[HN Gopher] Making Sense of Web3
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Making Sense of Web3
Author : gregdoesit
Score : 28 points
Date : 2022-03-16 21:02 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lifeitself.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (lifeitself.us)
| riffic wrote:
| A lot of web3 people don't seem to be open to much criticism of
| the space. As a whole this has kind of soured me towards anyone
| involved.
|
| The (shameless plug) /r/Web3skepticism subreddit[0] is an open
| place for critical web3 thought. Feel free to drop by and say hi.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Skepticism/
| exdsq wrote:
| I see the same the other way round though where people who are
| critical of web3 argue all the way down to semantics rather
| than admit a use case.
| leifg wrote:
| > Concretely, our approach starts with collecting and steel-
| manning the key claims made for web3 through conscious, critical
| and open dialog with a diverse set of experts.
|
| This is something that is desperately needed. More often than not
| I try to assess bold claims like "Blockchains will solve X". I
| try to follow the thought process of these claims and arrive at
| the solution: "Blockchains will most likely NOT solve X". The
| first comment to that is usually: "It was never supposed to solve
| X it is rather about Y which is loosely related to X".
|
| There is no way to have a proper debate if one side if flip
| flopping about claims.
| okwubodu wrote:
| There's no debate to be had most of the time. Something about
| this particular topic makes people so prone to decide they're
| right first, then debate as if making the smallest concession
| means defeat.
|
| Any discussion on the basis of "X will solve Y" or "X will most
| likely NOT solve Y" predictably spirals on and on because the
| parties chose hypothetical claims that can't be falsified so
| it's easier to play with semantics and pretend the other
| doesn't get it yet.
| searchableguy wrote:
| A simple overview of current technical trends in web3.
|
| 1. Identity
|
| Wallets are required to interact with chain. This means every
| user has one which is great because you can use wallets to sign
| message and authenticate people.
|
| People's transaction history are public so you can fetch that and
| do authenticate on a micro level. Say, you want to authenticate
| people who have a particular nft or spent money somewhere
| specific.
|
| 2. Tokenomics
|
| Encourage contribution and investing by providing financial
| motivation in the form of tokens through technical means.
|
| Take example of torrent protocol. A big problem with torrent is
| there are not enough seeders because there is no incentive to
| seed which means many useful torrents go down.
|
| 3. Public ledger
|
| This one doesn't need much explanation. Use cases like DNS or
| voting fits the area where every record needs to be publicly
| available and verified.
|
| 4. Financial & payments
|
| Prediction markets, Programmable finance, cross bridges, AMMs,
| lending, yield farming, etc. Some are cool, some are almost scam
| but there are some novel ideas tested in practice here. AMMs are
| one successful example.
|
| 5. Collectibles and scarcity
|
| This one is controversial. If you know the traditional gacha and
| pay to play industry is huge, then you understand the
| applications where trading and uniqueness is built in. The items
| can be made unique and be used outside the game which increases
| their value.
| leifg wrote:
| How does any of that sound appealing to anyone?
|
| Especially for the first two points, how do you not see the
| absolute dystopian downsides?
| burnished wrote:
| I would recommend reading TFA to you, because its contents
| are pertinent and also describe this interaction.
| Specifically, the polarization of the topic such that a
| neutral and high level description is being knee-jerked as an
| approval.
| searchableguy wrote:
| > how do you not see the absolute dystopian downsides?
|
| Sorry, I'm not commenting on the good or bad. I wanted to
| provide a dense technical overview of what web3 is being used
| for since it's HN.
| leifg wrote:
| OK fair point.
|
| If you want a concise definition of web3 the website
| provides this as well:
| https://web3.lifeitself.us/concepts/web3
| razzio wrote:
| LOL reading pt 1 and 2 I had a similar reaction.
|
| The first thought that came after the feeling of horror
| subsided, is that you can simply create a new wallet for each
| transaction, or maybe a new one once a day. I felt better
| after that.
| oldgregg wrote:
| Yep or a single HD wallet that automatically generates keys
| with each new interaction.
| mattlondon wrote:
| That won't work for web3, since your identities are tied to
| wallets, as is any user-generated-content is tied to the
| wallet. So it would be like creating a new user account for
| HN/Facebook/Gmail/etc every day. You'd not be able to move
| your content away to another site, which is one of the main
| selling points of web3 Vs web2
| oldgregg wrote:
| No you will still have a copy of all your content-- you
| can just move it to a different service or even republish
| it under a different key.
| mattlondon wrote:
| If you republish it, how can someone know it is you and
| not me? It undermines the entire point about "ownership"
| in web3.
|
| If wallets are disposable (i.e. you throw them away after
| a while to avoid tracking etc) then by definition you are
| throwing away ownership of your content too. They'll be
| locked away forever like all of satoshi's BTC.
|
| As soon as you try to move content between wallets,
| you've immediately and irreversibly "linked" those
| wallets so you may as well have not bothered and just
| accept that every tiny iota of your online life is
| publicly open for anyone to track and monitor from your
| first ever website you viewed as a child right through to
| signing the contract on your funeral plans before dying
| of old age - linking wallets and identities will be
| cryptographically/mathematically bullet-proof (not to
| mention trivial) and so they'll be able to easily tie
| together your entire life via your wallets (unless you
| totally separate you wallets and so have multiple totally
| separate identities with _zero_ overlap ... won 't be
| easy for "real life" stuff like work or banking etc).
|
| Have fun.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The items can be made unique and be used outside the game
| which increases their value.
|
| They can't be used outside the game [1]
|
| The only thing that "increases their value" is speculation (and
| scams).
|
| [1] One person's game engine isn't another person's game
| engine. One game's items are not other game's items. Even
| displaying and interacting with items in the game that has the
| mechanisms to display and interact with those items cannot be
| translated to the world outside the game.
| searchableguy wrote:
| For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can.
|
| There are companies using it to show ads in decentralized way
| in the metaverse right now.
|
| I don't understand it like you but I can reason about it
| looking at similar patterns in gaccha and game skins. They
| are a digit in a database but sold for huge money and have a
| big secondary market.
|
| The value of it comes from the association and possibility
| than immediate practical use.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can.
|
| Or just offer an image upload feature in their own app
| and/or website?
| searchableguy wrote:
| I think the second part of my comment answers it.
|
| The value comes from the association. A baseball hat worn
| by a famous person is worth more than if it is worn by a
| normal person even if the hat is the same physically.
|
| If you directly use nft from the chain in some big
| project, the value of that particular receipt will go up
| because the association can be made. This cannot be done
| if it was simply a digital image copied over.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > If you directly use nft from the chain
|
| You can't "use nft". Nft is a crappy recipt that tells
| you that you spent some money. That is _it_.
|
| In the absolute vast majority of cases the actual _asset_
| is some blob of data stored on a company 's server
| somewhere.
|
| Since we're in a subthread about _using game items
| outside the game for which these items were specifically
| designed_ , good luck using your "nft" in "some big
| project".
| searchableguy wrote:
| NFTs can be more than a receipt. It depends on the
| contract. You can program it such as that you can store
| state inside the nft and generate graphics using it.
|
| There are few examples of it I can dig up if you are
| interested.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can.
|
| Ah yes. We went from "items in the game used outside the
| game" to "basic sprites and characters".
|
| Define "character", by the way.
|
| > There are companies using it to show ads in decentralized
| way in the metaverse right now.
|
| And this has anything to do with the original statement?
|
| > I don't understand it
|
| This is the key sentence, and you should have started with
| it.
|
| > looking at similar patterns in gaccha and
|
| Gaccha: Gaccha, alternatively spelled as Gachchha, is a
| monastic order, along with lay followers, of the image
| worshipping Murtipujaka Svetambara sect of Jainism.
|
| Wat?
|
| > game skins
|
| What game skins?
|
| > They are a digit in a database but sold for huge money
| and have a big secondary market.
|
| Yes, and this has literaly nothing to do with their
| usefulness outside the game they were built for.
|
| Example: Fortnite skins are built specifically for the
| Fortnite game engine, using textures available for that
| engine, applicable to skeletons and meshes designed
| specifically for that game engine.
|
| How exactly are you going to use it outside of Fortnite's
| game engine?
|
| > The value of it comes from the association and
| possibility
|
| Translation: speculation, scams, and tricking people out of
| their money.
|
| _Edit:_ I mean, there was a huge public outcry because of
| EA 's lootboxes. No cryptobros want these loot boxes
| everywhere and pretend it's a good thing.
| kemotep wrote:
| By gaccha they likely mean gacha as in gachapon. The
| Japanese capsule toy machines. Many loot box video games
| are sometimes referred to as skinner boxes[0] or gacha
| games.
|
| I definitely agree with your assessment that most
| crypto/web3 stuff these days are terrible ideas.
|
| [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_ch
| amber
| exdsq wrote:
| I see this argument a lot and all it makes me think is
| general sadness people are so defeatist about something
| that's hardly brain surgery. If people can't work out a
| way to share a skin between games when they both _want_
| to then I understand why AAA games are so boring nowadays
| outside of a couple studios.
| razzio wrote:
| Thanks for the summary. Granted I feel a bit sleepy after lunch
| but the article doesn't have a TL&DR and after skimming I still
| felt clueless on problems web 3 is supposed to solve.
|
| I guess its one of those cases where time will show what sticks
| and what people find acceptable. To me they are all
| controversial.
| burnished wrote:
| I don't think the purpose of the article is to convince you
| about the merits of web3, so you probably aren't missing
| anything there. My reading of it is that the authors don't
| want to lose our ability to have a constructive conversation
| where people can be mutually intelligible and clearly
| understand what they disagree on.
| mattlondon wrote:
| RE identity & Auth tied to wallets (and therefore purchases),
| this is going to be a huge wild-west of privacy invasion and
| intrusive advertising.
|
| It is like a persistent super cookie that exists online and
| off, that _anyone_ can access, and that can never be deleted.
|
| People think it is bad now with Google and Facebook - web3 is
| going to be way worse, with every shady operation under the sun
| doing all sorts of questionable targeting, combining,
| profiling, mining, and selling of your publicly accessible data
| openly stored on the block chain (forever) for everyone to see
| and use for whatever unsavoury things they can conjure up.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Many people have alaready made sense of web3. The problem with
| web3? People involved in the space don't care. They are either
| gullible or know exactly what they are doing (scamming and
| claiming something that has nothing to do blockchains).
|
| One of the earliest articles that already made sense is 5 years
| old this year:
|
| - _Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain_ ,
| https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
|
| - And the follow up, _Blockchain is not only crappy technology
| but a bad vision for the future_ ,
| https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
|
| We've yet to see a single "making sense" cryptobro engage with
| any of the points in the article. I'm not even talking about the
| more recent ones like Moxie Marlinspike's _My first impressions
| of web3_ , https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-
| impressions.html, or Molly White's collection of posts on
| blockchains and web3, https://blog.mollywhite.net/
|
| There are more, of course. But they are all dismissed by crypto
| people because they don't care as long as crypto is useful for
| getting rich quick schemes. It's not here to save the world, or
| help the disadvantaged, or whatever other bullshit they sling
| your way.
| rvz wrote:
| I don't regard what security researchers like saurik: [0] and
| cryptographers like Matthew Green [1] to be the typical
| 'cryptobros' these days since they seem to know what they are
| talking about when it comes to _' web3'_ and the technologies
| behind it.
|
| Heck I even initially hated crypto (and still hate some NFTs),
| but even I recognise that 'critics' like Stephen Diehl, Molly
| White, Nicholas Weaver, etc have all deliberately been ignoring
| the eco-friendly cryptocurrencies and technologies for years.
| As soon as one is mentioned on Twitter, there are no counter
| responses or refutations. They are immediately silent.
|
| It seems that even Stripe [2] has recognised that change as
| well as Moxie, who is also pushing MobileCoin [3], a private
| and encrypted cryptocurrency into Signal (which he rarely talks
| about) and pissed off one of his critics. [4]
|
| I think they are finding it very difficult to ignore it. For
| them, it is only going to get harder.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/saurik
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green
|
| [2] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto
|
| [3] https://mobilecoin.com
|
| [4] https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/signal.html
| exdsq wrote:
| Stephen Diehl has been working on his own Digital ledger so
| in my mind he's biased anyway.
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