently probably only a tiny percentage of crypto
| users have downloaded whole blockchains, and instead defer to
| third parties.
| enisdenjo wrote:
| Exactly, the chain would increase indefinitely begging 2
| questions: - Who would even want to keep it? - Is using
| blockchains even worth it? Like, if you defer the download to
| third parties - isn't it again being centralized?
| hnbad wrote:
| This is a common misconception. Web3 mostly exists off chain.
| Storing everything on the blockchain would not only take a lot
| of space (and thus be extremely expensive) but also be horribly
| slow. Web3 apps generally use the blockchain more as an audit
| log. There's a reason most of the web3 apps crypto believers
| give as examples for web3 apps that actually work are trading
| apps.
|
| FWIW I think most people base this of a misunderstanding of how
| NFTs work based on the claims around it: NFTs prove ownership
| of a hash. That hash is associated with a URL. That URL points
| to a JSON document. That JSON document points to the NFT art
| piece (i.e. the "JPEG"). If the service hosting the JSON
| document (or the service hosting the art piece) goes away, the
| hash becomes a simulacrum, an identifier with no identifiee. It
| still indicates ownership but only to those who already know
| that this is what it does. There can be JPEGs on the blockchain
| (and allegedly there is already CSAM on at least one of them)
| but due to the size constraints this isn't how things usually
| work.
|
| This isn't even getting into multi-layer approaches which came
| about because while web3 is built on ETH, actually doing
| anything with the ETH chain is extremely rate limited and has
| extremely high transaction costs, so other chains have been
| built on top of it that as I understand it just bulk commit
| hashes of snapshots or something to it.
|
| FWIW the "first you download the Internet" solution already
| exists and is called IPFS. There is also a solution called
| Freenet that focuses on anonymity and avoiding censorship.
| Predictably the biggest problem with downloading the Internet
| is that you unknowingly (or knowingly) start collecting illegal
| content like CSAM, which may be a serious crime depending on
| where you live.
| enisdenjo wrote:
| So, is blockchain therefore even needed? Why should you even
| "first you download the internet" (or even a subset of it)? I
| just want to watch some cat videos.
|
| Confirming data integrity and origin is already solved -
| thanks digital signatures and checksums.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I think web3 means, most generally, decentralized Internet
| without big tech. How can this be achieved? By people sharing
| their computer/internet resources instead of relying on big tech
| servers. Why would they do that? Because they will receive
| incentives in the form of digital currency. Who will pay those
| incentives? People investing dollars into digital coins with
| speculative purposes and people providing services for digital
| coins.
| stevebmark wrote:
| I don't agree with this perspective. Crypto is designed to be a
| poor technology, the slowness, waste and scarcity are part of
| what lead to increasing prices, which is the only reason people
| have interest in it. If PCs were traded like beanie babies, with
| less regulation and bigger asset bubbles, then maybe this analogy
| would make sense. But PCs are designed to be useful, not only
| traded like commodities to increase fiat.
|
| If this take, "crypto is bad technology but we're at the very
| start of it, it will get faster and more efficient," shouldn't
| Bitcoin Cash have won a long time ago? Few seem to care about
| actually using cyrpto for anything other than increasing fiat.
| It's 90% wash trading.
| wrnr wrote:
| Crypto just loves broken analogies, it started with the claim
| it solved byzantine general problem. First off it's "a"
| solution to that problem, and two, a decentralised system
| deciding on one question only is not a sufficient model for any
| economic system where more than one utility is traded.
| redanddead wrote:
| I think we're doing a lot of speculating while most data on
| blockchain technology would suggest growth...
|
| I think this community could actually have a heavy weight on
| the future of the world, and to do well we need to go beyond
| black and white arguments/absolutiste (which never actually
| happens in real life btw). When has anything ever truly
| replaced anything?
|
| Telegrams have had their most successful year ever, 17 million
| of them sent last year.
|
| Things tend to coexist, in the same way that you have some that
| say "bitcoin will replace the dollar!", and those that say
| "bitcoin is stupid, and will never be used as currency". The
| future lay in the middle
| teucris wrote:
| > I think this community could actually have a heavy weight
| on the future of the world, and to do well we need to go
| beyond black and white
|
| I'm a huge skeptic of web3 as it tends to be defined, but I
| really appreciate this viewpoint. Web3 has tons of flaws but
| many of the motivations and ideas are interesting, powerful,
| and could be molded into something really amazing for the
| world. And The HN community has a chance to be a part of that
| process.
|
| It helps that web3 is poorly defined, too.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > most data on blockchain technology would suggest growth...
|
| What data would those be? Besides price increasing?
|
| We're more than 10 years into the "blockchain revolution" and
| I still don't see a single meaningful problem solved by this
| technology (it makes ransomware and selling drugs online
| easier, I guess).
|
| Compare other recent technologies: the web, mobile phones,
| electric cars... where were they after 12 years of
| development?
| thebean11 wrote:
| The same properties that make it useful for ransomware make
| it useful for other things as well.
|
| Irreversible transactions lower transaction costs, it
| reduces the risk you'll need to go to court basically.
| 300bps wrote:
| _Irreversible transactions lower transaction costs_
|
| Blockchain transactions are not irreversible. You just
| need 51% of POW miners/POS stakers to agree and they can
| do anything they want to the blockchain.
|
| It's the literal reason why ETC exists. Ethereum got
| attacked, some people thought those transactions should
| be reversed. So they reversed them. Others felt the hack
| should stay so Ethereum Classic was born.
|
| There will be more of this. Wait until the first court
| order and a bunch of regulation happens.
| thebean11 wrote:
| A court order won't work to reverse a transaction on the
| blockchain layer, only to force someone in-jurisdiction
| to send the funds back. That obviously can't be helped,
| but having the irreversible transaction on the base layer
| still eliminates a whole class of issues that cost time
| and money to solve.
|
| The big chains really aren't susceptible to 51% attacks
| at this point. If one is really worried about it, you can
| just wait more blocks before considering the transaction
| finalized.
|
| The DAO fork is a different class of issue unrelated to
| 51% attacks. It's true that a group of people (minority
| or majority) can fork a chain with whatever rules they'd
| like, but this isn't going to happen because some company
| regrets some purchase they made, only systemic issues.
| stevebmark wrote:
| I'm not speculating, 90% of crypto trading is wash trading ht
| tps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15446...
| [deleted]
| freediver wrote:
| > A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way
| more storage and compute, doesn't have customer support, etc. And
| yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different.
| No single entity or small group of entities controls it -
| something people try to convey, albeit poorly, by saying it is
| "decentralized."
|
| Is it true that major blockchains out there are really not
| controlled/controllable by a small number of people?
|
| I read that top 10,000 account holders hold over a third of all
| bitcoin [1]
|
| Assuming same thing happens with other blockchains, isn't that
| the same problem as top 10,000 Facebook shareholders owning a
| third of its shares? Basically the system is decentralized on
| paper, but in reality massive centralization happens driven by
| economic incentives, same as in non-blockchain world.
|
| [1] https://time.com/6110392/bitcoin-ownership/
| lngnmn2 wrote:
| This is technical wishful thinking, or an abstract tech, if you
| wish.
|
| In the old times we called this "a solution in search of a
| problem", but these solutions are imaginary.
|
| This, probably, hints the the top of a couple of bubbles.
| mwattsun wrote:
| It's a rule of mine to avoid any financial area that looks, acts,
| and talks like a mania after reading Charles Mackay's
| "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
| (1841)," which I discovered at random in a strip mall bookstore
| in Rhode Island. Reading it saved me over $300,000 dollars before
| the dotcom crash because I sold everything and got out (my timing
| was very lucky.)
|
| Crypto, NFT's, blockchain & web3 are currently in a mania phase
| so my 2022 resolution is to aggressively ignore them so I don't
| get sucked in before the inevitable correction. I can't afford to
| be stuck with a pile of tulip bulbs.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Reading it saved me over $300,000 dollars before the dotcom
| crash because I sold everything and got out (my timing was very
| lucky.)
|
| Are there not other books that you could also read that would
| tell you to buy mutual funds tracking a broad market index,
| hold, never sell, no matter what? aka don't time the market
| mwattsun wrote:
| Buy and hold is a good strategy if you never need to touch
| the money. However, life happens and I got divorced, so I had
| to hold on to my profits or be left with nothing.
|
| It's yet to be determined if a buy and hold strategy is a
| good one for crypto. I am aware of the price rise since 2012
| but as the old adage goes "trees don't grow to the sky."
| Trees built on wild expectations and promises of glory, like
| were made before the dotcom crash (the internet has rewritten
| the rules of the economy!) seem to me to be more likely to
| topple over than keep growing taller.
| asdev wrote:
| You need to separate web3 and cryptocurrencies.
|
| Cryptocurrencies are necessary. A parallel monetary system
| secured by cryptography and codified by algorithms, is highly
| necessary for nations with corrupt regimes. Being able to move
| fiat money into stablecoins and get a loan against it within
| seconds is necessary and has real utility.
|
| Web3 does not really have utility. It's all driven by token price
| speculation right now. The big thing is if you think about the
| general population, nobody really cares about decentralization.
| They just want a good user experience. A centralized but good
| user experience is good enough for 99% of the population.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 99% of the foundation of crypto seems to be grift. Just waiting
| for the bubble to pop when they run out of suckers. Lets see how
| much their ugly JPEGs are worth then.
| dqpb wrote:
| Which is important if you're talking about whether lay people
| should buy random crypto. It's totally irrelevant if you're
| talking about the potential of the technology.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Any genuine potential is totally obscured by the grift and
| the hype that comes with it.
| dqpb wrote:
| If that's true for you then you're probably better off
| staying away from it.
| almost wrote:
| It's weird that this article waffles on about PCs and how the
| author thinks that's a good analogy. It's not very convincing
| because you could easily pick another technology pair and show it
| the other way (often worse is just worse).
|
| But the thing that really seems weird is that all you need to do
| make it interesting is 1) define what you mean by web3 (it's a
| slippery weasel word that changes meaning whenever the people
| using it needs it to) 2) define a few uses that are obviously
| better than the alternatives and justify them without hand waving
| (including explaining why what would appear to be fundamental
| show stopping flaws are not in fact that)
|
| If you can't do that (and no one seems to be able to) the maybe,
| just maybe, it is bullshit?
| i_hate_pigeons wrote:
| I don't really know much about web3 or what it will happen in
| the future, but these same debates happened ith other techs
| before which are now mainstream in a similar fashion as this
| here.
|
| People like pointing out echo chambers all around while they
| are also in one.
|
| Remember all the feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just
| servers in a data center! Serverless? There are still servers!
| web2.0 s just ajax requests!
|
| If people dump money into it, then something is likely to come
| out whether is better or not than what it was before. Maybe is
| worse, or maybe something will be built on top of it that will
| be better or some othere political event might make it
| relevant. Who knows
| simonw wrote:
| "but these same debates happened ith other techs before which
| are now mainstream in a similar fashion as this here"
|
| They really didn't. In my 20+ year tech career I have never
| seen any new technology prove anywhere near as divisive as
| web3/crypto.
| almost wrote:
| Before we mostly had to deal with people emotionally
| invested in a new thing, now they're all financially
| invested as well. It makes for a different conversation.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > feathers ruffled with cloud computing? It just servers in a
| data center! Serverless? There are still servers!
|
| Unlike the crypto ecosystem, those offered a tradeoff of
| higher cost and less control for greater convenience and ease
| of management. Which was hugely successful.
|
| They're also not ... hegemonizing? in the way that
| cryptocurrency seems to be advocated.
| almost wrote:
| It's called survivorship bias. Most things that people called
| bullshit we don't remember because they were bullshit so why
| would we remember.
|
| Now "crypto" is a little different because the the promise
| (not always followed though on, it's still negative sum) of
| money to anyone who can bring themselves to believe. Like
| many bubbles and ponzi-like schemes before it's primary
| functionally is to promote itself, and damn that's one of the
| few things it's really good at.
| sbazerque wrote:
| I think the PC analogy is solid. I think the observation that
| we need a way to permissionly interact with data is spot-on,
| and I agree that that could bring a second wave of value
| creation and innovation.
|
| Think of having a Facebook-like social graph, not controlled by
| Facebook. Or a merchant aggregation system like Amazon's
| without Amazon. A system not driven by maximizing exposure
| monetization (via ads, paid placement, etc.) but by something
| like a Nash equilibrium that maximizes value creation for
| participants.
|
| This is what I work on, and I think it can be done.
| qeternity wrote:
| > I think the observation that we need a way to permissionly
| interact with data is spot-on
|
| The entire argument rests upon this premise and the author
| doesn't explain it one bit.
| jakupovic wrote:
| Maybe the onus is on the skeptics to conclusively prove that
| web3 is BS? Since none can effectively prove so, then maybe it
| is not BS? The skeptics are always inventing new reasons why it
| will fail, and yet it's still here and bigger than ever, day
| after day, making the skeptics seems crazy at this point,
| pointlessly arguing for lack of use for something that is
| clearly useful, judging by the sheer amount of capital and
| development resources used, if nothing else.
| simonw wrote:
| Is your argument here that web3 isn't bullshit as long as the
| number keeps going up?
|
| What will your opinion be of web3 should the number start to
| continually go down?
| jakupovic wrote:
| As long as it is above 0 it has value and skeptics have to
| admit so. Anything else is ludicrous, to me.
| svantana wrote:
| There is obviously monetary value, but us skeptics see
| that it is driven by illicit trade, money laundering, tax
| evasion, pump & dump schemes, ponzi schemes, wash trading
| scams, etc. All things that are a net negative for
| society.
| almost wrote:
| Yes it's totally normal to take a word with no real
| definition (or at best a definition that shifts depending on
| what's needed) and have to "prove" it's BS.
|
| If I tell you that web4 is all about complete freedom and an
| end to world hunger and it's based on cow farts is it up to
| you to prove that it's BS? (It's early days for cow farts,
| you can't judge them o what they can do right now)
| jakupovic wrote:
| Once your web4 has the same amount of capital and work
| behind it, then we can use cow farts, until then we got
| what we got, web3/crypto.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Is your theory that anything with lots of money shoved
| into it must be good? If so, can I interest you in some
| tulips? Or, more recently, a few thousand shipping
| containers of unsellable 3D TVs?
| emerongi wrote:
| Theranos also had massive capital, large corporation
| partners, years of work and many scientists working on
| it.
|
| The dot-com bubble was similar.
|
| The onus is on the cryptobros to prove its usefulness,
| not the other way around.
| almost wrote:
| Ah so that's your criteria, you should have said.
| jakupovic wrote:
| That was the whole point, it's here and now vs. what
| could be.
| zaphar wrote:
| I think his point is that what you claim to be "here" and
| "now" is different than what is _actually_ here and now.
| Just having funding and effort getting put into it does
| not mean it actually delivers on it 's promises. That
| said I find no reason that cryptocurrencies _couldn 't_
| deliver given enough time. I just find what they are
| delivering to be something I rather wish wouldn't exist.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Me I d define web3 by referencing the websocket arrival that
| evolved from Ajax polling to have better data subscription and
| the rise of full js frameworks which transformed the amount of
| work clients do on web resources that sometimes couldnt be done
| by the backend (drawing a financial graph full of beautiful
| indicator and refreshing live for instance).
|
| I can understand web4 could be self financing unstoppable web
| resources with no central authority able to close them but I
| dont see yet a proper use case beyond criminal endeavour. Plus,
| we're far from it, we'd need an organic transmission network
| that goes out of the traditional ISP system, like a global
| bluetooth peer to peer mobile network every phone contributes
| to in exchange for payment... that would be fast enough...
| Thlom wrote:
| When I studied at University 15 years ago web 2.0 was in full
| swing and the academics where busy talking about web 3.0
| which was at the time understood as "the semantic web".
| almost wrote:
| Web 2.0 was never a thing. It was just a vague term some
| people came up with so they'd have something to say in
| their magazine articles/blog posts. There is no Web 2.0 or
| in fact web2.
|
| Web 3.0 I have a soft spot for. It was a stupid name and
| the ideas didn't really work but the semantic web people
| had their hearts in the right place.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| BS. Web 2.0 was the conjunction, refinement and broader
| availability of several different web-related
| technologies, notably JavaScript and AJAX, among other
| things. They enabled an interaction model for web stuff
| that was impossible with earlier versions of the web.
|
| Nobody said "web2", indeed, but that doesn't invalidate
| that Web 2.0 described a very distinct and substantial
| evolution of what is possible in the browser.
| almost wrote:
| I though Web 2.0 was all about missing vowels in names.
| zaphod12 wrote:
| Rounded corners actually
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Criminal endeavours are not equal. Some are trading drugs and
| murdering people, others are overthrowing authoritarian
| dictators like Putin or Lukashenko.
|
| As you can imagine, the latter activity is criminal in Russia
| and Belarus.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Trading drugs is not equal to murdering people. For many,
| the only access to life-enabling medicine such as medicinal
| cannabis is buying it illegally.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| That depends on drugs. If you hook people on highly
| addictive expensive drug with severe withdrawal symptoms,
| like heroin, it naturally spawns more crime, because
| addicts would resort to anything to get the next doze:
| theft, robbery, prostitution, murder, etc.
| jakupovic wrote:
| People hook themselves up, not other people, who may help
| do so, but the person taking drugs is the one
| responsible.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I think you misunderstand how this works in reality.
| Nobody walks to a shady oerson standing near the corner
| and says, "hi, I'm joe, today i want to try this meth
| stuff I've been hearing about, how much for a dose?" When
| a person is in a vulnerable state, there is always a
| 'friend' who offers first dose for free, and says, that
| it is ok and totally safe to try a few times.
| Consequences come later when it is too late.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| Opioids are added to less addictive drugs to make the
| customer more regular and thus drive more profit. It's
| never smart business to kill your customer but it's also
| not smart business to have a customer that only texts
| once every few months.
| almost wrote:
| Of those three things "crypto" is ok for trading drugs, not
| very good for murdering people (not for lack of people
| trying but luckily it seems like death prediction markets
| and dark web assassins aren't really a thing), and not at
| all useful for overthrowing dictators. It's absolutely
| fantastic for dictators who want evade sanctions and
| continue enriching themselves.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It is absolutely critically useful for overthrowing
| dictators. Currently that's the only sure way for Russian
| citizens to fund anti-Putin opposition without immediate
| consequences.
|
| Source: I'm from Russia.
| almost wrote:
| I'm absolutely sure that Putin and his cronies will find
| enough use for crypto (avoiding sanctions, carrying out
| criminal enterprise) that they'll be more than happy
| about this minor inconvenience.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You are missing the point. Putin and his cronies will
| find ways to do their criminal business with or without
| cryptocurrencies. His opponents have little other choice
| BUT cryptocurrencies to fund their operations.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| Ukrainian politicians hold a lot of Bitcoin.
| sgt wrote:
| If you are in Russia, is it wise to call Putin a dictator
| on a public forum?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I think that going to anti-Putin rallies and getting
| detained by the police thugs is even less wise. But a
| dutiful citizen has no choice.
| polio wrote:
| You can be from Russia without being in it
| lottin wrote:
| How many dictators have been overthrown thanks to
| bitcoin? I guess none.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Dictators are overthrown at a rate of fewer than one in
| three years (maybe even lower), and Bitcoin has entered
| the public consciousness no earlier than in 2017. Give it
| some time.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, DuckDuckGo would all be great
| examples of self-financing unstoppable web resources with no
| central authority distributed across a peer-peer mesh
| network.
|
| Unclear if the value prop is large enough to overcome the
| activation energy of such an endeavor.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| When you use one too many buzzwords you let on that you
| don't know what they mean.
|
| None of those resources operate peer to peer, none of them
| operate in anything resembling a mesh network. DDG is
| absolutely stoppable and centralized.
|
| Not that I don't love all those projects and all of those
| qualities.
| avrionov wrote:
| DuckDuckGo - is a private company. The other 2 are non
| profits.
| qaq wrote:
| on top of that decentralized part is already the web itself is
| pretty much it
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| No. If you read up on how the web works at its base, it's
| highly centralized.
|
| If you look how people interact with the web, it's highly
| centralized to a handful of apps by a handful of companies.
| almost wrote:
| People choose to do that because it's convenient. There's
| nothing in any of the nebulous ideas around "web3" that
| would change that.
|
| You can use a federated social network RIGHT NOW. Or you
| can just make your own website TODAY. No permission needed,
| you get complete ownership. It's the amazing decentralised
| dream that was (and is) the internet. Only thing it won't
| do is potentially make you rich (at the expense of others)
| just for getting in (and out!) at the right time.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| - You need permission from the central root certifying
| authorities (aka. getting a domain) for people to be able
| to find your site.
|
| - You need to remain out of the shitlist of a handful of
| "spam and anti-evil" authorities (getting on a list means
| your site gets blocked by all the big browsers and can be
| permanent or take a long time to resolve)
|
| - You need permission to host your content from the:
| hardware / cloud provider, the datacentre if you self-
| host, and / or intermediary ISPs for peering (if no-one
| will peer, your site may as well not exists)
|
| There are some other parties you need permission or
| blessing from that don't come immediately to mind.
| boopboopbadoop wrote:
| A couple questions to dig into each point: What problem
| does it solve? Could web3 have the same problem? If so,
| how will web3 solve it?
|
| Most of the points mentioned are security features to
| shield people from bad actors, something that crypto does
| not seem very good at thus far, which is why I'm curious
| how web3 solves similar things.
| qaq wrote:
| Web3 is not using TCP and DNS :)?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _You need permission from the central root certifying
| authorities[...]_
|
| > _You need to remain out of the shitlist of a handful of
| "spam and anti-evil" authorities_
|
| And the exact same will happen in the world of 'web3'.
| Except you won't sign your terms and conditions in
| English but in from of a smart contract. The internet is
| a distributed computer, blockchains are distributed
| computers. Whatever people built on top of it will be as
| permissioned and have as many authorities as anything
| else.
|
| You think you can't do encrypted, peer-to-peer
| communication without authorities on the good old
| internet? Of course you can, there's nothing technically
| in the way of it at all. It's just that nobody runs a
| business that way and they won't do it in the world of
| 'web3' either.
| almost wrote:
| Freenet and Tor have existed for a while and are
| solutions to these problems for those that need them.
| You're not interested in that though are you? No coins so
| no option for speculation.
|
| Web3 as it currently stands (as I said before it's a
| slippery weasel word so no don't you'll change it to
| suite) also needs all that stuff. Most "web3" apps are
| served via Cloudflare ffs!
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| It's a cultural shift that is epitomized by trends like
| WSB, $GME, and Robinhood. To older people it doesn't make
| sense. So you can scream and shout that it is illogical
| (like many have re: gold, silver, etc) and adoption will
| continue to increase and the value of the underlying
| assets will go up.
| qorrect wrote:
| Very good points. I can't see Joe the Plumber using or
| caring about web3 if it requires any more effort then the
| current internet ( which is arguably already
| decentralized ... )
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| It misses the point of _why_ PC 's were adopted, which was
| spreadsheets. No-one put a PC on your desk because you needed a
| PC. They put a PC on your desk because you suddenly needed to be
| able to use a spreadsheet to do your job [0].
|
| And the reason we all got internet connections in the mid-90's
| wasn't Web0. It was email. Web0 was a toy thing that only us
| geeks played around with, that came free with your email account.
| All the "serious" stuff that we use the web for now was in the
| walled gardens (CompuServe or AOL).
|
| Web3 needs a "killer app" like email or spreadsheets. Still not
| seeing one.
|
| [0] Source: I had this happen to me. Working a desk job as an
| admin clerk in a transport company, and suddenly our monthly
| budget/financials had to be sent to head office in Lotus 123
| instead of paper. So I got a PC (286, 4Mb of memory woot!) and
| learned Lotus 123. Fun times :)
| tim333 wrote:
| Maybe spreadsheets and email for business use but that's not
| why I and people I know got them - more to play around on.
|
| The killer app for crypto / web whatever in reality is
| speculation. From recent US research "43% of men ages 18 to 29
| say they have invested in, traded or used a cryptocurrency."
| Maybe it's not the sort of adoption you approve of but it's
| still adoption.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Speculation is training wheels for scalable direct democracy,
| and that'll be the killer app of crypto / web whatever.
| coolspot wrote:
| No government would allow that.
|
| Crypto will be illigal due to terrorism/CSAM/gambling/etc
| long before it starts threating ruling establishment.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Disclaimer: I don't own any crypto, even though I can tell it's
| the future because I don't know which ones will win.
|
| Web3s "killer app" is government services.
|
| Crypto in general is a pseudonym for open source rewrites of
| developed countries' legacy government infrastructure for
| developing countries.
|
| Eventually it'll be so good it'll replace the legacy variants
| that exist today.
| dangoor wrote:
| > Web3s "killer app" is government services.
|
| I don't understand. Can you give an example?
|
| A government is already a central entity. If you have some
| service controlled by a central entity, why not build it in
| the standard database-on-a-server approach which is much
| easier?
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Because whoever controls that database can change the data
| in it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| So maybe rather than investing in the hope of some
| technologically-provided immutability, you just use the
| historical method(s) of (a) applying significant criminal
| charges to changing the data (b) structures and processes
| to audit data transformation.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Blockchain seems like a very costly way to add
| transparency and auditing. Especially if the chain will
| be controlled by one or only a few stakeholders.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| This was the crypto pitch for several years except it was
| for supply chain. "You can't hack the database!!" that
| didn't work out either because it doesn't stop someone
| from putting incorrect data into a database regardless of
| how easy it is to hack the database.
|
| Same thing here. There is nothing to stop the government
| employee from putting incorrect data in the database.
|
| This is why people see Crypto/Web3 as a solution looking
| for a problem. The complaint people have about the DMV
| isn't that their database gets hacked. The complaint is
| that the government workers do not care about doing a
| good or quick job.
| ramijames wrote:
| I hope that you are right. Using open networks for
| transparent governance is the right way to go for
| democracies.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Why can't we just pass legislation requiring government
| software to be open source and government databases to be
| open access? This is already the case in several
| jurisdictions.
|
| I currently work for a local government, and pretty much
| everything in our databases (apart from SSNs and certain
| HIPAA-protected data in the health department's database) can
| be freely accessed via an FOIA request. Some legislation
| requiring that these DBs (or a live copy) be directly
| accessible by the public would be relatively easy and
| inexpensive to implement.
|
| What advantages would there be by doing this via
| crypto/blockchain/whatever?
| dpweb wrote:
| I've no doubt when they get VR sex with robots incredibly
| realistic, it will be a huge business.
| ramijames wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work in the web3 (crypto) space and have for a
| long time already.
|
| I think the killer app for web3 is going to be a decentralized,
| open identity/auth solution. The idea that we use our email
| accounts, attached to huge corporations which siphon every
| detail about us for their advertising engines is absolutely
| absurd. I just want to be able to log in to applications and
| carry some of the simple data like my identity and what assets
| I have available with me, without having to pay for it by
| losing my privacy and autonomy.
|
| Nothing in the web2 tech stack currently allows this.
|
| Imagine being able to log in, securely, to HN, Twitter, your
| bank, et al., and with you comes basic data about how to
| contact you, how you pay, what assets you're holding, etc. You
| get to choose what you share, and you get to authenticate each
| transaction discretely. It's powerful and it puts that power in
| your hands, not in those of large corporate entities.
|
| That's what I'm interested in, and that's what I work on. We
| should all want some form of that.
|
| --
|
| edit: glad the response to this was by people interested and
| curious. my usual feeling on HN is that people are hyper-
| negative about web3 tech. It's ok to be curious about new,
| cutting edge technology. That's what we're all here for, I
| think. Maybe the decentralized trend won't pan out. Maybe it is
| all a giant scam. Doesn't mean it isn't interesting and it
| doesn't mean that the people working in that space aren't
| legitimately trying to innovate.
| doom2 wrote:
| Honest question: can that happen without users having to
| purchase ETH (or whatever the underlying token is)? My very
| limited understanding is that web3 is inherently tied to
| cryptocurrency and the miners have to be paid somehow.
| ramijames wrote:
| The open network that we built has free accounts, free
| transactions, no resource staking requirements, etc. Gas on
| Ethereum is absolutely a problem and absolutely does not
| scale.
|
| We do not have mining (proof of stake), and have been
| certified carbon neutral (https://medium.com/ultra-
| io/ultras-blockchain-is-carbonneutr...)
| brokensegue wrote:
| > With this in mind, we chose to assign seven designated
| Block Producers for Ultra's blockchain.
|
| This does not sound truly distributed. Like you might as
| well not use Blockchain if it's not distributed.
| ramijames wrote:
| Decentralization is really a spectrum. We have a set of
| block producers that we've vetted and have worked closely
| with to set up the infrastructure for our network. They
| are external companies (Ubisoft is one of them). The code
| that runs on the network gets vetted by them and only
| goes into production after they sign a multisig and allow
| it.
|
| It's not thousands of anonymous nodes, but it is also not
| a single entity that controls everything.
|
| We intend to build out a more decentralized pattern with
| more complex governance as things mature. It's a software
| project and as you all well know, you can't launch your
| ideal at the start. You launch what you can and you
| improve as you go. Decentralization is that way, too.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Git uses a kind of blockchain and is often centralized
| rather than distributed.
| brokensegue wrote:
| Pedantic but fine. I'll revise to "why use a trustless
| distributed ledger if you are going to only allow 7
| validators. Might as well just use MySQL with an API.".
| Sevii wrote:
| Thats the fun part, you don't have to purchase any
| cryptocurrency. All you need is a crypto wallet and you
| have a public/private key pair.
|
| Crypto only empowers this by encouraging people to maintain
| their keys with a serious financial incentive.
| nradov wrote:
| That doesn't solve anything. People will still lose their
| keys. What is the key recovery strategy?
| waprin wrote:
| Check out Vitaliks post on the topic :
|
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
| intrasight wrote:
| This is a cool insight.
| wmf wrote:
| In newer systems, users don't have to buy any tokens
| because VCs pay the transaction fees and they pay you to
| use the system.
| uh_uh wrote:
| But this can't last forever no?
| wmf wrote:
| Of course.
| uncomputation wrote:
| This has been proposed as decentralized identifiers before
| actually: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| > Nothing in the web2 tech stack currently allows this.
|
| Seriously? It takes five seconds online to find projects like
| https://solidproject.org (backed by people like Tim Berners-
| Lee) that don't need blockchain and present strong arguments
| to address the kind of issues you raise.
|
| But it's an open specification for the web. How lame and very
| NOT crypto $$$diamond_hands$$$.
|
| The most impressive thing about blockchain is its capacity to
| create zealots for the One True Way, all others be damned.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I'm curious because I'd bet you're right that such a thing
| would be adopted really quickly if it were user-friendly but
| my biggest question is whether everybody would be limited to
| a single identity or if you'd allow multiples. If you allow
| multiples, would 'identities' be free? If so, I'd be
| concerned that the same thing would happen to your company
| and product that happened to Web 1.0: In THEORY we'll all
| have control over our own data, but in actuality, running
| software takes time, expertise, and money, so aren't we all
| (meaning the general public/average person) going to have a
| choose an intermediary anyway? And you think it should be
| your company. (Which maybe it should, idk).
|
| I'd also be a bit concerned about:
|
| - Ability to spin up alts and anonymous pseuds is a key
| component to Internet use, for me. One great thing about
| email is how easy it is to get an email address; I don't need
| a credit card, address, ID, etc. I don't need to use a real
| name. And so on. This is one of the things that makes the Web
| so powerful a force for the marginalized. For instance, I had
| an email address when I was 6. That's illegal now, but 13
| year olds can have them. Or say you're a lady in Afghanistan.
|
| - This information persisting over time and being unalterable
| might result in some very uncomfortable social situations if
| people keep the same credentials for decades.
|
| None of this is a reason not to do such a thing, and I think
| it's a good idea and one I'd actually use in a heartbeat, I'm
| just not under any illusions I'd be doing much other than
| switching my 'alliance' away from an email service provider.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| > The idea that we use our email accounts, attached to huge
| corporations which siphon every detail about us for their
| advertising engines is absolutely absurd.
|
| That's what the companies want, though. Facebook and Twitter
| don't trust me because I have an email address, they trust me
| because I have a _Google_ email address.
|
| Having a Gmail account means that Google trusts you. Google
| only trusts you if you provide a reputable phone number.
|
| If you host your own email, you can't do anything because
| nobody trusts you.
|
| Changing the protocol from email to crypto won't fix that. I
| either have to be reputable ("Yes I'm wealthy, Google trusts
| me, I have a phone number which means I have a bank account,
| which means I'm a legal citizen with a government ID, and
| this is my legal name") or I can't get in. Standing up my own
| throw-away identity will be as useless tomorrow as a
| Mailinator address is today.
|
| For you and me, email auth is a dark pattern. For the
| companies, it's a feature. It keeps out freeloaders,
| spammers, and criminals.
| zild3d wrote:
| > If you host your own email, you can't do anything because
| nobody trusts you.
|
| Where can you not signup with your own hosted email? I
| can't think of any service. Twitter, bank, saas apps, just
| care that you have an email.
| elevader wrote:
| Wouldn't that be just as bad (if not worse) than the current
| situation? Those huge corporations could just read everything
| from the blockchain. At least in the current situation
| companies need to provide some sort of service to get to your
| data.
| intrasight wrote:
| Reminded me of this Jaron Lanier quote from "Sway" podcast:
|
| "I believe Facebook is undervalued for what it does. Because
| Facebook is essentially running identity for the internet,
| which is a very valuable function. So under a data dignity
| regime, I think Facebook would double or triple in value very
| quickly."
|
| I do think that digital identity is going to be an
| existential(pun intended) question. Ideally it would be
| managed by a competent government agency. That's likely in
| many countries. I doubt that it'll be the case in the USA.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> I work in the web3 (crypto) space_
|
| _> Maybe it is all a giant scam_
|
| Normally you'd expect people who work on something supposedly
| worth billions to be able to say with a degree of confidence
| that it's not a giant scam.
| leifg wrote:
| Leaving aside the discussions around PKI and necessary
| centralization in public/private key authentication I've seen
| this web3 debate a couple of times now.
|
| It starts with "web3 is the second (third?) coming of the
| internet and will revolutionize everything".
|
| If you ask for proof or use cases the very first comment is:
| "You can log into Twitter using a public/private key pair"
|
| These are two very different statements. So even if you
| assume there is advantage in public/private key auth it is
| still nowhere close to an internet revolution.
|
| Imagine the PostgreSQL team had praised the JSON data type as
| the revolution of the internet and disruption of all
| industries as we know it. It's a useful feature and it is
| used by a lot of companies but it has zero impact on everyday
| people. And Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal are
| certainly not writing about it.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> I think the killer app for web3 is going to be a
| decentralized, open identity/auth solution.
|
| How would account recovery / password reset work in a
| web3-based system?
|
| With Google, Apple, etc. there is a party that one can go to
| for account recovery.
|
| How would it work for web3 if it is decentralized?
| ramijames wrote:
| This is a really big problem that we spent a long time
| solving. The fact that if you lose your private key you
| lose your account and its associated identity and assets is
| a big deal.
|
| We have a recovery mechanism that allows you to set and
| manage secondary authenticators which are used as witnesses
| in the case of loss of access to your primary account.
| Another working group that I'm involved in is trying to
| solve this problem in a tangentially similar way using
| multi-signatures. It's an interesting approach.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| So what's stopping my friends from stealing all of my
| money behind my back?
| josephcsible wrote:
| You're worried that a bunch of your most trusted friends,
| who you can even choose a subset of such that they don't
| know each other and have no connection other than you,
| will conspire to betray you in a provable way? Isn't that
| strictly less risk than giving a spare house key to a
| trusted friend or neighbor, which people do all the time?
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Can't a shared signed key algo be used ? Ala Shamir Shared
| secret algorithm?
|
| If 2 out of the 5 keys ( or whatever value ) are present
| you can log in.
| yokem55 wrote:
| There are multisig social recovery wallets where one party
| or a group of parties is trusted to help you get regain
| access to the account with a new signing key. Gnosis lets
| you do this with arbitrary friends of your choosing. Or if
| you're like most crypto folks and have no friends,
| something like Argent can handle this for you with
| email/phone number authentication after a delay (a few
| days).
| aardvarkr wrote:
| So what's stopping my friends from stealing all of my
| money behind my back?
| yokem55 wrote:
| Social recovery with friends usually needs something like
| 3 of 5 or more to effectuate a recovery. So your friends
| would have to effectively collude with each other without
| any of them tipping you off about the plan.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Signature-based authentication has existed for decades. All
| that has changed now is that your public key is now a
| "wallet." If blockchain based authentication becomes the
| norm, it will be entirely because there is now an unrelated
| reason for people to create, publish, and store an asymmetric
| key pair.
| afavour wrote:
| > The idea that we use our email accounts, attached to huge
| corporations which siphon every detail about us for their
| advertising engines is absolutely absurd.
|
| Is it, though? It's just a trade off people make to get a
| free service. If I want my email to be free of advertising
| scanning by large corporate entities I can just pay for
| Protonmail or something.
|
| This is what I feel like I see with web3 time and time again:
| it's a complicated technological solution looking for a
| problem when (for the vast majority of people) that problem
| is already solvable without the complexity.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| I strongly agree. Email is already a federated system that
| lets you own your own data. It turns out everyone would
| rather have convenience and that's completely
| understandable.
| ramijames wrote:
| Honestly, I think the tech and infrastructure is simpler
| than what is currently deployed at google.
| tptacek wrote:
| I love when web3 people say this, because it's revealing.
| There is really no application you can come up with that is
| less amenable to decentralized blockchain technology than
| identity. The hardest problem in identity isn't public key
| authentication (which we've had for 2 decades, and nobody
| wants) but account recovery. The absolute last thing any
| ordinary user wants is an identity that is cryptographically
| unrecoverable, or that functions like a bearer bond if
| compromised.
|
| Account recovery isn't a basket of features like multi-sig
| wallets and threshold schemes. It's the assumption, so far
| baked in that most users don't even realize they're making
| it, that if something goes wrong with an account there is a
| _human-mediated process_ for restoring access. A centralized
| authority is intrinsic to the concept! It has to be there
| from the beginning! You can 't ask users to opt into it,
| because they're users and they don't know how any of this
| stuff works.
|
| It's for this reason that Apple and Google control so much of
| Internet identity, and are going to continue doing so.
| Advocates of decentralized identity are poisoned by the
| experiences and preferences of a tiny but vocal sliver of
| users that (1) are deeply into this stuff and (2) do enough
| weird shit to occasionally get on Google or Apple's bad side
| and have bad/annoying experiences with account recovery. The
| problem is that these voices are not representative of the
| market, like, at all. Google does a better job of global
| Internet identity than any organization operating at any kind
| of scale. If you can't recognize why this might be true, and
| will be an enormous obstacle to adoption, you're not engaging
| seriously with identity.
|
| The power that decentralized identity offers, normal people
| don't want. The things it takes away: necessities. It's a
| toy, not a killer app.
| kabdib wrote:
| A while ago I worked on the 2FA access feature of a large
| online service.
|
| The fun crypto-related and login-path stuff took maybe two
| weeks.
|
| The remaining months were all about account recovery. It's
| really hard to do well, and unless you hire support staff
| it just won't work.
| digitailor wrote:
| I think you could go even further and add that a lot of
| power users who you'd think would want decentralized
| identity don't want it either, for the same reasons you
| mention.
| numair wrote:
| I can turn this right back around on you.
|
| > The power that decentralized identity offers, normal
| people don't want. The things it takes away: necessities.
| It's a toy, not a killer app.
|
| Who are you to decide what "normal" people want, what a
| "necessity" is, what a "toy" is? And, moreover, are you
| _sure_ account recovery is as important as you think it is?
| Maybe people would prefer to have accounts that have very
| little identity, that get thrown away without much care --
| you know, like how people use throwaways on here -- than
| some One Absolute Source Of Recoverable Truth?
|
| Humans have thrown things away _forever_. If anything, it
| is absolutely abnormal to want eternal persistence.
|
| Also, the whole thing that public key identity has existed
| and "nobody wants" is utterly laughable when you look at
| the actual usage metrics on web3 wallets. If that entire
| industry does _nothing_ else, the fact that it's made 19
| year old art students feel cool for knowing how to handle
| their public and private keys is enough innovation for one
| cycle.
|
| Not sure why the crowd on HN is so irrationally religious
| about this issue. It's not bike-shedding, but it's
| definitely something similar.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| > Who are you to decide what "normal" people want, what a
| "necessity" is, what a "toy" is? And, moreover, are you
| sure account recovery is as important as you think it is?
| Maybe people would prefer to have accounts that have very
| little identity, that get thrown away without much care
| -- you know, like how people use throwaways on here --
| than some One Absolute Source Of Recoverable Truth?
|
| The person being replied to literally suggested it as a
| single source of truth. For everything from HN to your
| bank account. So you're tilting at the wrong windmill!
|
| I think one thing the crypto fad has proven is that even
| experienced people can't keep hold of their keys
| properly. You're always one mistake from an irrecoverable
| situation.
|
| Why would I want creds that once compromised not only
| were irrecoverable but also affected my entire life?
|
| If you want easy, temporary identity then the current
| situation is pretty great.
| numair wrote:
| > The person being replied to literally suggested it as a
| single source of truth. For everything from HN to your
| bank account. So you're tilting at the wrong windmill!
|
| The parent I replied to is competent enough to know that
| there is an easy way to have that "recoverable account"
| he is obsessed with: custodial wallets. You know, like
| the custodial accounts that are the defining feature of
| Web 2.0.
|
| People who don't understand the innovation of being able
| to choose between custodial and non-custodial, and how
| that's a big deal that many appreciate beyond the opsec
| requirements, sort of expose their own weaknesses.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I can see that login via private key is cool for some
| people, and being able to login via a private key some
| other party maintains for you would work for "normal"
| users. But I could also implement that without bringing
| in a block chain, right? Wouldn't we expect that Google
| and the current authN providers just implement that if it
| ever became popular?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > But I could also implement that without bringing in a
| block chain, right?
|
| Not only that, but they have! Signature-based
| authentication existed 20 years ago. Register with a
| public key. Sign a message with your private key to
| authenticate. Modulo some small details to prevent things
| like replay, you are done. The only thing that the
| blockchain brings is that now lots of people have
| asymmetric key pairs where their public keys are
| published somewhere widely accessible.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| So the answer is web2!
| aardvarkr wrote:
| I'm confused, you didn't respond to the person's
| argument. Way to go missing the forest for the trees.
| "Normal" is the >90% that hasn't even heard of key
| signing and no amount of screaming at them will convince
| them to care.
| numair wrote:
| No, you're the one who is missing the point. An ever-
| growing number of highly engaged young people are using
| wallets and engaging in key signing without even thinking
| about it. And what those people do today, becomes the
| norm tomorrow.
|
| I had meetings with newspaper executives in 2007 where I
| told them "everyone will get their news on Facebook
| soon." They couldn't understand what I meant, because
| they didn't think "normal" people would ever use such
| things. A lot of comments on HN regarding web3 remind me
| of those conversations. This will all be so embarrassing
| in 10 years.
| tptacek wrote:
| Facebook tells the opposite of the story you're trying to
| sell, of people flocking to a highly centralized space to
| get a single feed of news.
| pcwalton wrote:
| There are lots of things that highly-engaged young people
| have done that don't catch on in the long run. Given the
| problems that Web 3 has, I see it as a lot more likely
| that Web 3 will go the route of fidget spinners than the
| route of Google.
| dlubarov wrote:
| You mention Google as a positive example, but they don't
| really have "a human-mediated process for restoring
| access". If you can't restore access with their recovery
| form, it seems the only option is to seek a court order,
| unless you have contacts at Google.
|
| And I don't think it's just a matter of Google being cheap.
| If they had thousands of CSRs with the technical ability to
| reset passwords, I imagine we'd have a lot more cases of
| stolen accounts, using social engineering or bribery (as we
| see with SIM swaps).
| tptacek wrote:
| The hard-landing process Google has is both human-
| mediated (which does not mean "you're hand-held through
| the process by a human being") and also iterated over
| time. Nobody had to figure out precisely what the account
| recovery process for Google was going to be _a priori_ ,
| because Google is a trusted third party and can adapt its
| recovery procedures as it needs to.
| annnoo wrote:
| I completely agree with you, but I a small thought about
| public key authentication.
|
| Today more and more people without a background in IT which
| got in the "Web3"/Crypto ecosystem get in touch with public
| key authentication mostly used with wallets like Metamask.
| It get's understandable and usable for the average user.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't see what that would get me that I wouldn't
| already have with Sign In With Apple, other than not
| being tied to Apple, which is one of the most important
| features of SIWA: if something goes wrong, there will be
| an ultra-annoying hard-landing customer service procedure
| that will, ultimately, restore access to my account.
| Animats wrote:
| The problem with identity is summarized in the "why your
| anti-spam idea won't work checklist"[1] We still don't have
| a solution to identity that prevents generating large
| numbers of fake identities, doesn't cost each user money,
| and doesn't require a central authority.
|
| Blockchain systems are a demo of this. A blockchain just
| needs some number of players who are independent and not
| colluding. That ought to be simple, right? The best ideas
| the blockchain crowd has come up with to do this work by
| making playing very expensive. (That's what both proof of
| work and proof of stake do.) Even that didn't really work,
| as mining has become very centralized. A solution to
| identity has not emerged from that crowd.
|
| [1] https://trog.qgl.org/20081217/the-why-your-anti-spam-
| idea-wo...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Legitimate companies are unlikely to rely on decentralized
| identity unless required to by law. Apple/Google federated
| login? Absolutely, they have the power to dictate it (Sign In
| With Apple). Login.gov and ID.me? Absolutely, they're trusted
| government and private sector identity proofing providers.
| But trusting the identity of your users to a distributed
| ledger or computation fabric? I just don't see it happening,
| and it'll likely go the way for Mozilla's federated identity
| provider.
|
| You are seeking a technical fix for a regulatory issue (data
| sovereignty and portability & digital privacy).
|
| (I work in digital identity and interface with decision
| makers)
| tome wrote:
| I'm a bit confused by why this is in the "crypto" space. I
| thought the whole point of the "crypto" space was to prevent
| double spend. If you don't need to do that then a
| distributed/federated database seems sufficient. Are you
| planning to allow users to give/sell their accounts to
| others? If not then why are you using a "crypto" platform?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Because you get into the issue of who gets the right to
| modify what part of the database, and encrypted blockchain
| is supposedly a solution ?
| zomglings wrote:
| Also building on web3. I agree about authorization
| (permissions) but not about _identity_ /authentication.
|
| We do not need people to have to disclose their identities in
| order to use a service. We already have an authentication
| mechanism on every blockchain - the notion of an
| address/account. What we need is a decentralized way to
| associate permissions with those accounts.
|
| This is something that must happen more by social consensus -
| projects adopting a standard. The technology already exists.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| >The idea that we use our email accounts, attached to huge
| corporations which siphon every detail about us for their
| advertising engines is absolutely absurd. I just want to be
| able to log in to applications and carry some of the simple
| data like my identity and what assets I have available with
| me, without having to pay for it by losing my privacy and
| autonomy.
|
| Okay but instead of it being known to just say one company,
| anything on the block chain is known to everyone. I fail to
| see how that's any better or even remotely "powerful".
| ramijames wrote:
| How does it feel knowing that you've signed up to 100
| applications, which you use for everything from work to
| pleasure, and that that authenticating account can be taken
| from you at the whim of a company? Feels bad to me, man.
| uncomputation wrote:
| To me, it seems the solution here is not to centralize
| into one identity for everything but the opposite: to
| distribute each account into its own identity. Software
| can then manage each disparate identity to ease the
| burden for the account owner.
| kdjfjcjcjd wrote:
| Couldn't someone just steal your token and you lose
| access to 100 applications?
| ramijames wrote:
| No. It's not a token. It's an on-chain account verified
| by multiple permissions that are controlled by key pairs.
| It's based on EOSIO technology and is pretty robust.
| nradov wrote:
| How do you recover your account when you lose your keys?
| waprin wrote:
| Check out Vitaliks post on social recovery wallets
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
| uncomputation wrote:
| You can't.
| judge2020 wrote:
| That doesn't address their concern, really. Threat models
| are personalized to everyone, and for a _lot_ of people,
| they choose Google/Apple/Microsoft and are fine with that
| company knowing their 3p logins - but wouldn't be fine
| with anyone being able to plug in their crypto address
| and see all the services they've connected with.
|
| Although, i'm sure a blockchain identity service could be
| properly architected to keep connections secret - i'm
| eager to see if that ever comes to fruition.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| On the other hand, a company providing the service can
| ban users for spreading harmful information. Imagine a
| situation where, say, the president of the US was
| spreading misinformation regarding a pandemic for
| example. To me it sounds good that there is some control
| to it.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I think this touches on the heart of such issues. Many
| people see a big difference between censorship and an
| obligation to follow certain rules. Others seem to view
| any rules as a defacto form of censorship. I don't think
| these positions can be fully reconciled with each other.
| nradov wrote:
| There is no such thing as harmful information. Only
| actions can cause harm.
|
| Do you think we should trust unaccountable corporate
| managers more than elected leaders to determine what is
| misinformation?
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| > There is no such thing as harmful information. Only
| actions can cause harm.
|
| Perhaps in some idealistic model of society this is true.
| However, in reality people cannot process and evaluate
| the factual basis of all information that is pushed on
| them. Otherwise we would not be seeing so wide-spread
| misinformation campaigning, fake news and conspiracy
| theories. Harmful information tends to transform into
| harmful actions (harmful here being subjective - there's
| often someone benefiting as well).
|
| I don't have a clear-cut answer who should be determining
| what is misinformation. Also, I don't believe one bit
| that a free-for-all model is a good one, quite the
| opposite. Currently it seems that when someone clearly
| crosses the line, public opinion or perception forces the
| company to reconsider allowing the violator to remain on
| their platform. It might not be the most elegant model,
| but possibly the best we have.
| ineedasername wrote:
| > _only actions can cause harm_
|
| Disseminating information is an action. Also
| misinformation does not always contain information: Many
| times it's just a more polite way of calling something a
| lie, or simply wrong. Even when there is information,
| cherry picking which information to share can give the
| opposite impression of what more robust information would
| show.
|
| The question of who to trust is a good one. The issue I
| have with the viewpoint that platforms shouldn't be
| allowed to make these decisions for their own platforms
| is that it takes away property rights by having the
| government mandate what can or cannot be done with
| privately owned property. Should people have the right to
| decide what people can do on their privately owned
| property? Businesses are allowed to make all kinds of
| rules about this, from dress codes to what they consider
| disruptive conduct. Limiting that ability seems
| problematic to me.
|
| I don't have anything that I would consider a solution to
| finding the right answers or balance here, but I don't
| think we can ignore these issues.
| nradov wrote:
| That is a valid concern. But in practice most of the
| sites which allow federated authentication support
| multiple providers, typically Google, Facebook, and
| Apple. I expect one of those will eventually ban me for
| wrongthink, but probably not all of them simultaneously.
| fuckcensorship wrote:
| > Okay but instead of it being known to just say one
| company, anything on the block chain is known to everyone.
|
| Bitcoin != blockchain. Technology exists [1] to store data
| on the blockchain in a private manner without sacrificing
| its decentralized nature.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/ringCT.html
| elevader wrote:
| But if you encrypt it so nobody else can read it then the
| big bad companies of evil will still need to collect your
| data individually - which brings us back to the initial
| point, but now with a blockchain for some reason
| aardvarkr wrote:
| But it's different! Because blockchain!! /s
| wyre wrote:
| Companies are going to collect our data as long as they
| are able to use that data as an income stream.
|
| I don't have a Facebook account but I know they have data
| on me.
| elevader wrote:
| Yeah, and even if they can't sell collected data because
| we all agreed to just put them on a blockchain aggregates
| and whatnot will still be valuable assets. This isn't an
| issue that can be solved by technology. It will need
| regulation/laws and I don't see that happening.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Unfortunately you acquire users by building what they
| actually want, not what they should want.
| ramijames wrote:
| This is true and wise.
| haswell wrote:
| This is not incompatible with what the parent comment is
| talking about.
|
| People want easy / seamless access to the services they
| use. If Web3 can find a way to provide that or improve upon
| the current hellscape of email based logins mixed with
| federated social logins mixed with the pain of maintaining
| 100 different accounts, it might just find a place.
|
| But the people working on this need to focus on the user's
| end goals and UX needs, and not just declare the problem
| solved once a solution is technically working.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > People want easy / seamless access to the services they
| use.
|
| Free. People want it for free. Not free as in speech, but
| free as in beer.
|
| History has shown that the vast majority of people will
| trade their entire personal data set if they can get fake
| internet points for free.
| ramijames wrote:
| ABSOLUTELY.
|
| Accounts and transactions are free on our network. We
| think eventually all networks will have to go this route.
| Paying per-transaction is mind-bogglingly anti-user.
| haswell wrote:
| Sure, people want things for free, but that is orthogonal
| to the simplicity angle. Something can be free, but won't
| see use if it sucks badly.
|
| People spend $$$ on Apple products because of the "just
| works" reputation. I'm not saying people want to pay for
| services, but I think it's important to distinguish UX
| vs. cost when examining what motivates people.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > open identity/auth solution
|
| An open solution built around public key cryptography? This
| has been technically possible to do for two decades, in the
| form of PKI client certificates, but never got anywhere
| because the key management is the problem.
|
| Decentralisation trades "lose your account because you got
| banned" for "lose your account because any device with your
| key on it got compromised or lost", and for many people that
| works out worse. It's certainly less convenient.
|
| Identity provision is also a two-sided market. You need
| adoption from users _and_ the companies they want to log into
| at the same time. That 's why there's only a few providers
| that most companies bother to integrate with.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| The two-sided market is the big deal here. Imagine that you
| are a bank or online market place. What are you going to do
| when one of your top customers shows up and says that they
| lost their account keys? Are you going to explain that
| losing your account is actually a great feature that your
| company offers.
| pjc50 wrote:
| To be fair, this is the level of customer service that
| you get from Google in the first place. Banks are forced
| to do better.
| ineedasername wrote:
| > _Google_
|
| I don't think that helps the Web3 argument. Google has
| made a choice, whereas crypto it is a technical
| limitation (or, to some, a feature). It also isn't a very
| good talking point to say "it's no worse than Google"
|
| Crypto needs to develop a better balance between bad 2FA
| with loop holes on the traditional side and absolute loss
| on the crypto side before a lot of people would feel
| comfortable with it. Maybe that should be one of its
| target killer apps.
| thebean11 wrote:
| It's not a technical limitation any more than it is for
| Google. You can easily create software where a chosen
| third party (or some 2/3 parties scheme) can recover your
| account.
| ineedasername wrote:
| That's good to know. It is a hindrance to Web3 adoption
| that such mechanisms aren't in place: It would certainly
| prevent me from relying on a service.
|
| But what would a 3rd party or 2/3 party consensus use
| that would differ from current mechanisms?
|
| There would also need to be some care taken to make sure
| that such 3rd parties don't become centralized choke
| points themselves: They would be somewhat essential, so
| any service(s) that did this could rise to dominance
| either as a monopoly or a cartel.
| thebean11 wrote:
| These mechanisms definitely aren't something built into
| the chain any more than they are built into HTTP or x86,
| but these chains are semi turing-complete so the software
| can be written (existing multi-sig ETH wallets are an
| example).
|
| Let's say I control some funds and want you to have
| access to recover the funds if I lose my master key. I
| transfer these funds to a smart contract that allows my
| Ethereum key full control to move things around, and
| allows your Ethereum key access to give control to a new
| key if I lose mine (probably with a x-day delay, so I
| have time to revoke your access if you go rogue!).
|
| For a 2/3 system, it's basically the same except 2 out of
| 3 of the other people need to "vote" on chain, and only
| then can my key be reset.
|
| There wouldn't need to be a centralized party who resets
| the keys. Social solutions where you give trusted
| friend(s) limited reset access, probably with a time lock
| like I mentioned, are extremely promising IMO.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Thanks for the further explanation-- I fully understand
| that such things aren't baked into the current
| infrastructure-- which also creates problems (for example
| a cell service provider resetting a password over SMS
| through their own supposedly 2FA system). L
|
| The smart contract you describe is sort of what I meant
| by service providers emerging for this sort of thing: The
| average user will not feel comfortable rolling their own
| such contract. It either needs to be dead easy, or there
| will emerge services that do this for you and oversee
| their execution. I could be wrong about that... Much of
| what Web3 will look like is speculation. But if those
| sorts of services emerge and become market dominators,
| they would have a lot of control-- contracts that allow
| termination (deplatforming). As contracts become more
| complex to avoid edge cases we see being exploited right
| now, it may become even harder to understand all
| implications, loopholes, exploits, etc.
|
| The above may be a solvable problem: Develop tools to
| parse smart contracts. A specialized class of automated
| testing tools for smart contracts.
| ramijames wrote:
| Banks, at least in my country, can choose to accept
| incoming or outgoing financial transactions. Worse,
| governments have the rights to seize your assets, close
| your bank accounts, etc. Not sure any of that is better.
| I'd rather have Google shut my account down with no
| recourse.
|
| It's all shitty and it's all infuriating.
| tzs wrote:
| In the case of my bank, I'd expect to walk into my local
| branch with my driver's license, passport, birth
| certificate, and any other official ID I have, and
| convince them that I am the same tzs who owns the account
| and have them set me up with new account keys.
|
| What I wish is that there was some way to tie my other
| accounts, directly or indirectly, to my bank. My bank
| account is the most recoverable account I have, because
| they can handle me showing up in person with ID.
|
| Other accounts just know me by my knowing the account
| password and/or being able to receive emails at the email
| address associated with the account. If either of those
| is compromised I can lose the account with no way to
| recover.
|
| If there were some way I could have my bank verify my
| identity to my email provider, and tell my email provider
| that if account recovery is ever needed on my email
| account to re-verify with my bank that it is really me
| requesting the account recovery it would be much safer.
|
| (If you are using an email address at a domain you own,
| then replace email provider with domain registrar).
|
| Then no matter how badly I'm compromised (as long as it
| is not by someone with sufficient resources and interest
| to be able to get past an in-person identity check at my
| bank), I've always got a path to recovery.
|
| Worst case, first recover the bank account in person.
| Then recover the email account using the bank account.
| Then recover compromised accounts that are using the
| email account for verification.
| abeppu wrote:
| The bank still has a dependence on trusted authorities
| when it assumes your ID documents are legit. Rather than
| asking banks to confirm your identity for other accounts,
| I think we should ask governments to extend their
| practice of providing physical ID documents to providing
| online identification services. States have worked with
| Apple on "digital drivers licenses" that live on your
| phone, but the idea is still that you show them to
| someone in meatspace. Why shouldn't they provide an
| online service?
|
| Of course, all this depends on the assumption that your
| ID should be who you are IRL, rather than the model where
| we can all make up several independent pseudonyms for
| different purposes.
| tzs wrote:
| > The bank still has a dependence on trusted authorities
| when it assumes your ID documents are legit. Rather than
| asking banks to confirm your identity for other accounts,
| I think we should ask governments to extend their
| practice of providing physical ID documents to providing
| online identification services.
|
| Sure, that would work too. Or even do both. The point is
| to have some place I can go in person to have my identity
| verified for a third party such as an email provider or
| domain registrar. Then set up the email or registrar
| accounts so that account recovery requires such a
| verification.
|
| I wouldn't have to tie everything back to the in person
| verification. Just things that I want to be sure I can
| recover if I lose them via accident or hacking.
| throwaway473825 wrote:
| Many European countries have government-provided online
| identification services.
|
| Estonia's implementation is usually regarded as one of
| the best: https://github.com/open-eid
| Animats wrote:
| In-person account recovery is tough. A friend of mine
| runs a branch of a major bank. She regularly meets with
| customers who need to recover their account identity. A
| sizable fraction of the people who show up trying to do
| that are attempting something scammy.
|
| _If there were some way I could have my bank verify my
| identity to my email provider_
|
| Major banks can do their end of that. They will notarize
| documents and provide signature guarantees for
| established customers. Now, having obtained a notarized
| statement guaranteed by a major bank that you own your
| identity, how do you submit that to Gmail?
|
| Banks don't really want to be in the authentication
| business anyway. It's an unprofitable sideline, and takes
| up a lot of staff time.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| So what you are suggesting is that the bank has full root
| privileges to change credentials associated with an
| account. What is the point of having a decentralized
| database if the bank can change ownership of accounts as
| they see fit?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is sort of what happens when you use OpenID with
| Google. The "break glass to recover account" flow at
| Google does literally involve photographs of government
| issued ids and other human process like that.
| carlosdp wrote:
| Right so this is where smart contracts come into play.
| There are crypto wallets that are based on smart contracts
| which encode logic that allow people to "recover" their
| wallets if they lose their key by having some N of a
| selected group of trusted friends sign off on switching it
| to a new key.
|
| _That_ is why this was impractical before: we didn 't have
| a neutral/decentralized layer to remediate practical issues
| like this.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Sybil attack as a service: SaaS 3.0
| this_user wrote:
| Smart contracts are something that can never work,
| because it is predicated on our ability to write correct
| code. Empirically, we know that is not going to happen,
| which means you need some sort of disaster recovery
| mechanism, which will end up being some centralised
| entity that has a sufficient level of permissions to
| override the contracts, thereby losing the primary
| selling point. Or you try to solve this with even more
| technological complexity, but that will only increase the
| fragility of the entire system and will paradoxically end
| up having the opposite effect of what is intended.
| carlosdp wrote:
| This is a bananas statement, there is literally billions
| of $ transacted safely and successfully on smart
| contracts every day.
|
| Gnosis Safes (a multi-sig smart contract wallet) secure
| $96b in assets today and hasn't had a single security
| incident.
| q-big wrote:
| > Smart contracts are something that can never work,
| because it is predicated on our ability to write correct
| code.
|
| Laws are of similarly bad quality (in my opinion of even
| much worse quality than software), we just have at least
| centuries more experience how to deal with crappy laws
| than with crappy software.
| teucris wrote:
| Does that really justify an entire blockchain
| infrastructure? This is possibly a hot take, but I can't
| help but feel like key recovery as you describe could be
| implemented on its own, e.g. like horcrux[0]
|
| 0: https://github.com/corvus-ch/horcrux
| carlosdp wrote:
| Yes, because otherwise you are still trusting a
| centralized third party, which has incentives to lock you
| in to an ecosystem =/
| teucris wrote:
| Huh? What part of something like a horcrux relies on a
| centralized third party?
| carlosdp wrote:
| Oh well for this specific scheme, an MPC, it offers less
| flexibility. What if I want to remove one of my friends
| from my trusted guardians? What if I want to swap one
| out?
|
| You can also design other schemes, like a time-lock one
| that says if none of the guardians are reachable (say
| they all lost their keys too, bad luck), you can recover
| it with some other secret key as long as none of the
| guardians reject it in 90 days, or something like that.
|
| There are groups trying MPCs for this, but I think smart
| contract wallets will be far superior in user experience
| in the long run. You can even put in like bank-level
| protections, completely decentralized. For example, you
| could impose a daily spending limit, so even if you were
| compromised, you didn't lose everything and had time to
| lock the wallet. You could also restrict transactions to
| a set of whitelisted contracts, a list possibly
| maintained by a DAO. The possibilities are endless, it's
| turing complete code!
| worldmerge wrote:
| > Imagine being able to log in, securely, to HN, Twitter,
| your bank, et al., and with you comes basic data about how to
| contact you, how you pay, what assets you're holding, etc.
| You get to choose what you share, and you get to authenticate
| each transaction discretely. It's powerful and it puts that
| power in your hands, not in those of large corporate
| entities.
|
| That sounds interesting! How could I learn more about that?
|
| > that's what I work on
|
| What's your company?
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah... How do I get to choose what I share? How would it
| work for HN or Twitter? Do they have to support this? Where
| should they start to be able to support this? Again, how am
| I going to choose what I share? Who exactly has to
| implement it? I really need some details.
|
| If we actually have to rely on Twitter implementing
| something like this, then I do not have high hopes, as they
| most likely would not want to implement something like
| this. :)
| ramijames wrote:
| Basically, we have an oauth-like mechanism that sites can
| integrate. The user gets to control, from their side,
| what data they whitelist and share. Whatever they don't,
| they don't get to have access to.
|
| You're right, though: this is a steep hill to climb.
| ramijames wrote:
| Ultra.io is the company.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Web3 people need to talk about this more instead of all the
| FOMO scam bullshit they currently hype and which is tainting
| every reasonable human being against their ideas.
|
| Because right now, given how long the community has had to
| work on the problem and we still haven't seen anything like
| what you're describing, I'm still inclined to believe that
| Web3 is all a bunch of bullshit.
| ramijames wrote:
| I do. I run a podcast
| (https://anchor.fm/ultraio/episodes/EP8-Ultras-case-for-
| NFTs-...) and this is my primary concern: educating people
| about the real benefits of the technology. There's a lot of
| baseless hype and a lot of scammy bullshit. There is also a
| lot of real-world benefits that simply have not been
| leveraged to their fullest potential.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Love to hear some of the alluded to "real world benefits"
| - I have heard none so far, just claims of things an
| experienced engineer can invalidate with a few minutes of
| work.
| ramijames wrote:
| "A few minutes of work" is entirely disingenuous and
| misrepresents the problem at hand.
|
| "Blockchains" are not just distributed databases. They
| are also distributed, open APIs, and consensus mechanisms
| for updating and managing the functionality that controls
| those APIs and the data that they produce.
|
| I think about it this way: if you have one company that
| creates a database that many people use to build
| businesses around, then that company now holds a lot of
| power over the people who chose to build there. I believe
| that those people should have a say in the direction of
| the APIs that input/retrieve data, and ultimately should
| have some say in how long that database persists. The
| idea that we allow single entities to permanently control
| datasets seems absurd to me.
|
| Now, from an engineering management perspective, think
| about how you manage multiple teams who have different
| agendas, different priorities, and different needs for
| those APIs and the child data. How do you govern that?
| How do you ensure that all nodes that replicate this data
| set and the APIs are up to date and not doing funny
| business?
|
| This is all stuff that the decentralized community (web3)
| is trying to figure out together. It's DEEPLY interesting
| and ABSOLUTELY not "a few minutes work".
| anduru_h wrote:
| Could you elaborate more on how a blockchain will allow
| clients to influence the direction of the API and also
| keep other clients up to date on new API changes? That
| seems a lot more complex than the way you're putting it.
| ramijames wrote:
| It varies a lot from network to network. You're right: it
| is very, very complex.
|
| Politics and governance are topics that are, I think, a
| bit broad for a post in a reply on HN.
|
| Suffice it to say that groups of dedicated people, either
| as loose alliances or as tightly controlled development
| teams, come together and make proposals for change,
| implement those proposals, and then push them to a
| network. If the network as a whole thinks it is in their
| interests to use it, it gets voted on and enabled.
| Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Mostly it is
| entirely transparent to users. Rarely it causes a fork in
| a network (basically a civil war) where infrastructure
| providers decided to part ways and go on to support two
| child networks instead of one.
|
| It's messy, as all democracies are. I think it is a
| beautiful process, and it has taught me a lot of valuable
| lessons about how groups really work, what politics
| really is, and how to convince people who do not want to
| be convinced because you believe in something fiercely.
|
| Open networks take a lot of the best parts of FOSS and
| bring them to life in a way that I never thought I'd
| experience so intensely.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > Because right now, given how long the community has had
| to work on the problem and we still haven't seen anything
| like what you're describing, I'm still inclined to believe
| that Web3 is all a bunch of bullshit.
|
| That's because based on everything that's been demonstrated
| by 'web3' is essentially useless. And this post you're
| responding to is a well.
|
| They claim the benefit of web3 is you'll be able to have
| 'privacy' by controlling you identity and transaction
| history and choosing what to share by using blockchain.
|
| Prevent a large company from having all your info. By
| putting it in a blockchain? So now instead of one, every
| large company has your info! You aren't gaining privacy by
| putting your private info in a public distributed db!
|
| And just like almost everything I see posted about web3 a
| few mins of thought by any serious engineer shows this
| again is all hype that can't be backed up by the tech. And
| just like web3 in general, in this HN thread you see people
| caught up in the hype and missing the obvious core flaw
| with the very premise.
|
| This is the problem with web3, the main product it
| successfully produces is hype.
| Latty wrote:
| OpenID let you have custom auth that you controlled.
| Basically no one supported it, and basically no one used it.
|
| What would make the "web3" version different?
| ramijames wrote:
| The honest answer here is because valuable assets are
| attached to that account. Money makes a big difference in
| what a company is incentivized to integrate and what they
| are not.
|
| OpenId is awesome, and is awesome FOR USERS. It's just not
| awesome for companies. They have zero incentive to
| integrate it.
| Latty wrote:
| That seems very hopeful to me. You can attach
| certificates of ownership that mean nothing inherently
| and no one has any incentive to respect. I see no
| evidence of anyone finding a good use for NFTs right now,
| and all the suggestions I've heard have been hand-wavey
| and/or obviously deeply flawed.
|
| A bunch of speculators aren't going to drive actual
| adoption.
|
| To be clear: I used OpenID and I loved what it offered
| me, but I don't buy that "web3" fixes the problems that
| caused its death, or offers anything more than it did.
| brokensegue wrote:
| I'm not sure it was awesome for users. I remember finding
| it confusing.
| can16358p wrote:
| Combine it with a decentralized/uncensorable web3 version of
| Twitter/Facebook and it also has the potential to become a
| killer app.
| Vespasian wrote:
| I don't think I agree that this is a killer app.
|
| Virtually no one wants the consequences of a fully
| unmoderated (aka uncensored) social network.
|
| Either there is are strong filter/segmentation capabilities
| (like "the algorithm" on current plattforms and different
| plattforms for different audiences) or anybody but the most
| radical / loud users leave sooner rather than later.
|
| Most users also have any of their content removed.
|
| So I don't see many advantages over the present state.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Email is already decentralized. I pay for Fastmail with my
| own domain because I don't want Microsoft or Google to own my
| primary online identity.
| yucky wrote:
| I like this as well, but have zero faith in the wider public
| caring enough for that become the killer app. Most people do
| not care at all about Google/FB/Amazon owning their identity.
| It's sad, but true.
| ramijames wrote:
| Sad, but true indeed. My hope is that there is a large
| enough minority that does care that will push for it's
| gradual integration and acceptance.
| pengwing wrote:
| I agree: There is no killer-app from the perspective of a
| first-world citizen.
|
| For low-wage workers in developing countries the killer app is
| play2earn gaming.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> For low-wage workers in developing countries the killer
| app is play2earn gaming.
|
| Farming resources in MMORPGs was happening before
| cryptocurrency became popular:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming
|
| The killer app is illegal markets, malware / ransomware
| payments, and money laundering.
| s-lambert wrote:
| The killer app sounds like a dystopian hell to me, wow work
| that is the epitome of pointlessness.
| minzi wrote:
| Admittedly I'm not very well read on the whole play2earn.
| However, I think the article posted on hn the other day about
| it makes a pretty compelling argument that it's a Ponzi
| scheme.
|
| Article: https://paulbutler.org/2021/play-to-earn-and-
| bullshit-jobs/
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Strongly agree :)
| icambron wrote:
| Why does play2earn require (or is made much easier by)
| crypto? I'm missing a step in the logic
| yucky wrote:
| I'm not an expert on it, but I think this refers to the
| various "things" that can be bought/owned on various
| metaverse type environments. People from first world
| countries are able to buy these things since it's easier
| than "earning" them. People from developing countries can
| then do the earning part for them, and sell what they've
| got on various NFT marketplaces, for desperately needed
| money.
|
| Why crypto is needed is because that is the tech that makes
| it possible for Player A to actually own Thing X, when
| Player A sends money to Player B who actually spent 8 hours
| playing or doing in order to earn Thing X.
|
| There are a few of these examples starting to gain steam
| like Axie Infinity[1] for instance. Although I suspect FB &
| Roblox are going to really go all in on this soon, if they
| haven't already. And their user bases are enormous.
|
| [1] https://axieinfinity.com/ (click on their marketplace
| link to see for yourself, the prices are crazy)
| icambron wrote:
| You can build a marketplace without crypto, though. The
| question is why crypto is an important enabling feature.
| E.g. would Axie Infinity be as successful if it simply
| let you buy/sell assets directly? (Putting aside any of
| the surrounding discussion of pyramid schemes; I'm not
| really interested in Axie in particular, more how the
| concept is supposed to work)
| gilleain wrote:
| I am also unsure as to how crypto benefits ownership of
| assets (eg "Axies"). I looked into NFTs recently, and (to
| my very simplified understanding) there seems to be:
|
| Asset <-> Token <-> Blockchain
|
| where the <-> are links of some kind. I understand that
| the T-B link on the right is secure and uses all the
| fancy crypto stuff (smart contracts, whatever) . However,
| the A-T link is less clear to me.
|
| Concretely, if you 'own' a Pokeman/Axie then that is the
| T-B link, but what links the Axie to the token? A
| URL/URI? So where is that stored - in a database
| somewhere?
|
| It all seems very suspect, but maybe I'm missing
| something.
| pengwing wrote:
| 1) It enables users to own their assets regardless of the
| state of a centralized server. 2) Standardized format to
| trade on any third-party marketplace. A player could sell
| to an investor who has no intention of playing.
| icambron wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| 2 mostly makes sense to me--ownership can be managed
| independently of the game, and without a bespoke
| integration with that particular game. I do wonder a
| little how important being able to turn game assets into
| general-purpose instruments is (meaning, to the success
| of the game), but I can see how it expands the market and
| in particular how it makes it harder for the game company
| to manipulate that market, which makes the assets more
| reliable.
|
| I'm not sure I understand 1 though. Don't the assets only
| have value in the context of the game's mechanics, which
| _are_ centralized? Like if the game decides your bag of
| holding no longer holds anything, or even to simply
| ignore its existence, does it matter that you have a
| token asserting your ownership of the bag? In theory, the
| token could have value as a token outside the context of
| the game, like a meme stock or, uh, the current price of
| Tesla, but that's true of anything tradable.
| pengwing wrote:
| Regarding 1: Sure the game itself is centralized, for
| example Axie Infinity might even ban players who "cheat"
| according to their definition of cheating. So if you are
| a bad apple or get banned without justification, then
| block chain won't help you.
|
| If however (some years down the line) the original game
| creator abandons the game, any group of people could jump
| in and revive the game (by re-creating or updating it or
| doing something completely novel) based on the state that
| is still available on the block chain.
| icambron wrote:
| That's a nice property, but it seems like only a marginal
| benefit to Axie? Something like, players are more likely
| to invest money and energy into the game if there's some
| chance their assets' value will outlive Axie, thus
| slightly reducing the risks to their investment. Seems
| like that would be a small effect, or am I missing
| something? I guess what I'm trying to understand here is
| how crypto is a big game changer.
|
| Thanks for the discussion in any case.
| pengwing wrote:
| The bargaining power is much higher on the user site. "I
| did not like the new feature. Take it back or we throw
| together some money to build a competitor. We already
| have all player data, it is on chain."
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| Play2earn gaming is just a disguised ponzi scheme 99% of the
| time.
|
| It's a closed loop system so the only way for people to earn
| money is to get it from other gamers. And gamers aren't going
| to throw money at these games when they could play a better
| "centralized" alternative.
|
| And the reason why non-pay2earn alternatives will always be
| better is because non-pay2earn games are much cheaper because
| they only need to pay the game devs while pay2earn games need
| to pay both the game devs and the freeloading "earners".
| pengwing wrote:
| I always like to imagine how we will look back onto
| subjects 5 years from now, which helps to come up with more
| precise terminology and potential perspectives:
|
| "Generation 1 of play2earn gaming popularized in 2021/2022
| was based on an ongoing influx of capital and generated
| profits only in the form of its redistribution. This
| changed when ... "
| pjc50 wrote:
| > play2earn gaming
|
| Where does the real economic benefit come from in this?
| "Paying people to play games" cannot possibly scale beyond
| the existing gold-farming niche. It's also something that
| historically games have tended to ban.
| pengwing wrote:
| You asked for the econ perspective, so prepare for some
| darkness: When judging the economic productivity of the
| lowest class of wage workers the usual expectation is
| negative. Violent crime and substance abuse leads to a huge
| cost in terms of medical care and law enforcement.
|
| If you have a way to keep them busy and earn esteem without
| hurting anybody, that's a huge economic benefit.
| austincheney wrote:
| After working on a decentralized side project the only
| projection I can promise you is that nothing you imagine is
| correct until you are heavily using decentralization.
|
| Decentralization enables basic necessities that would you never
| before attempt, which means you are likely already engaging
| with killer ideas and dismissing them outright. That which is
| current boring and/or common can suddenly become sexy and
| powerful in ways that are unexpected or unplanned.
|
| It also means that which you imagine as being the next hot
| thing most likely isn't. The more time you spend working with
| decentralization the more true this becomes.
|
| Think of decentralization as a steroid. It makes you (your
| technology) more of what you already are, an amplifier, not
| something new. New things will ride on the success of a
| successful application.
|
| The challenge there is if an application is actually fully
| decentralized how will you determine success.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| What I remember is different. People bought a PC to play games.
| And they connected to internet to download porn.
| acdha wrote:
| > And the reason we all got internet connections in the
| mid-90's wasn't Web0. It was email. Web0 was a toy thing that
| only us geeks played around with, that came free with your
| email account.
|
| Your comment about spreadsheets matches my experience but this
| does not unless "mid 90s" really means "1995 at the very
| latest". I was seeing a ton of interest in web projects by then
| from normal companies who wanted to replace catalog ordering,
| put product and support information online, etc. - and normal
| people were starting to use it for all kinds of non-web things
| by then.
|
| I strongly agree with your main point: I've never heard someone
| ask about cryptocurrency or NFTs except in that they heard
| someone on CNBC saying the prices were booming & were wondering
| whether it was a good bet.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's true that a killer app is probably necessary, but isn't
| that what Web3 developers are currently trying to develop? It's
| kinda weird to say "there's no point in developing Web3 because
| there's no killer app for Web3."
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I didn't say there was no point developing it. I said that
| the author missed the point of why PC's (and the internet)
| were adopted.
|
| There's been hundreds of technologies developed because they
| were interesting to the developer, and then failed to find a
| market (or found a niche market and stayed there). Web3
| currently looks to be one of those.
|
| But who knows? If a killer app emerges, a reason for the
| average person to use it, then it'll succeed. Trying to
| predict this in advance is notoriously difficult.
| c-cube wrote:
| Right, it's only been 10 years after all!
| [deleted]
| bsenftner wrote:
| The Web3 killer app is here and everyone pretends it is not
| here. That killer app is Gambling, Speculation, and Hope of No-
| Work Instant Wealth. Until this killer app is tamed, it will
| overwhelm the web3 movement until it dies the death of a failed
| gambler.
| diegocg wrote:
| So what you are saying is that the internet should be built on a
| model where people can upload children pornography or propaganda
| from state actors and nobody can do anything to stop it? Thanks I
| pass. I'm also curious about how to provide distributed storage
| that competes with google in terms of size, reliability and
| performance.
|
| The fun thing about cryptography is that allows building internet
| services that can beat the blockchain. There is nothing
| preventing you from creating a service where people upload
| encrypted stuff that is only associated to a key id. In fact
| there are already services that kind of do this.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Why consider data redundancy the use case at all? If you really
| care about a file you could always back it up on multiple local
| drives and email it to those who want it - that's not what Web3
| or crypto is about. Its about the storage of valuable data i.e.
| data whose integrity holds a lot of value: Public keys, account
| balances, etc.
|
| I'm interested in culling the superfluous aspects of crypto,
| heaven knows they exist, so if you want to be involved in
| helping with that you should first become more competent on the
| subject.
| WaxedChewbacca wrote:
| Exendroinient wrote:
| Web3 is just an excuse to still shilling crypto while using it as
| a payment system has not taken off. They need to hype the next
| empty buzzwords to keep parade going.
| myownpetard wrote:
| I think that the original idea behind crypto is still the most
| interesting. It's programmable money. Large swaths of the finance
| industry exist to make money programmable. Why not build it into
| the monetary system directly?
|
| The general historical trend is to make money more abstract and
| to be able to perform more complicated functions with it. But
| fundamentally money is a social technology that consists of three
| things: An abstract unit of value in which money is denominated,
| a system of accounts, which keeps track of the individuals' or
| the institutions' credit or debt balances as they engage in trade
| with one another and the possibility that the original creditor
| in a relationship can transfer their debtor's obligation to a
| third party in settlement of some unrelated debt. [0]
|
| Crypto seems to satisfy the essence of that in a pretty cool way.
| DeFi projects are experimenting with the question of, "can we
| build the financial instruments and capabilities that a complex
| economy require on top of, and directly integrated with, this
| type of monetary system.
|
| Like any technology that requires a large network of users to be
| valuable it has a difficult bootstrapping problem. But it seems
| to be gradually working its way to larger and more important
| transactional contexts. First with illegal digital marketplaces
| and now in countries with weak monetary system like El Salvador
| (and with unbridled speculation along the way).
|
| Maybe all of the current crypto projects will fail but it will be
| interesting to see the nature of monetary systems in 10, 20 and
| 50 years from now. What aspects of these current experiments have
| been adopted?
|
| [0] Money: The Unauthorized Biography
| skywhopper wrote:
| This author fundamentally misunderstands PCs and HTTP, and then
| goes on to make bogus claims about what can be done on a
| blockchain. "Permissionless" is wildly misleading description of
| the blockchain. You can't change anything in the ledger besides
| things you already own. There's also the implicit lie that
| blockchain means everyone is on equal footing. If that were true,
| VCs would not be racing to pour billions into Coinbase, et al. If
| anything, blockchain makes you more reliant on the
| intermediaries, and everything that web3 promoters resent about
| web2 will return, only worse.
| skilled wrote:
| I just find it a little concerning that there are people out
| there, who are blindly following this Web3 "trend" by spending
| their money on digital "art".
|
| For the average person, there is no real use for Web3 because
| there is no actual definition for it.
|
| My impression is that Web3 is being praised as decentralized, yet
| it is people with a lot of money who are the one's regulating the
| pace right now.
|
| And that is a tad bit concerning to say the least, because if I
| invest millions into something (whether as an individual or a VC)
| - I'd like to feel a sense of "ownership", otherwise that money
| could have been spent helping real causes.
|
| I'd go as far as saying that for most people, including those
| entrenched in spending their hard earned money, the word Web3 is
| immediately associated with NFTs, not the actual blockchain
| technology. And that says a lot.
| berkes wrote:
| I'm not at all convinced that "web3" is positive.
|
| But when people say things like
|
| > otherwise that money could have been spent helping real
| causes
|
| It bleeds their personal opinion and hampers the debate.
| Apperently you think "digital art", or cryptocurrencies are not
| a "real cause". Which begs the question: who defines what "a
| real cause" is? The International World Causes Committee?
|
| Isn't anything that people want to spend money (resources) on
| by definition a real and worthy cause to at least those people?
| uncomputation wrote:
| Not OP but no. If someone buys in to a multi-level marketing
| scheme and starts peddling weight loss pills on Facebook,
| they certainly have spent real money on that and yet it is
| not a worthy cause because their only expectation is profit.
| NFTs have the possibility that the buyer is just genuinely a
| collector with no concern whatsoever for the value of the
| asset, but art collection is largely a financial venture. Not
| to mention that this simple art purchase contributed to
| higher gas fees for everyone else - why should we have to
| suffer just because you purchased something? - I don't
| consider that a worthy "cause" at all.
|
| In this space, you can donate to the EFF, sponsor open source
| projects, use services with subscription models over
| advertising models, donate to charities expanding internet
| and computing access globally, etc. which are all more "cause
| worthy" than buying digital art alone.
| shrimpx wrote:
| > Isn't anything that people want to spend money (resources)
| on by definition a real and worthy cause to at least those
| people?
|
| No, not if they're being misled or scammed, or simply making
| financial decisions under wrong assumptions about outcomes.
| Just some examples.
| skilled wrote:
| I'm talking about ownership, more specifically - market
| control. I don't care about "Web3" if a handful of
| people/companies are the one's controlling its growth.
|
| It's so stupid it actually hurts my brain just to type it.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Who are these handful of companies that you believe control
| web3?
| uncomputation wrote:
| Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Coinbase Ventures,
| Paradigm (founded by former partners of both Sequoia and
| Coinbase), Solana Ventures, and surprisingly quite a few
| Facebook alums (Anthony Pompliamo, Chamath Palihapitiya)
| sebmellen wrote:
| I think that, as with any debate, "worthwhile causes" cannot
| be defined so absolutely.
|
| I know people who "want" to spend money on addictive and
| destructive drugs, because they're continuously compelled by
| a pathological chemical imbalance to do so.
|
| Does that mean an addiction to heroin or Xanax is a "real and
| worthy cause"? How about an addiction to online gambling with
| generative art of monkeys/lions/pixel art?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There's far more innocuous examples, such as french fries
| and soda and sweets. Is it a real and worthy cause for
| someone to create a restaurant that serves junk food? Junk
| food that causes diabetes and heart disease?
|
| Apparently it's okay to be Coca-Cola or McDonald's or Mars.
| Those are real and worthy corps blessed by boomers of yore.
|
| If someone is addicted to gambling, there are plenty of
| casinos which are also worthwhile businesses apparently.
| Legal in many states, nations and territories.
| sebmellen wrote:
| Again, none of this can be defined _so absolutely_. That
| is my point. And all of the things you mention _are_
| already regulated (gambling, etc.), or under
| consideration for regulation (such as New York City
| banning soda [0]).
|
| I'm not saying that I'm for or against these regulations,
| but obviously there are boundaries where society needs to
| intervene, in one way or another. Portugal handled their
| drug problem in a very innovative way [1], and that's my
| preferred modal for ending the "drug war"
| (decriminalization and support for addicts). But it's
| still some form of regulation.
|
| [0]: https://globalyouth.wharton.upenn.edu/articles/big-
| gulp-new-...
|
| [1]: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Am a fence sitter. I think new technology and innovation is
| interesting. I think exploring new ideas is interesting. Theres
| enough capital to go around.
|
| Will be interesting to see how this develops
| leifg wrote:
| > Ok, so how is this remotely the same as PCs being cheaper? Well
| because to some people this matters a great deal. Why? Because
| much of the power held by large companies (and by governments)
| comes from the fact that they operate and control databases.
|
| The key point here is "Some People". But to make meaningful
| change a majority of people have to switch to a new system. The
| sad truth is: 90% of people do not care.
|
| The best example for this is podcasts. They started out as a
| decentralized utopia. Self hosted files, self hosted feeds,
| multiple apps to listen to them, improvements of existing formats
| (mp3 chapters were not really a thing before podcasts), there
| were even talks about enabling BitTorrent distribution.
|
| Fast forward a few years, now Spotify seems to accumulate most of
| the podcast universe and a lot of the existing podcast use them
| as a distribution platform. And their exclusive content is
| drawing in more and more users.
|
| So my question here is: if we have a decentralized system that
| works but people willingly use a centralized alternative of that,
| how can you claim that decentralization is remotely popular?
|
| You need to address this social issue before coming up with any
| kind of technology to solve it.
| muglug wrote:
| People sometimes claim that there's a generational divide in
| crypto adoption -- younger people "get it" while older people
| (those who came of age with the early web) are stuck in their
| ways.
|
| But there's a large group of older people who cling to crypto
| because they think it'll make their ideas sound relevant again.
| While appearing "disruptive", the crypto space actually
| privileges those (generally older) folks who already have money
| to burn (like the Winklevoss twins, whose payout from FB provided
| more money than they could ever spend on themselves in one
| lifetime).
| OtomotO wrote:
| Counterexample: Me.
|
| Relatively young, not at all into crypto, due to environmental
| reasons
| xur17 wrote:
| If Ethereum completes its migration to proof of stake as
| expected this year, would you be interested?
| OtomotO wrote:
| Yes
| codehalo wrote:
| There are many new systems that are superior to Ethereum
| (e.g Polkadot, Terra LUNA) that already satisfy your
| requirement.
| OtomotO wrote:
| That may well be, I am not that interested in crypto.
|
| I found the idea of a non governmental controlled
| currency with an upper bounded amount interesting, as
| inflation can't be a thing.
|
| But as a means to satisfy greed... Nope, I am happy with
| what I have.
|
| So there are other spaces in science and computer science
| I am more invested and interested in.
| Filligree wrote:
| > I found the idea of a non governmental controlled
| currency with an upper bounded amount interesting, as
| inflation can't be a thing.
|
| As I'm sure you would realise if you give the textbooks a
| chance, deflation is much worse than inflation. Nor is
| bitcoin truly inflation-less; the prices swing like a yo-
| yo, it's simply deflationary _on average_ thus far.
| Centmo wrote:
| How about as a means to provide financial security to the
| world's 1.7 billion unbanked, a means for those who live
| under oppressive rule to preserve wealth in the face of
| rampant currency debasement, in a form that cannot be
| confiscated or stolen. Money-printing drives inflation
| which is is a regressive tax that disproportionally hurts
| the poor, who don't own real estate or stocks. It
| accelerates the wealth gap, which further strains our
| society. Bitcoin is a means to expand financial
| inclusion, and help level the playing field just a bit.
| It's not just about greed.
|
| Regarding energy use, Bitcoin mining inherently seeks out
| the lowest cost electricity which turns out to be either
| stranded energy (not usable for anything else) or
| renewable (solar, wind, hydro). This is yet another
| reason to push governments to stop subsidizing fossil
| fuels. Also, since Bitcoin mining can be done at any time
| and in any place, it is able to act as the buyer of last
| resort for renewable projects whose energy production
| does not line up with grid demand. Having this extra
| buyer can greatly reduce the payback period for a
| proposed solar/wind project that otherwise would not have
| been able to attract the investment to build it.
| OtomotO wrote:
| How is me investing in crypto changing the lot of 1.7
| billion people?
|
| I may be the chosen one, but am I that important?
|
| To phrase it differently: all you said may (sic!) be
| true, doesn't change my personal interest though.
| Centmo wrote:
| You could think of where you store your wealth as a vote
| for the system which best represents your values, and for
| the system you would like to see proliferated. Your
| inclusion adds value to the network, which strengthens
| its security and helps push it up the adoption s-curve.
| The more users there are, the more services appear, and
| the more accessible and useful it becomes.
|
| I was never that interested in monetary policy or the
| history of money until I found out about Bitcoin and
| started doing my own research.
| OtomotO wrote:
| My house on the countryside and self sustaining lifestyle
| (obviously not totally hermitic, but way more than the
| average person) votes for the system very loudly I'd say.
|
| I am very interested in the history of money, but it made
| me a Marxist, or rather a Trotskyist ;)
| muglug wrote:
| > How about as a means to provide financial security to
| the world's 1.7 billion unbanked
|
| Let them eat crypto
| polio wrote:
| If Bitcoin can be spent, its owners can be coerced to
| spend it, so it can be stolen. Regarding excess energy,
| I'd rather have energy storage firms be that buyer.
|
| Cryptocurrencies may have a part to play in the future of
| humanity, but Bitcoin will not be it. It's a proof of
| concept that's overstayed its welcome.
| Centmo wrote:
| A person's Bitcoin holdings can be distributed across any
| number of wallets. How does the thief know (1) their mark
| owns Bitcoin, (2) how much Bitcoin they are stealing, and
| (3) whether they have coerced the owner to hand over the
| keys to all of their wallets?
|
| Energy storage is inefficient and expensive, so a new
| renewable project based around this is less likely to be
| funded and built than one that can directly monetize the
| excess. Profit and greed is the incentive structure for
| much of human society.
|
| Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of
| value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of
| the future. The energy expenditure is required to provide
| the highest level of security and decentralization which
| is needed for a global reserve asset. Any other system is
| vulnerable to attack or centralization, which will
| inevitably succumb to human greed like every fiat system
| in history.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > A person's Bitcoin holdings can be distributed across
| any number of wallets. How does the thief know (1) their
| mark owns Bitcoin, (2) how much Bitcoin they are
| stealing, and (3) whether they have coerced the owner to
| hand over the keys to all of their wallets?
|
| Are the unbanked really going to operate a number of
| different wallets, including decoy wallets, to prepare
| for this scenario?
|
| > Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of
| value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of
| the future.
|
| Its parameters were picked on a whim by somebody nobody
| can ever find. "Completely unchangeable parameters handed
| down from the equivalent of God" is not a property that I
| look for in a monetary system.
| Centmo wrote:
| The safest and most effective method for storing wealth
| that the unbanked currently have is to bury gold jewelry
| somewhere. Gold holds its value better than fiat, but is
| not easily divisible and there is a large cost to
| converting it to/from fiat. Bitcoin keys can also be
| buried, but if necessary they can also be memorized and
| transported across borders without risk of seizure. Also,
| having multiple wallets is not complicated; you may be
| underestimating the cleverness of the unbanked.
|
| The parameters of the Bitcoin code are changeable (and
| have changed multiple times since inception) via hard-
| fork based on the 'voting' of the nodes which verify all
| new blocks and number in the tens of thousands
| distributed across the globe. The parameters of the
| protocol are set such that anyone can run a verification
| node on only a couple hundred dollars worth of hardware,
| thereby encouraging decentralization.
|
| https://river.com/learn/can-bitcoins-hard-cap-
| of-21-million-...
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Inflation is not just caused by printing money. You can
| still experience inflation (rising prices of a basket of
| goods) without any change in the amount of available
| currency.
| Malp wrote:
| What are your thoughts on current PoS systems, such as
| Polygon?
| OtomotO wrote:
| No thoughts, never heard of it.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm not convinced younger people get it when they seem to spend
| all their time on TikTok.
| MrPatan wrote:
| Just buy some, this is tiresome.
| [deleted]
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Dumb questions: Why does "web3" need venture capital. Why are VC
| (like this author) pushing for web3.
|
| Someone suggested it is because they have invested heavily in ETH
| mining.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| What makes you think it needs it? If every person in the world
| shilled something they called Web3 that wouldn't change the
| conclusion of this blog post? What are you on about, exactly?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Even deeper question. Why does "web3" need to make money?
| Wouldn't it be better to go hobbyist providing services? Or
| everyone running their own things at their own cost, marginal
| let's say 10 or 100 a year? Like true decentralization, that
| isn't burden to profit...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Interest rates are zeroed out and they need another tulip
| frenzy.
| grey-area wrote:
| Because VCs have heavily invested over the last few years in
| blockchain companies and cryptocurrencies in general, they need
| to keep pumping this bubble, so NFTs, web3 etc became necessary
| to invent.
|
| Web3 is just the latest excuse to keep the game of musical
| chairs going and preserve the chimera of use-value for
| cryptocurrencies since very few people want to use them to
| actually transact.
| hnbad wrote:
| Because Proof of Work requires computational power, which is
| expensive and thus requires a lot of capital, and Proof of
| Stake requires controlling a significant amount of the
| currency, which also requires a lot of capital. Basically the
| consensus is built around ways to demonstrate you already have
| a lot of money, either through conspicuous consumption (PoW) or
| flaunting your balance (PoS).
|
| As to why VCs would invest in it: it's currently dodging most
| regulations that apply to financial transactions (money
| laundering, pyramid schemes, pump & dump schemes, etc) much
| like loot boxes dodge most gambling regulations (and it turns
| out selling gambling to kids is extremely profitable). This
| makes the market uniquely profitable to invest in right now
| with promises of extreme ROI as long as it remains unregulated.
|
| "Humanitarian" campaigns to normalize tracking public records
| and qualifications on the blockchain in technologically
| underdeveloped countries also produce a high amount of
| technological lock-in while increasing the capabilities of
| automated decision making on the blockchain without having to
| bother with externalities. For example, if one's ability to use
| an NFT on social media hinges on demonstrating ownership of
| that NFT, copyright law becomes a tangential consideration much
| like systems like ContentID make it harder to claim fair use
| rights because the ContentID claim is not based in copyright
| law but in the terms of service.
|
| Additionally a lot of the more vocal tech VCs are libertarians
| bordering on anarcho-capitalism (i.e. free market maximalists
| who think humanity's survival and progress hinges on a few
| Great Men rather than the unsophisticated masses). The greater
| Web3 ecosystem is trying to solve cooperation with people you
| actively distrust and represents every interaction as a
| financial transaction. This is extremely appealing to them.
| Their problem with capitalism isn't that it inevitably leads to
| a massive wealth disparity (because after all, some people are
| "just better") but that the government gets in the way. This
| makes the promise of decentralization (even if it defers to
| consensus between the already wealthy) ideologically appealing
| to them.
|
| Based on my conversations with web3 believers, they would
| generally agree with most of what I said but object to the
| language I'm using because it doesn't sound very flattering.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| regarding "free market maximalists who think humanity's
| survival and progress hinges on a few Great Men rather than
| the unsophisticated masses" -
|
| Libertarianism may have changed in character, or perhaps more
| in how it is characterized in media, but it used to be that
| libertarians believed in lots of little people acting freely
| and that states and the large corporations they are mutually
| supported by are the opposite of what they want.
|
| Hopefully it is because the little people have largely left
| the relatively pointless large media spaces online and does
| not represent a genuine change in how the majority of
| libertarians, who used to not be terribly wealthy if they
| were wealthy at all, think.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| ETH mining is going away forever with ETH 2.0's The Merge that
| is set for June 2022.
|
| https://cointelegraph.com/news/eth2-devs-put-out-call-to-com...
| pudo wrote:
| You mean the thing when the ETH people are going to hand the
| power over the people with the most money? I'm sure this idea
| is deeply chilling to... venture capitalists, they're
| probably shaking in their boots.
| stavros wrote:
| Whereas now power is with the people with the most... GPUs?
| Those don't grow on trees either.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Right. And both are bad.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| How do you think proof of work operates now? Do you think
| big mining operations don't take massive capital? They do,
| and also waste ungodly amounts of power at the same time.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The difference is PoW can still be distributed beyond
| what exists today if someone decides to get involved and
| take power away from the consensus.
|
| With PoS the consensus chooses if they want to give up
| power and you can only gain decentralization if they
| choose to give it up.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| POS only works with an active economy i.e. validation
| requires something to validate e.g. consumers using ETH
| to buy goods and services. This implies the general
| population has access to large amounts of liquidity of
| the currency.
|
| A new institutional investor just needs to start hoarding
| that easily accessible liquidity and the biggest players
| in the space will need to give up their share or risk the
| price of the currency dropping to zero because it's too
| hard to transact in it and therefore it's no longer
| profitable to tie up 32 ETH and run validators.
| 0x64 wrote:
| You gain more power by having more money in both PoW and
| PoS. In PoW it means you can buy more hashing power, in PoS
| it means you can buy more of the network's currency to
| stake. Even under PoS, the network's upgrades still rely on
| social consensus, as in node operators (!= validators)
| agreeing to forks, and the network's finality requires 2/3
| of the network's almost 300'000 validators to come to
| consensus.
| hnbad wrote:
| Yes.
|
| "Actually both systems give power to those who are
| already wealthy" isn't the argument for democratization
| and decentralizations crypto believers apparently think
| it is.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Someone suggested it is because they have invested heavily in
| ETH mining.
|
| VCs own ETH from the presale not from investing in mining.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| VC funding is needed to raise funds for software engineers and
| provide access to mentorship and community, like every other
| software company that uses VC funding. You can raise funds
| through other means (bootstrapping, ICOs, etc) but these have
| their own sets of downsides.
| shrikant wrote:
| Gatekeeping access to (edit: online, but I suppose this could
| also apply to offline) resources based on digitally verifiable
| ownership and the subsequent rent-seeking is a capitalist wet
| dream. I'm not the least bit surprised the VCs are slavering
| over web3.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Why does "web3" need venture capital._
|
| There's no reason why a business trying to use "web3" _wouldn
| 't_ need to raise a round. Every business that wants to grow
| more quickly than the founders can manage alone needs some sort
| of capital to pay people to help. One way to do that is by
| giving up a bit of equity in return for money.
| pudo wrote:
| That sounds a lot like, you know, web 2.0. Let's scheme this
| out: Facebook (and its corporate policies) is often named a
| motivating factor for web3. If I wanted to make a web3
| replacement (let's call it MastoCoin), how would the
| economics of that actually work? People would still want to
| upload lots of posts and pictures and stuff, and that would
| presumably continue to live on S3 (etc.). Somebody needs to
| pay the bills for that monthly. So even if I had to pay $3
| bucks in gas to post my sarcastic tweet, someone else would
| incur an indefinite expenditure on it, no? I really cannot
| think of a non-pyramid model here.
| onion2k wrote:
| Society should certainly protect people from being scammed
| by others, but I don't think that's what web3 is. It's not
| a "pyramid scheme" in the traditional sense because it's
| not a scheme. It's just a pyramid. It's a collective
| delusion. If people believe in it, great. If they think
| they can profit from it then they should try. If they win,
| cool. If they lose, also cool.
|
| I definitely don't think web3 should be 'stopped' on moral
| grounds. Maybe it should on environment grounds, or on the
| grounds of how annoying web3 evangelists are, but stopping
| it to protect people from investing in something silly is
| not a good idea. Let people learn from their mistakes (or
| maybe I'll learn to be less cynical when NFTs turn out to
| be the next BTC, which I also regret not buying, or Amazon
| stock that I didn't buy, or Apple, or Pixar, or MSFT...
| this is a long list.)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Filecoin, Sia, and Arweave are three of the bigger chains
| involved in decentralized file storage. A combination of
| IPFS for data verification and one of these services for
| storage is typically enough. Many apps will store both on
| S3 and on Filecoin and link the IPFS hash for redundance.
| It's not a pyramid model, the native tokens are used to
| purchase storage and incentivize the bootstrapping of the
| storage network build out. Arweave has created an endowment
| like structure to guarantee data storage for 200 years.
| vorhemus wrote:
| Decentralization and taking power out of the hands of large
| corporations is no guarantee of success - otherwise Napster would
| have to dominate the music streaming market today and not
| Spotify.
|
| > prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn't know how to have
| permissionless
|
| Simply not true. Torrents allow you to store and retrieve objects
| from a decentralized object "database" without an individual
| having control over it.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| I'm generally a web3 skeptic, turned off by all the hype and
| ideology, but the interesting thing about "web3" is you a
| potentially critical mass of zealots working together and
| building on ideas. I'm sure something interesting will emerge out
| of that. Will it require crypto? Maybe, but probably not. In
| fact, I think what will likely happen is interesting ideas will
| come out of web3 but then they'll just end up implemented without
| crypto/decentralization.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| I rememeber someone on Twitter describing the invention of public
| blockchains by way of an analogy of computers being invented as
| part of an effort by someone to invent pong.
|
| A permissionless database was invented as part of an effort to
| create p2p electronic cash.
| godelski wrote:
| I still don't understand how Web3 doesn't become centralized like
| Web2 did. While services like email are technically decentralized
| we see that they are highly centralized on Web2 because almost
| everyone uses GMail. We see similar centralization with other
| types of services. I understand Web3 is also trying to
| decentralize not only the services, but the hosting. I still
| don't see why the big main players like AWS wouldn't just
| continue to host the majority of the servers. I feel like a lot
| of Web3 evangelists are asserting decentralization but not
| explaining a good mechanism for it to be so. Web2 has clearly
| shown us (as most of history) that momentum is powerful and that
| there is a positive feedback loop in systems like these. That
| power begets more power. So what's the mechanism for maintaining
| decentralization?
|
| As for the crypto parts, I'm all for making everything possible
| cryptographically secure by default and E2EE.
| rambambram wrote:
| Web3 is nothing but an echo chamber. A very empty echo chamber,
| so it echoes pretty nice. I'm back to the world wide web.
| [deleted]
| dqpb wrote:
| There are actually two rooms. A big one full of people who
| barely know what a data structure is, yelling about whether or
| not Web3 is a Ponzi scheme. And a much smaller room where
| Engineers are actually building things.
| qeternity wrote:
| As if that somehow confers value or usecase. Most engineers I
| know think web3 is beyond stupid.
| rambambram wrote:
| > where Engineers are actually building things.
|
| These things have names. Web3 is a name without being a
| thing.
| dqpb wrote:
| > Web3 is a name without being a thing.
|
| Then it's just as meaningless to argue against it as it is
| to argue for it.
| rambambram wrote:
| Exactly! You get the point.
| nathias wrote:
| It seems like the VC's are coming to harvest crypto. They will
| try to regulate it and squeeze out all the tech and profit for
| themselves, but at least they will counter the much worse
| regulation that would submit crypto under the control of central
| banks.
| gexla wrote:
| It's a long article which says that Web3 is a database which
| nobody owns followed by a lot of hand-wavy stuff that you see
| everywhere else.
|
| The worst part of this is that I feel like I could get dragged
| into this. That at some point I'll have no choice but to start
| digging into this and dedicate time to other stacks because the
| money behind Web3 succeeds in shoving it down everyone's throats.
|
| This is someone talking about technology fixing problems, but
| ignoring the messy real world. For example, we have repeatedly
| seen how governments can control things which "nobody owns."
|
| Another item which stood out was the idea of Web3 taking back
| control from the big tech companies. But if they are monopolies,
| then shouldn't it be the government which takes them down?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The government has been completely weak on antitrust law since
| the 90s.
| mizzao wrote:
| This article does a decent job at casting the decentralized
| database argument as disruptive innovation without resorting to
| hype. But I wonder about the other fundamental drawbacks of
| blockchain for developing new applications:
|
| - Immutability: building any software requires iteration, and
| therefore mutability. How do you build a startup if you can't
| ALTER TABLE on your database (or it requires a new database)?
|
| - Irreversibility: if there are any bugs, or mistakes in the
| code, you can't fix it later (and in fact, someone may be able to
| steal a lot of your tokens)
|
| - Dependency on real-world data sources: even if smart contracts
| are ironclad, they can dependent on potentially erroneous or
| manipulable data sources
|
| - Off-chain centralization: many of these blockchain apps such as
| the play-to-earn games have a lot of centralized control that is
| not on the blockchain and under the discretion of the developer.
| Probably because of the reasons above
|
| At a meta level, the hardest problems are people problems and not
| solvable by technology. Trying to solve people problems with
| ironclad code seems like a fool's errand. If there was a killer
| app that wasn't handicapped by the issues above, that would make
| me a believer.
| [deleted]
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Well, where are the killer apps?
|
| Where are the mass usage use cases beyond "get rich quick"
| schemes?
|
| We have had the technology for years and all we got are NFC
| schemes, speculation and hot air.
| Closi wrote:
| Absolutely agree - any technology is only useful if it solves a
| problem.
|
| IMO, Blockchain/Crypto seem to come from a perspective of "how
| can we apply blockchain to X?" rather than asking "What problem
| are we trying to solve, and what requirements would any
| solution need to meet?" BEFORE deciding what technology options
| there are which could solve it.
|
| Pitching 'Web 3' as a technical solution rather than solving a
| problem inevitably leads to 'when all you have is a hammer,
| everything looks like a nail' (which is my personal opinion of
| the whole crypto space).
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| And what of any hidden nails which there was previously no
| motivation to search for?
| Closi wrote:
| Well you don't look for ways to use nails, you try to work
| out what you want to build first and then use nails if they
| are the best tool for the job.
|
| i.e. work out the problem you want to solve, then see what
| the right technology is afterwards.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| The phrase is "when all you have is a hammer, everything
| looks like a nail." We can stretch the analogy but I'll
| reiterate my point literally:
|
| Longstanding problems do not have bootstrap solutions,
| i.e. they are longstanding because simple hard work and
| known strategies could not solve them. To think that you
| can go around looking at longstanding problems and come
| up with solutions top down is out of touch with how
| innovation drives technology.
|
| Innovations are small miracles - there is no formula for
| them, they don't come around often. When rare
| advancements are made it makes sense to test what good
| they can do for problems which do not give way to the old
| toolset.
|
| To put it back in the analogy: When you invent a hammer
| to drive nails, check and see what else it might be good
| for.
|
| You may not like the over extension of applied crypo
| currencies, but nobody is forcing you to invest in any of
| it. I for one would rather have experimentation with
| failure than none at all.
| rsp1984 wrote:
| _Ok, so how is this remotely the same as PCs being cheaper? Well
| because to some people this matters a great deal. Why? Because
| much of the power held by large companies (and by governments)
| comes from the fact that they operate and control databases._
|
| What a naive and short sighted world-view this is, it's almost
| grotesque. No company or government derives its power from
| holding a big database. By the same argument it would follow that
| Venezuela must be a really wealthy country because it's got lots
| of oil. And it's the same kind of argument as saying Stripe or
| Paypal or some other Fintech got big because they had the idea of
| "enabling payments on the internet".
|
| Power is derived from getting others behind a cause and then
| executing on it. That's it.
| brightstep wrote:
| "executing on it" is doing a lot of work here, i.e. it requires
| resources, political connections, etc. But ultimately you're
| right, and this is what "Web3" believers always miss. A
| technology alone is not going to bring about the change you
| want to see. Absent the associated "execution" (which often
| requires political action), a new tool/tech will be adopted if
| and only if it serves existing power
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > 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 painfully wrong. _Almost_ true for Facebook, but in
| general these companies most valued assets are their _systems_
| and operations, not the data itself.
|
| Also I'm pretty sure the first PCs weren't cheaper at all.
| jakear wrote:
| Paypal's might be the closest. If FB, Amazon, or Google woke up
| and saw that all their data was gone, it'd be extremely
| annoying but recoverable by just having users recreate accounts
| (or re-scraping). If they woke up and saw that all their ops &
| systems were gone, it'd be the end of the company. If PayPal
| lost either it'd be the end of the company.
| vmception wrote:
| One person in the comments there asked about how its better from
| a corporate marketer's angle, I think Web3 has the perfect
| funnel.
|
| For any application The funnel is practically nonexistent, except
| to the luddites that still need onboarding into a wallet. No
| different than trying to show an existing experience to an AOL
| user in 1995 versus showing it to the people writing editorials
| questioning what the World Wide Web was. _"Is there any useful
| application on the World Wide Web, why has nobody convinced me
| for me, why has everyone started ignoring my bait about what
| useful means! I swear I wont move the goalpost if you talk to me,
| this time!"_
|
| For marketing theory its matches perfectly, get a user to pay $1
| and you've found the audience that would pay more, while bouncing
| the freeloaders. Any web3 application has authorized payments
| built in and users prepared to create a transaction with a fee.
| cillian64 wrote:
| > some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a
| libertarian nirvana.
|
| What bothers a lot of us isn't the libertarian nirvana ideal,
| it's the fact that most loud proponents have a financial interest
| and stand to gain by increasing adoption, even if only
| temporarily. Even if they truly believe the technology is
| pointless and has no future, they are incentivised to pretend
| that it is revolutionary in order to increase the value of their
| investments so they can offload their holdings. This makes it
| difficult to trust anybody writing positively about
| cryptocurrency-related topics. It's like knowing a manufacturer
| pays people to write positive reviews about their product and
| then suddenly seeing lots of blogs and comments raving about how
| great the products are with little justification.
|
| If you can separate the distributed database technology from the
| financial speculation then I will be a lot more enthusiastic
| about it. However, without the get-rich-quick aspect I suspect
| such a technology won't get nearly as much excitement overall.
| Mastodon and Diaspora are already working examples of
| decentralised social networks and this article doesn't state what
| advantage web3-based products would have over them and people
| generally don't seem very excited about them.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| You make a good point, and you deserve appreciation for your
| ability not to confuse all of Web3 with the vocal majority
| behind Web3 right now - who I agree are empty salesman.
|
| > If you can separate the distributed database technology from
| the financial speculation then I will be a lot more
| enthusiastic about it.
|
| Tough pill to swallow for you: the consensus mechanism
| fundamental to Bitcoin and blockchains in general (assuming
| they are fully decentralized) is economic. It relies on block
| producers spending or staking their money for no profit if they
| lie or cheat. The tokens or coins associated with the network
| are the digital collateralizations of that money, and are
| therefore subject to shift in valuations relative to anything
| else you might trade it for.
|
| Crypto is inherently financial as long as its consensus
| mechanism is economic - that is not a bad thing, but it should
| inform how communities interact with the topic. Despite
| believing in crypto, this is why I believe some spaces should
| not consider it polite to talk about specific crypto-currencies
| versus others, as it quickly deteriorates into shilling of
| one's own holdings. This is the same reason novice's can't
| reliably make money in the market - since everyone advertises
| coins/tokens they hold as the next coming of Jesus, the only
| productive way to make decisions about which are good or bad is
| to not only have a deep understanding of them but also their
| context in the market as it is currently. Even then you might
| fall victim to the 'clown market' when hype trumps
| fundamentals.
|
| Long story short crypto-currencies are inherently economic and
| therefore financial and subject to price fluctuations which
| attract speculators. This does not make "crypto" a scam, but it
| does mean that novices have little recourse for understanding
| the space sans becoming more independently competent or having
| a trusted advisor.
| vmception wrote:
| The standard you want is not reconcilable and you will simply
| have to find other signals to pay attention to.
|
| The general idea amongst crypto enthusiasts is: no conflict, no
| interest.
|
| So its not about just listening to someone and trusting them,
| its about having the tools to find something that works for a
| goal you have, within that ecosystem.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I really don't get it. What is the appeal? Is it an anonymous web
| like existing darknets? They exist and work already. Obviously,
| so long as there is a more convenient/cheaper/more accessible
| non-dark-web, the only people who will be on the dark web are
| criminals.
|
| What is the connection between "web3" and "NFTs" and
| "Cryptocurrency"? I mean _apart_ from all being loosely related
| to the same underlying blockchain tech - are there other points
| of contact?
| mad182 wrote:
| Since the ICO craze in 2017 I've seen countless ideas and
| millions spent trying to use blockchain and crypto for everything
| you could possibly imagine, and yet I don't see anything
| meaningful has ever came out of it, apart from get rich quick
| schemes, ponzis and some virtual novelty items.
|
| Bitcoin has been around for 12 years, but in real life I don't
| know anyone who has ever used something crypto related for
| anything else than risky investment, or basically gambling. I'm
| very skeptical.
| corobo wrote:
| Drugs too, don't forget drugs!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I've never met anyone who's ever used their stock certificates
| for anything other than speculation.
|
| However, I have participated in a multisig that controls six
| figures of funds with a handful of strangers on the internet. I
| have used my governance tokens to vote on DAO proposals
| regarding new product lines and features. I have created and
| sold NFT artwork. I have registered a domain name and set an
| immutable record on a smart contract linking to a website and
| an Ethereum wallet. I have used it for logging in to software.
| I've built software that gates access based on ownership of a
| particular NFT. I've stored data on Filecoin and archived it on
| Arweave. I've borrowed money on-chain. I've commissioned
| artwork and paid in ETH. I've bought gold with Bitcoin. I've
| helped raise a million dollars for charity with a major
| celebrity. I've contributed to Gitcoin grants for public goods
| software funding. Your skepticism just closes your mind and
| blinds you to what's possible.
| noselfpromote wrote:
| Do you have an email I could write to ?
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > [DAO, NFT, gold]
|
| Pretty bold stuff! Thought people had generally accepted
| DAO's and NFT's as likely scams.
|
| Do you want to actually share the URL's for these things?
| Shit, does web 3.0 even use proper URL's? Where is this magic
| land of highly democratized services? And why isn't a URL,
| perhaps the most fundamental tenet of the "web", _ever_
| shared in these discussions?
|
| Perhaps it would illuminate the fact that this stuff is all
| highly centralized already? With most services requiring
| personally identifying information in order to use them?
| Wonder what that's needed for...
| bp0017 wrote:
| and none of these things were impossible before. what's the
| value add of doing it in this way opposed to the old way?
| jakear wrote:
| Links would be more compelling than grandstanding.
| yeezyszn wrote:
| Sure - and these are all great examples of what you _can_ do
| with crypto. Where I see parent pushing back is that all of
| these things were already possible before. You could buy jpg
| 's with credit cards, you could buy gold with the dollar.
|
| Before the spreadsheet it was extremely difficult to do
| arithmetic at scale. After the spreadsheet it was much, much
| quicker.
|
| What's the killer feature that cannot be replicated easily
| without crypto?
| ericd wrote:
| My understanding of these things is limited, but I think
| the most interesting thing about them is that open APIs
| seem to be the default way to interact with them, not
| something tacked on after the fact, and you don't have to
| beg for an API key for each one, contact a salesperson, or
| whatever. If these things proliferate, it seems like one
| could compose mashups of services to build online things
| relatively quickly.
|
| Also, for bitcoin in particular, the lightning network
| makes it possible to pay a fraction of a cent for
| something, which is not possible with a credit card, and it
| potentially offers a uniform location/country-agnostic way
| to pay for things online. Stripe has made that much less of
| a problem than it used to be, but I'm not sure it's quite
| 100% global coverage yet, and afaik they have no solution
| for micropayments.
| yeezyszn wrote:
| appreciate the response - your second point especially
| rings true for me and has set off some thoughts of my
| own:
|
| I would say my 'theory of crypto' is that they're
| rediscovering the financial system. The financial system
| can do everything crypto can and more. The fact it does
| not is due almost entirely to regulation.
|
| This implies crypto will be most useful in environments
| where you can skirt regulation the longest. I imagine
| cross-border payment systems(esp to emerging market
| countries) are the most promising examples of where this
| would be useful, and i know there are some groups working
| on this already.
|
| This also implies that in the developed world, crypto has
| capped upside. The point at which it's big enough to
| matter is the point at which its regulated. It will
| rapidly converge to 'Trad Fi' without the institutional
| support the financial world already has.
|
| Just some thoughts bouncing around my head that your
| comment spurred...
| ericd wrote:
| Yeah, they seem to be rediscovering lots of the reasons
| for regs :-) The whole DAO fiasco and the resulting fork
| was especially interesting to read about.
|
| I think that it's much more of an internet-native payment
| system than anything we've seen before, so I have some
| hope that it won't just be useful for skirting
| regulation. It feels like a much better match. But we'll
| see.
|
| My biggest issue is that Bitcoin (and all proof of work)
| is still a bit of an environmental disaster. Hopefully
| the carbon generation doesn't scale with transaction
| volume.
| pudo wrote:
| > Put differently: it turned out that permissionless publishing
| alone was insufficient. We also need permissionless data.
|
| Has the author ever heard of OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, or a
| million other projects like them? I'm also not quite sure
| "permissionless data" is how I'd describe a database that stores
| tiny amounts of data at a massive cost. Pay-to-play is
| permissionless iif you have the money.
|
| Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
| throway453sde wrote:
| Wikipedia database is managed by the wikimedia staff. You have
| the permission to edit it for now but can not guarantee it will
| be make available always. This is what the author meant.
| lottin wrote:
| Doesn't wikipedia keep a history of all the edits, and aren't
| these available to wikipedia users?
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| I believe they do; you can download archives at [0]. It
| mentions that the edit history can be downloaded by looking
| for dumps with page-meta-history in their name at [1]
|
| The same is probably true for OpenStreetMap et al.
|
| [0] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ [1]
| https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| They're just rows in a MySQL database. Traditional RDBMS
| for OLTP are built around the assumption that all data is
| mutable. An unscrupulous Wikipedia DBA could unilaterally
| delete new history rows before anyone downloads a hard-copy
| and then no-one would be the wiser.
|
| On the topic of OLTP RDBMS: things are changing though: ISO
| SQL (and at least MS SQL Server) have added support for
| "LEDGER" tables that extend the Temporal Table system
| (...that we know and love...er...hate) with immutability
| secured with cryptographic keys. Basically, you get to have
| your own centralized blockchain-like table.... so long as
| you trust your DBMS (and DBA) with the keys.
|
| There's two types: append-only and updatable (which is
| still append-only under-the-hood, as destructive DML
| operations are still just appended to current history, just
| like with git).
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-
| sql/database/le...
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-
| sql/database/le...
|
| It's pretty cool, I'll admit - I've been wanting support
| for true "read-only" tables for ages - the only thing I'm
| dreading is having to put-up with poor tooling support for
| a decade or two (e.g. Entity Framework Core still doesn't
| support temporal-tables, and SQL Server still only supports
| SYSTEM versioning and not the (far more useful) APPLICATION
| versioning system, argh).
|
| That said, I don't think Wikipedia would really want
| crypto-signed page edit histories: it would obligate them
| to host truly objectionable content (otherwise the hash
| references would break), and there's far too many
| sociopathic griefers online for that to not happen...
| grey-area wrote:
| Opensea is managed by opensea staff, Bitcoin and Etheream are
| in a very concrete way managed by the devs. You absolutely
| cannot guarantee anything about access in the future for
| sites based on web3 - if anything it is worse as there are
| two gatekeepers, the site owner and the cryptocurrency (so
| for example gas fees might go up making a tiny transaction
| very expensive, or a currency might fail).
|
| Nobody wants a truly distributed org because it is impossible
| for anything to get done, just as nobody actually wants to
| use a distributed currency because the costs outweigh the
| benefits, and the web we have is distributed enough, though
| of course it has flaws and is in some ways too centralised
| now, but I don't see how web3 as currently sold helps to
| solve that.
|
| The biggest problems currently are around identity (SSO), and
| microtransactions, but neither of those are solved well by
| existing cryptocurrency solutions or things like NFTs.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Opensea is managed by opensea staff
|
| Opensea is just a viewer and tool to interact with
| contracts. If your NFT is removed from opensea it could
| still be interacted with through another platform or a
| platform you make yourself (see notlarvalabs).
|
| E.g the developer of a large NFT platform called hicetnunc
| had a temper tantrum and deleted their entire platform. But
| because it's decentralized another platform (objkt) now
| provides all the same functionality with the same data.
|
| Because of this you can see why there are such passionate
| people either side, a lot to gain but also a lot to lose if
| you've normally profited from owning data.
| grey-area wrote:
| That's the theory, in practice the largest market wins,
| nfts are often urls to a particular service and opensea
| does things like this:
|
| https://blockzeit.com/opensea-nft-marketplace-stops-
| hacker-f...
|
| This is very much controlled by the intermediary (as well
| as the chain it uses).
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| Microtransactions will be solved by Brave/BAT. They have
| the largest user base which is very important for
| negotiating with publishers and advertisers.
| fredley wrote:
| > can not guarantee it will be make available always
|
| True! However I trust the wikimedia foundation, and the fact
| that because it is a valuable dataset there are many copies
| of it. If they really did restrict access, anyone could spin
| up their mirror.
|
| Most of the decentralisation arguments seem to rely on some
| fetishistically absolute version of the world where you
| cannot trust any single person or entity, and crypto/web3 is
| the only reasonable solution if that is true. I, however,
| have more faith in other people, and am fine placing trust--
| to varying degrees--in others.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| That's a great example of decentralization, but expecting
| anything which gains value from being decentralized ala
| Wikipedia to be handled solely or even marginally by
| volunteers is unrealistic.
| 627467 wrote:
| > I, however, have more faith in other people, and am fine
| placing trust--to varying degrees--in others.
|
| That's one perspective, another is: privilege.
| paulgb wrote:
| > some fetishistically absolute version of the world where
| you cannot trust any single person or entity
|
| And even then, there's still trust necessary to the extent
| that web3 things interact with the real world. You can have
| provable on-chain voting in a DAO, but if the DAO owns any
| non-crypto assets, you're trusting a human to execute the
| consensus decision.
| igorkraw wrote:
| ...and society to run the internet you depend on
| throway453sde wrote:
| > I trust the wikimedia foundation
|
| The board members change so it can go wrong.
|
| > ..where you cannot trust any single person..
|
| You are missing the point. Obviously society runs based on
| mutual trust. One can not ignore the fact that a few people
| or group in power can create great damage. Crypto makes it
| possible to create "trust by design" systems so that a
| small group can not do great damage or censor things that
| undermine their power.
| igorkraw wrote:
| No it doesn't. It just creates the illusion of this and
| allows you to build systems with different tradeoffs.
| WaxedChewbacca wrote:
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > not guarantee it will be make available always
|
| Untrue. You can download the entire database _now_ , and
| there are many clones.
| [deleted]
| asimpletune wrote:
| So, yeah, most crypto people don't have the faintest clue how it
| works. And it's kind of weird to embrace this very hyped/vc'd
| tech, while remaining mum on all the already decentralized tech
| that's the bedrock of the internet. And exchanges + crypto is
| basically legacy decentralized web tech + Google/Meta.
|
| But one thing that I do have to say is interesting about the tech
| is embedding smart contracts. This is legitimately interesting
| and novel, and probably the best justification for web3 tech.
| satisfice wrote:
| I am astonished at the adolescent boy level of gee whiz
| rationalization, here. The damning aspects of Web3 are barely
| being mentioned because of the emotive appeal to scary
| corporations controlling you.
|
| Web3 does not solve the problem of being bullied or controlled.
| It makes it worse. You can dislike Facebook, but it is a legal
| entity that the state can hold accountable. Who is held
| accountable in Web3? What recourse does anyone have if things are
| published about them that harm them in Web3? Russia created a
| well-funded agency to troll the web and manipulate public
| opinion. It seems to me they will love Web3.
|
| Entities that will vie to control Web3 will be rich, powerful,
| and better protected from legal moves against them.
|
| We already have a decentralized web. It called the Web. Anyone
| can connect a server to it.
| delegate wrote:
| Web3 is 'the future' if you're invested in crypto.
|
| If you're not (or have been and got out), then it's nothing but
| the delusion of a sect of believers who want to wish it into
| existence.
|
| Being invested fundamentally changes the way people think and
| allows them to come up with any justification for their
| investment. It's not just crypto, but pretty much everything else
| where people expect easy returns at the expense of other people,
| nature, other countries, the future, etc.
|
| There is nothing special or magical about this technology. Just
| because it uses an immutable data structure called 'block chain'
| and cryptographic hashes left and right, doesn't automatically
| make it useful or needed. In fact, the opposite is true due to
| the POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the
| benefit of very few.
|
| The fact that the vast majority of crypto enthusiasts, who have
| absolutely no idea how it works and what it represents, decided
| to part with their fiat in the hope that money grows on Merkle
| trees and pushed the price to astronomical levels does not
| validate the technology itself, but rather is an example of human
| psychology and greed at work.
|
| I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as possible
| before it takes down the whole world economy with it. Or maybe
| that is exactly what must happen so that the world wakes up to
| reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
| djohnston wrote:
| Do you think not being invested and watching the value grow
| 500x over the past few years leaves you embittered and too
| pessimistic to see the value? Or is it only the one side of the
| coin that clouds judgement?
| igorkraw wrote:
| I think it's both sides, but asymmetrically: I'm not being
| paid to not (re-)invest into crypto, and while I might make
| less than the true believers, there's an incentive to not be
| idologically skeptical (unlike some narratives, nothing stops
| banks, notaries, paypal etc. from simply absorbing crypto
| instead of being replaced by it, cryptocurency coding isn't
| fundamentally more difficult than other payment and
| distributed systems).
|
| But if you are invested into crypto, you have a double
| incentive for delusion: you need to convince yourself and
| others that it will grow so it can grow _and for the price
| not too collapse_.All while having to deal with the
| temptation to cash out.
|
| If real value is created, this problem doesn't exist as much.
| And of course, I might be biased and this might be a just so
| story, but I buy it.
| [deleted]
| berberous wrote:
| >> Web3 is 'the future' if you're invested in crypto.
|
| While investors for sure talk and promote their bags, I do
| think this statement of yours is overly cynical and ignores the
| fact that professional educated investors also invested in the
| first place because they truly believe it is the future.
|
| A16Z and USV, for example, could certainly be wrong about web3.
| But they are both some of the best early stage investors of all
| time, and have consistently had a thesis about the future, bet
| on it in face of ridicule, and been proven right in the end.
|
| I frankly think both A16Z and USV genuinely believe in the
| future of this technology, and betting billions on it reflects
| that, and is not some cynical pump n dump scheme.
|
| And given their history of being correct versus the average HN
| commentator, my money is on them being right.
| abeppu wrote:
| But surely one of the hallmarks of VC is to bet on multiple
| possible futures, only a minority of which needs to have a
| large payout? You could coherently believe that the web3
| future is only 15% likely to arrive, but still justify
| investing in it -- and then once you've put in the money of
| _course_ you want it that future to be realized, and so you
| may as well act in ways that support it.
| rvz wrote:
| > There is nothing special or magical about this technology...
|
| I hope this is not the same thing as the _' use rsync'_
| response when Dropbox was introduced. [0]
|
| > I hope the whole crypto delusion crumbles as quickly as
| possible before it takes down the whole world economy with it.
| Or maybe that is exactly what must happen so that the world
| wakes up to reality. Maybe that is the whole point of it.
|
| Right. Let us make a start rather than continuously talking
| about it since it is very difficult for everyone here to ignore
| it and we will see yet another HN post about cryptocurrencies,
| Web 3, etc.
|
| How do we get rid of crypto entirely then? Stop everyone using
| it, shut it down and ban all of it?
|
| EDIT: Good luck attempting to ban cryptocurrencies entirely.
| Either way, the undeniable trend in all of this is going
| towards regulations for cryptocurrencies.
|
| It is not going away and we will still continue to keep talking
| about it and for many on this thread, it will be excruciatingly
| difficult to ignore it.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
| mathnmusic wrote:
| > How do we get rid of crypto entirely then? Stop everyone
| using it, shut it down and ban all of it?
|
| Govts around the world could start treating tokens and NFTs
| as just another kind of security. Bitcoin and Ethereum would
| also qualify. Free speech never allowed anybody to issue
| ownership in projects for future gains without satisfying the
| regulations.
|
| https://www.seclaw.com/what-is-a-security/
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I hope this is not the same thing as the 'use rsync'
| response when Dropbox was introduced.
|
| Because, invariably, everything crypto is "the next big
| thing". And not, you know, Theranos. Or Google Nexus Q. Or
| AT&T's ISIS mobile wallet. Or...
| bluecalm wrote:
| "Just use rsync" have the same problem as "don't use
| Discord". The alternatives are way less convenient, not as
| polished, not as pleasant. Thankfully there is nothing
| convenient, polished or pleasant about using crypto other
| than going around regulation.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I think it's feasible to define "proof of waste" in a way
| that makes it possible to ban it, in the same way and the
| same rationale as you can't sell inefficient vehicle engines
| or lightbulbs.
|
| Anonymous/pseudonymous money, unregulated securities,
| gambling, etc. are already on a collision course with
| regulators who are largely unable to keep up. On the other
| hand, I don't think the problem is _big_ enough to trigger
| massive action yet, it would have to be on the scale of 1MDB.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think 10-15% of the web3 bag is potentially a good idea to
| do what Dropbox did to many parts of society. Constant,
| transparent, ubiquitous tracking of shit. A task no one wants
| to do but causes a lot of friction.
| bena wrote:
| The difference was that "use rsync" was several steps
| specific to Linux that required some knowledge about how it
| all worked.
|
| Vs.
|
| Signing up for Dropbox.
|
| Using any crypto is more akin to the "use rsync" side of
| things as there are several steps you have to perform before
| actually getting to the asset.
|
| Vs.
|
| Paying cash.
|
| I think crypto in general has run into the same problem
| Uber/DoorDash/Airbnb and other similar "disruptor apps" have,
| but much sooner: Every seemingly stupid rule has a reason.
|
| The cab industry operated as it did because it already ran
| into the problems Uber faced. DoorDash is finding out exactly
| why these restaurants did not offer delivery in the first
| place. Airbnb is learning a lot about why the hotel industry
| works as it does.
|
| Crypto/DeFi enthusiasts are learning that maybe a little less
| De would make the Fi more plausible.
| Traster wrote:
| My big problem with crypto at the moment is that 99% of
| normal investors are just using exchanges. It's like we've
| claimed to invent a new technology to replace rsync and it
| really does exist but it's worse than rsync, and everyone who
| thinks they've bought in to the new technology are actually
| buying things from companies that claim to use the new
| technology and do genuinely have the ability to use the new
| technology but _actually_ are using rsync 99.99% of the time.
| Or to put it another way - almost all the transactions are
| actually off-chain.
| gghhzzgghhzz wrote:
| indeed. the promised advantages include de-centralisation,
| on-chain, and no big financial institutions taking a cut or
| manipulating rates.
|
| yet to practically trade in it you are back to
| centralisation, off-chain, and the exchanges taking a cut
| and manipulating rates.
|
| and if it made any sense to use it as an actual currency,
| e.g. to buy coffee, then you are back to centralisation,
| off-chain, and wallet providers taking a cut.
| Karellen wrote:
| Another interesting comparison is git and GitHub.
|
| We invented a new technology to replace
| CVS/Subversion/SourceSafe/$CENTRALISED_VCS, and it really
| does exist, and it's better than all of those old systems
| partly because it really is decentralised, and it's also
| based on crypto(graphic) primitives, but 99% of the people
| who think they've bought into it are actually just using
| another centralised service all over again. Or to put it
| another way - when GitHub goes down a disturbingly high
| proportion of a) git users are unable to get any work done
| at all, and b) build systems just break.
|
| (Ok, git didn't invent the DVCS. But it was better enough
| on a number of important axes than those that came before
| it - including "being used by a high-profile project" -
| that you can say that it made DVCSs happen.)
| namdnay wrote:
| using git with github is still a DVCS. You can branch,
| commit, merge, whatever without access to the central
| repository. None of that was possible with the classic
| VCS - if the central server went down, you were stuck
| with your current working copy, or copying a colleague's
| state on removable media
| roenxi wrote:
| That doesn't necessarily change how exciting the tech is.
| The exchanges are working in an asset with known,
| predictable and locked-in inflation. 3rd parties ( _cough
| the US cough_ ) cannot weaponize that asset against the
| traders. Inter-exchange transfers of wealth are relatively
| quick and trustworthy, even across borders without trusting
| any other exchange.
|
| That is a pretty substantial change from any existing
| asset. It isn't all sunshine and roses, but there are a
| combination of properties here that never existed before.
| gghhzzgghhzz wrote:
| there's no regulation, auditing or government backed
| guarantees / insurance on the exchanges.
|
| so what happens when there is a run on an exchange, and
| it turns out that it does not hold the assets that it has
| on its books?
| bleachedsleet wrote:
| > there's no regulation, auditing or government backed
| guarantees / insurance on the exchanges.
|
| I consider this a feature, not a bug.
| roenxi wrote:
| People losing all their money (in an entirely foreseeable
| way) is a tragedy. But it isn't new, that has been a show
| on repeat for millennia. This time, at least the losses
| will be in something new.
|
| Much like how the first dot com bubble doesn't change the
| transformative nature of the internet, a massive crash in
| crypto isn't going to be the end of this story. We might
| outlive Bitcoin, but no-one alive today will outlive
| cryptocurrencies. The only real question is how much
| change they will cause.
| tim333 wrote:
| Depends which exchange - some are US regulated eg.
| Coinbase, Kraken.
| octopoc wrote:
| It's better for society than our current banking system,
| because the government considers our current system "too
| big to fail," so banks know that the government will bail
| them out if things get too bad, and the banks engage in
| risky behavior accordingly.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Plenty of banks went bankrupt or were acquired, so it's
| not quite true that the government will just bail out
| failed actors.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banks_acquired_or_b
| ank...
|
| And of course the financial system as a whole is "too big
| to fail", but that would be true regardless of the
| implementation. Are you saying that if we switch to
| crypto then suddenly the financial system failing is OK?
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| That will always be true. Even with a 100% crypto world
| governments can use taxes/reserves/bonds/tariffs to prop
| up / bail out failing companies.
|
| They just wouldn't be able to use quantitative easing
| (easily - i.e. without global consensus) to do it.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Why not? Tether showed that quantative easing works just
| fine in cryptoland.
| reese_john wrote:
| Yes but banks are subject to a wide array of regulations,
| liquidity requirements and frequent third-party audits.
| And then, in crypto, you have Tether, whose reserves
| claims are dubious at best
| tome wrote:
| > an asset with known, predictable and locked-in
| inflation
|
| What's your definition of inflation, because by my
| definition Bitcoin experienced more than 100% inflation
| during this year, since which time it has experienced
| roughly 30% deflation.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Eyeballing the numbers on Coingecko DEXs seem to have a lot
| more than 1% of the volume (and this has been steadily
| growing). Further, most of web3 isn't about payments and
| where people invest and trade in them has little to do with
| whether those projects have potential.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Dropbox did the same thing rsync did but made it so simple
| that my grandma who barely understands the difference between
| single and double click could use it. There's a clear value
| proposition there.
|
| web3 so far mostly makes things more complicated. My grandma
| (still going strong) is not going to figure it out.
| timdaub wrote:
| For fairness then I think we should consider that everyone that
| is anti web3 and has no crypto might have too much Google and
| FB stock according to your logic?
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Or simply sour grapes. He is right that your investments
| cloud your thinking, but maybe he doesn't have enough
| experience to understand that the desire to see the price go
| down against something you decided to never buy, or recently
| sold, is driven by the same bias.
| recursive wrote:
| I stick to the index funds. I have no idea how web3
| shenanigans affect me. I still haven't seen a
| comprehensible use case for it.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| All good reasons not to get involved. But I don't think
| that's as cogent an argument to convince others despite
| it being used as such on this board quite often.
| delegate wrote:
| For context, I've been an early bitcoin core contributor
| and paid 7.5 btc for this old laptop. In all fairness, I've
| only profited from btc and am still invested, but it
| doesn't change the conclusions I've had to accept.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| why? it's not a binary choice
| igorkraw wrote:
| Google and Facebook will simply adopt web3 if it takes off
| (see Facebooks existing attempts). So maybe, but less so
| pjc50 wrote:
| Exactly. Recentralisation is under-appreciated by the
| decentralists; decentralisation is not a magic dust, and
| almost all decentralised services are made more convenient
| by intermediaries .. who will tend to consolidate. See e.g.
| OpenSea for NFTs.
| timdaub wrote:
| If you've been following crypto currencies' history,
| you'll be aware that weakly decentralized (read:
| centralized) attempts always fall prey to decentralized
| protocols. The underlying principle is that a process
| controlled by nobody is more anti-fragile than one
| directly controlled by a few. Control is a liability.
|
| Over the long term, protocols outcompete hosted services.
| E.g. Automated market makers will be much longer around
| than any centralized exchange like e.g. Coinbase.
| brokensegue wrote:
| > Over the long term, protocols outcompete hosted service
|
| The exact opposite happened with email
| malermeister wrote:
| Both Google and FB have a clear value prop. Web3 and crypto
| don't, which is exactly what the poster was criticizing.
| jakupovic wrote:
| They don't according to you and the author, but others
| think it does have value, which makes your point moot also.
| emn13 wrote:
| People say that, but almost everything brought forward
| has non-crypto equivalents that are likely superior, and
| don't involve the opportunity cost of burning large
| amounts of fossil fuel, and redirecting huge amounts of
| valuable compute resources towards merely sustaining it.
|
| Maybe someday some clever smart contract thing will
| really take off; and maybe someday some non-PoW coin will
| really matter, and maybe one day all the stabilizing
| regulatory infrastructure will be replicated for that
| hypothetical coin. It could happen. But it hasn't
| happened yet; so far it looks more like a ponzi scheme.
| And even if the tech really does evolve into something
| truly valuable, the route to that promised land could
| still have some surprising ups and downs, and if coins
| really continue growing, real-world economic pains along
| the way. Also - the tech behind it all isn't the same
| thing as the specific instantiation of todays coins. Even
| if the tech finds a niche, todays coins could still turn
| out to be a ponzi scheme.
| jakupovic wrote:
| Thanks for describing how web3 will succeed that's not
| based on "number go up"
| timdaub wrote:
| It's because you're comparing a company to a category.
|
| If I were to say that Coinbase and Uniswap have a clear
| value prop but AI doesn't, it also wouldn't make much sense
| as I'm not comparing apples to apples.
| malermeister wrote:
| Parent made that comparison, not I.
| timdaub wrote:
| I'm the author of the parent comment and I haven't
| compared FB to e.g. a category like web3. Re-read it. I
| pointed out the unfairness of assuming that "everyone
| arguing for web3 is an investor" while simultaneously
| ignoring that anyone opposed to those ideas may have
| investment-bias too.
|
| E.g. HN is known for being anti-crypto but suspects
| anyone pro crypto to be a crypto-invested shill.
|
| But then at the same time I think it must be considered
| that e.g. anyone being anti-crypto also has a stake or
| interest in non-crypto related endeavors. I doubt there
| are people on here without some form of stake simply
| arguing for "the universal truth".
| echopurity wrote:
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| For all your trivia recitations you failed on a crucial point.
|
| > POW being a race to burn as much (mostly) coal for the
| benefit of very few.
|
| POW is a consensus mechanism that secures the entire Bitcoin
| network. At times that has represented over one trillion USD
| worth of value. The benefit of Bitcoin's consensus is to all
| the money locked up in it, without it, or even if the profit to
| hack Bitcoin were only slightly marginal, the whole thing would
| fall apart, almost one trillion in value.
|
| It is not for the very few that consensus mechanisms reward, it
| is for the whole network (in the ideal case). So in a way, when
| Bitcoin is driven to astronomical prices, and the incentive to
| break into it becomes irresistible to the most powerful people
| in the world yet they still cannot accomplish it, it does
| validate the technology.
| delegate wrote:
| The trillion dollars is a dream, it's not real.. Fugazzi.
|
| Once the price starts falling, the scared 'investors' will
| get rid of it at any price to reduce loss. The network won't
| handle the load, so the price will drop even more. It
| happened before with BTC, where the 'billions' evaporated in
| hours, it will happen to the 'trillions'.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| That was not point. I feel it was fairly clear: Its not a
| dream when the hackers could turn it into 'real' money,
| which they easily could have (not all of it, but enough).
| But they couldn't crack into the pot despite the insane
| amount of honey right in front of them.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| And the price will go up again after a great buying
| opportunity for the people who see the value of the
| technology. As has happened before.
| lottin wrote:
| What value do you think people see in Dogecoin, for
| example?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Value resides where people _believe_ it resides, and if
| 2021 has shown one thing, it is that the power of memes
| is practically infinite.
|
| That being said, I don't own Dogecoin and my previous
| comment was mainly in reference to btc and eth.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Funnily enough Dogecoin started as something completely
| antithetical to all the things about web3 'culture' HN
| hates the most. It was something to make fun of the
| venture capitalists wowing novices with buzzwords to part
| them from their money. I would say its now obviously
| overvalued considering the amount of money which flows
| there rather than to projects making real innovations.
| But then again, how do price a meme anyways?
| pjc50 wrote:
| No sane attacker attacks the strong point. They go for the
| weak points. https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/crypto-
| platform-suffers-log...
|
| (I wonder what happens if attacks are ever found against
| SHA-256 as they were for SHA-1?)
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| The article you linked refers to a centralized service
| being hacked to steal data - truly only related to crypto
| network security superficially.
|
| SHA-1 exploits were found by researchers, if SHA-256 had
| the same forewarning protocols would initiate an emergency
| fork with a more secure hash function.
| realce wrote:
| My most-paranoid self thinks that crypto is basically a
| giant cracking algo being tested out.
| blhack wrote:
| Here's a good analogy for crypto that I think helps close the
| loop on people who don't seem to want to understand it.
|
| If I have a tungsten cube sitting on my table, it is
| theoretically possible that I could track that tungsten cube
| backwards through time. It's sitting on my desk now, but before
| that it was in a box on a UPS truck, before that in a foundry
| somewhere, before that it was in the earth, before that the
| elements were in a supernova which themselves could be traced
| back all of the way to the origin of the universe.
|
| So the fact of the cube sitting on my desk is really just an
| expression of all of the events _leading_ to it sitting on my
| desk, and this isn 't something that can be fabricated no matter
| how much authority you have (you could like, but the universe
| would know it as a lie).
|
| Blockchain is _that_. I have some value in my wallet, but that
| value can be traced all of the way back through various
| transactions to when it was mined /minted/whatever, and actually
| the _entirety_ of the various crypto ecosystem could be traced
| back to, literally, the genesis block.
|
| That is a Very Big Deal. It means that the block chains are
| internally consistent universes of their own, with no central
| authority. That's a big deal for gaming, for ownership proxies
| (like NFTs), for currency, and for really anything else that
| exists within our own universe.
|
| To say it in a somewhat flowery way: our own universe is a
| physical blockchain.
| qeternity wrote:
| You write this as if this is profound, or otherwise not
| understood by the HN audience.
|
| What you're describing is not a blockchain. You've described
| time. Every path dependent process is not a blockchain.
| timdaub wrote:
| > A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way
| more storage and compute, doesn't have customer support, etc.
|
| Please Mr Albert Wenger. You are a VC and not a technical expert
| on what is a database or a blockchain.
|
| It makes absolutely no sense to compare a database to a
| blockchain. These things are completely different and have
| entirely nothing in common except that they persist data. You
| wouldn't compare a file to a database to make a point, would you?
| Also, you don't have the authority anyways to make that
| comparison as I doubt you know the technical details that
| differentiate a database from a blockchain.
|
| Databases aren't blockchains and blockchains aren't databases.
| Stop comparing them for your ignorance's sake.
| weego wrote:
| Yes, he's talking about them at the level of abstraction that
| is 'things that persist data'
|
| _You wouldn 't compare a file to a database to make a point,
| would you?_
|
| If the comparison fitted the abstraction level the conversation
| was at, absolutely.
|
| For most purposes that have ever been implemented on a
| blockchain, a database of some kind would just be a far
| superior persistance backend.
|
| The mistake is thinking that interesting underlying technology
| gives something de facto justification for existing in 'user'
| space when it does not.
| timdaub wrote:
| For me it's just cringe. Imagine a VC would start selling
| hash trees to programmers. That's the feeling that his blog
| post invokes.
| mad182 wrote:
| File system is a database. Spreadsheet is a database. And
| surely blockchain is also a database.
| timdaub wrote:
| I think you should adhere to the HN guidelines and not make
| such unsubstantiated claims.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > When (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee invented the HyperText Transfer
| Protocol (HTTP) he unleashed what we now think of as
| permissionless publishing.
|
| 1. Retconning
|
| 2. As always, web3 and crypto is the next WWW, and the next
| Internet, and the next car, and the next wheel. Even though
| literally all signs are pointing to it being the next Juicero or
| the next Enron.
|
| > We also need permissionless data. Why do we need this? Because
| otherwise we are left with a few large corporations ... We of
| course know where this winds up and that's why pretty much
| everyone hates their cable company and their electric utility.
|
| That's quite a logic leap. We need permissionless data because
| that's why everyone hates their cable company.
|
| > prior to the Bitcoin Paper we literally didn't know how to have
| permissionless.
|
| 1. We did.
|
| 2. Retconning yet again. Bticoin paper is literally this:
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow
| online payments to be sent directly from one party to another
| without going through a financial institution.
|
| We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a
| peer-to-peer network.
|
| --- end quote ---
|
| The etire paper mentions permissions or permissionless exactly
| zero times.
|
| > It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is.
|
| Yes, you have. Yoi have just significantly overstated how big it
| is.
|
| > As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind
| of regulation, provide
|
| Ah yes, regulations. Which, if I remember from just a few
| paragraphs above "then leads us to all sort of regulatory
| contortions aimed at rectifying the power imbalance but in
| practice mostly cementing it. "
|
| > And if widely adopted Web3/crypto technology will also start to
| improve along other dimensions. It will become faster and more
| efficient.
|
| And that will surely happen just because you say it will happen.
| Also because innovation I guess?
|
| > And much like the PC was a platform for innovation that never
| happened on mainframes or mini computers, Web3 will be a platform
| for innovation that would never come from Facebook, Amazon,
| Google, etc.
|
| Innovation never came from Juicero either. Somehow, your web3 is
| surely the next Internet, and not the myriad of failed
| "innovations".
| Ygg2 wrote:
| To add to the list of complaints.
|
| > No single entity or small group of entities controls it
|
| In practice they will. The moment +50% of miners agrees on any
| transaction, regardless of it happening - it will happen. So
| having +50% of Bitcoin miners means you control the Bitcoin
| market. And we're back to square one.
|
| Edit: Fine they only control current transactions, but forking
| as a solution to this implies the current network won't be able
| to just join and takeover a new bitcoin fork. Which is highly
| suspect.
| dmitriid wrote:
| There's also the case of many "scalable protocols to fix
| blockchains" relying on people with a lot of cash to run the
| nodes.
|
| And things like DAOs replacing "single entities or small
| group of entities" with the rule of the mob, which is just as
| scary.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| This is inaccurate, especially in the case of Bitcoin where
| the blockchain is relatively small (around 300-400gbs). Hash
| majority has zero influence on transaction validity. Invalid
| transactions are never accepted by the vanilla software, and
| those running nodes have no reason to accept them. Even if
| 99% of the network accepts an invalid transaction, the
| network will simply fork into an obviously invalid state and
| a valid state. Users will simply choose the one without foul
| play, and the majority of Bitcoin holders, even those who
| don't run nodes, will know which fork is valid and simply
| price the invalid fork at $0.
|
| You are confusing a 51% attack, or a block re-org attack,
| with complete control over the network, which it does not
| grant.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| So?
|
| They would be able to double spend and control any future
| transacations.
|
| At that point. Blockchain reinvented Bank with extra steps,
| that emits enough CO2 to replace Sweden.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| So what if you are incorrect? Is that what you mean to
| say?
|
| What about double spending allows miners to control all
| future transactions afterwards? Double spending is of
| course undesirable but its hard to imagine its profitable
| to organize such an attack when it immediately begins
| burning money once word gets out, and if it didn't it
| would devalue the miners' own infrastructure when people
| lose faith in the currency.
|
| You can dream up many a scheme where it can happen, and
| renting hash is certainly a problem down the road for
| many coins, but you're exaggerated presentation of the
| 51% attack is clearly flawed and stemming from your
| simple understanding how the network reaches consensus.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| If you own 51% or more of net you may double spend as
| much as you like. Essentially you get to print money for
| yourself, while screwing over someone.
|
| Sure, you might fork it, but nothing prevents previous
| 51% mining rigs from taking over the fork.
|
| Bitcoin like any p2p tech relies on concensus. Which is
| fine when it comes to torrents, less fine when it comes
| to online games, and downright catastrophic when it comes
| to money.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| No, you do not get to print money. The value of Bitcoin,
| for example, is what people are willing to trade it for.
| You cannot stealthily sustain a 51% attack and will
| therefore be devaluing your equipment (you are the most
| invested person in the network likely by far).
|
| There are cases where this isn't true. If you are able to
| rent the hashpower then you can 51% attack without
| worrying about equipment devaluation; if there is an
| equally valuable coin which uses the same hash function
| you could migrate to it after. These are somewhat
| unlikely; Why would one ever rent out 51% hash? Gaining
| 51% hashpower is extremely expensive and relies on the
| network community not reacting to it.
|
| But lets say the unlikely happened. If I hold Bitcoin and
| I understand that someone holds 51% hashpower by credible
| reports of malicious re-orgs, I simply do not send. At
| this point I would wrap my tokens onto another blockchain
| if I needed to send them and wait for a solution. Its
| certainly not catastrophic, and the majority of people on
| the network will not lose their coins. The community
| reaction greatly hinders profitability of an attack. Its
| also very unlikely - not a significant concern, but also
| not an unsolvable problem should it become one.
|
| Hope that clears things up for you.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| The concepts and ideas about web3 are interesting, but the
| comparisons with how web1 and web2 came to be are ludicrous. Both
| were fueled by real needs of real people and companies, and came
| to prominence slowly as people figured them out. It took a long
| time before it was profitable and money came into the picture.
|
| Lee's web1 started in universities and it took years until people
| believed in it. Web2 came slowly as companies wanted to let their
| users interact more with their websites. I guess *AMP software
| was a major turning point in this, open source and available to
| everyone. You can be a part of web2 and never even know the name
| of a single VC.
|
| What is happening right now is the absolute opposite. Money is at
| the very center of the discussion to begin with. Don't get me
| wrong, I'm not a socialist, but I understand that a revolution
| such as web1 or 2 cannot be steered by money. If it happens (or
| when it happens I guess) it is probably going to be in a
| completely different way as what is being discussed on Twitter
| today.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| What I'm trying to figure out about blockchain in general is how
| people think it will avoid the inevitable consolidation that
| efficient economies drive towards. A few examples:
|
| - In the early days of the automobile there were hundreds of car
| companies. Now there are essentially what, 10 worldwide?
|
| - In the early days of personal computing there were hundreds of
| competing platforms, PC brands, etc. Now there are essentially
| what, 10 worldwide?
|
| - In the early days of the internet there were hundreds
| (thousands?) of dial-up and last mile internet providers
| (sometimes literally some person in your neighborhood with a T1
| and modems in a garage). Now there are what, 10 in the US?
|
| - In the early days of the internet there were hundreds of web
| hosting companies, e-mail providers, etc. Now almost all of the
| internet runs on what, three?
|
| These examples go on and on (mobile devices, cell providers,
| pretty much anything and everything).
|
| Point being it's extremely unlikely (to me) that as the immutable
| blockchain ledgers all of this is built on grow endlessly
| (storage, compute, bandwidth, etc) and attempt to scale to any
| meaningful application, transaction rate, etc beyond the toy
| level it's at now "decentralized" will almost certainly turn into
| a handful of power players that can bring the advantages offered
| by massive economies of scale.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I'm not a web3 evangelist but I feel the need to say, all of
| these examples are the result of incentives. Dig into "theory
| of the firm" it is a very poorly yet somewhat understood set of
| principles. If you can construct a system with incentives that
| make consolidation more costly you can by and large prevent it
| where you want to prevent it. Of course, there are still things
| that are more efficient after consolidation, there are things
| you wouldn't want to disincentivize consolidation in, and
| carefully designing incentives is a lot like preventing
| security exploits: you have to think of everything to prevent
| an unwanted outcome, but all you have to do is miss one thing
| and you get unwanted outcomes.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I don't agree with some of your examples but setting that
| aside, all of what you mentioned are economic products and
| services. Crypto is neither. Without crypto you have cash,
| credit card, debit card, prepaid card, gift card, paypal,
| ecash, applepay, western union, money gram, epay and a myriad
| of other non-crypto payment methods that are based on central
| bank currency. They did not consolidate. Or look at currencies
| in general, every country has one by design.
|
| Also decentralized does not mean that there are no hubs where
| decisins and power is concentrated, it simply means there is no
| one center. Much like how people say the US is democratic
| because you have two parties to choose from instead of just one
| like China. I do think perect decentalization is egalitarian in
| that all important decisions are 51% majority consensus with
| every vote having equal weight. However most practical
| decentralized systems are distributed with the capacity to be
| fully decentralized.
|
| Crypto currencies that will last long term will reflect a
| demand for specific payment needs. To use your example, we have
| lesser number of PC makers because they all make similar
| varieties of PCs. With payment systems you have ACH,SWIFT,card
| payment (instant), cash (anonymous),etc... there will be
| cryptocurrencies that will reflect popular payment and
| speculative investment needs for the long term.
|
| Heck, I would even speculate in a crypto lottery!
| kkielhofner wrote:
| I'm aware I'm talking very broadly and generally about the
| "majority" and in many cases "overwhelming majority" of these
| cases. I know some of my examples are hyperbolic and a little
| "loose". I've been meaning to research and document actual
| numbers and examples to either validate or invalidate my
| take. Now that I'm really thinking about it because of your
| thoughtful reply I just might!
|
| That said I think banking and payments are further examples.
| The vast, vast majority of banking and payment activity
| happens through a relatively tiny number of banks and payment
| processing networks. The US dollar is used officially and
| unofficially in many other countries. Europe went to the
| Euro. As I understand it much of worldwide settlement
| internationally happens in the US dollar which is also more-
| or-less the official worldwide reserve currency.
|
| Bitcoin currently does about 500k transactions/day worldwide
| (as best as I can tell). That's probably roughly the number
| of daily transactions for a mid-sized US city. At a future
| point in time where a significant number of people are
| transacting in cryptocurrency multiple times per day an
| immutable blockchain ledger with no upper bound on growth
| will swell to astronomical size when a significant number of
| people are transacting with it multiple times per day.
|
| Now your $3 Starbucks purchase is recorded for eternity and
| replicated across hundreds or thousands of nodes?
| badrabbit wrote:
| > The vast, vast majority of banking and payment activity
| happens through a relatively tiny number of banks and
| payment processing networks.
|
| Not by choice of merchants or connsumers, does not reflect
| demand but incentives
|
| > The US dollar is used officially and unofficially in many
| other countries.
|
| Kind if like BTC?
|
| > Now your $3 Starbucks purchase is recorded for eternity
| and replicated across hundreds or thousands of nodes?
|
| Great point, hence the demand there created zcash and
| monero. I would say BTC is akin to ACH and SWIFT not credit
| cards or cash payment.
|
| Whatever the limits of exiting currencies is, it only opens
| up room for demand. Heck, you can even have central bank
| crypto (as JPM and China are trying).
|
| There is hardly anything new about crypto other than
| specifics of implementation. BTC does not define or reflect
| upon all crypto. Currency is not a new concept, using a
| distributed ledger is new-ish and using proof of work,
| bandwidth, storage,etc... while these backing value stores
| are new, having precious metals, livestock, land, etc... as
| a backing value store is not that different, crypto is just
| an adaptation of having something difficult to obtain or of
| value to others and using it as a value store.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| My example of the $3 Starbucks purchase is not specific
| to BTC and applies to every distributed immutable ledger
| technology I've seen. I use Bitcoin because it's the most
| ubiquitous but generally these same statements and data
| apply to every cryptocurrency (just at different scale).
| From the Bitcoin node documentation:
|
| "It's common for full nodes on high-speed connections to
| use 200 gigabytes upload or more a month. Download usage
| is around 20 gigabytes a month, plus around an additional
| 340 gigabytes the first time you start your node."
|
| There are roughly 1 billion credit card transactions per
| day. There are currently 500k Bitcoin transactions per
| day.That's 2000x for credit cards alone. Bitcoin
| transactions are at a more or less all time high and it's
| still a TINY number. Yet, the full ledger is at least
| 340GB with 20GB added each month. With simple math (and
| current tech) if credit cards were Bitcoin the ledger
| would be 6.8 petabytes. Back to my comment about it only
| being available to well funded large players
| eventually...
|
| In terms of everything from energy consumption, supply
| chain, manufacturing resources, raw minerals etc there
| are roughly 13,000 bitcoin nodes online. That's 13,000
| nodes using 340GB of storage each with total storage use
| at 4.42 petabytes. If there were still only 13,000 nodes
| at credit card scale the global storage resources alone
| would be 88.4 exabytes.
|
| At 500k transactions/day some estimates put Bitcoin's
| global energy usage at seven times higher than all of
| Google. Bitcoin is a mid-size US cities worth of ledger
| activity while Google gets 3.5 billion searches per day
| alone. That's not even considering their countless other
| products - GCP, etc, etc.
|
| Blockchain advocates always like to point out the energy
| consumed by the financial system and that's fair.
| However, if you think it's absolutely vital that the
| record of your $3 Starbucks purchase needs to be
| accessible to your great-great-great grandchildren 13,000
| times over I think we're just going to have a fundamental
| disagreement about that.
| madrox wrote:
| I'm slowly coming around to web3 as an idea after giving it a lot
| of thought. For me, MMOs are a great boostrap for thinking about
| this. People pay real money for in-game items and
| currency...usually from the developer, but web3 enables players
| to buy/sell directly (and allowing this can be a product draw,
| much like APIs were for Twitter). Web3 technologies can enable an
| ecosystem for this without a bunch of bespoke work that likely
| isn't core to what a business is trying to achieve.
|
| However, I don't see it as a "web3 all the things" like web2 was,
| but as a set of protocols for certain kinds of behavior we're
| beginning to see online more and more. We'd probably add it in
| without thought (like we did Facebook's share buttons 10 years
| ago) if the tech weren't so complicated and the energy concerns
| so pernicious.
|
| A lot of the success will come down to how successful everyone is
| at standardizing on schemas. In a decentralized world, I'm
| skeptical of that working out better than it did for web2, but I
| wish everyone luck.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > but web3 enables players to buy/sell directly (and allowing
| this can be a product draw, much like APIs were for Twitter).
| Web3 technologies can enable an ecosystem for this without a
| bunch of bespoke work that likely isn't core to what a business
| is trying to achieve.
|
| I'm old enough to remember that in the ancient history of just
| 10 years ago Diablo III was released with an auction house that
| let people buy and sell items from other players for real
| money.
|
| I'm also old anough to remember that in the ancient history of
| just 7 years ago it was removed from the game and I also am old
| enough to remember the reasons.
|
| Having players trade in-game items is not as good a proposition
| for "what a business is trying to achieve" as you think it is.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 9 years ago Valve launched Steam Community Market. Still
| running still making them stupid amounts of money and
| providing some value to consumers.
|
| I see no reason why this blockchainless centralized solution
| couldn't be replicated by anyone else in industry... No need
| for NFTs. Just do it...
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| It's likely because you can make more money by holding more
| control over the supply. Even users of the Steam Market
| would scoff a bit at it - they would rather have it be
| without taxes and exchangeable for real money. I wonder if
| there is a web3 solution already in place which could
| achieve that...
| Ekaros wrote:
| Is there feeless web3? If there were no taxes, how would
| the people running it make money?
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| That's my mistake - indeed nothing is free, but when the
| protocol is open source and interchangeable the market
| will settle on a sustainable marketplace which users
| prefer the most; price will of course play a role in
| that. Point being I'm not sure Steam is simply
| compensating their database operations with their
| marketplace tax, and that they have no competition for
| market making their own items.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| With all due respect, the point of all these crypto buzzwords
| is to forgo what's 'good' for [centralized] businesses in
| favor of what users want. I can imagine the vast majority of
| Diablo players (assuming the market was ran legitimately)
| would prefer to still have the market, while Blizzard
| discovered they could make more money closing it. A high
| ideal (to me) for web3 is that users can uphold the system
| they want and be compensated for doing so at the same time.
|
| While the web3 example still features a creator and early
| investors who may make the most money, users will prefer the
| market which promises to stay up via its contract code. We
| may be a long way from enough users understanding this to
| influence developers, and it may never reach that perfectly,
| but that's the direction web3 can hopefully push things.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > the point of all these crypto buzzwords is to forgo
| what's 'good' for [centralized] businesses in favor of what
| users want.
|
| The point I was replying to was literally this: "Web3
| technologies can enable an ecosystem for this without a
| bunch of bespoke work that likely isn't core to what a
| business is trying to achieve."
|
| The core business can actually be _hurt_ by unchecked
| trading of items.
|
| > I can imagine the vast majority of Diablo players
| (assuming the market was ran legitimately) would prefer to
| still have the market
|
| Why don't you go and ask the vast majority of Diablo
| players before making these assumptions?
|
| > We may be a long way from enough users understanding this
| to influence developers,
|
| How do you "influence developers" by trading some items
| outside the core of what the developers are building?
|
| BTW, building tradable items can and usually is still
| outside the core of what business is building.
|
| > but that's the direction web3 can hopefully push things.
|
| Ah yes, the hope that web3 may push towards unchecked
| trading of meaningless items (meaningless outside the
| game/business in question) that actually ruins the core
| game experience.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| > The core business can actually be hurt by unchecked
| trading of items.
|
| Again, that's the point. Its obvious centralized market
| makers only make money when they control the market and
| limit market freedom, which is why its easy to imagine
| the players in general would prefer to avoid such a
| tax/manipulation/centralizing forces.
|
| > How do you "influence developers" by trading some items
| outside the core of what the developers are building?
|
| By placing personal value in systems that give users more
| freedom and assurance of the protocols they initially
| bought into. When people can understand that that is what
| they are being offered with a 'web3' approach, they can
| influence developers to build what's most demanded, i.e.
| basic economics.
|
| > Ah yes, the hope that web3 may push towards unchecked
| trading of meaningless items (meaningless outside the
| game/business in question) that actually ruins the core
| game experience.
|
| Ahh so Diablo items are meaningless now? Maybe to you,
| but certainly not to many other players as you've
| demonstrated. What about decentralized exchange protocols
| is unchecked? Its as safe as the blockchain itself -
| perhaps you are thinking of government regulations.
| alex_young wrote:
| The author makes a great case for creating protocols such as http
| and xmpp and the like, which as protocols, are decentralized
| already.
|
| Why add magic number guessing for financial gain to something
| like a photo sharing platform?
|
| Maybe your answer is micro transactions, but then how do you
| protect consumers from fraud and abuse with reversibility and
| dispute resolution? This seems like a feature and not a bug of
| our current financial system.
|
| Things like Patreon and Kickstarter exist already and seem to do
| a fairly good job of this. Why do we need all of the downsides of
| cryptocurrency to do something that already works well for
| billions of people?
| k__ wrote:
| How many people use MANGA services despite open protocols
| allowing to build open things?
|
| I'd say, protocols being open isn't enough. Something seems to
| be missing, otherwise centralized services wouldn't have won.
| qeternity wrote:
| > Maybe your answer is micro transactions
|
| Micro transactions have never and will never work and the
| reason has nothing to do with technology. There is a mental
| cost to assessing a purchase value, and that cost is relatively
| fixed. People don't want to go around having to think "oh
| should I pay 25 cents for this? how many other 25 cent
| transactions have I made this month and what is my budget?"
| They would rather make one decision to pay $10/mo and consume
| as much as they want.
| enisdenjo wrote:
| I think people don't care enough about "I am the true origin"
| internet. Web3 is, IMHO, a waste of time.
|
| At the end of the day, an internet server will (and should) be
| managed by a single entity (person or corporation). Why? Well,
| why not? Why should _I_ host _your_ website (IPFS)? Just so that
| some granny with a laptop can cryptographically prove it's yours
| as originally intended?
|
| For example, I personally don't care what FB (now Meta) does with
| my data - my likes aid in teaching an algorithm to understand
| humanity better than humans themselves? That's fucking awesome!
|
| How would Web3 change this even?
|
| There'll always be a need in understanding people in ways no one
| can imagine yet, and to do so, someone has to leverage your data
| in ways you might not like (mostly because you don't understand
| the need, or you're just a sheep in a herd screaming "that's
| mine!"). This is inevitable.
|
| P.S. I am still struggling to understand Web3, please bear with
| me and my rant.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Not commenting on TFA's content but... It's using:
| text-align: justify; hypens: auto;
|
| That is, IMO, underrated. I'm reading this on a M1 MacBook Air:
| maybe at "retina" pixel density we can, at last, use _text-align:
| justify_ and have pages looking (nearly) as nice as book pages.
|
| I'm not going to force justification for people on small devices
| (it looks bad on these) but it sure is pleasant to me on a high-
| density, kinda large, screen.
| rsynnott wrote:
| A constant crypto-person refrain seems to be, essentially,
| "technology X was quite bad, yet hyped, at first (there is a
| tendency to overstate the badness), and then took over the world,
| therefore crypto-stuff, which is quite bad, yet hyped, will
| naturally also take over the world."
|
| Counterpoint: remember 3D TVs? Or those chatbot things that
| briefly received all the VC money a few years back?
| miles7 wrote:
| I have a dumb question that keeps nagging me, and wonder if
| someone here has a good answer. What does Web3 necessarily have
| to do with the web? Couldn't an iOS app which uses blockchain
| technology as a decentralized database be just as good an example
| of what Web3 is trying to achieve? Or a technically oriented
| command line app for finance using a blockchain which does not
| involve a web browser?
|
| Are Web3 people just using "web" as a stand-in for the internet?
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| > Couldn't an iOS app which uses blockchain technology as a
| decentralized database be just as good an example of what Web3
| is trying to achieve?
|
| Until Tim decides to wave his hand and shut it down. Same thing
| with a hosted website. But developers could distribute the web
| app as html and then users run it locally. It connects to the
| blockchain and submits transactions.
|
| > Or a technically oriented command line app for finance using
| a blockchain which does not involve a web browser?
|
| Interacting with smart contracts does not require a web
| browser.
| acdha wrote:
| Cryptocurrency has no value beyond what someone is currently
| willing to pay you for it and blockchain networks are expensive
| always-on distributed systems which require payment in other
| currencies. That requires a constant stream of new buyers, and
| the combination of limited usefulness and mounting bad
| reputation was starting to cut into it.
|
| "web3" is the rebranding campaign which the large holders came
| up with to try to drive demand.
| vmception wrote:
| A novel platform that can't block its users from deploying on it,
| or commerce, and people have trouble seeing some value in that?
|
| Even the somewhat centralized platforms have so much high speed
| commerce on them that they don't disrupt anyone. Even people that
| quickly exit to the bridges are not stopped and couldn't be, on
| the centralized-ish ones.
|
| That's a lot of alpha and value extraction to miss. Especially if
| you invest in the bridge :)
|
| Don't worry you'll read about it late, in 2030, ngmi
| lottin wrote:
| > Even the somewhat centralized platforms have so much high
| speed commerce on them that they don't disrupt anyone. Even
| people that quickly exit to the bridges are not stopped and
| couldn't be, on the centralized-ish ones.
|
| What do you mean by "high speed commerce" and "people that exit
| to the bridges"? Why do you talk in riddles?
| vmception wrote:
| There is lots of trading, borrowing, arbitraging, building
| and releasing new products, marketplaces. Thats the commerce,
| a lot of it is high speed.
|
| Bridges are the technologies that move assets between
| blockchains, so because there are trillions of dollars of
| assets in this ecosystem already, they dont rely on the
| exchanges to move fiat in and out anymore, they rely on the
| bridges to move other assets to other blockchains. There
| usually is a service fee to the bridge operator. It is
| lucrative.
|
| > riddles?
|
| I'm not here to explain, I'm just using the terms as they
| are. If people are stuck in 2017 or earlier with their older
| skeptics arguments, then they wont try to learn and just be
| more and more confused as the space keeps evolving, not my
| problem.
| lottin wrote:
| > There is lots of trading, borrowing, arbitraging,
| building and releasing new products, marketplaces. Thats
| the commerce, a lot of it is high speed.
|
| No, that's not commerce. Trading, borrowing, arbitraging,
| building and releasing new products, marketplaces is not
| commerce. Commerce is the exchange of goods and services.
| vmception wrote:
| okay then the SaaS and gaming and merchandise used in the
| games
|
| I don't care which phrase you use, a lot of it is
| happening
|
| and even centralized-ish chains don't block any of it,
| and would be too slow to even if they were compelled to
|
| that was the point, not the semantics
| qeternity wrote:
| > There is lots of trading, borrowing, arbitraging,
| building and releasing new products, marketplaces.
|
| I've seen you post about crypto many times before, and you
| obviously have a large bag.
|
| But all of the trading you're talking about is of crypto,
| the very thing we're trying to establish what the usecase
| is. There are no products outside of crypto, and building a
| bridge/exchange/marketplace for assets does not
| automatically confer value to either the assets or the
| venue.
| vmception wrote:
| > But all of the trading you're talking about is of
| crypto, the very thing we're trying to establish what the
| usecase is
|
| Or just look at the market needs, build the bridge, and
| collect a toll from everyone using it. Your standard is
| "I can't tell why people are using the bridge and they
| might stop, so therefore its a fools errand to build the
| bridge for income", "also income built from other
| people's speculation is not a use case, and my
| participating for income at all is also speculative so
| therefore I can't take it seriously"
|
| With that kind of standard, you'll never reach a
| reconcilable conclusion, while continuing to miss all
| opportunities. Its an impossibly high standard when the
| same questions apply to every SaaS product or physical
| world commerce too. The whole world is built on
| consumption and speculation, and when the variables
| change everyone stops commuting over any particular
| bridge.
|
| if you want dollars, get passive income from a product
| you built for that market niche, and convert your income
| to dollars. if you make anything that's used, then you've
| made a minor improvement for people in the space, which
| is good enough.
| trabant00 wrote:
| I stayed away from crypto coins despite having a lot of friends
| get into this very early and I even refused gifted bitcoins. I
| still have zero interest or regrets.
|
| That being said I have no ideea where this tech is going. Maybe
| it will tranform enough times it becomes useful to me. A better
| analogy for me is the gold rushes. A lot of bad things happened
| during those but it also encouraged migration and settlement of
| some unexplored regions.
|
| If I don't get involved it doesn't cost me very much that other
| people try. Let them do the work and take the risks. If they
| produce anything useful I will profit. If not...
|
| (I know about the environment cost)
| w_TF wrote:
| I totally get why people stay away from this stuff, but I've
| found the best way to understand what is going on in this space
| and what it potentially has to offer is to actually use it and
| experiment with it which is something any naturally inquisitive
| person would do. The quality of journalism (which as far as I
| can tell many are relying on to form opinions) surrounding
| anything crypto or "web 3" related has been astonishingly lazy
| and just flat out bad for a long time.
| spyder wrote:
| _" A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way
| more storage and compute, doesn't have customer support, etc. And
| yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different.
| No single entity or small group of entities controls it ..."_
|
| No, blockchain in itself doesn't mean it's not controlled by a
| single entity. There are many permissioned and private
| blockchains:
|
| https://www.foley.com/en/insights/publications/2021/08/types...
| galacticaactual wrote:
| That HN universally eschews Web3 should be an indication that
| there is something of value to be found in it.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| So basically web3 is the solution to money-hungry super companies
| centralizing power? Then why is it that we only seem to be
| discussing it after big names on Twitter decided to talk about
| it?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Publishing a website is not permissionless. You have to get a
| public IP address and register a domain name with an ICAAN
| provider, and various ISPs have the power to block your site.
| Actually promoting your site, scaling your site, integrating with
| common services, require more centralized servers, they're just
| just more implicit and you can choose from multiple providers
| (e.g. AWS or Azure). But you can choose to post to Facebook or
| Twitter.
|
| The problem isn't centralization. It's centralization through a
| company which exerts too much of its own influence and censorship
| and monetizes your usage for its own benefit. Plenty of
| centralized databases allow free speech and don't seem to
| monetize your data: look at HN or if you're more radical, 4chan.
|
| Idk if all centralized services are doomed to be corrupt so
| decentralized is the best we can do, like all monarchies are
| doomed to be corrupt so democracy is the best we can do. But
| unlike monarchies that hasn't really been shown. Maybe if someone
| invents a more efficient way to serve decentralized data the web
| will transition, but until then most decentralized services are
| most useful only as a backup to centralized services.
| eldelshell wrote:
| End of day you have to deal with physics. All those bits have
| to be stored somewhere. Have we really reached the point where
| the Facebook database can be stored in a distributed system
| across personal devices? Hell no! As a matter of fact, being
| centralized, FB can store that amount of data more efficiently
| than any Blockchain can even dream about.
| larodi wrote:
| It misses that Tim Berners-Lee and early internet architects
| perhaps were thinking of decentralised and also peer-to-peer in
| the same way that web3/crypto guys do. What TBL had no interest
| in was the container (DB or server, whatever). Some 20 years
| later Tor people got interested in the decentralised and
| redundant storage for HTML and IPfS for files. So this is kind
| of... already invented. But not anywhere near to mass adoption.
|
| While I agree that FB, twitter and alike are just big content
| holders and providers, I cannot agree that vast majority (of
| users) even understand the implications or care to go
| decentralised and redundant (in respect to content).
|
| So it seems the appeal of the so called web3 is still very weak.
| And btw It's not even a web, really. It seems to me rather an
| extremely bloated approach to 'torrenting' assets. And extremely
| energy-pricey.
| asattarmd wrote:
| As someone who has just heard the name Web3 over and over again,
| is there anything tangible that I can try? I have tried IPFS, but
| I don't know if it's "web3".
| rodiger wrote:
| DeFi is pretty cool. Check out some of the strategies on
| yearn.finance or the simpler ability to be a market maker on
| uniswap.org.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Just heavily invest into badly drawn monkey NFTs and you'll
| soon become a devout web3 enthusiast.
| i_hate_pigeons wrote:
| there are a few clones of social media sites like
| https://orbis.club/, there are others that are like reddit or
| similar but I don't remember their urls.
|
| As other commenter mentioned below, "web3" is mostly storing
| transactional info into a blockchain and then linking stuff to
| ipfs + some layer on top to display this. For example that
| orbis site, indexes/caches the data in the bc to be able to
| display it as per their use case. So the only real difference
| is that the "tweets" are not owned by them but by each user.
| For anything else it's still a normal web app.
|
| I don't know how this works legally, but there was a link from
| Vitalik's blog a few days ago explaining this. Say if a user
| uploads CP or some other illegal/offensive content the site can
| hide it but can't delete it. I'm not sure where liability would
| fall on here.
|
| Similar, the case with Twitter blocking Trump a few years ago,
| maybe another site could still allow him to continue if they
| wish to do so by displaying the same content
|
| I guess there are more use cases that distill from here, not
| sure how beneficial they are or might be, and just as many
| things in technology it is not 100% neccessary that the
| solution is better than something that already exists, it just
| needs to get traction and attract people/investment. Whether
| that happens with web3 is just to be seen I suppose.
|
| Also descentralised exchanges are things coming up, but this
| gets even muddier with all the compliance requirements so not
| sure where those will end up
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