Many criticisms of blockchain apps, comparing their use cases to conventional technologies (databases, conventional separation of services such as that described in the article, etc) all seem to miss a major point: Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown.
Immutability is important because it's guaranteed that no matter how many times you interact with a contract address, you can be assured that at no point has the code in that contract ever changed. This is not an assurance you can typically get, as backend code for traditional endpoints can change at any time.
Even more important IMO is the difficulty in shutting down a contract that's deployed to the blockchain. In the case of this article, the reliance on external services such as AWS opens up possibilities for your app to be shut down, whether it's through non-payment to your AWS account, AWS decides you've violated their terms of service, or legal action compels AWS to shut down your app.
In the case of dapps deployed to the blockchain (combined optionally with frontends deployed to a service like IPFS, but this isn't a requirement, as one can always interact directly with contracts), the ability to shutdown these apps would rely on somehow breaking the blockchain itself.
Whether or not you see these aspects as bugs or features is a matter of opinion. Yes, blockchains are slower and more expensive. This is the current cost of enabling the two facets above. If we're not comparing blockchain dapps to other systems that offer the same assurances, then we're comparing apples and oranges.
Unless there is a killer feature it enables, it's an implementation detail and I don't care. And I will gladly compare other solutions against blockchain despite not having the same implementation detail you claim puts it above comparison.
And so will everyone else that isn't blinded by fanaticism.
Right. In addition to the issue you cite, folks seem to have confused things like immutability and things like compatibility.
Immutability generally guarantees something like integrity.
It does not, ever, guarantee compatibility.
Often the opposite.
IE things end up immutable and incompatible, immutable and broken, etc.
Or even worse "immutable and vulnerable".
(IE can interact enough to still kinda work, but often do things it should not).
If you truly want to jump down the rabbit hole, it's true that immutability of this kind can provide great integrity.
But you can get pretty darn good without it.
It's an implementation detail, right. But in most cases, it's implemented as immutable. With some exceptions, but developers are very upfront about that in those cases.
But even if developers implemented their contract with the possibility of updating, the most important detail here is that only those developers can do that.
Everyone that says "show me it doing its end goal and I'll buy," are simply the most risk off speculators. I don't think they even know what speculation means or why someone would do it.
... anonymity isn't a killer feature for me personally, but it is for some.
Anyway, the parent post's point is just that it's not clear what the 'killer feature' that web3 is offering is.
Without that, it's just expensive and pathetically underpowered compared to other platforms.
You can use it to do crypto. hm... ok. I don't have crypto, and I don't have piles I money lying around I want to throw away gambling or turning into crypto.
That doesn't seem to leave any 'Killer features' for me to care about.
> Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to.
> Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract.
> Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users.
> Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.
And when it comes to "That doesn't seem to leave any 'Killer features' for me to care about", I'll also say what I said to somebody else:
Good for you. These are not killer features you'd care about. They are, however, killer features that some others care out. Why is it a bad thing that an option exists for those that do care about these features?
The US government can also swoop in and ban or heavily tax ETH exchanges and that cuts off the majority of those would do transactions. There's no need to take down every node; I can't see how any of those translate to killer features for this reason. For PGP, I don't understand why the user isn't encrypting them on their own machine. That seems like an incredible waste to implement encryption in a smart contract. As far as sanctions go, the fact that criminals and ransomware and other fraudsters can't be stopped or sanctioned is an anti-feature if you ask me.
Also I hope you can understand that leading the conversation with these "fight the government" sentiments really sours the debate on crypto, to me that only cements the idea that this stuff only appeals to other nation-state actors, activists, journalists, and scammers/criminals. Which I suppose is fine, except for the criminals, but at that point it's the same niche that Tor fits into.
> The US government can also swoop in and ban or heavily tax ETH exchanges and that cuts off the majority of those would do transactions.
Yes, that would cut off most of the fiat on/off ramps, but your assets there are still untouched. You could still, if you wanted, go to another country that hasn't banned crypto and exchange it for other assets in those countries. That's far different from the US freezing your US bank account, in which case it doesn't matter which country you go to, your assets are still locked in the US bank.
And even in the US, I'm sure there will still be people on the street willing to exchange cash for crypto, albeit obviously at a markup. Like I said elsewhere, we've been unable to stop the billion dollar drug trade. What makes you think we will be able to completely stop a trillion dollar crypto market from within our borders?
> There's no need to take down every node; I can't see how any of those translate to killer features for this reason.
Because you need to take down every node (or prevent anyone in your country from accessing any node) before the smart contracts stop executing. So long as that's the case, it's a killer feature for anyone who is concerned about traditional financial services shutting them off. You can't see how any of these are killer features because that is presumably not you.
> For PGP, I don't understand why the user isn't encrypting them on their own machine. That seems like an incredible waste to implement encryption in a smart contract.
I didn't mean that PGP would be implemented on the smart contracts, I meant that functionality wouldn't change from under you like they did with the darknet markets. The functionality you see in a smart contract is the functionality you get, and it'll stay that way forever unless you built your smart contract to allow for such change in the future.
> As far as sanctions go, the fact that criminals and ransomware and other fraudsters can't be stopped or sanctioned is an anti-feature if you ask me.
That's fine. It's a feature for others. In other words, it creates value for people who are not you.
> but at that point it's the same niche that Tor fits into.
Well yes, I do strongly believe this is the case. Which is why I make repeated references to Tor. Do you also think that Tor's strong anonymity guarantees protecting pedophiles is an anti-feature too?
The drug trade seems to be heavily bolstered by crypto. It seems like the US could hamper both the drug trade and the crypto trade just by increasing taxes on crypto. A significant number of ETH nodes are in the US so they could also mess with it a lot just by cracking down on domestic node operators.
>I meant that functionality wouldn't change from under you like they did with the darknet markets
I still don't get why it did, it sounds like they were not using secure tools? Crypto isn't necessary there, just an ordinary E2E encryption scheme.
>In other words, it creates value for people who are not you.
Yes, criminals, who actively decrease value for me when people I know get hit by ransomware attacks, people I know get addicted to drugs purchased online, companies I work with get taken offline with ransomware attacks, government services I need to use get taken down by ransomware attacks, etc. All of this has already happened to me, by the way; I'm not an investor so the only real effect crypto has had on me is loss of money and well being.
>Do you also think that Tor's strong anonymity guarantees protecting pedophiles is an anti-feature too?
Well just like a lot of promises about crypto being faulty, I think this one is also faulty; I've heard a lot of stories of deep web child sex abuse rings being busted up. Tor is not a panacea. But if we say for a moment that it was, I don't think I would be ok with it. Would you be okay with finding sex abuse content on Tor that included your children? What would you do?
- Uniswap and Sushiswap allows you to trade different cryptos for one another. If you want to trade gold for some reason in a decentralized manner, you could do that by making trades between gold-pegged crypto and stablecoins
- Aave allows you to lend and borrow different crypto assets. If you wish to short a crypto, or if you wish to borrow against your portfolio so that you're spending fiat rather than your portfolio (a feature offered by traditional assets as well), this lets you do both of those.
- Tornado cash allows you to anonymize your Ethereum, because unfortunately Ethereum just doesn't have strong built-in privacy guarantees like Monero
- All the gambling websites. If gambling is illegal in your jurisdiction, but you'd like to gamble anyway, it's hard to stop you from doing so. Depending on your political sensibilities, this could be a good or bad thing. Personally, I say let adults do what they want, including making dumb decisions for themselves. (Of course, if you want to hide your tracks well, you'd probably want to use the aforementioned Tornado Cash.)
- Trade blockchain tokens for other blockchain tokens. Or trade blockchain tokens for tokens that claim (with dubious, temporary and totally non-cryptographic evidence) to be backed by something else.
- Lend and borrow blockchain tokens.
- Try to launder your blockchain tokens. They have to be really dirty for it to be worth it, since obscuring how you got hold of something valuable is already a crime in itself.
- Give your blockchain tokens to blockchain casino owners.
> Trade blockchain tokens for other blockchain tokens. Or trade blockchain tokens for tokens that claim (with dubious, temporary and totally non-cryptographic evidence) to be backed by something else.
The Perth Mint is "dubious" and "temporary" to you?
If you dislike examples of assets backed by centralized entities, then look at decentralized algorithmic stablecoins.
> - Lend and borrow blockchain tokens.
Yes, including tokens that track "real world" assets. Lending and borrowing is afater all an integral part of the modern economy. This bulletpoint stands by itself.
> - Try to launder your blockchain tokens. They have to be really dirty for it to be worth it, since obscuring how you got hold of something valuable is already a crime in itself.
Just because you don't see any value in money laundering doesn't mean others don't. It's a billion dollar industry.
> - Give your blockchain tokens to blockchain casino owners.
If you want to, yes, you should absolutely have the freedom to do that. Alas, some jurisdictions in real life prevent their people from doing just that.
Yes, it's temporary, in the sense that even tokens backed today might not necessarily be backed tomorrow.
And yes, it is actually a surprisingly dubious organization (that corporations fully owned by a state and performing some minor official service for it, can still be extremely dodgy, should not come as a surprise).
They seem to be profiting off the assumption that from the name, they would be as tightly controlled as a central bank. But it's very clear from dodgy stuff they've already been involved in, that they're absolutely not.
But of course, I wasn't first and foremost talking about them, I was talking about the 800 dollar gorilla, Tether. They're now where Mt Gox was ca. mid-2013, with "everyone" knowing they're extremely dodgy and likely to collapse, but hoping to make money off those who haven't realized it yet.
As to "tracking" real world assets, that mechanism of tracking is a weak point, rendering all the other "guarantees" moot.
> Just because you don't see any value in money laundering doesn't mean others don't. It's a billion dollar industry.
So is other fraud. Doesn't mean it isn't money out the window. For that matter, you don't know how much of the economic activity is real. Saying "this laundromat must be really good, see how much money is going through it" is a lot like saying "this service for purchasing fake reviews must be great, look how many 6 star reviews it has".
> They seem to be profiting off the assumption that from the name, they would be as tightly controlled as a central bank. But it's very clear from dodgy stuff they've already been involved in, that they're absolutely not.
Alright, then don't trade in their token. Or short it, if you think it's going to collapse in value anytime soon.
> But of course, I wasn't first and foremost talking about them, I was talking about the 800 dollar gorilla, Tether. They're now where Mt Gox was ca. mid-2013, with "everyone" knowing they're extremely dodgy and likely to collapse, but hoping to make money off those who haven't realized it yet.
Well yes, the whole point of a decentralized ecosystem is that it gives people the freedom to do things without government stepping in and telling them no, for better or for worse. Tether is free to print as much Tether as they want, and everyone else is free to hold or not hold USDT if they want. Caveat emptor.
> As to "tracking" real world assets, that mechanism of tracking is a weak point, rendering all the other "guarantees" moot.
Sure, that is still a centralized point of failure. But the other decentralized benefits still hold. No government sanctions can prevent you from buying this gold-backed crypto, if you so wish. Or if you have it already, from selling it for something else. Nobody to enforce pattern day trading rules on you. For better or for worse, it still gives you all the benefits that decentralization entails.
> So is other fraud. Doesn't mean it isn't money out the window.
It's money circulating through a different part of the economy than it would've otherwise. It's valuable to the people participating in it. Not to you, obviously. To other people.
> For that matter, you don't know how much of the economic activity is real.
Of course, that's the whole point. But you can still make educated guessing. Looking at the size of various illicit businesses, money laundering is obviously a billion dollar global industry. Why? Because a lot of people find it valuable. Not you, obviously. Other people.
Where's your "Google"? Where's your "YouTube"? Where's your killer app? Everything you've listed is just different ways to throw away cryptocurrency. The average Joe is going to look at that list, chuckle, and go back to browsing Twitter on their iPhone. There's no main attraction here.
> Where's your "YouTube"? Where's your killer app?
Where's the "Youtube" of the dark web? The famed red rooms don't even exist.
What's the "killer app" of the dark web? Doesn't even exist, unless maybe you count the drug markets. I'd hazard a guess that they're by far the most popular.
> Everything you've listed is just different ways to throw away cryptocurrency.
I literally gave as an example how you could use fiat-backed crypto to buy gold-backed crypto. These assets literally track their real-world equivalents. Or do you have an issue with modern banking and the stock market too, because it's "just different ways to throw away" fake fiat money?
> The average Joe is going to look at that list, chuckle, and go back to browsing Twitter on their iPhone.
Good. The average Joe has no business using Tor. Hell, the average Joe doesn't even care enough about privacy to stop using Facebook. The average Joe doesn't need a lot of things. Who cares what the average Joe wants or doesn't want, unless you're trying specifically to market a product to the average Joe?
Crypto exists for those who actually find a use for it. You seem either unable or unwilling to acknowledge this fact. Which is it?
If you've reduced your argument to "people shouldn't use it if they don't know what it is", have you considered that you might not be talking about the future of software? Nobody sold iPhones because it "exists for those who actually find a use for it".
Right, so what's happening right now is much more akin to the early days of the internet than anything else IMO. In the same ways we couldn't have ever predicted Facebook, Google, iPhones, etc, in the 90s it's hard to say exactly what impact crypto/web3 will have on the modern world.
There's actually something truly new and tangible that crypto has spurred - the ability to drive consensus in a trustless manner automatically and the ability to execute computer programs that are deterministic, immutable, and will run forever. With those new tools in the global toolbox I suspect that some iteration of them will be in use somewhere in our future, but no-one exactly where. Are NFT game assets the ultimate expression of crypto? No, but Friendster and HotOrNot weren't the ultimate expression of the internet either.
The ability to network 2 computers together was also new and tangible thing that the internet as a concept brought, but it wasn't before a huge amount of foundational work in the form of IETF protocols, router hardware design & production, software network stacks, and wireless communications before it really took off. Mass adoption was one of the last phases, and I still remember a day when people would call you crazy for putting your credit card anywhere near the internet.
IMO that's the phase we're at, so for most people it's just not ready yet, but it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people out there trying new and novel things with these tools ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> a trustless manner automatically and the ability to execute computer programs that are deterministic, immutable, and will run forever.
Let's try to think quite ahead, going sci-fi even:
Maybe the only use case for such programs is valid if they are powerful AIs, or uploaded human minds. But for the blockchain to be able to run that? The compute and memory needed is astronomical. It also means that blockchain will be relevant technology only in the 22nd century and now we are just playing with it for no actual value whatsoever.
Because, how else would I ensure that my uploaded mind from year 2060 henceforth runs forever in the cloud? I can't, the 22nd century equivalent AWS may be shutdown. Solution - blockchain...
Right now smart contracts are very crappy computer programs, but people are still building amazing things with them (like DAOs or decentralized exchanges). It’s hard to say what people will be building 20 years from now or what they’ll look like in the same way that the idea of end to end encrypted video calls through Signal was not even something people could dream up in a practical sense without the groundwork invention/innovation of things like public key cryptography, and a minimal level of ubiquitous computing power in the form of cell phones to make it usable and practical.
Quantum computing is going through this too right now where we have the ability to compute with a handful of qbits, but the implications on a years time horizon are profound.
You do bring up a valid point in that it’s unclear exactly how the “legacy software” story fits in here. Migrations to new blockchains and the blockchains themselves upgrading without contention (Tezos comes to mind with this as a core feature) seem like the natural response to this problem. Not unlike anything else though it’ll be hard to predict until it slaps us in the face lol.
It is of course possible that web3 is a world-changing idea and most people are unable to envision the amazing and revolutionary impact it will have in the future. But criticism doesn't mean anything on its own. Those examples you listed — iPhone, Google, Facebook, etc — there were countless failures for each of those successes. You're relying on survivorship bias. Just because a new technology faces initial criticism, that doesn't mean it's guaranteed to succeed because some successful products also faced initial criticism.
> Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown.
Yeah, and that's why we have Ethereum Classic, a remnant of its own shameful history. Dapps are still man-made, so can be faulty, but Ethereum doesn't have any recovery scenario for faulty dapps other than forking out. No one can save you from your own deadly mistakes. This simply can't scale.
The eth classic fork was because of the first high profile hack of a smart contract leading to massive loss of funds (way way back in 2016 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)). The Ethereum community back then was a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what it is compared to the size today, and that early on in the network I don't think it was a detrimental thing to do like it would be today.
> No one can save you from your own deadly mistakes.
Alternatively, "You really really have to give a shit about your own security". Imagine if banks had some skin in the game in terms of their security story. Why was I able to have 2 factor on my world of warcraft account many years before my bank account?
You're right in that crypto is a cold world of immutability, but in the same way that exposing servers and data to the internet (along with all the hacks, identity theft, etc that came with it) ultimately led to better security protections like ASLR, DEP, Yubikeys, etc, I posit we'll see rise of new technologies to help combat these issues as well to help offset the risks as much as possible. Hardware wallets, multi-sig contracts, and now multi-party computation are promising new tools to help make the blockchain space more operationally safe, which enables the whole thing to scale.
> Alternatively, "You really really have to give a shit about your own security". Imagine if banks had some skin in the game in terms of their security story. Why was I able to have 2 factor on my world of warcraft account many years before my bank account?
It’s telling that you don’t know how wrong this is, but feel qualified to redesign a mature industry anyway. Banks are highly regulated and spend billions on security — that’s why the major breaches which are routine in the cryptocurrency world don’t have an analog in the real financial system.
They know that there would be significant penalties if they lose customer resources or grant access to your account improperly, but they don’t spend it on the same things. For example, MFA doesn’t solve every problem — if I phish you or compromise your device, your cryptocurrency life savings are gone but trying to send a wire transfer from your bank for an amount that large will require out of band confirmation, especially if it’s to a random third party or out of the country.
That irrecoverable failure mode is one of the core design flaws of cryptocurrency which makes it unappealing to most people. Most people do not want the risk or constant maintenance work of being their own bank, and mitigating that by reinventing the banking sector except more expensive is a tough sell.
> the major breaches which are routine in the cryptocurrency world don’t have an analog in the real financial system.
You're either ignorant or joking.
Just because FDIC has taken care of the blunders that couldn't be sorted out internally between the banks does not mean there haven't been huge privacy and security hacks on these systems since the 90s.
> Just because FDIC has taken care of the blunders that couldn't be sorted out internally between the banks does not mean there haven't been huge privacy and security hacks on these systems since the 90s.
Yes, that's the point: banks have not lost that much money because they have layers of process built around preventing large amounts from moving quickly without lots of layers of approval, things like the SWIFT hacks (which were smaller than the cryptocurrency losses even before you consider how many orders of magnitude larger the banking system is), and as a customer your risk of a permanent loss is extremely low. This is a stark contrast to what happens when cryptocurrency attacks are successful and the community says “you should have been more careful, nothing we can do”.
It’s designed in at the base level — that immutability is a feature for most proponents: if you don’t have it, you’ve just paid a lot more for a very slow database.
You're operating under a binary understanding. Forks are the very obvious proof that what you say is wrong - they are a primitive way of settling disputes but a good starting point none the less.
Token governance is the next step from forking that isn't so arduous. With proper governance, the community around a token can come to a consensus that a mistake led to irrecoverable funds (for example) for one user and if the amount is worth the time issue a proposal and vote on minting replacement tokens for that user. Token holders are the share holders of their protocol, no reason all the normal operations that make a business safer for users can't be implemented in token contracts.
Try not to confuse the current state with what's possible.
> It’s telling that you don’t know how wrong this is, but feel qualified to redesign a mature industry anyway. Banks are highly regulated and spend billions on security — that’s why the major breaches which are routine in the cryptocurrency world don’t have an analog in the real financial system.
I don’t want to get into some pissing match about my qualifications but I’ve seen the insides of a number of large financial institutions and their security first hand while working in the security industry. Your argument is that they’re regulated and have a large security spend which is sufficient, my counter argument is that they’re bloated and that large spend is largely security theater.
Doing things like spending money and installing Carbon Black on a server in some closet to check the “endpoint protection” box to auditors is not the same as a competent team sitting down and building an infrastructure with effective defense in depth principals.
Crypto is immutable which can be dangerous but that edge of it is also spurring novel research into things like hardware wallets, multi sig smart contracts, and multi party computation which are real tangible ways to alleviate some of these problems (and other, non-crypto space problems as well). You call it a bug, I call it a feature.
Ultimately crypto’s immutability is a form of global free market Darwinism playing out where protocols that are well designed (and again, really really give a shit about their security) are the ones that continue to exist. Shitty protocols built by incompetent people get hacked and die. Darwinism is not a “design flaw”, it’s what allowed us to transcend living in caves and build society. Has it all been smooth and easy? Of course not, but evolution rarely is. E-commerce had its own rocky start too.
> They know that there would be significant penalties if they lose customer resources or grant access to your account improperly, but they don’t spend it on the same things.
Just because banks have reduced the tail end consequences of their ineptitude and crappy behavior doesn’t mean that it’s scalable globally and forever with no cost for those that use it or prop it up (U.S. banks largely rely on U.S. govt for this compensating control, as well as bailouts when they’re too big to fail), and I will point out that major financial institutions/networks have been getting hacked for decades at this point, but especially in the early days. There are tons of cases of theft, fraud, and abuse in the traditional banking sector (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–2016_SWIFT_banking_hack). Fin firms tend to hire “crisis management” firms to spin media coverage and offset the negative PR when it happens though, which makes it ok in the public eye.
Just because they’ve offset the risks from this shitty behavior doesn’t suddenly make this behavior palatable or something we should accept IMO. The Equifax breach comes to mind as well, but don’t worry because they’re still around, and they were so nice as to offer everyone a year of identity protection (…offered through equifax) as compensation for their gross negligence. They definitely learned their lesson though right?
> No one can save you from your own deadly mistakes.
Well yes, that's kind of the point. Freedom to choose what you want to do with your money -- including the freedom to make your own mistakes and shoot yourself in the foot.
The problem you cite doesn't seem so common, or so large, that it is worth changing literally the entire architecture of everything over.
Maybe it will be someday, but it definitely isn't today, nor does it seem to be happening particularly soon!
Until developers feel like that day is coming, this neither makes sense, nor will it go anywhere.
(as an aside, the non-payment one seems kind of silly, since the blockchain apps don't work without payment either - network fees, etc. Sometimes they are covered, sometimes not)
You can't define away comparisons with how things are done now by saying it can only be compared with things that offer the same assurances.
That makes no sense - all software architectures are tradeoffs of these sorts. Privacy vs Security vs Ease of Use vs Cost vs Performance vs ...
People are quite literally going to ask themselves whether it is worth getting those features for the current cost. They aren't going to say "well, we can't compare the cost because the current system doesn't do that". They are going to say "is it worth <cost> to get these things".
> (as an aside, the non-payment one seems kind of silly, since the blockchain apps don't work without payment either - network fees, etc. Sometimes they are covered, sometimes not)
There's a subtle difference here though: So long as I use AWS, I'm responsible for funding the account, and my non-payment means the app goes down. I have to continue to pay for the app to run, even if no one uses it.
On a blockchain, once I've deployed my app, I can walk away and never think about the app again. I only have to pay for the initial deployment of the contract without any further ongoing cost. The app will always be there ready to be used by an end user who's willing to pay to interact with it.
You are implying the false pretense that the person you are replying to is arguing that Web3 technology is being properly valued and therefore should be used right now! What an easy strawman to knock over - what they are actually saying is that the vision and promise of this emerging technology layer has obvious value compared to today's standard. Man that latter statement is a real thinker in comparison.
Your sarcasm actually doesn't fix anything, but, for all your sarcasm, you apparently didn't read very carefully.
I pointed out it appears to not solve any problem that currently exists, yes.
But I also qualified it by saying it doesn't solve a problem that people seem likely to have anytime soon, ie the future, either.
So the latter statement you try to prop up doesn't change anything - it does not have obvious value compared to today's standard, but it also doesn't have obvious value in the future, either.
So no, the latter statement is not a thinker in comparison. In fact, as i said elsewhere, there appears to have been zero diligence on product/market fit. This appears to be something that was done because they could, not because anyone actually seems to want it.
Good luck on turning that vision that solves nobody's problem into a thing anyone cares about!
Yes yes the board that vies for more sovereign web architecture and values user control and consent cannot grasp the vision behind Web3. And you wonder why sarcasm is all the energy you are worth.
"mostly" being the key word :) If you're self-hosting, then your server is a weak point. It goes down, your app goes down. The additional cost and risk that comes with using blockchains provides a platform for your app to run on that you don't have to manage and is highly resistant to being shut down.
Likewise, there always exists the possibility that your server can be compromised and the code can be altered. The immutability of the blockchain guarantees that your code cannot be changed, with or without your knowledge.
You pay a lot for that blockchain redundancy. You can buy a lot of conventional redundancy for that money. Comparing it to a cheap self-hosted server isn't apples to apples.
> The immutability of the blockchain guarantees that your code cannot be changed, with or without your knowledge.
There's been a lot of examples lately why this is not a desirable feature at all for most purposes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a dapp dependent on sufficient mining/distributed compute being in the network?. Of the network becomes small can someone attack it and change past transactions/hijack apps?
Yes, these are the failure scenarios I had in mind when I wrote "the ability to shutdown these apps would rely on somehow breaking the blockchain itself".
It's possible that bugs in the blockchain software can cause blocks to no longer be produced, essentially halting the network until the problem is resolved. So-called 51% attacks are also a failure possibility.
I'd suspect that the longevity of a cloud provider or self hosted environment would be higher than the time miners are willing to support a new block chain (I'm not paying a btc transaction fee everytime I update an app).
How will miners be paid to host apps? Given that app usage concentrates into winner take all groupings wouldn't we except the web 3 winners to be paying for the vast majority of any web 3 mining?
You're getting to a fundamental issue that separates Bitcoin from other chains which strive to push and hold more data on chain: there is no efficient pricing mechanism to host data. What this means is that putting any data on chain at all is either expensive, or limited by hard code. The issue is that the data stays on chain forever yet without any 'rent' associated to it, therefore space is limited or cost is poorly estimated up front (or compromises on decentralization like sharding occur).
Bitcoin doesn't technically solve this either, its just that its data growth rate is small enough to be trivial in comparison to storage costs. Ethereum and other classical distributed ledger systems cannot fulfill the true vision of Web3 (it can and will continue to do a fraction of that vision) because they have no affectual economic functions for data rent or data handling in general. Mining/staking is paid for and everything else is an economic after-thought. Ethereum's Infura Problem is a quick way to see the consequences of these poorly suited economic incentives.
Bitcoin is about stability, but Web3 is about data, so I believe its fair to say that a distributed ledger technology built for "Web3" (which is quickly becoming a dirty word) will have its economic components focused on data. This is different from keeping the traditional Nakamoto Consensus (which judges value based on somewhat arbitrary measures) but deriving tricks to push more data - this means maintaining or exceeding the security guarantees of Nakamoto Consensus while incentivizing data routing-work and storage rather than number crunching.
There are easy mitigations for those things though. My self hosted apps run on immutable infrastructure and are replicated and load balanced. Still stupid cheap and easy.
> My self hosted apps run on immutable infrastructure and are replicated and load balanced
What? Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to.
Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract.
Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users.
Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.
Phrased another way, “bug immortality guarantees.” What is the use case for completely immutable software? Even Ethereum smart contracts do not actually guarantee the compiled byte code matches the supposed source of the contract, so while it might be immutable, it is not free. I think the bigger concern is not that the code will update - updates are good, especially ones for bug fixes like the log4j vulnerability recently - but that the code they say is running, is not actually running.
And let’s assume that we need to update our code. You need to pay to deploy an entirely new contract and then have some sort of “pointer”/gateway that redirects all your users to the new patched contract, and then we’re right back where we started where this gateway can be forced by law to not direct people to your contract much like Google can be DMCA’d to not show copyright violations.
> Even Ethereum smart contracts do not actually guarantee the compiled byte code matches the supposed source of the contract
What? You don't have to publish your smart contract code for the public to verify, but you absolutely can. And once you do, the public can absolutely verify that the smart contract code you provided does in fact compile to the byte code deployed to the blockchain.
> and then we’re right back where we started where this gateway can be forced by law to not direct people to your contract much like Google can be DMCA’d to not show copyright violations.
You don't have to include that upgrade functionality in your smart contracts. Or if you do include upgrade functionality, you can limit what sort of functionality can be upgraded. Otherwise, yes, it's no different than just running your own server and changing the code all of a sudden with the users being none the wiser.
Question is, if you don't limit your upgrade functionality, are your users going to trust you not to rugpull?
Given that you can deploy smart contracts as binaries (without source) and you can design the contracts to be upgradeable if needed, I don’t see any advantages of this system. Sure, the contract can be immutable but the only advantage is for the archivist who now has a permanent record of the software history. Other than a public change log, this doesn’t have much utility.
It's up to you to decide how much control over your smart contract and it's assets you want to put into who's hands. It reasonable that the EVM would want to account for a wide range of use-cases.
The point is simply to be able to make certain immutability guarantees, if you do want them. The utility is very evident in that something like a Uniswap pool a) works and b) cannot be stopped, so people who do find a Uniswap pool useful, are able to rely on the guarantees made by the smart contract, including of course any potential bugs.
It seems you’re talking from the developer’s point of view, the person who writes and deploys smart contracts. I am coming from the end user’s point of view, who has very little to gain from the immutability guarantees.
For Uniswap pools, you’re referring to smart contracts that allow people to take out or provide funding for loans, right? So the immutability of the contract may be appealing in terms of interest rates or loan duration/terms/etc. But this option already exists outside of DeFi (fixed rate loans). It is cool that we can offer these in a decentralized manner, but the possibility of a bug affecting my mortgage or another sizable loan is a huge, huge deterrent and I am also sure that, if DeFi “takes off,” there will be solutions implemented that completely remove all immutability guarantees.
Immutability is the least of DeFi's problems. A DeFi "loan" requires that the borrower must put up an amount equal to the sum of all future installments... which means for a borrower to be able to borrow funds they need to already have the funds they're borrowing (plus interest).
The point I am making is every smart contract is Schrodinger’s contract where the user has no idea what is inside and no way to know. Say you have a game called, I don’t know, Crypto Run. To purchase in game assets, the developers of Crypto Run deployed a smart contract that lets players do this. You have to use the smart contract from the developers and even if alternatives exist, people want to use the official contract from the development team. There is nothing stopping the Crypto Run team from sneaking in some telemetry code and we have to trust that they don’t. So we’re back to a trust-dependent system.
The contract developer releasing the code is the problem, not verifying that is what is running. When a company open sources some code, we assume and trust they are not keeping a separate, evil branch running in production unbeknownst to us. If Facebook “open-sourced” their entire platform and infrastructure tomorrow, the hard part is not verifying that this code is what is running. The hard part would be getting Facebook to do this in the first place. Your use case (of the developer open sourcing their code already) is not the hard part.
> The contract developer releasing the code is the problem, not verifying that is what is running.
In a trustless environment like defi, why would anyone other than the most gullible put their money in any smart contract that doesn't have open sourced code?
> When a company open sources some code, we assume and trust they are not keeping a separate, evil branch running in production unbeknownst to us.
We assume and trust because we have to. With crypto, you can trust and verify, as the Russians say.
> In a trustless environment like defi, why would anyone other than the most gullible put their money in any smart contract that doesn't have open sourced code?
So... this is a thing for techies only? The rest of the world that can't read the code will have to trust the techies that say "this is good".
As a not-JavaScript-devleoper, open sourced optimal written JavaScript is only slightly less inscrutable than minified or compiled JavaScript.
So, would I be gullible to put my money into a smart contract written in JavaScript?
Most of the world can't verify the code and will need to trust someone. I hope that isn't the password verification commission that calls grandmothers offering to help check out their bank account security.
> Most of the world can't verify the code and will need to trust someone.
I haven't scrutinized the code for major flagship apps like Uniswap either. But plenty of others have, including paid auditors.
With open-sourced code, you can actually do this. You can actually get semi-reliable signals that others have scrutinized the code and found it to be fine. Not completely reliable, because sometimes auditors also miss subtle exploits. But you know, everyone's risk tolerance is different. Decide for yourself what degree of trust you're comfortable with, and put or don't put your money in accordingly.
This isn't specific to crypto, this is true for open source in general.
> So... this is a thing for techies only? The rest of the world that can't read the code will have to trust the techies that say "this is good".
But yes, as of now pretty much. The average Joe who cannot remember their own passwords should not be using crypto, IMO. With freedom comes the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot, and unless you understand basic digital safety procedures, you are best off not shooting yourself in the foot.
> Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract.
They won't have to. It's like putting absurd security on your door yet leaving the windows as open as always.
If you ever want to move value out of your virtual economy and into the real, they can and will be there waiting for you, with all their unreasonable demands.
That introduces more friction into the process, but incentives will always find a way. We haven't been able to stop a billion dollar drug trade, what makes you think banning a trillion dollar crypto market will cause it to disappear entirely? It might have a huge collapse in value and finally drive away all the dumb money pouring in, but it will still be there.
I’m just waiting for the day when governments decide that all this crypto is hurting the environment more than necessary for no real gain and forces ISPs to block this traffic. Similar to how many ISPs block serving DNS or SMTP from residential IPs.
IMHO, VPNs scare me more than ISPs spying on me. I ran a small ISP (<100 subscribers) and the sheer amount of data you could collect on a single person was mind boggling. This was pre-https-all-the-things, so I’m sure it’s better these days. Still, do I really want my traffic to go through some unregulated entity? Not really…
I believe it is possible to ban them, with a combination of multinational regulation and technical coordination with ISPs. Not easy nor even likely.
ISPs could simply run honeypots that in real time sniff out who is running a blockchain node and block traffic to those IPs. These nodes must broadcast publicly to other nodes to even function, so they can't hide the fact that they are a blockchain node: they are forced to peer with whoever else is... peering in the same direction, pun intended.
I'd love to know what gaps in my knowledge invalidate the above thesis, though.
Ah, natural language. I'd interpreted you as meaning that you host the apps yourself rather than let someone do it for you (hence "self-hosting"), and you host these apps for others to use.
I mean, yes, but if your use case is only yourself as the sole user, that's quite different from the majority of businesses out there who need to service many users. This is truly like comparing apples and oranges.
Is that true though? If two people run self hosted apps that can communicate, all you have to verify is the data passing between. What assurances are you missing?
They can communicate, but if they want to agree on shared state between them, they have to solve the same problem that blockchains seek to solve, and the options available to you there are essentially on a spectrum of how many people are going to participate and to what extend you can vet them.
I don’t think multiplayer games are running a blockchain and they agree on shared state. Humans being humans tend to reject cheaters who manipulate the state in their favor. But you don’t need a blockchain for any of this, and in fact, it’s too slow to have shared state /in real time/.
While I'm not really big on "Blockchain all the things!" this might be a poor analogy, considering just how many big multiplayer games use very intrusive, almost rootkit level anticheat software to, effectively, try and force all clients to behave and share state fairly...
Hmm. Might be a poor analogy then. I’ve never had any issues with anti-cheat software or ever noticed it’s existence — other than an icon on a splash page.
Not really; it is the server that tells all clients what the state is.
I know "there is nothing new that blockchain does" has become a meme among sceptics, but with respect, I am getting a bit tired of it.
It's just not accurate. You can argue that what the way blockchain allows for shared state is useless all they long, or that the financial use cases are undesirable, and that's all fine. But you simple cannot run the kind of apps that are running on Ethereum right now, enabling financial transactions, with the same guarantees of décentralisation and permissionless access, w/o a blockchain.
It may be useless and/or criminal, but it is certainly new and it works.
> Not really; it is the server that tells all clients what the state is.
Not with realtime action games, nope. The server hopefully verifies, but not even that is a given... Just look at New Worlds immortality bug from a few weeks back for a pretty large budget game that forgot to do that to a sufficient degree.
I’m not arguing that the blockchain isn’t valuable. I think it does unlock new and interesting things. I think we are still learning what those things are, outside of crypto transactions. And like anything else, there’ll be times to apply it and times not.
If blockchain is more expensive than cloud for you, the person that launched the product, then you architected your project wrong
Blockchain products are write once, read free, persist forever for free.
Your users pay to interact. Every SaaS funnel person knows that of you get users to pay at all then you have filtered the funnel to larger payments already. Blockchakn projects are that funnel in warp speed.
I disagree. The cost of just deploying my contract might pay for years of self hosting at current transaction rates. It might eventually amortize out to cheaper over many, many years, but that assumes no changes are ever needed. How likely is that?
The person you're replying to has already addressed your points:
> Yes, blockchains are slower and more expensive. This is the current cost of enabling the two facets above. If we're not comparing blockchain dapps to other systems that offer the same assurances, then we're comparing apples and oranges.
Could you please respond more meaningfully to the conversation?
I thought I did... That quoted paragraph doesn't negate my point which is that I do get the same (or very similar) assurances elsewhere, so I think the comparison is valid.
They didn't address the points - they tried to say nobody gets to compare other things unless they do <the two facets that dapps offer>. Which is wrong.
They said it's an apples to oranges comparison unless both things do <the two facets that dapps offer>. Which is absolutely correct. You could compare apples to oranges if you wanted to... but usually there's no point in doing so.
As I said to OP, no, it's not apples to oranges, you are absolutely wrong. It's comparisons of different points in the app architecture space, and that's normal, and not pointless as you claim.
You can't wave away the serious issues by saying "there's no point in comparing them"
Lots of things offer different functionality and tradeoffs. If you want to play in the space of "web app", you can and should be compared to things that are solutions for producing "web apps". We compare codeless web apps to code ones, etc.
The same way people compare gas and electric vehicles. Or minivans and suvs and trucks.
Or, well, everything in a solution space.
Any solution for a given use case can and should get compared with other solutions for that use case.
I'm really sorry that it doesn't seem (judging by this thread) to compare particularly well for most developers, but that doesn't invalidate the comparison.
> Any solution for a given use case can and should get compared with other solutions for that use case.
And the current use cases are sufficiently different that it's like comparing apples and oranges.
> I'm really sorry that it doesn't seem (judging by this thread) to compare particularly well for most developers, but that doesn't invalidate the comparison.
Again, do you think the same of Tor? It doesn't compare particularly well by most mainstream metrics. High latency, low bandwidth. And yet it serves a lot of value to a lot of people.
But then some smartass goes and says "It's completely useless tech, I can host a simple static website on clearnet for much less hassle." Yeah, duh, but that's not the point of Tor. Go use the clearnet if that's what you're looking to do.
No, this particular thread started by v64 is precisely that comparing existing apps on the regular web to dapps is comparing apples and oranges. The use cases and guarantees are pretty darn different.
If this is how my position came across, it wasn't my intent and I'll clarify.
Immutability and resistance to shutdown are not features that the vast majority of apps, present and in the future, will ever need. My main dispute with the original article is that the author argues every single use case of a Web3 app can be done with a traditional app, and I argue that's simply not true. The case where that breaks down is precisely when your app requires immutability and resistance to shutdown.
To use an analogy: Most people will never need to own or use an armored car, and if you evaluated an armored car based on its viability as a consumer vehicle, you would say that its fuel requirements and maintenance costs are impractical, because you don't need the assurance of having a bulletproof vehicle in your everyday life. It would be overkill.
Similarly, these Web3 technologies are not being designed to replace YouTube or Facebook. If you're building a service like that, you don't need the armored car. On the other hand, if you're designing an app that performs financial transactions, then the armored car may be something you can use. Or not! But the option is there.
99% of developers will never need to build an app this way. But there are use cases outside of ponzi schemes and fraud that seem to be overlooked and which I think are worth drawing attention to.
This is great, but I don't need it at 10^9 times the cost.
Imagine if a single red apple costed about $100M, yet it had rather unique qualities such as indisputable, provable lack of contamination. That's the kind of cost difference we're talking about here.
What did the first cell phone cost? The first laptop? Every new piece of technology goes through a cycle where things are wildly inefficient and barely operable, but over time they're refined in a loop of iteration and improvement.
Vacuum tubes gave way to the silicon transistor, which immediately moved the idea of "personal computing" from a complete impossibility to something that was a pipedream that was technically possible to do. From there things like the Apple II made paths to make personal computing actually usable and affordable. The iteration cycle continues, drives demand for new things to do, which drives demand for the internet. Eventually we arrive at the iPhone where I can now have a low-latency, high definition, video call for (basically) free with anyone in the world. Try explaining that vision to someone in the 90's who has a pager, pays for long distance, and buys stamps and they'll tell you it's impossible or a pipedream.
The crypto/web3 industry is just finding its feet with some new tools in the proverbial toolbox (distributed consensus and smart contracts). There's a lot of people building on it and iterating every day, but in the same way that the IETF were unsung heros of bringing everyone Youtube, there are a lot of folks hard at work at making things usable and practical for mass adoption. Mass adoption just comes last.
I hope we can all agree that NASA pays NASA costs to solve specific, low-N problems. The problem with the blockchain is it wants to spend NASA money on basic translations.
> Why hate that a solution exists for those who do?
Because from where I am it looks more like it exists for charlatans and scammers to draw more people in and exploit them. Also, why do cryptocurrency fanatics so frequently accuse anyone critical of them as being hateful?
> Because from where I am it looks more like it exists for charlatans and scammers to draw more people in and exploit them.
Yes, "charlatans and scammers" are definitely part of the demographic that would benefit from crypto. But you're really going to ignore every other use case I've mentioned?
From where some people stand, it looks more like Tor exists for pedophiles to draw other pedophiles in. They're not wrong, but they're also not acknowledging the full picture of what Tor and privacy in general enables.
> Also, why do cryptocurrency fanatics so frequently accuse anyone critical of them as being hateful?
Because the critics, as you can see over and over again in this very thread, are being completely dismissive to the actual use cases and benefits that crypto brings. Never acknowledging the minority of people for whom it actually brings real value to (granted, they've become a minority now that there's a lot of speculative dumb money in the market), never acknowledging the points that are being made, and also calling crypto advocates MLM schemers who just want to draw more people in to make money off of them.
It's one thing if the critics take a look at it and say "Oh that's not really for me" or "Oh I don't know if censorship resistance is an attractive enough incentive for people to keep running Ethereum nodes long-term." Then we could really have a conversation. But they don't say it like that. They say everything with disdain and a sneer. So I respond in kind.
What would you call that other than "hate"? If you kept criticizing something your friend likes despite them telling you all the reasons they like it, and you only ever saying how much it sucks and how nobody should like it, doesn't it make sense for them to ask you "Dude, why do you hate it so much? What do you have against it?"
The thing with tor is that it is only 1-2 orders of magnitude worse than the “normal” approach in terms of performance and so forth. Enough to be annoying, but still totally workable for a lot of applications
One thing I don't get, maybe someone can shed some light; what happens if some trademarked content is added to the blockchain metadata or on something like arweave. If a DMCA comes in - from my reading, blockchains or ipfs stores won't take the item down, but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing. So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS? Sure, the item at the address is immutable, but you might not be able to get it. If that's accurate it's 'mostly' immutable, which is not immutable. Am I way off?
So the way IPFS works is that the URLs are hashes of the content. If providers are pressed by DMCA they can stop resolving the content but as long as one person resolves the content it should be theoretically accessible. Potentially IPFS relays could choose not to relay this but that's ultimately a weakness of the client not polling multiple relays more than it is the network failing to be resilient.
So IPFS does allow DMCA and the like to exist and function but as long as a certain margin refuse to comply, the network continues to function as expected ignoring the actions of centralised organisations.
I think you're pretty off, yes. Censorship-resistance is one of the core selling points of Ethereum. :)
> but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing
There's no way for the blockchain to do that. The only way this is possible on ethereum is if the smart contract includes a self-destruct function, and the owner of the smart contract decides to call it (either because their private keys were compromised, or because they were coerced into doing so IRL). Otherwise, it's technically impossible to do without taking down the entire network or breaking encryption.
I'm less familiar with IPFS so can't really speak much to that -- but from what little I understand, censorship-resistance is also a major selling point there.
> So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS?
There is the ENS, but even then, nobody can take an ENS domain down except for the owner of that domain. Not even the creator of the ENS smart contract, unless they specifically included upgrade functionality into the contract, because smart contracts are immutable.
> Sure, the item at the address is immutable, but you might not be able to get it.
As long as you have access to a single Ethereum node, or access to a service that has access to an Ethereum node, you will be able to get at it. It's hard to imagine you not getting at any Ethereum nodes unless a Great Firewall of China situation exists, and even China doesn't care to ban most proxies.
It's not always about censorship resistance. What if someone uploads child pornography on IPFS? Do we all just go "ah well, it's immutable" and live with it?
Well yes, you either play whack-a-mole with every single IPFS server, or you live with it, because you have no choice.
Like I've said elsewhere, this is "for better or for worse," depending on your political sensibilities. Again, I think Tor is a good example here. Lots of CP on Tor, or so I hear. But also persecuted journalists and whistleblowers, and safer drugs than you'd find on the streets. You can't realistically say "I want X to be outside the reach of tyrannical governments, but not Y." It's an all-or-nothing deal. By its very nature, these sorts of libertarian technologies will attract all the illegal parts of society -- for better or for worse.
That's a strong claim. Depends a lot on what the regulatory landscape is going to look like in the future. I'm guessing you're no more a Congress insider than I am.
Having used both defi and traditional financial infrastructure, defi definitely feels a lot, lot more frictionless to me, at least while acting within the Ethereum ecosystem. Time will tell, but I find it hard to believe such frictionlessness won't eventually force its way into the world.
Why would that be a good comparison? If Tor offered comparable services to crypto then we wouldn't be talking about crypto as something different and more advanced than Tor, which it fundamentally is.
Blockchain nodes are just servers like http servers or ftp servers and so DMCA notices and other legal measures can be taken against the operators of each server. Whether or not such measures would be successful is debatable, but there's nothing magical about a blockchain in this respect. It's just a set of servers replicating state between each other and (potentially) serving that state up to clients.
No actual blockchain will be able to (even in theory) take down DMCA'd data. There is no mechanism whatsoever for complying with such requests, anymore than there's a mechanism for reversing transactions associated with activity a government deems illegal.
Individuals running IPFS gateways or nodes may be directly targeted and asked to take down data, but there's no mechanism for "the network as a whole" to remove data. It's exactly the same as bittorrent. So long as one individual in some hard-to-reach jurisdiction continues hosting the data, nothing can be done.
Name any that execute Turing complete programs that have also shown resiliency to being taken down. Lot of darknet markets running on Tor have been shutdown over the years. Can't shut down a smart contract with no self-destruct function unless you shut down the entire Ethereum network.
> opens up possibilities for your app to be shut down
Is this a big worry for a lot of people or is just one of the possible things that can go wrong incidental to doing business, like a traffic ticket is to driving?
It's definitely a worry for people doing illegal businesses, for example all the drug markets. Depending on your political allegiances, that's either a good thing or a bad thing, but either way, real value is being created for some people here.
It's also a worry for people who are traditionally blocked from doing business -- for example, anyone who's got some sanctions placed on them. Again, could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your political opinions. But some people find it valuable, that's for sure.
Hopefully, the number of people you are talking about is fairly small, or maybe I'm just out of touch with the rise of crime and corruption on the dark web - but I wouldn't lose any sleep if they got shut down. I'm fairly libertarian about drug use, but there's a lot of other terrible stuff that is enabled along with drugs in this system.
Well, you don't have to like the criminals of today, but lets also not forget that good people are deemed criminals under repressive regimes, for crimes such as "watching K-Pop."
Even today, many in more liberal US states will find it unconscionable that someone could still have their life ruined over a little bit of weed in the more conservative states.
Again, not saying this way is the right way. Just saying, there's a lot of value in such tech -- for better or for worse.
Not being able to shut down an app is important when money is involved - otherwise you could lock up tokens in a contract, shut it down, and never be able to retrieve them.
No, we get it. There are transactions we want to shutdown - child porn, bribes to public officials, money laundering, black market arms trades. There are transactions we want to reverse: mistakes, ransomware.
The gatekeepers are important and play a role. There are real arguments to be made about how we can make the gatekeepers more efficient, but not that they aren’t necessary.
If, as with Ethereum, your users pay me $100 per transaction to execute a few trivial lines of code, I and my future children will happily keep a server running immutably for you forever.
I appreciate the offer, but I have a stronger belief that the Ethereum blockchain will persist into the future compared to your proposed family server trust :)
> Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown
I have tried my best to read up on how all this is supposed to work but have come up blank. Is there a simple explanation - using zero buzzwords - of how I can run a site in the way you describe in the Web3 world?
A typical web3 site consists of two parts: The first is the smart contract code that lives on the blockchain, which handles the tasks that a typical server backend would handle (keeping and changing state, producing outputs given certain inputs, etc).
The second is a web frontend typically deployed to a decentralized service like IPFS to provide interactions with the backend contract, however this isn't the only way a web3 site can be made. You can also have the front end as something the user runs locally, or you can eschew the front end entirely, as it's also possible to programmatically interact with smart contracts directly (analogous to the command line in a way).
An example of such a site would be the decentralized trading exchange Uniswap located at https://app.uniswap.org/. Rather than calling a centralized API endpoint to populate the front end, all the data is being pulled through interactions with contracts on the blockchain. Smart contracts can provide read-only data fee free, and you only have to pay to interact with the site when you're doing something that would change state.
- I can't say about the compute, but it's pretty obvious that the site isn't running on 1/5,000 the power of a Raspberry Pi for $250 a second (aka Smart Contract).
So, what part of it is distributed and resilient to takedowns?
The smart contract is. It's like https://xkcd.com/932/ . The static JS being served by the site is just a poster that could be hung up anywhere else. Even if that URL is taken down, your money is still safe and sound on the blockchain. You can still sign transactions and interact with the smart contracts, get your liquidity out, etc., so long as you have access to any part of the Ethereum network.
There is no money or smart contracts involved in my scenario. I just want to host a random site.
Put another way – is there a use case for Web3 which doesn't involve touting Web3? What is the "killer app" for the average user who isn't obsessed with crypto/blockchain?
Then just do that. You're neither the kind of user nor the kind of developer who would want to use web3.
> What is the "killer app" for the average user who isn't obsessed with crypto/blockchain?
What's the "killer app" of Tor for the average user who isn't obsessed with privacy? Nothing. The whole point is privacy. If you're okay with clearnet tracking, then just use the clearnet.
What I don't understand is this refusal to understand that there's actual value in blockchain technology for some people. I get that you don't need or want it. Why is it so hard for you to understand that others do need or want it?
Honestly you couldnt explain at all what could be interesting usecase and resulted to saying "its not for you". Whats killer app of TOR? Well its TOR - its pretty clear proposition even to mainstream users it will be instantly obvious - the privacy is the feature.
> Honestly you couldnt explain at all what could be interesting usecase and resulted to saying "its not for you".
I've explained again and again in other comments. As did the parent comment of this whole thread. It's really not that hard to understand, but there's nothing I can do if you don't want to understand.
> Well its TOR - its pretty clear proposition even to mainstream users it will be instantly obvious - the privacy is the feature.
Really? Have you ever met a non-technical user who said they wanted to use Tor for anything?
Regardless, that's entirely besides the point. So what if a mainstream user doesn't understand why version control would be useful for their Excel sheets? The rest of us carry on using version control just fine.
> I've explained again and again in other comments. As did the parent comment of this whole thread. It's really not that hard to understand, but there's nothing I can do if you don't want to understand.
Look, we all know how MLMs work. Just say that you’re finding reasons for other people to pay money for your tokens rather than accusing people of not understanding. None of your comments have included a compelling sales pitch and it’s not the reader’s obligation to help you improve it.
There's no compelling sales pitch because I'm not trying to make one. I think there's already too much dumb money in it already, and I sure don't want yours either. Those of us who want or need it will continue to use it. Those of us who don't... well then, just don't.
You're looking for something that just isn't there, so you can sneer at it and show your snide superiority. Go somewhere else for that sort of validation, because you're not getting it from me.
Why are you being so rude to people who just want to foster a real conversation with you about cryptocurrency? When you're backed into a corner you can't resort to "it's not for you", and start making personal attacks. It frankly makes your case look paper-thin and further reinforces the idea that cryptocurrency is a chump's game.
These people are hardly trying to foster a real conversation. Person I was responding to implied I'm trying to rope him into an MLM scheme. I respond in kind, and I'm the one being rude?
> When you're backed into a corner you can't resort to "it's not for you"
I think your bias is showing. I'm hardly backed into a corner. From my perspective, I've only ever stated hard facts. They're the ones backed into a corner by these facts, and all they can ever muster up is "Oh but I don't find that useful. My use case is an app that literally only myself uses."
It's like wading into a conversation about Spark and saying it's overkill when you just want to process a hundred line CSV file. No duh, that's not what it's meant for. It gets real old when commenter after commenter -- and often even the same commenter -- misses the same point again and again.
And I'll say, that includes you. You're backed into a corner and unable to name any alternatives here [1], so you resort to criticizing my tone instead.
> It frankly makes your case look paper-thin and further reinforces the idea that cryptocurrency is a chump's game.
I wasn't looking to convince anyone in particular, and that includes you. It seems you're more swayed by tone than by facts. So be it.
Your hard facts are really just reframing a conversation that time and time again you've failed to engage with. People are calling Web3 a fraud; a system where value is derived simply from the demand of crypto in general, and purely serves to benefit people who invested first (like MLM). When confronted about the possibility of all of it being a scam, your only response was "caveat emptor". When people say that's stupid, you resort to "well that's fine, I didn't want your money anyways". What people want to see is how Web3 iterates on the internet as it exists right now. You've provided a few implementation details, and repeatedly stated that it's different, but at no point have you produced a compelling refutation to the idea that, as a concept, it is a scam. Web3 is a bubble, even you're willing to admit as much; "there's already too much dumb money in it already" you claimed. Furthermore, you're arguing for a level of utility that doesn't exist out of the context of transferring money to wildly unstable assets. This is a textbook scam, and your rhetoric will perpetually be at odds with the rest of the discussion unless you engage them on their own terms.
Web3 is marketing itself as something it is not. You're using a combination of expectation management and goalpost shifting to refute that, and people have called you on it. I can imagine that you don't see yourself as "losing" these arguments, since you haven't even responded to them in the first place.
> People are calling Web3 a fraud; a system where value is derived simply from the demand of crypto in general
The supply of ledger space is limited. When demand for that space not only goes up, but keeps going up, what does economics tell us happens to the price? I keep giving example after example of what people use this ledger space for, but all anyone every says is "Oh, but it's just moving tokens around." I have yet to see anyone say how that's any different from the stock market just moving fiat around. Deflection, deflection, deflection. Who's refusing to engage with the conversation now?
> and purely serves to benefit people who invested first (like MLM)
That is simply not true, and I've given example after example of the use cases that benefit the people using the chain. But after every explanation, you still resort to "Oh but I don't use it, so it must be an MLM." You haven't engaged at all with any of my points, you just keep repeating your own. Who's reframing the conversation now?
> When confronted about the possibility of all of it being a scam, your only response was "caveat emptor".
When confronted about the possibility of any single smart contract being a scam, my only response is "caveat emptor," yes. Because that's the whole point. You can't have censorship resistance without having this phenomenon.
But when it comes to the possibility of the whole thing being a scam, that's clearly ridiculous and as I've said, I've refuted it many times over. The next few sentences of your comment are just more of the same, so I'm not going to bother refuting every individual sentence.
> When people say that's stupid, you resort to "well that's fine, I didn't want your money anyways".
Yes, all people ever do is to call it "stupid" without backing their argument up. You said it yourself.
> This is a textbook scam
And by implication, I'm one of the scammers then, aren't I? And you expect me to respond to such accusations politely and demurely?
> your rhetoric will perpetually be at odds with the rest of the discussion unless you engage them on their own terms.
"On their own terms" meaning that we accept the premise that it's a scam? So you don't want a discussion, you just want me to affirm your pre-existing beliefs.
> I can imagine that you don't see yourself as "losing" these arguments, since you haven't even responded to them in the first place.
I notice you still haven't named any alternative technologies in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588753 . You say "decentralization doesn't need the blockchain," implying that the blockchain doesn't really do much for decentralization. I respond asking for any other alternative that does what crypto does, and gave an example of a major decentralized platform that was only possible because of crypto. Once again, you're backed into a corner, and all you do is refuse to respond, and then deflect and project your own loss onto me. I rest my case.
And this is something very useful. There's been a lot to show for the last decade of crypto development.
It's just not useful for you. Which I understand. Not everything is for everyone. But you seem incapable of understanding that it's useful for many who are not you.
> But you seem incapable of understanding that it's useful for many who are not you.
Then why can't you provide examples which are useful for things other than moving cryptocurrency tokens around? When the web started, sure some of the pages were talking about the web and how to build new things with it, but most of the things people were putting online were using the web to make were related to their hobbies, professional interests, politics, etc. and simply using it as a communications medium.
More crassly, why do I not hear anyone saying it's useful unless they have a personal financial stake in me buying their tokens? The closest past event I remember seeing was during the dotcom era when day-traders would talk up stocks without being able to say what a company did or why they were a good bet.
> Then why can't you provide examples which are useful for things other than moving cryptocurrency tokens around?
I provided, among other things, examples of trading tokens that track real world assets. Or what, you think the stock market isn't actually useful because it doesn't do anything useful other than moving money around?
Do you know why Ethereum gas fees are so high? Because lots of people are using Ethereum. Obviously because they find it useful for -- yes -- moving tokens around and whatnot.
Again, you're obviously not someone who would find it useful or even interesting. But seriously, how is it so hard for you to understand that the world isn't just you?
> More crassly, why do I not hear anyone saying it's useful unless they have a personal financial stake in me buying their tokens?
Maybe because you're not interested in the tech, so the only people who you ever get to talk to about crypto are the shills? Because that has obviously not been my experience, which has been a lot more technical.
IMO these projects are aiming at a new form of sovereignty on the internet that doesn't/can't exist currently - the ability to have your data be permanently stored and accessible on the web. Google can decide to kill Google Photos, and every email provider on the planet can delete everyone's old emails if they so choose. It's unlikely, yes, but the ability to put something on the internet permanently surely has some novel value to it, even if just as an open building block to something bigger than the sum of its parts.
A massive part of what's going on right now in the crypto space is people experimenting with these new protocols and tools like smart contracts and DAOs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...) and attempting to figure out new and novel things to do with them. Web3 is a moniker du-jour to try to encompass these experiments in finance, governance, art, and collaboration.
When the internet was early, people were doing the same, and it gave rise to new forms of art, online gaming, radically different access to banking, ecommerce, and low latency, (basically) free, video calling anywhere in the world. Imagine trying to explain Twitch.tv or Facebook to someone in the early 90s when people were paying for long distance calls and stamps. The groundwork for these things was being created as people were inventing DNS, HTTP, etc etc, but in the same way that NeoPets was not the ultimate expression of online gaming (but had influence on it nonetheless), the things we're seeing today are not the ultimate expression of what "web3" will eventually be but instead a bunch of passionate people trying to figure out what revolutionary things can be built with these new unique tools.
Resources like storage and bandwidth aren’t free. People won’t pay to host strangers content for free forever, especially with the personal legal risk that entails, so you’re going to need to pay regularly to host content which isn’t both very popular and under an open license, which is the content which is most reliably replicated now at much lower cost.
Similarly, there’s a lot of mythology about content not being censorable which falls apart as soon as you think about it. People still have to follow the law in their country: if you upload a Disney movie to IPFS, their lawyers will send takedowns to everyone hosting it. Just as with other P2P services, anyone using it will be deterred by the risk of your ISPs cutting your service if you don’t comply with legal requirements but unlike its more efficient and private alternatives these services are both public (making it easier to track users) and the blockchain services handily provide a signed statement for prosecutors, which seems unlikely to be a popular feature for anyone who actually needs it.
That’s the key difference between the early internet and “web3”: those early efforts were building things people outside of that community clearly wanted but the latter is what happened when people spent a decade pumping money into cryptocurrencies in the hopes of one day becoming rich and are now desperately searching around for reasons why everyone else should pay a premium for their random numbers. It never goes well when the conversation starts with what you’d like to sell someone rather than what they need.
Sure, I generally think of these projects as experiments to try to make this “store something permanently” vision happen in reality. Just because the vision has hurdles to overcome doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.
Arguably GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault aimed to do the same thing in a different way https://archiveprogram.github.com/.
I agree that the tail end support of bandwidth and storage costs for X years are obstacles for this vision but blockchains in their current form already incentivize keeping this data around and hosting the data as part of normal network operations. These projects are just trying to separate out the storage layer from the computation layer (which may be a folly, or may prove viable).
The point is that there’s groups of people trying to apply these new tools in novel ways to try to give humanity better tools in some capacity, and I think that’s a fine use of resources and effort.
Have you heard of the uncensorable library project? https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en it aims to make some data permanent and available even in the face of Chinese censorship. Is it a panacea that’s going to scale for all data forever? Of course not, but it’s a novel approach and an interesting experiment (and look ma, no blockchain!).
But it's not on the internet permanently, it will disappear eventually at an unknown point in the future, like a dead torrent due to the lack of seeders.
Eventually everything will disappear, so this is. It quite a valid counter argument. On the other hand, there is a real chance that these protocols have a shot on enabling preservation of data for a significant amount of time - literally hundreds of years, sensorship-free, which is kind of cool.
If you took all the Web3 hype and aspirations for technical specifications of what is possible today, you have mistook the schematics for the build. Its very early, and if you want to do what you ask you will have to do more work, just like you would in 1995.
That's all well and good for the handful of niche services that rely heavily on immutability but not performance, but the vast majority of applications need performance as well.
Yes, this is the case. Quoting myself from another comment:
> On a blockchain, once I've deployed my app, I can walk away and never think about the app again. I only have to pay for the initial deployment of the contract without any further ongoing cost. The app will always be there ready to be used by an end user who's willing to pay to interact with it.
Presumably the app also has other assets like js and frontend that need to be hosted. These aren't just compiled and stuffed in The Blockchain until the end of time.
I don't know, but even if everything is stored on a blockchain, the blockchain itself needs to be stored somewhere, and storing data has a cost. So someone has to pay for that (which typically is the users of the blockchain with their fees).
The technology is interesting, but so far most of the use cases involve some form of illegality. If you want to use, say, NFTs for something legitimate, it turns out they don't really work very well for that.
I'd looked at using NFTs for cross-grid ownership transfers of objects in Open Simulator. That's a set of virtual worlds run by several hundred different people and organizations, but using the same software, a rewrite of Second Life in C#. There's no moderately-secure way to pass 3D models around in that system without them being copied for free, which is why most of the good stuff stays in Second Life, which is centrally managed.
Such object instances have prices in the US$0.25 to US$20 range. When you go through a portal from one grid to another, and take some objects with you, a database transaction is required to transfer ownership from avatar A, grid X, to avatar A, grid Y. Otherwise, you could buy one copy and have a free copy in every grid.
The assets have to be hosted somewhere. Somewhere with reliable access times in the < 1s range for a few megabytes.
The blockchain systems just don't have the bandwidth and costs for that. As databases, they're far too slow, and transactions are too expensive. As storage, I've seen $5 for a gigabyte, forever. It's supposed to be funded by investing the $5 in a speculation that storage cost will decline.
But the fine print says basically "until they get tired of doing this".
As for NFTs generally, the art is unimpressive, to put it mildly.
The NFT world is reportedly about half Axie Infinity and a quarter OpenSea, with all the little guys in the remaining quarter. (That may be bogus; there are no reliable stats on this stuff.) Axie Infinity is a Ponzi in the final stages of collapse.[1] OpenSea is becoming a stalled market. Pick some category, like "Bored Ape", which was getting news coverage a few weeks back. Look at the asking prices. Then look at "recently sold" prices. The "recently sold" prices seem to have a lot of zeros after the decimal point.
> The technology is interesting, but so far most of the use cases involve some form of illegality. If you want to use, say, NFTs for something legitimate, it turns out they don't really work very well for that.
This sounds like opinion written as fact. NFTs have use cases that don’t just encompass illegal activities and work well. I personally own NFTs that are used for governance in terms of a budding project’s direction and NFTs that are even used as subscription keys to certain alpha products.
Also it’s a little disingenuous to encourage looking at a contextless single data point indicating a collapse of a product without understanding other factors like there being a bear market in place for the overall cryptocurrency landscape
> Also it’s a little disingenuous to encourage looking at a contextless single data point indicating a collapse of a product without understanding other factors like there being a bear market in place for the overall cryptocurrency landscape
Which is it? Is it a single data point, or is crypto in a bear market?
NFTs are 100% a scam, and the use-cases you've described sounds like financial cosplay.
Solana blockchain would be appropriate for your grid transfer as it can function in that time frame. You can also just do things asynchronously client side.
NFT data is not comprehensive and doesn't include all subsets of that market, most of it is collectors markets.
The Play 2 Earn space has nothing to do with collectors markets. This is analogous to saying Fortnite players grinding for characters skins are providing a forecast into the baseball trading card market.
The verified Bored Ape Yacht Club is the only Bored Ape collection to care about. This seems like the worst example for you to pick, since that collection is still under high demand? Asking prices being met, recently sold prices being the same price?
I do really dislike this general attitude that blockchain/web3/crypto is some elaborate scam with no benefits. Everyone focuses on the same negatives but never look at the interesting elements like solving the double spend problem, safely transferring digital assets in a trustless environment, having a working global computing system with inbuilt incentives, etc..
Yes there are crap uses at the moment. NFTs are a bubble, tokens are overpriced. But the idea of taking ownership of your financial wallet, allowing atomic transactions of digital items, allowing fast cross-border transactions, are all cool ideas. The issue is people only see the cryptobro memes and videos about what coin will 100x, or being asked if they own ethereum by their hairdresser, or seeing news articles about NFTs being sold for 500k.
Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of "Crypto is awesome, let's make a ton of money" or "Crypto is stupid, proof of work is bad for the environment, txs are slow" take the time to actually look at some of the underlying tech. I feel most people are just parroting issues they've heard rather than actually taking a look under the hood.
The problem is that I have been hearing about all these amazing use cases for crypto/blockchain for over a decade now, and not a single one has materialized that is useful for me or any other common user who is not involved in the community. The entire ecosystem is circular. All web3 apps are about web3. And what point does it start adding value outside of pushing itself?
This is fair, I wish more teams were working on the boring useful use-cases.
One I particularly like is gig tickets. Represent them as NFTs, prove ownership of the ticket as it is in your wallet, trade them for USD with anyone around the world in a single atomic transaction, use third party tools to verify a ticket is authentic (either manually copying an NFT address onto a bands website or programatically). Suddenly I can sell you a ticket to a band we both like from a link in this message and you can guarantee if you pay you get the ticket and if I send the ticket I get the payment, and you can guarantee the ticket is authentic by checking it was one of the originally minted tickets. Boring, bad UX, but solves a multi-million dollar issue in the ticket reselling market. These are the peer-to-peer systems I wish people focused on. Sadly a couple million just isn't that cool in the web3 space.
The tickets are already in closed ecosystems like Ticketmaster. It would be orders if magnitudes more efficient for them to just add resale functionality to their platform. Problem is they don’t want third party resellers.
And herein lies the problem. At some point cyrpto tokens have to come back into the real world. If you can’t get $centralized_authority onboard you’re screwed. And if it’s not “decentralized” just make a freaking web app.
> The tickets are already in closed ecosystems like Ticketmaster. It would be orders if magnitudes more efficient for them to just add resale functionality to their platform. Problem is they don’t want third party resellers.
Not really, adding a payment infrastructure that allows peer to peer payments is non-trivial. Also with smart contracts you could collect royalties on the reselling of tickets while keeping the data open enough for anyone to capitalize on creating a front end marketplace along with the original minter (which could encourage more innovation in usability). The minters also would have financial incentive to not shut down these 3rd party front end marketplaces because they can make it so that they’ll collect royalties regardless
This is a perfectly reasonable use case, but also completely infeasible right now due to transaction costs - it could cost hundreds of dollars just to mint and transfer the NFT. Ticketmaster charges outrageous fees, but they’re nothing compared to eth transaction costs.
This is true for Ethereum, but if you look at other top 10 chains like Cardano the fees are much smaller! And proof-of-stake so it's not destroying the planet (I know Eth is going that way soon too).
> This is true for Ethereum, but if you look at other top 10 chains like Cardano the fees are much smaller!
Isn't this a temporary state of affairs? As a chain gets more popular, the fees will necessarily go up. A Dapp that must continually migrate to newer chains to provide a similar value proposition is vulnerable to being shut down, is it not?
For technologies that have gatekeepers, popularity eventually drives down costs. The tradeoff for these gatekeeper-less platforms is that popularity must drive costs up for them to work.
While it is possible to imagine use cases whose value equals or exceeds the cost at any point in time, it is difficult to imagine a use-case that scales in value at a rate equal to or exceeding the rate at which the costs do. Blockchains must continually find new higher value use cases or collapse in value. This isn't exactly the greater fool dynamic, but instead a 'greater foolishness'.
> And proof-of-stake so it's not destroying the planet (I know Eth is going that way soon too).
Proof-of-stake substitutes assets under management for transaction costs, but there is still an adverse selection problem that only gets worse over time.
Sure but you’d need to set up infrastructure to allow that. This is one example that runs on the blockchain. You could have many others with no change in the underlying infrastructure. Also things like the Ethereum Name Service allow you to give names to the NFT beyond some hash so there’s some improved UX there too.
I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot. And let’s keep in mind your reply to this comment will be using a trusted entity.
In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user
Hot take: The proponents of decentralized systems feel disenfranchised by those who own and govern centralized systems, therefore decentralized systems are their way around what they consider injustice. It is a grasp for control and power where they feel they have none. They don’t feel they have a seat at the table, so they argue for building their own table, which is, naturally, “superior” to the existing table (why would you use it if it wasn’t superior?).
It’s not about “open finance” versus “centralized finance”, it’s about “our finance” vs “their finance”, our ledgers versus their databases. This is no different than Silicon Valley starting as David and turning into West Coast Goliath, wrestling with the East Coast Hegemony for status and power.
I get the sentiment, but code doesn’t fix people problems. I am not without curiosity, but web3 still has much work to do to show both novel and meaningful use cases.
While you are undoubtedly correct to some extent, there's also the entire academic side of decentralised systems which is more about solving the our (plural) system vs their (singular) system problem. The same tech that makes these complex decentralised services work also often functions just as well if not better (performance wise) in federated/centralised contexts.
These decentralised systems are a natural abstraction for so many different types of problems and systems. If you leverage them you can still get high performance systems in a centralised manner but the hard work making those systems resilient, localised, and highly available has already been solved. If you design your systems on top of this technical layer you can leverage the benefits without the costs of centralisation for the most part.
The other academic argument to be made is that this is basically the only industry that is meaningfully pushing cryptography forwards (IMHO). Concepts like Functional Encryption, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Secure Multi-Party Computation, and Zero Knowledge Proof Systems have been primarily funded by cryptocurrency research and towards the application in decentralised zero trust systems (which are basically the "ideal" environment for exploring cryptography and game theoretic technologies).
Code doesn't fix people problems but it can augment existing systems and letting those systems evolve to their logical conclusions is a worthwhile endeavour.
I would say it’s about choice, not an “our finance” vs “their finance” (at least not primarily). I don’t think the traditional finance systems needs to be overthrown but I do think people have a right to choose an alternative open system if they choose. If it was an “our finance” vs “their finance” problem, people could just build a new centralized system without the properties offered by the blockchain.
> If it was an “our finance” vs “their finance” problem, people could just build a new centralized system without the properties offered by the blockchain.
Well, they did. They pretty much all failed or were made to fail (DigiCash[0], Flooz, e-gold, etc.) or were subsumed into the existing system (eg. PayPal).
As far as I can tell, the big picture hope this time around is that the existing system will be subsumed into one or more successful cryptocurrencies, rather than the other way around (which defeats the decentralization).
[0] DigiCash was an anonymous, nominally distributed, system, which is a different set of properties than current cryptocurrencies.
How is it censorship free? The government could decide to make Bitcoin illegal. Sure, you could move it to another country without these laws or do things illegally, but that's no different for cash and the issues you mention.
It is censorship free because I can send you a million bitcoin and no-one can stop us without physical force.
The same is far from being true via other means such as the legacy banking system or cash. I mean, you can try and send a briefcase full of notes in the post cross-border, it might work, I wouldn't know or care to try.
Obviously the Government can attempt to, or pass laws, to censor anything at any time for any reason. In my country it was illegal for me to visit family for about 6 months this/last year, there's nothing special about Bitcoin, power will attempt to fuck with you simply because they can.
Also, KYC and AML are mandatory the moment you actually interact with the regular US banking system or USD at all. So any place where you can buy crypto or sell it is going to do KYC and AML on you, including asking uncomfortable questions if your behavior looks suspicious.
Legislation requiring a backdoor in e2e encryption, such as WhatsApp, is also considered a positive by most people even now, but wait after it's been in place for 10 years, it will be as universally unquestioned as KYC or AML policies.
I think this is a toxic way to look at it. Casting it as "they", you're implicitly condoning partisanship/tribalism and putting people into bins. Discussions around this would be guaranteed to be vile and full of hatred. Not just from "your" side, but "they" will also see you in the same way.
As technologists, we ought to be better than this. Think about this like we do with on-prem vs cloud. It is decentralization vs. centralization, but far more muted and less political. We should approach this with a mature contemplation, not cheap tribalism.
Crypto isn’t about technology. It’s about wealth and power (literally!) on top of a (slow) distributed database.
As technologists, we ought to recognize the difference and see the forests for the trees. As a technologist, I cannot unsee the patterns nor look away.
I’m sure you’d find similar musings in 2600 or Phrack decades ago.
I’m am specially speaking about blockchains, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the like, not IPFS, DHTs, or improvements to existing internet technologies (mutable torrents, webtorrent) to support decentralized storage, discovery, or name resolution. The “web3” nomenclature throws it all together, which is annoying. DeFi =! Dweb
What's the difference between the first group of technologies you mention, and the second, other than the fact that a large group of investors has piled onto the first, whereas the second is basically non-profit? Do you refuse to acknowledge the value-add to decentralization that the first group brings?
The difference is that decentralization doesn't have a system of inequality built into it's core principles. Web3 inherantly and explicitly refers to things that integrate with blockchain technologies, and more often than not, cryptocurrency. Of course investors would be more interested in a platform where their financial superiority carries over, it lets them game the system unlike an ambiguous decentralized protocol.
> Do you refuse to acknowledge the value-add to decentralization that the first group brings?
Decentralization needs the blockchain less than the blockchain needs decentralization.
> Of course investors would be more interested in a platform where their financial superiority carries over, it lets them game the system unlike an ambiguous decentralized protocol.
Short of a worldwide communist revolution, that's just going to continue to be the case for any up and coming technologies that make money. Who benefitted most from the enormous gains in tech stocks over the last 25 years? I'll wager it isn't the minimum wage employees.
> Decentralization needs the blockchain less than the blockchain needs decentralization.
Name for me any other way of transferring money to a stranger over the internet in a decentralized fashion. Name for me any other way of executing Turing complete code in a censorship-resistant fashion. These are two big parts of decentralization that crypto solves. Do you refuse to acknowledge that?
There's a reason the Silk Road only appeared after Bitcoin came on the scene. Tor's been around a long time, PGP's been around a long time, but Bitcoin was the missing puzzle piece. I'm not saying drugs are good, I'm just saying decentralization tech didn't reach the level required to implement Silk Road before crypto came on the scene.
> In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user
For many use cases, BitTorrent is a superior file distribution mechanism compared to centralized alternatives.
BT, as a community, is actually being challenged by cheap streaming services, like Netflix, Spotify, Youtube, Steam, etc. They are so cheap and convenient that even simple torrenting feels very slow and cumbersome.
BitTorrent is a terrible file distribution mechanism. I can't think of a single instance where I have had better performance downloading a torrent than a simple FTP/HTTP transfer or video stream from a web server or CDN.
I think part of this may be that the Internet is a Western world invention and we're used to somewhat functional governance in the West. In developing countries finding a trust-able entity is far more difficult, and in those instances it makes sense for people to come together and pool capital into these virtual institutions that can only operate according to their script(s).
We assume everyone in the world has access to non-rug-pulling companies like, say, BofA or TD Ameritrade but that's really not the case. These institutions have become trustworthy through decades of lawsuits and regulations.
Anecdote: My parents immigrated to the US from Albania, a few months before our planned move my dad's bank just decided to stop existing and the owners fled the country with all the (paper) money. My parents came to a new country with no money to their name because the FDIC is an American invention that a bunch of other countries still haven't copied.
So, I can see how it would work in that context, but I would agree here in the US where our tech overlords are generally benevolent it doesn't seem much more useful over web2.
> In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized.
Strong objections to most Web3 concepts can actually be derived from the idea that “there is no algorithm for truth.”
We can imagine an NFT that claims to be a deed for a house. We can also imagine:
* Someone with a fleet of tanks forcing me to leave the house, and then keeping me and my heirs from moving back in. Regardless of what the NFT says, by no means do I own the house.
* I might guess someone’s password and give their NFT to myself, and if it was government binding, convince the rest of society to go along with this. Maybe this counts as owning the house, but it definitely shouldn’t.
Political tools can live or die by being realistic, or by being just and fair. Etherium has managed the astonishing feat of being popular without achieving either.
So, how do we actually ensure that the database reflects the underlying social reality? That’s the part where all these supposedly “decentralized” applications punt, either by explicitly relying on a centralized entity, hoping the government goes along with it, or not having the database really reflect anything outside itself (a very small niche).
> > I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot.
> The lack of trustworthy entities.
Note that trusted != trustworthy.
In security parlance a trusted entity is one you must trust, that can fuck you over (eg. 'Control' in popular culture, handlers in actual HUMINT, a bank that has your deposited money, etc.).
In that same parlance, trustworthy isn't really a thing. You can raise the cost of violating that trust in various ways (assets held by a theoretically disinterested third party with different incentives, reputational costs that foreclose future participation in the system, credible threats of legal action, etc.), but there isn't anything that you can do if the trusted entity is willing to pay that cost (or is unwilling to pay the cost of not violating that trust) to prevent the trust violation.
Your comment still doesn't actually illustrate any example in which web3 is superior to a centralized entity. You must always trust something. Civilization is already inherently centralized.
Establishing yourself as a trusted entity is a huge barrier to entry. Decentralized, trustless systems allow small teams with little to no money achieve things that only institutions and heavily funded companies could do in the past. Technologies like blockchain are a great accelerator for innovations in this area and will also spark a new category of use cases that weren't possible before.
the value proposition of all the crypto nonsense is that some people don't like trusted entities.
I tend to think its not worth the trade off (and the "decentralization" is questionable in practise), but this line of criticism is basically begging the question.
>the value proposition of all the crypto nonsense is that some people don't like trusted entities.
Becoming a trusted entity is hard. Crypto allows for the creation of systems that don't require trusted entites. That's a huge win for the little guy and catalyst for innovation.
I'm not saying there aren't rational reasons to dislike trusted entities. At a minimum they are single points of failure. But all this does come at a high cost.
The real questions to ask with blockchain stuff:
- at what cost does this lack of trusted entitids come at? I don't just mean in terms of money but also engineering complexity
- what are the hidden trust relationships? Plenty of blockchain stuff still involved trusted entities, its just hidden through layers of indirection. The only thing worse than a trusted entity you dont trust is a trusted entity you don't even know exists.
I don't understand what problem email can solve that mail cannot.
Sorry to be sarcastic.
I am still skeptical of most web3 use cases touted on twitter, but have personally experienced a few that have made me pause and be a bit more open minded.
Personal experiences:
- Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!!
- Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks
- ResearchDao's like ResearchHub
> I don't understand what problem email can solve that mail cannot.
I think it's a wrong example. Email provides light-speed delivery, dirt-cheap cost, and brain-dead convenience on top of also being able to mail. So email actually never competed with mail.
Web3 is yet to strike any decisive blow against today's web (or it may never). It's more like another part of the web.
> Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!! - Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks - ResearchDao's like ResearchHub
For a smaller amount of money (<$100k), banks already can transfer money within seconds. I've seen people sending $1Ms only using their phones, but, IIRC, you need a good record to do that.
"Email provides light-speed delivery, dirt-cheap cost, and brain-dead convenience on top of also being able to mail. So email actually never competed with mail"
These advantages are obvious now. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk . My point being that blockchain does offer some new capabilities that were hard to build before. We maybe oblivious in what applications that may unlock.
Regarding money transfer, I know the technology exists, but all providers don't built it. That is native technology in blockchain.
Here in the NL, we’ve been able to send money for free to each other instantly, for at least half a decade. We use apps like Tikkie to mask each other’s bank account numbers and automate some of the book keeping for many transactions, but we don’t technically need the app in the first place.
The US is very slow to move money, I still dread any time I have to use my old US bank accounts to get things done.
> I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot.
Trust cannot solve the problem of giving too much power to trustee. The fact that IT giants are collecting people's data to manipulate people's mind is one good example. We should be able to control the level of trust we can provide to other parties.
> In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user
Twitter won't allow you to say what the CDC says on viral transmission. They won't allow you to say that men aren't women. They hide posts as "sensitive content" that show crime in the cities that people of the same mindset run. Their CEO doesn't believe in freedom of speech.
Blockchain is currently a set of underwhelming technologies, but in a world of 0 or 1 existentials, it's a driving force to allow the open expression 90s tech people said they wanted but lied about.
I think we can analogize to open source and closed source software:
"I don’t understand what problem [web3] can solve that [a trusted entity] cannot."
"I don’t understand what problem [open source software] can solve that [close source software maintained by a well funded and benevolant company] cannot."
A point of open source software isn't that it can create software that would be impossible given the correct closed-source company, the point is to not be beholden to them in the first place. You want to make a change to the software, make it. It's your right.
The same idea for web3. Want to make an application to do something and accept payments for it? Release it as a dapp and charge for each interaction. Nobody can stop you from doing that.
As for the second part, "the things built will inherently be centralized". I'm not sure what you mean. The dapp gets published, you can now interact with it and it doesn't run on any one specific machine. The interaction consists of you and the dapp (and the miners who adds your transaction to the chain). What part is centralized?
> I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot
So that means HN really loved the .org takeover [0], and the price increases for .io [1]
and now the holder of all our beloved trendy top level domains are going into the hands of the great Ethos Capital (again) who are going to do all of the above again. [2] /s
Nothing terrible to see here folks, its for your own good! /s
In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user
I will mint NFTs of your comment, $300 pop so anybody who wants to prove you wrong can do so by buying the NFT of your comment that will surely age well. :) /s
NFTs require at least one of two centralized services to remain functional - the original URL and the Opensea cached URL. So proof of ownership is decentralized, but the actual image is not.
People make this mistake because they think there is a "function" part to NFTs. It's a ledger, and you want to remember what media an entry refers to. You can do that by just keeping it in your community's collective memory, or you can use a hash of the file, or both.
People can then choose to value that ledger entry, or not.
Everything else, such as the ability of n app to figure out an image URL for the NFT, is just sugar on top.
NFT people will value a Bored Ape token whether the URL is valid or not - and they are entirely right to do so. The Cryptopunks don't even have a URL!
While I agree with you that the Internet was better before Social Media, these service are highly centralized. Although, for most normal users decentral or central doesn't really matter.
I once had a lot of excitement about it, but the closer I looked at and used "web3" tech the more I came to the conclusion this is all a big pump and dump scheme.
What's crypto been good for in its 10+ year span? Financing terrorism and ransomware, selling meaningless jpeg certificates of ownership, ICO scams, totally empty and greedy "number go up" speculation consuming the money and attention of potentially creative and productive fellow human beings, and Cryptokitties.
Meanwhile it's already irrevocably wasted, and continues wasting daily, tragic amounts of our world's resources and electricity.
Crypto is a cancer - it thrives because the earlier Ponzi participants are working overtime to hype it to the later ones, with mainly emotional and ideological appeals, plus plenty of technical handwaving. If you get deep enough down the rabbit hole technically and structurally, you discover basically what this article is saying.
You are incredibly confused like many on this site. Confused about the difference between marketing and actual technology. You've basically stepped into a metaphorical convention center with no aid for beginners, been hit with 99 sale's pitches that are genuinely empty and made the conclusion that the whole industry is a scam without realizing that your inability to discern the 1% of actual value makes you conflate aggressive false advertising with the entire space's promise.
I've written and deployed smart contracts, have run an ethereum node, and know most of the EVM opcodes. I'm not an expert by any means but my criticism of crypto isn't that of an "incredibly confused" beginner listening to marketing hype at a convention center.
Well perhaps you should expand your horizons a bit. If you have a good grasp of the core issues with Ethereum then you should have a good idea of what to look for in newer projects.
Let me ask this then - say a newer crypto project succeeds and works as advertised. What then? What specific future applications make you excited about it, besides trading crypto for crypto?
People ask this over and over, and rather than "you could do x, y, and z" what I always seem to hear are vague emotional appeals - "the possibilities are limitless", "we didn't understand the future of the internet / the smartphone / Facebook / The Beatles / Jesus when they started either", "it's not for everyone but if you're selling cocaine in Venezuela it's indispensible", "well currency/tech X is horrible too" etc.
DAO's for one. The implications are broad enough that you could easily feign ignorance or straw-man what they mean. Unless you think the innovation behind Bitcoin is useless, then its hard not to be excited about how that innovation generalizes which is exactly the vision if not quite the result of smart contracts.
Something that I think a lot of Web3 (and metaverse, et al) proponent types don't understand is that you can't plan out a revolutionary technology. By definition, any wide-reaching society-wide overturning of the current order will behave in ways you can't anticipate. For example, HTTP code 402 "Payment Required" was standardized in 1999 when the W3C anticipated that people would be paying for things over the web, but didn't realize that such an error message wouldn't ever really be used because of how such payments were eventually implemented.
I mean, this is true, but it feels like there is a more basic issue of product/market fit here.
Even given the comments here about what this stuff is supposed to provide, it's really unclear anyone did even basic diligence.
Something as simple as "we went around to different focus groups of developers and said "what are your biggest problems and pain points".
Things like "immutability" and "not being shut down" would not be the top 2 for most groups of developers, and i'd bet not in the top 10, either.
As a result, every time i hear about "web3" i can't stop hearing the simpsons clip where Stephen Hawking says "i wanted to see your utopia, but now i see it is more of a fruitopia"
Don't get me wrong, there are certainly types of apps, etc out there where they are going to say "being shut down" is their biggest problem, but that seems like a really small portion of the total addressable market.
There's not much central planning going on. For example, the smart contract standards for NFTs came out of existing smart contracts; they standardized a lot of already-existing practices like creating a `transferFrom` function. Emergent standards like that exist to tamp down on contracts creating functions with slightly different function names, behaviors, etc.
This article misses the point, it sees web3 decentralization as purely technical and makes performance comparisons with existing systems. The power of web3 decentralization is about control, not more powerful computing. Yes your raspberry pi runs faster than the EVM, but can you give me any guarantee about what code it runs?
The comparison between Raspberry Pi and EVM is off by many, many orders of magnitude.
What Ethereum marketing likes to call a “global supercomputer” is slower than a 1950s computer built out of vacuum tubes, and running programs is more expensive than it was in 1955. (Programming ergonomics are also nearly punch card level.)
There are very few applications you’d actually want to execute on a platform like that. And every attempt to improve the design (including the long-promised PoS transition) is going to turn it into a centralized plutocracy.
It’s a fascinating science experiment that doesn’t have much purpose as an application environment. But because people are stubborn and the marketing was successful enough, “blockchain” is to this decade what “object-oriented” was in 1990s: a token gesture towards it will make managers and journalists happy.
Your comment is flawed from the start: no one actually working on Ethereum ever claimed the EVM itself would be a 'super computer.' Thats's day 1 shit.
If instead of focusing on the flaws and then writing off blockchains, you searched for solutions or for the people more intelligent than yourself working on those solutions, you may have stumbled across ingenious proposals like the TrueBit protocol which can perform efficient computation trustlessy, or its competitors like the very well known Internet Computer, which surely deserves some criticism but doesn't waiver to your simplistic, narrow, and misplaced argument.
Most layer 1 Blockchains are trying to replace the existing payment processing systems such as visa. Not replace all of our computing infrastructure (although some are trying to do this such as ICP)
It's no longer considered the only way though, nor are companies selling software based on how object-oriented it is.
They did in the 90s.
OO is now one of several styles, and we no longer have the drive for OO purity we did back then - modern languages and modern versions of languages tend to mix up paradigms and make pragmatic choices, rather than insist on OO everything being the only way.
You could, if the code came from a signed blob that is verified. No need for a blockchain to allow that, it's basically what Mobile OSes are doing, and with multisig you can verify both the developer and the OS vendor.
well then you are trusting the signer, that is the ultimate promise of decentralization. especially coupled with deterministic builds by gcc you could have a end-to-end verified firmware running on a device.
As a 13 year old programmer learning to code in 2005, transferring money online seemed impossible, this was pre-stripe after all. A 13 year old getting a bank partnership or a payment processor deal seemed a bit out of reach as well. These days though, sending money online via stable coins like $USDC over a fast and cheap block chain like Solana, Polygon, avalanche, etc is not only possible but flat out inevitable.
As a 14 year old programmer and tinkerer in 2004, I had no problem buying a Helium-Neon laser for an experiment and paying via PayPal.
As an 18 year old tinkerer and hacker in 2008, I had no problem signing up to take payments via PayPal and running a little side thing selling home-assembled widgets out of my bedroom.
And as horrible as PayPal is, cryptocurrencies have even more friction and risk.
> And as horrible as PayPal is, cryptocurrencies have even more friction and risk.
This comparison with PayPal is perfect. The way I see it, ACH and wire transfers are to PayPal what cryptocurrencies are to startups and tech that is being built right now. The reasons why cryptos have more friction at this point of time is because the PayPals of crypto are being built and distributed. I see a future where creating a wallet and accepting crypto payment will be faster, easier and cheaper than signing up for Venmo or Square Cash.
Stripe fees are higher than Solana $USDC transaction fees.
You also don’t have to worry about getting your account shut down or funds frozen. I once worked for a YC company, LendUp, and we started off using Stripe for accepting payment but had to stop because the policies of their partner bank at the time disallowed servicing of our types of transactions. We spent a large chunk of time integrating with many different payments processors on and off, it was rough.
In summary, web3 has the potential to be and already is, cheaper, faster, and permissionless.
I’m not a crypto bro, but I don’t think it’s fair to criticize a prototype on its cost. Airplanes were very bad at the beginning. I think the valid criticism would be if there is some kind of physical limitation that prevents the system from evolving to something useful (think of the rocket equation, the ratio of useful mass/propellant is stuck at a ridiculous number).
Always these comparisons to wildly successful products. Airplanes, smartphones, the internet, the computer. A great hype technique.
Any day now, just you wait, once we have PoS or Zkp or Cardano launches X or people adopt Solana, etc... crypto is going to do something amazing and unforseen, indescribable and worldchanging besides trading it for more crypto.
Nah man. Its been ten years! Time to shut it all down because after ten years if its not perfect yet its not a good technology. I would know, I'm a computer programmer on HackerNews!
This has got to be trolling. Almost every point is nonsense or at best uninformed vitriol. I literally don't know where to start with a comment so I'll just make a series of points related to claims in the article.
Nobody has ever claimed that you can run normal computer programs on the Ethereum blockchain. It isn't meant to run fucking Doom. Smart-contracts are more like financial protocols.
Blockchains are a form of database but they are not meant to store large amounts of data. That's more a job for IPFS.
Ethereum is migrating to a layered architecture and users are meant to stay on Layer 2's which provide substantially cheaper transactions.
I'm a fan of cryptocurrencies because I think there should be a spectrum of centralization <-> decentralization. If someone wants to stay centralized then fine but I should be able to handle my own money without a bank. I also believe that cryptocurrencies reduce financial friction and overhead. Taking donations is as simple as posting your public address. Taking payments means just integrating a library in your application instead of signing up with a service.
I'm a fan of NFTs because I think people should have ownership of digital items. I think if I pay money for Hearthstone cards then I should be able to sell them on my own terms just like Pokemon cards in real life.
This is how I feel whenever I read a 'blockchain is scam.. is broken.. is a fraud' article. Everyone wants to put their 2 cents in and jump on the criticism train to seem like le technical experts. Over reading the same fallacious and tired arguments. I haven't seen anyone make an original point for some time now.
No it is not. There is no inherit value to bitcoin or any other token or coin. Those are just some hash values printed on a digital marker.
Imagine that I assign value to my monopoly money (as in the game), and it is traded in a stock exchange. Yes, it could reach 60K, but it is still monopoly money.
How is that any different from Fiat money? Or anything for that matter. It holds no real value beyond the paper it is printed on. It is valuable because we all agree as a society to give it value.
Yes, cryptocurrency is the purest form of fiat currency, which is to say a very weak one. The difference is that almost all other fiat currencies are backed by an organization with real world power: for example, the US dollar is required to pay taxes in one of the largest world economies, which guarantees trillions of dollars in demand, and it’s what the US government uses to pay millions of people and buy all kinds of different things. Other countries currencies follow that pattern to varying degrees which is also why we’ve seen efforts like the Euro to, among other reasons, increase the overall volume.
Cryptocurrencies lack sovereignty and don’t have an alternative source of baseline demand, which is why they’re volatile on a level normally associated with collapsing states — especially if they’re like Bitcoin where the deflationary model encourages everyone not to spend. When anyone can easily set up a functional equivalent, there isn’t much to anchor the valuation. This is why people created things like NFTs to give others a reason to buy their tokens rather than someone else’s but that’s not especially stable until those NFTs are accompanied by legal contracts conveying tangible value.
While I dont completely agree with you, you do make good points. I would argue that Cryptocurrencies lacking sovereignty is what makes it appealing and gives it value for most users. Bitcoin is seen as an inflation hedge for many investors when they see their own government printing money like its post WW1 Germany (Exaggeration). The volatility is definitely an issue for someone looking to invest a serious amount into.
I personally feel that we are still in the very early stages of this tech and I think it will continue to grow.
Forget blockchains. TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, etc. they are all fantastic. What they give us is _connectivity_.
The problem is commerce (Amazon et al), search (Google), social (Facebook), etc. or, in general, the information layer built on top. David Clark said (in 1992!)
"The network as an Information Mesh. An old goal, not yet achieved."
The information theoretic and algorithmic ideas have matured (in no small part due to cryptocurrencies, yes, among other things).It's time to build that information mesh. I want a social identity that's not tied to a particular product/company. I want to shop online using a distributed protocol where reputation is independent of the platform. I want a search engine that can validate the identity and verify the integrity of the content it indexes. We can build such a thing now.
> So what does the supposed “web3” add to this vision? The cryptocurrency web3 starts with all our existing infrastructure.
To some degree, the author is not wrong. Some of these so-called 'defi' apps were still sitting on AWS, GCP, and Azure and were affected by the outage underlying the decentralization illusion they created. The same thing with NFTs stored on OpenSea and not even being tied to the blockchain itself.
Right now, the only reason that Ethereum is hyped for this is because the defi hype squad has their investments in the cryptocurrency; even when it is not the best cryptocurrency to use for this. Not even I can use it to pay for my groceries without over paying for the fees just for it to go faster.
What if you just dropped all the ideology speak and just called them platforms? Theyre open finance platforms.
Everyone building bullshit on Shopify’s platform is the exact audience that would be better off building on an open finance platform (the shopify apps that are sold to merchants). That crowd just wants to launch a product, have users, and make money passively. Thats what defi builders are doing on web3 platforms waaaaay more effectively. If you actually thought anybody cared about the consensus then haha yeah you’re the one that fell for it, not them.
Why are you comparing DeFi platforms to Shopify? Who are the developers choosing between these options, and what are they trying to sell? How does a DeFi platform (or any blockchain) help me to sell physical products?
Also, it seems like you're arguing that blockchain platforms are better developer experiences, which seems untrue. There are a lot of extra hurdles, costs, and scaling issues on blockchains, but enthusiasts say it's worth it for the consensus. Now you're saying the consensus is unimportant.
So what is the benefit of building on a platform (please let me know a specific one you've used and liked) and why it can't be done elsewhere?
I have seen so many HN posts like yours, but no one will give me specifics. Who are all these builders launching apps that aren't just speculation frenzies (e.g. Axie Infinity)?
How is building against defi better than building on Shopify if you want to sell things to regular people who just want to exchange their money for things that they want?
Better in what sense? Its extremely difficult to actually use cryptocurrency for selling things beyond cryptocurrency related instruments.
You need both your vendors and your customers to be able to easily transfer money in and out, and as things stand, that's an absolutely massive pain in the ass compared to using USD, and approximately nobody does it. But that is only the start of the problems, not factoring in things like wild exchange value swings, and huge gas/processing fees.
But it’s fairly easy to use “cryptocurrency” to pay for things, e.g. if you have a cryptocurrency-denominated account at the same provider as your vendor. This is, of course, not open finance in any meaningful respect.
If I transfer from my Coinbase account to yours, the transaction is not subject to the vagaries of the blockchain. It’s more or less like transferring from my PayPal account to yours.
Are you suggesting it's sidechain? Or that our funds in Coinbase are pooled?
Either way, it completely defeats the purpose of decentralization, consensus, etc. Coinbase, in that case, is exactly like a traditional bank except that you're trading non-money instead of money.
If you are depositing anything in an online Bitcoin account and you’re making transactions that aren’t insanely expensive, they’re either side chain or pooled.
Sell physical assets for crypto, then cash out at a Crypto ATM in your currency of choice, if you absolutely need to. A big part of the problem is Crypto ATMs aren't prolific enough. Restrictions on money-handling businesses come into play there, which is argued as anti-terrorism/organized crime measures but is really just gatekeeping/rent-seeking by the established players.
Okay, so how does it compare to Shopify? If I sell coffee beans, what’s my situation for cost of transaction (including conversion into the currency I need to pay my bills), ease of use for customers, transaction speed, difficulty of doing my taxes, etc.? If this is better, that should be easy to quantify.
I did an debate with the author 6/4/2018. He lost. https://youtu.be/I9Pxv1i9W7M?list=PLN0RF11rNdP0kkklAiif2pBLv... By the way Bitcoin was at $2530. Ethereum was at $590. Bitcoin went up $69,000 since then. Ethereum went to $5000. But pundits and critics seem to be immune to educate from years of progress, and now history.
Quote from his article: "So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only “utility” for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers."
The gentlemen that invented and host this forum don't believe that. Disclaimer: I've founded a few cryptocurrencies.
> By the way Bitcoin was at $2530. Ethereum was at $590. Bitcoin went up $69,000 since then. Ethereum went to $5000.
This is not a convincing argument to me. It tells me that the real utility is just speculation.
Shiba Inu has a market cap of 10B. But you’re an idiot if you think Elon musk dog money is valuable to society. If I make a 1000000% return selling magic beans, does that mean the beans have actual utility?
Best performing asset in the history of mankind. Removes counterparty risk. Removes middlemen. Privacy (if you work for it.) Better uptime than your bank and credit card network. Is a better way to login to things, self sovereign usernames and passwords, which are easy to use across all platforms (if they would stop with the lock-in.) The most transparent trading in the world. The highest yields in the world for those that want to just provide liquidity and have less risk.
A platform for things I don't like, but others love, customer rewards programs, collectibles, proof of ownership, timestamping. Removing the government money printing press from free war funding, and perhaps requiring a war tax, would reduce military globally. An impossible to fake record of the past, if you pay to write to the db.
You can get loans 24 hours a day with no signup that allow you to pay less tax by not selling the asset and paying capital gains, and just living off the borrowed money (like the wealthy have been doing for decades.) Shall I continue, or will you be ignoring all these features and benefits anyway?
I like this game. Security can't exist because you didn't compile your own keyboard controller firmware. Then just go all the way up the abstraction layers. Didn't audit and compile it yourself? I guess we're all hacked forever. Yet in fact it's a parade of imaginary horribles and the vast vast vast swathes of noobs remain unhacked for decades.
1. You can mine your own transaction, and the chance that some miner somewhere is happy to do so is extremely high (Which is why no transaction has ever been censored to the best of my knowledge.)
2. You running the code of your own choice is not a counterparty risk. It's your own problem. It's the same problem you have when with physically securing your seed words. There's no reason to break the word counterparty.
3. The protocol never had that kind of bug, some mobile wallets did with bad RNG though.
4. Yes and? The network routes around that, see China banning mining, etc.
I will help you trash talk bitcoin though. It's fun. Uncensorable? Ask Ross Ulbricht how the Federal Marshalls auctioned off his bitcoin to Tim Draper.
Inflation bugs twice where anyone could mine as many coins as they like, one executed, and one responsablity disclosed about 2 years ago. Have a list of vulnerabilities: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...
Have a list of weaknesses: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses
Summary: The vast majority of users have no hacks at all, and far less problems than their banks give them, in my experience.
P.S. Using your definition, is counterparty risk reduction even possible at all, and if so what would that look like? If you take the time to answer that, I think you'll see you're just trying to break a quite useful word.
This is a nice example of the tech consensus anti-web3 perspective.
Of course, it openly claims everyone promoting web3 technologies are scam artists, that it is a ponzi scheme, and that nobody in the space has considered "DNS and AWS are cheap, the EVM is way slow and expensive."
I guess we'll just have to wait and see which it is: the above claim, or that the authors writing these pieces are missing something. I'll admit I do respect the bravery to post something like this, lacking all humility, and fairly falsifiable, that will result in embarrassment if left up and disproven.
One thing that is interesting about these critiques is they mirror identically the early critiques of Bitcoin. And now, ironically, they take it as a given that cryptocurrencies are here to stay and are no longer going to eventually crash to zero, which was the claim made in these kinds of posts 5-10 years ago.
The reason I'm hyped about crypto (which in this article seems to be incorrectly equated to "web3") is because of the new possibilities it brings. The reason I put my money into stupid shit in crypto is because I don't know if it will work or not, but I'm excited to know if it will. Some of it does, most doesn't. I learn, progress has been made.
Imagine a whole new continent is discovered, and all the people back home are criticizing those who go there because it's not particularly safe at the moment, and look how warm and cozy they could be back in civilization.
No one's asking you to go to web3, stay here if you like. Hell, I found out today there's still people using gopher. There's room for all of us.
the reason people put money into crypto is to get rich quick. Imagine you put $1000 and got 1000 BTC as an early adopter. Now, you are a multimillionaire many times over. Most refuse to acknowledge the truth and it is almost a meme now about being there for "the tech"
I don't know of anything in crypto which actually works (read: does something better/cheaper than pre-existing technologies). The single value of it is speculation.
> Imagine a whole new continent is discovered, and all the people back home are criticizing those who go there because it's not particularly safe at the moment, and look how warm and cozy they could be back in civilization.
Imagine a whole new black hole is discovered, and all the people back home are like "but it just absorbs everything that crosses the event horizon" and "it will destroy everything you put near it" and "it's the end of everything you care about" and saying you shouldn't try to spend any more time getting close to it.
Someone is going out of that scenario (or not) looking (or not) a little the worse for wear. So the question is: do you feel lucky?
Creatively showing how expensive and slow Ethereum is is entertaining but not entirely relevant. It's like comparing a passenger airplane and a tank, claiming transportation is their sole purpose and since airplanes are both faster and cheaper than tanks, tanks are fraudulent.
Ethereum is architected to be a decentralized, permissionless computing platform. Performance is one of the trade offs.
It's much more productive, and more challenging in my opinion, to discuss whether or not the trade offs being made are worthwhile.
Fraud or not fraud, that is pointless because so called Internet will die down very soon, I guess in less than 10 years, because when AR/VR/wearables replace the smartphone, people will soon rush into a recreational world, where everybody plays game everyday, sure, left 1% don't want to play games, they may use some traditional APPs, at that time, most those APPs do not need to implement Web3 tech stacks, so web3 has meanings, but very very few usage scenarios, IMHO.
You reach for Web3 when your requirements include: (a) self-sovereign ID/auth, and/or (b) hosted materials that can't be censored via a centralized hosting provider.
Horses for courses.
ps. Does he think Web3 is about storing data on the blockchain network? It's not. Ex. https://ceramic.network/
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. I realize it's frustrating when you feel surrounded by a lot of people who you feel are wrong, but there's a guideline for that too:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
As my post was one of the first in this these threads, the topic had not yet gotten divisive. Moreover, my comment about moderation did not regard my comment but regarded the parent comment, which I felt made a substantive contribution and got downvoted for it for, I am guessing, ideological reasons.
Thanks, anyways. Ironic that they effectively "censored" my comment rather than engage with it.
Prompts a few thoughts for me: (1) coming to HN is like time-traveling ~10 years back, (2) HN today reminds of the late stages of after slashdot, digg, etc. peaked, and (3) decentralized projects have real incentives with "points" that mean something, so losing some silly HN points to moderation seems more meaningless than ever before.
You know what Carl Sagan said about Bozo the clown?
> "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Sometimes, Haters Gonna Hate and there's nothing more to it. But sometimes, Haters hate because they and you should hate what they hate, and one day, it will be clear to all. Problem is, of course, knowing if we're talking the equivalent of powered flight or Bozo the clown.
Looks like the daily "hate on web3" article has arrived. Yes, there are problems that need solving in blockchain / crypto / web3. We're doing something that has never been done before, i.e. building censorship resistant trustless systems. It's come a long way but it also has a long way to go before its potential is fulfilled. I don't know that a daily thread of people complaining about well known issues in the space is useful.
> After all, a programmer doing the most basic test of a web3 prototype is going to need to get the cryptocurrency, spend the cryptocurrency, and any application will require all users to get the cryptocurrency as well. If this gets abandoned quickly due to the inevitable technical failure “web3” still accomplished its goal of getting more suckers in and extracting their money.
Hard to take serious the rest of the blog when he doesn't seem to be aware of development testnets that exist for exactly the above reason. Or familiar with scaling efforts, or some of the long term ethos of the crypto developer community.
> or some of the long term ethos of the crypto developer community.
Do you mean "the code is the contract unless the contract would cause a substantial number of wealthy stakeholders to lose money, in which case the code is no longer the contract" (a stance, I might add, that is _formalized_ by PoS systems, if anyone ever manages to get one online)?
Immutability is important because it's guaranteed that no matter how many times you interact with a contract address, you can be assured that at no point has the code in that contract ever changed. This is not an assurance you can typically get, as backend code for traditional endpoints can change at any time.
Even more important IMO is the difficulty in shutting down a contract that's deployed to the blockchain. In the case of this article, the reliance on external services such as AWS opens up possibilities for your app to be shut down, whether it's through non-payment to your AWS account, AWS decides you've violated their terms of service, or legal action compels AWS to shut down your app.
In the case of dapps deployed to the blockchain (combined optionally with frontends deployed to a service like IPFS, but this isn't a requirement, as one can always interact directly with contracts), the ability to shutdown these apps would rely on somehow breaking the blockchain itself.
Whether or not you see these aspects as bugs or features is a matter of opinion. Yes, blockchains are slower and more expensive. This is the current cost of enabling the two facets above. If we're not comparing blockchain dapps to other systems that offer the same assurances, then we're comparing apples and oranges.