For those who don't know web3 is the idea of building a web on a decentralized blockchain. I think more specifically the idea is to replace the need for name servers with a blockchain protocol. Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes. I find it ridiculous that this idea even got to occupy the name as I think we'd want to reserve it for the next generational change in web technology and not half-baked bs.
The original definition of Web 3.0 (or Semantic Web) was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and meant something completely different, it referred to a web that had all information assembled into an open graph that was easily accessible and machine readable with the goal of leading to an AI revolution. AFAICT the "web3" moniker was co-opted by Ethereum developers to refer to something which is almost entirely opposed to that, it's about locking everything up on the internet behind paywalls. But somehow this is supposed to be revolutionary because technically anyone can set up a paywall, as if they somehow couldn't do that before, as if web businesses haven't been a thing since the early 90s.
This. The Semantic Web produced some interesting technologies that lost their cool factor and dissolved into the background (SPARQL, graph DBs... etc.). Ontology everywhere simply never caught on because it wasn't worth it.
This co-opting of term by blockchain-backed everything is for something actively dangerous as opposed to simply too little bang for too much buck.
To be fair, the semantic web was also very much bullshit
It completely ignored "trivial" things like the cost and benefits of maintaining machine-readable general compatibility with unknown consumers of said data.
Companies and people are rational in their self-interest and the semantic web is just an academic utopia that was never meant to be.
I personally think it's very fitting that web3 is now hijacked by crypto, another utopia dream that tries to deny the benefits of government and human judgement in the rule of law
Aren't most new technologies discarded once we realize that they are just a waste of time and money unless they deal directly with the financial system, sports, religion or the law in which case we cherish and protect them with great zeal?
I've looked at a ton of these "web3" startups and basically all of them are trying to build some form of payment system or financial service via smart contracts. Either that or they're making a less efficient version of a "web 2.0" company by forcing everyone who uses it to go through a blockchain first. If that's not true then please enlighten me as to what I missed. If you were trying to do something else then why even bother with blockchains? They don't bring anything of value if you're not trying to "keep score" and then make decisions based on that.
You took a sample of startup-land with people using the latest buzzwords and came away thinking that the meaning of those buzzwords is actually "scam." I mean how naive do you have to be to not realize how these people advertise? You basically have the same level of nuance as the suckers but with a different predisposition - there is actual tech and progress being done by teams not spending all their money on marketing; I don't suspect your cursory glance capable of finding any.
I don't think that's what web3 is, that's just one direction some are taking it. Web3 is a move away from centralized platforms to ones which are either decentralized or more directly controlled by users (self-hosted, federated).
> Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes.
I don't understand this part. In pretty much every decentralized name system I've seen a user pays to own a name for a period of time, there's no stale records.
> Any former meaning is now drowned out by that definition, whether you like it or not.
Random pronouncements on HN don't make it true. If you want to restrict your understanding of the term, by all means do so. But don't expect others to follow suit.
You might be right. But just like crypto bros co-opted the term, it could very well be co-opted again by whatever tech seems like the next big thing after "everything is blockchain" fades into obscurity
I used to use this obscure little piece of software for that called Apache. Maybe y'all have heard of it. Though I think it's getting some competition from this unknown little project called nginx. Really looking forward to that stuff becoming mainstream, it'll be revolutionary.
What sparked the sudden surge of interest in "Web3"? Was there a specific blog post or talk that pushed web3 = distributed web into the spotlight? I feel like overnight there was all this discussion about web3 and it felt very artificial because I didn't see any build-up.
Everyone focuses on the big scams, but there's lots of "small-scale" attempts to get funding from big players who don't want to "miss out" - some may not be scams, but they're all filled with "true believers".
Its just VCs. Its the same playbook they (some of the same ones) did for Web 2.0, which was just as cringy at the time. Keep repeating it enough and it becomes normal.
My cynical take is that some of the smarter players in the field were worried about running out of greater fools, so they did a concerted marketing push of something new.
The feel like the meaning of the term "web3" is not so specific. It refers more generally to the idea of building decentralized services that run over blockchains whether they resemble web apps or not. I think the sentiment is that blockchain technology is imagined by some to be the next technology that will be as transformative as the web was when it first showed up. It's also a play on the term "web 2.0" which I believe referred to a new generation of more powerful web services and more refined design aesthetics that showed up on the web beginning around when Facebook started getting popular.
> there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time
What do you mean? Record expiry can easily be incorporated into the smart contract protocol. ENS already does that. When you register an ENS domain, you can pre-pay for up to 10 years, after which you have to renew the domain. Same as web2 domain name registry.
Web3 makes a lot of sense to me. The people that got into Bitcoin early are now out and ridiculously rich. Other people also wanted to get rich, but that exact opportunity feels like it passed (still holding out for my $80 invested in Bitcoin to be worth >$100,000, but I got in kind of late), so people started making their own coins in the hopes of repeating the process. That had mixed success, Etherium (and maybe Dogecoin) did pretty well, but most didn't. The SEC even started cracking down on ICOs.
So, there is a legitimate need for some new business model where you print money and keep most of it for yourself. Web3! I guarantee you someone will get rich from it. That means it worked.
(I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here. I get the actual idea for cryptocurrency and even NFTs if I squint a little bit, I just think that the hype is from people that think they're going to get rich without doing any actual work. It does happen, but at the end of the day, doing actual work is probably going to be more profitable on average. You're probably too late to the game if you start now intending to be a Web3 trillionaire, anyway. The hype is to get you to buy some of the money you're printing with money that can actually be used to buy mansions. So they can buy some mansions.)
That it doesn't seem to be generally true, and is incredibly rare... so the real issue seems to be that people outside of the Silicon Valley VC scene can get rich "without doing actual work"?
I don't think it's incredibly rare, I've known plenty of people to start with nothing and get "rich", as in, worth enough to retire by 40. Unless your idea of rich is like 7 zeroes.
I'm sure it's possible if you live in a place that pays you much above the costs of living, but such places are very rare and the rest of us are barely keeping up with costs (especially if you are poor and have more costs).
Isn't a brutish tweet still a brutish tweet no matter who its from? There have been infinitely more interesting crypto conversation starters on this board than this - I don't care who the author is - I care about the content, of which this has none.
If you notice that this tweet is a reply to a person that called Guido out who seems to be somewhat pushy about calling people out - it is a perfectly fine answer.
If someone on the street comes out of the blue and wants something from me there is no obligation that I have to be nice.
Especially if that someone seems to be building his personal profile on calling out people on TT.
I really really wish twitter would change their UI to make it more obvious that I can scroll up to view the parent tweet. I didn't realize this until I read your comment.
Fair enough, but still not too rich of content, is it? I guess while we are here I'd like to add on as a 'crypto believer' that there is a certain type of dogma alongside the false advertising (and I shouldn't even have to mention scamming) that myself and others like me share a disdain for and actively call out.
Guido is not a controversial figure in the industry. This isn't an Elon or Linus tweet. This is a well-respected individual poo pooing pretty directly on the "web3" scene.
It gets upvoted because it supports a popular narrative which validates people's beliefs, and it allows people to use another point of authority to support their belief that crypto is bad.
I'm not sold at all on the Web3 dream, but I'd be open to being convinced if any true believer wishes to try.
A lot of these Web3 discussions just seem really boring.
The interesting thing about crypto to me is how there seems to be a deep divide among very smart people, some who think it's the greatest thing ever and some who think it's a fraud.
I can't remember when there's ever been such a Bigendian-scale dispute in technology before. Can you?
Where is the divide? Crypto is 99% full of hucksters, and the remaining 1% are the sorry saps.
The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it.
Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs. In other words, they are perfectly ripened marks for the hucksters.
In my anecdotal experience, every one of my closest friends who are all very successful silicon valley software engineers are hugely bullish on crypto and defi.
Sounds like you hang with a certain crowd. Unfortunately, being a "successful SV engineer" doesn't mean one is particularly intelligent. In fact, I think we tend towards some other common and frankly ugly human traits- primarily greed and selfishness, without giving much back to our communities. IME, crypto bros are especially guilty of this.
"Crypto is bad for the earth? Well fuck it, ima still get mine."
Even though I can't personally get behind it, it's easy understand the appeal of hopping on the wagon to make some easy money. Especially if one feels FOMO and has little empathy for others or concern about the long-term prospects for humanity surviving.
Vitalik's the only person in the entire crypto space that gives me pause about my belief crypto is 90% a mixture of useless and fraudulent. He's clearly much more intelligent than me and much more thoughtful, and has come to the opposite conclusions about the topic.
I really don't know how to square that with basically everyone else in the space being clearly morons or hucksters.
Smart as he is, Vitalik also has a massive financial interest in the conclusions he's reached being the correct one, which can lead to all sorts of biases.
I'm pretty bearish on crypto long term, but Vitalik is one of the few crypto people who has actually thought critically about crypto. Most people who try to defend crypto struggle to answer the fourth or fifth why when pressured (if you use the five why philosophy for example).
The problem (like many others) is that Vitalik doesn't necessarily think practically about the situation. For example, how do you explain to my grandma that the fork of BTC is the newly reached consensus or the original one? Vitalik would have an answer for this, but it's not a practical one.
Maybe how you square it is "if a really smart person disagrees with me, might I possibly be wrong?"
Lucrative opportunities attract frauds. The dot com boom attracted frauds, was the internet a big scam? Literally every technological development in history that was potentially very lucrative attracted swathes of con men. For every stock worth purchasing there are a dozen garbage ones. For every innovative product you can buy online there are dozens of cheap worthless pieces of junk. The fact that idiots and scumbags are attracted to crypto only means there's money to be made, it says nothing about the actual utility of the technology.
Same thoughts but also Sam Bankman-Fried, although his is better understood as likely “billion $ grifting is worth it if it’s used to benefit humankind more than it harms”
I believe there are a few intelligent people who have seen the opportunity to make money off the morons :) you know, someone has to sell the pickaxes :)
Just to be clear, there's very little you (or any readers) ought to conclude from the fact that you know who Guido van Rossum is but are unaware of those other people.
Just to be clear, I have no idea who those people are or what their accomplishments are, but I do know and trust Guido's 1) intellect, and 2) judgment, so I'm inclined to trust a known factor over three unknown ones. And he's known for good reason. Reputation is a thing. I figure I'm not alone.
> Just to be clear, I have no idea who those people are or what their accomplishments are, but I do know and trust Guido's 1) intellect, and 2) judgment
I trust his intellect and judgment for Python, and that's it. I don't trust him for programming in general, for example, let alone a completely different arena.
There's much better arguments for/against crypto than appeals to authority. Consequently, you then cited an appeal to majority to defend your appeal to authority
Granted, the crypto debate on HN is pretty well hashed & Guido's tweet doesn't add anything to the discussion besides making clear where he stands on the issue
I don't care about logical fallacies in this case because the world doesn't work in a purely logical way. If programming was purely logical, it wouldn't be so fad-driven, for instance. And reputation ends up being one of the best ways to filter out useless noise in basically every useful discovery system we programmers have come up with.
People are conflating intelligence with wisdom here. Both Gavin and Vitalik are clearly extremely intelligent but have shown a lack of wisdom. A lot of us technology types are like that.
I don't know the first two. Vitalik intelligent? He used to believe, and maybe still believes, that you could do quantum computing by simulating a quantum computer on a conventional computer. In fact, he even founded a start-up if I recall correctly, based around this bizarre idea.
Cryptocurrency is not that, because it is not anonymous nor is it a cash replacement. I have sympathy for those folks who were led to believe those things, it's not their fault.
Small correction: some cryptos are anonymous, Zcash and monero for example. Bitcoin and ether are not, and once those have been rolled into something like the Winklevoss's Gemini, it is harder to follow them publicly.
But that's not true, even those privacycoins are still technically pseudonymous because transactions are still done by wallet ID. This fundamentally can't be fixed because otherwise you can't have something like a wallet that stores a balance which is assigned to you and only you.
Also I would like to point out that the idea you can ever be fully anonymous on the internet is a lot of bunk. Regardless of what kind of cryptography you use or how many obfuscation layers you put things through you're still generating a great deal of identifying data just by accessing other servers. This is a problem I have with most of the marketing behind any privacy technology, it's not just these privacycoins that are making false promises.
You should read more about Monero & especially Zcash, because their tech specifically overcomes this "pseudonymous" false-allegation in your 1st paragraph.
If they in fact worked like Bitcoin, with balances & account-numbers transparent to everyone, I might believe as you do. But I know the tech obscures both amounts & recipients, so I don't.
Your 2nd paragraph, that people are spraying all sorts of privacy-destroying info with every interaction, is mostly true. But it's not essentially true, and with education, & software, & further technical advances, far more privacy than we have now is possible. Especially, far more privacy from criminals & abusive regimes that would persecute/imprison/kill people for dumb reasons.
I have read plenty about them and it's still possible to track those coins through various means using various pieces of metadata. The worst problem with them is probably that the privacy gains are basically useless if you ever plan to cash out on a legitimate exchange.
>But it's not essentially true, and with education, & software, & further technical advances, far more privacy than we have now is possible
Yeah and that's a huge headache most people don't want to go through, very few even in the privacy community want to have their money tied up in that kind of system forever because it's so cumbersome to use correctly.
>Especially, far more privacy from criminals & abusive regimes that would persecute/imprison/kill people for dumb reasons.
I have seen no evidence that this kind of technology actually helps those people in any disproportionate way, the same technology can be used by criminals and abusive regimes to conceal their activities and in fact it is being used that way right now. Long-term I think it's unwise for them to use it for that purpose, for the same reason it's unwise for others to use it for the purposes of evading them. Remember that the human factor of people making stupid yet honest mistakes is the biggest vulnerability in any system of this kind.
Before, I could think you were simply misinformed. But when you say "I have read plenty about them and it's still possible to track those coins through various means using various pieces of metadata", you're either lying or unable to understand what you've read.
I could give you my Zcash z-address right now, & there's no way known to cryptographic science for you to know its balance, when and how much ZEC it has received or sent, from or to whom, or even if it's ever been used at all.
None of the metadata thrown off gives any hints to that. Even godlike omniscience about my every interaction with the internet, or a man-in-the-middle attack against all my connections to other Zcash nodes always, would only indicate that I have interacted with the network, and likely sent transactions at cerain times. You'd still know nothing about my address's activities. (The case is somewhat weaker for Monero, though savvy Monero users can start to approach Zcash's privacy with some extra steps like 'churning'.)
If you keep spreading falsehoods, you're harming people who have a right to know what's technically possible, whether they like the implications or not.
And while I'm unlikely to convince you, any other lurkers who want to do their own research, and confirm my claims, should take note: I am providing truthful, reliable info here, under my real name, which you can use to discover many other facts against which to calibrate my credibility (including the fact that I'm a compensated advisor to Electric Coin Company, the original developers of the Zcash software). A anonymous account is spreading falsehoods that will mislead you. Proceed accordingly.
I have spread no falsehoods. None of what you're saying matters, you're still hung up on what's technically possible in ideal circumstances when that's irrelevant to most people, it's irrelevant to most users of security software, and even most users of Zcash. Everything you're saying is technically correct and I agree with it but you've missed the basic point which is how that only applies if you only conduct every transaction in your whole life in Zcash using z addresses and you never plan to cash out or comply with accounting laws, which nobody does and will never actually happen on a large scale because it's inconvenient and unrealistic. If you actually do that you'd be the first person I've ever heard of, so I hope you can understand how unusual that is and how pointless it is for you to be trying to push this angle. Just stop, the harm you're doing from this is much worse than anything I could possibly say. You could actually stand a chance to convince me of whatever it is you're trying to say if you didn't take this very bad angle of trying to dump theory on people when you very well know that's unrealistic, combative and not convincing. Why are you doing this? Please just have a normal discussion and stop with this. You're clearly a very smart person and you don't need to resort to this negative attitude.
This is a general problem with zero knowledge proofs by the way, you can use them all you want but they ultimately mean nothing when some other party that actually has the knowledge leaks it. And since the blockchain is required to be public there's going to be so much publicly generated metadata available that it eventually makes no difference what you hide behind a ZKP, the information leaks are built into the system. The weirdest and most self-defeating part of your comment is this:
>would only indicate that I have interacted with the network, and likely sent transactions at cerain times
Sorry but this is identifying metadata. It gives away a lot about you depending on who you are. I don't know why you wrote this and then wrote the rest of your comment trying to claim that I'm promoting falsehoods, when you refuted yourself in your own comment! I hope you were honest and forthcoming about these problems in your advisory position.
Your claim was that it was possible to “track those coins”.
Your insistence, wordiness, & goalpost-shifting can’t cover up that you’re trying to assertively bluff knowledge of things you don’t understand, like a child trying to pretend they’re an adult. The adults aren’t fooled!
> This fundamentally can't be fixed because otherwise you can't have something like a wallet that stores a balance which is assigned to you and only you.
This statement is false. Zcash's shielded transactions hide both the wallet ID and the transaction via zero knowledge proof.
No it's not false. For practical or legal purposes you will need to have that ID disclosed eventually anyway. And actually it appears that most Zcash users are not even attempting to conceal their wallet IDs.
Building on this, what does that tell you about the state of crypto when the coins that actually have libertarian values built into them (Zcash and monero) have not exploded in value? That crypto is generally dominated by marketers and pump and dumps.
It tells me it's still early. Many still think Bitcoin offers anonymity. It takes life experience to fully appreciate privacy, & there's tons of naive enthusiasm in crypto that will "grow up" into better, more-private options. Still, over a number of time periods – including the last year – Zcash's value appreciation has outperformed Bitcoin. The real contest, and shake out of true value, is a multi-decade marathon.
If your impression, based on what you've seen, is that "crypto is generally dominated by marketers and pump and dumps", well I suppose you're the expert about what's in your junk info-diet.
But even if most email, by count, is spam or promotional, people with good filters see little of it, and it'd be a total misreading of the transformative social/economic value of email to say it "is dominated by marketers".
I have good filters against seeing, or spending any attention, on the carnival-barker & naive-speculator froth. (And, any truly momentous economic shift is often wrapped in a phalanx of such pretenders & hangers-on. I don't mistake the lampreys for the whale.)
And looking at tangible measures, like total market cap, real innovators with interesting tech & growing histories of stability are a comfortably majority of all value.
This is not news to anyone working in cybersecurity. It's still very difficult to sell security technology to the general public. The only people who really want to use it is people who are either very smart technologically or they have a lot to lose. So that basically means only C-level executives, high ranking government officials, very wealthy investors and other rich people, major celebrities, and hardcore computer geeks. It doesn't matter if you try to incentivize it in some kind of money making scheme. And actually it would be very bad if these coins exploded in value because then they would become a bigger target for criminals and fraud just like bitcoin currently is.
I find it endlessly amusing that the subset of libertarians who love to berate socialism "as never having worked" by pointing to Bolshevik Russia have limitless patience for the at-scale failures of crypto. Obviously not all libertarians, but quite I large number that I've bickered with on HN/Reddit.
There's a big difference here: they're both experiments, one that's already over and failed, the other that's ongoing. We have the power of hindsight with one, the other is still actively being explored. We may find one day soon that it was also a failed experiment and bad idea, but we aren't there yet.
I'm amazed how many Westerners still thinks socialism is "cool".
It is not, because people are not angels. Everyone has their own goals and wants to have something only for themselves.
Soviet Russia and Maos China are great examples of cool idea that has no possibility to work in reality. Because people are people, not because they "did it wrong".
Cryptoeconomics has been a mix of successes & failures, among the very-privileged who can afford to take financial risks, for just the last ~13y. Everyone involved knows there's a lot of things left to solve, but sees reasons for hope.
For 100+ years, the most fervently 'socialist' regimes have promised various utopias but actually delivered famines, prison camps, pathologically dishonest & oppressive police states, and even genocides on a larger scale than famous 'fascist' regimes.
I can see why you might get into bickering if you find those situations analogous!
Yes, but I do think it's valid to include such a qualifier to draw a distinction between people who apply a very mild "socialism" to enhance a welfare state – while leaving most traditional freedoms and private property intact, and most of the economy operating by capitalistic principles (like the 'Nordic model') – and those who endorse full nationalizations & revolutionary socialism.
Many of us still have hope in crypto because in 13y, it's made amazing progress & hasn't yet done mass murder – and we're suspicious of those who rally under a banner of "socialism", without reservations, because there's now a long history of that having a large body count. If 100y from now, those patterns reverse, check with me then. YMMV.
The point I think the parent was making is not that they are analogous situations, but that in the reasoning they've encountered (and you helpfully provided to illustrate their point), one could literally just swap the positive aspects for negative aspects, and it would read as supportive of socialism and against crypto.
Here:
Socialist governments have been a mix of successes & failures, among the very-privileged who can afford to take risks, for just the last ~100y. Everyone involved knows there's a lot of things left to solve, but sees reasons for hope.
For 13+ years, the most fervently 'crypto' fanboys have promised various utopias but actually delivered scams, fraud, pathologically dishonest companies, and even financial ruin on a larger scale than other technologies.
It's the same exact logic.
(please note I am not comparing genocide and financial ruin as being analogous)
Of course you can always do a MadLibs-style search and replace on rhetoric.
But are the resulting linguistic similarities relevant in the real world? Isn’t all the real impact on people - who aren’t mere language models - dependent on the relevant magnitudes, & other salient distinctions?
We real people suffer financial losses, or bleed, or starve, or die in revolutionary purges & prison camps. Of those 4 outcomes, only the 1st one can be blamed on some subsets of the 13yo cryptoeconomics movement. For the last three, you've got to wage a "socialist" war on other traditional economic arrangements over decades.
Crypto believers don't have "limitless patience". If after 100y, the fiercest crypto zealots have killed tens or hundreds of millions, they'll update their beliefs. (Probably, much sooner.)
The reason I didn't try to engage with you is your awful and misinformed reasoning in your original reply, and your post history, which indicates you aren't worth the time. If you had a history of intelligent comments and not trolls, you would be worth engaging with. Maybe clean up your act a little and people will take you more seriously?
I'm quite comfortable with my 15+ year comment history, associated with my real name – especially as compared to a 55-day-old anon account that just expresses peeved attitude, above as here, instead of reasoning.
But hey, thanks for at least describing Zcash's privacy-protecting-qualities accurately in a sibling thread.
> Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs.
Replace "risk taking" with "compliance" for outgroup point of view. (Being "into it" then meaning heavy investment into being opposed to cryptocurrency.)
Those character traits are well represented in both the pro- and the anti-cryptocurrency crowds, no doubt. But it was more of a meta comment on GGP saying "there's a deep divide" and GP responding "what are you talking about, every good person I can see is anti"
I disagree with this. I work at a large US bank and from the conversations I have been apart all the big banks are moving into crypto. So much float is moving out of the banks that they are scramble to catch up to try and control the damage. They are all planning to become crypto banks in a custodial sense to maintain float. Lots of people want to hate the new trendy thing but once this gets mainstream banking support everyone one will be on board.
Could you give us a ballpark number of how much is moving out of banks compared to the reaming that is not? Is it 10, 50 or 90% of the current economy?
>The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it.
Eric Schmidt is president of ChainLink
Silvio Micali professor at MIT created Algorand
Emin Gün Sirer creator of Avalanche is a professor at Cornell
Nicholas Szabo holds a honorary professorship
etc. etc. etc
I guess you either don't know these people, or they don't count as intelligent to you.
On another note, Web3 technology will soon be everywhere. Individuals are building tools everyday, and so are governments. The latter because they have found a powerful tool to subvert your rights. Wake up, adapt, or die.
Or maybe they count as "hucksters". All of these people you mentioned seem to be quite invested into the ecosystem and therefore stand to gain quite a lot from crypto going to the moon. It's in their self interest to do everything they can to ignore or dismiss any negative arguments, and convince as many people as possible that their hustle is legitimate.
How many of these "very smart" people were just early adopters of cryptocurrencies? Usually there is a financial conflict of interest which causes people to overlook the extremely negative aspects of web3/cryptocurrencies. Anecdotally I have seen a lot of people who were previously gung-ho cash out and sour on the whole space.
My take on smart people in the crypto space comes down to the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The whole selling pitch is about replacing intermediaries, and that's what most tech giants are.
P2P payment systems and P2P collateralized loans are already there more or less working with a clear path to scaling. If they gain adoption they directly obsolete existing fintech companies.
I'm not saying there's much concrete stuff there yet, but web3 has a clear MAGMA hostile discourse, so it's natural that reactionary feelings arise when web3 gets hype (deserved or not, that's not the point).
Big tech isn't fintech and that's about the only thing that could be threatened.
Even for fintech there's a lot of value in providing a streamlined user experienced on top of crypto so there's still room for intermediaries. See how many people primarily use CEXs.
> Web3 has a clear MAGMA hostile discourse
I really don't see it. There's nothing in web3 that threatens any of these companies.
> The interesting thing about crypto to me is how there seems to be a deep divide among very smart people, some who think it's the greatest thing ever and some who think it's a fraud.
Most people, even web3 proponents, seem to agree that the current crop of web3 companies is largely scammy or without real value propositions beyond speculation. It's actually hard to argue otherwise when you look at what's out there.
You also have to look very closely at financial interests. There are a lot of "smart people" who invested heavily in web3 tokens and have a vested interest in hyping them to the moon.
Web3 proponents have been repeating that all the smartest people they know are in web3. It's more of a meme that's been repeated than a real observation, and I would guess the "smartest people they know" aren't very smart at all or have a large financial interest in it.
I think usually the divide in other areas is much more about technical aspects. Whereas with crypto a lot of proponents fairly aggressively push an ideology, and trying to make you literally buy into it. Which leads to, at time, fairly aggressive responses.
The most similar dispute I can remember during my career were the early years of MongoDB. The gripe of people with it wasn't much about that there is no space for no-sql databases and that they don't have their uses cases (after all they existed long before mongo), but how it was marketed and pushed by some people.
Which side is which? As someone not on twitter I’m constantly bombarded with anti-crypto stuff while almost never organically see pro-crypto pieces. I’m assuming you see the opposite? Gotta love algorithmic echo chambers.
There's many people who are smart, know that it's all crap, but also know that there will be a greater fool they can dump their coins to while using their clout to hype it up in the meantime.
After you sell your crap just in time, people will either forget your stance or you say "but nobody knew it was all crap back then!"
It mostly comes down to whether you trust in democratic institutions or not and whether you think it's a good idea to have markets operate outside the control and supervision of regulators and an enforceable rule of law.
Exactly this. All these promises of crypto being "independent" of banks and governments all rely on the relative obscurity and novelty of the technology. If crypto became the default currency, it would have to play nice with existing economic and political structures, and all of those "advantages" would be gone.
all the very smart people know it's a combination of speculative bubble and pyramid scheme; they're just divided between those who think it's fine as long as they can be part of the group who get to make money off it, and those who find the entire thing repugnant or too akin to gambling.
I don't see the divide. Among the very smart CS people I know both working in the software sector or in academia I'd estimate 90%+ think web3 and crypto is bullshit.
That's because it's a combination of envy and the fact it's mostly a ponzi. Many people got into 8 or 9 figures from ~zero by being active into crypto, they are overwhelmingly below 40 years old. Basically everyone in tech heard about crypto years ago.
If you missed it, you can either admit to yourself you missed probably the easiest way to get rich in your entire life, or rationalize to yourself it's all a scam and you didn't get in because you're morally virtuous.
I looked into crypto early and passed because I figured it would either not live up to the hype as a usable currency, or if it did take off governments would step in and squash it.
Turns out both concerns were largely correct. The part I missed was that people would still buy it anyway. I don't really feel bad about the decision since the process that lead me to it will work out more often than not. I'm sure plenty of tech folks had a similar thought process.
Let us replace the abundance of the near infinite with the eternal dedication of resources to the enforcement of artificial scarcity that some copies might be more real and unique than others. For such is the power of crypto eternal. Amine.
I don't get the extreme positions on that. There will be some sort of web3 and will be really relevant for some bigger groups of people. Saying that it should die and (the other extreme) saying "it's the solution for everything" is just ignorant.
The "it should die" camp take their view literally. At issue for many of us is the rampant consumption of resources to keep web3/cryptomining going. The ends() do not justify the means.
() for any variation of "ends" people have come up with so far.
This is the most sensible answer. There is probably no black and white outcome here, the web3 stuff will stick around for those who want it and who want to keep it alive. If you don’t understand or need it, just ignore it.
This is just the usual “twitter bait” thats going on now. People are promoting this and then other people feel “threatened” and feel the need to take a position. Same with the whole Metaverse discussion going on now.
its the web3 equivalent of an antique that failed to sell on ebay. interesting, but it's easy to draw wrong conclusions like "nfts are dead". market size and volume tell a different story.
Oh I'm very aware that it doesn't tell the whole story. I think that some guy who thought he would strike it huge by buying Jack Dorsay's tweet in NFT form then resell it multifold while donate half the profits to a charity then realizing he way overpaid for it feels like a good story to me on it's own. It's a great analogy for the market but probably not accurate on the whole.
I’m seriously sick of the dogmatism from both sides of the crypto discussion. It has good and bad aspects, good and bad projects etc. Think for yourself and evaluate things on your own for goodness sake! Just because the NY Post or whatever influencer hates NFTs and things they’re a scourge, doesn’t mean you have to fall in lockstep like a lobotomy patient. If you hate NFTs, and their use of energy, I implore you to stop buying funko pops, which have more embodied energy and are just waste plastic.
Yes, crypto is (if the implementation is good) a way to make sure transactions are valid.
But I think there is too little discussion about the transactions that go in and out the network. Those transactions are still about trust. So crypto doesn't solve any trust issues.
And since not a lot of people have the resources to host crypto it will become less decentralized over time. So in the end it also doesn't fix centralization.
To me it's just a gold rush. Some people will get very wealthy from it, most wont.
I've reached a point where I'm tired of discussing the possibilities/potential/revolution of crypto and blockchain. Is there anything I can use today, or must I keep waiting for this hypothetical future?
Try headline https://viaheadline.xyz/ which uses ceramic for storage, unlock for payment and membership, ipfs for pinning, and a bunch of other protocols for decentralisation.
I can walk you through some of the useful stuff going on if you want to have a chat.
> HEADLINE is a decentralized publishing platform where a creator’s content is always their own. There’s no service fee, no long form privacy agreement and your unpublished and token gated content is encrypted, enabling access control.
> Publish web content and send out newsletters. Build meaningful connections with your community and followers. Feel confident that the publishing platform you’re using respects what you create and who you create it for.
Our excellence is in our collaborations.
> Powered by Unlock Protocol and built by Raid Guild, with integrations of Ceramic, Lit Protocol & IPFS, HEADLINE is truly multi-player, built and maintained by collaboration.
> HEADLINE operates as a DAO, decentralized autonomous organization. That means that we are run by collective efforts and innovation. Join us as we build together.
Who exactly is this being positioned to? If I passed this along to the marketing team at my job they will probably just reply back with a bunch of question marks attempting to understand that language. Is that even the right audience?
I'm using it (ALGO) for micro transactions and for my clients' art and gaming projects that require the smart contract and NFT features. Such as artwork that transforms or digital fighting cards that get upgrades.
Isn’t Guido actually making a political gesture here? There is no technical argument.
One side signals their allegiance to centralization as a philosophy of government; the other side signals their allegiance to decentralization.
It’s similar to the recent dust-up over masking: one side craves centralized, top-down, totalizing governance by experts; the other side craves decentralized power, maximizing individual liberty. Both sides loudly advertise their allegiances.
Because investors as a whole cannot know more about a product than the people who have to build and use that thing every day. Being financially invested in it requires them to have a certain level of optimism about it even in the face of reasonable doubt.
No one can say for sure how the entire thing is going to turn out. As investors, there's no harm in placing multiple bets as long as a small number of those bets end up giving an outsized return.
web3 is a gold rush. It doesn't matter if it succeeds or not, you still win by selling shovels. That's what all web3 companies and web3 investors are ultimately doing.
Very early in bitcoin I had the opportunity to mine, but I didn't do it, because while I felt it would make money, it would be a net-negative for the world (IE, I'd get richer but the world on a whole would be poorer).
Some VCs don't invest in things they think are net-negative even if there would be a big profit.
Personal theory is that it's becoming obvious that the VC model is very limited, i.e. it largely works in sectors where you rapidly scale up a product with zero marginal costs of production which is pretty much only software, and they've run out of social networks to fund.
In other sectors be it healthcare, construction, anything involving people or the 'world of atoms' as Thiel liked to put it things aren't going that great. Web3 seems increasingly the only thing to throw billions at.
when I worked at a VC (well, volunteered) I recall the tech investors looking at the health investors and boggling. "You ... want ... us ... to ... do ... what?" "Invest in a company and wait 20 years for it to go out of business? hell no, we invest in 10 companies, 9 fail and 1 makes a billion in their first year"
The invites to parties, intros to founders, the opportunity to help guide large monetary decisions, and insane amounts of competitive intelligence (VCs dont sign NDAs and founders are often willing to say a lot) were the compensation.
Also if I'd ever want to start a company, I'd know exactly what to say and to whom.
It's funny how the simplest of the questions about this "Web 3" throws off the evangelists. They don't have answers for anything. Good scammers can sort of BS for a bit.
- Decentralized! No government control! 100% freedom of speech!
- What if someone posts a video of child rape, with no moderation or ways to take it down
I'm skeptical about the ecosystem as a whole, despite running a project myself, but a distinction needs to be made between web3 as a technology and web3 in its current iteration.
I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO). Concretely, if I can jump onto a website and consume content without having to go through the hassle of signing up to a monthly subscription and entering my credit card details, that's a step change improvement in my enjoyment of the web. Want to read a particularly interesting paywalled news article? Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on.
The other interesting application are the technological innovations brought on by smart contracts. Blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps. Instead of having to write a lambda on AWS, I can just submit a smart contract to the blockchain. Provided it's a read only use case, I pay once and can freely call the contract for as long as the network exists.
This might seem uninteresting but as the contract gives access to the current state of the blockchain, there are interesting applications that you can build on top of this [1], particularly if you combine it with oracles that give access to real world data.
Crypto as a financial revolution seems incredibly contrived but web3 as a tool has potential merit. Whether web3 is the best solution to such problems is a question worth exploring.
[1]. I use it to determine whether crypto tokens are honeypots or not by simulating a buy and sell.
>Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on.
1. Couldn't this be done with just a credit card if companies took micro payments? My browser will save my cc details, so if they accepted micro payments, I could just click one button to get it.
2. Why would companies, who do not accept micropayments now, suddenly accept them just because crypto?
3. Wouldn't I still have to enter information into the system (more than 2 clicks)? Or would everyone just have access to my information all the time?
I don't get why crypto needs to be involved here, or how it forces companies to accept micro-payments.
Probably not today but there's a future where this could be done without crypto (hence my comment re whether web3 is the right tech).
1. Fixed payment processing fees make it unfeasible. Minimum credit card fees are 10s of cents, so anything sub a dollar becomes unpractical.
2. Viability of micropayments is proportional to the fees charged by the payment processor. If the processor charges 1c, then 10c micropayments are feasible. If they charge 30c, it makes much more economic sense to charge larger amounts in bulk (as a business, a 40c microtransaction means I'm giving up 75% revenue to the payment processor). Sure, you could always charge in aggregate at the end of the month but the experience to me as a user is worse.
3. What information? If I'm reading an article on a news website, what more information do they need then my wallet address to identify me (if that)? If they require name, that can be linked my wallet address and I can decide whether I give access to that information (no different to SSO today or app store permissions).
Can it be done without crypto? Absolutely, but it requires a lot of change to make it feasible. It's one application that does seem ideally suited to crypto and web3.
> Fixed payment processing fees make it unfeasible. Minimum credit card fees are 10s of cents, so anything sub a dollar becomes unpractical.
VISA could waive those fees tomorrow. And then the rubber would meet the road: who will be more efficient at processing transactions on a global scale, hundreds or thousands of millions of transactions? VISA or a crypto coin?
Absolutely they could. There's multiple groups that need to come to the party (Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, CC companies, etc). Whether they will without a viable alternative like crypto remains to be seen. Whether there's enough fat for everybody to make a cut remains to be seen.
Crypto does offer (on the surface) an end to end solution to the problem that's not going through multiple companies.
The other side is identity linking. Again, can have a global account with a payment processor like stripe or PayPal that solves that problem though linking to your wallet does seem like a lower impedance opportunity.
I'm not of the opinion that crypto is going to become the new incumbent, but as a technology it presents as a viable alternative to the existing system that could trigger real change.
I love Python, but any definition of 'web3' broad enough to include the things GvR despises also includes many foundational things likely to outlive Python, with greater influence on human welfare, like:
* natively-software-accessible incentive systems engineered with the same rigor, & productivity-multiple upside, as our personal-computers/mobile-devices, world-wide-web, & ecommerce/industrial automation systems
'web3' may even give a new life to the semantic-web vision TbL had under the name "Web 3.0", which "died in a flaming ball of fire" via the dominance of the Web 2.0 platform monopolies.
Web3 is a big fluff hype of slow tech with a lot of inflated expectations.
Btw, web3 is an old term, back in the days the semantic web was seen as web3.0
Failed, just like the "new" web3.0 will...
Crypto/blockchain will still exists, web3 will have some use-fullness.. But no, it wont change the world. Centralised systems work quite well in a capitalist system.
I just created the worlds slowest database. People will have to pay many dollars to specialists called "miners" to update it. For design reasons, no one can delete anything from it. It's going to change the world.
I just created the world's most redundant and incorruptible database. People will have to pay many dollars to specialists called "miners" to add rows. For integrity reasons, no one can delete anything from it. It might change parts of the world where redundancy and integrity are threats to very powerful people who want to control transactions and corresponding data.
>It might change parts of the world where redundancy and integrity are threats
Sadly it won't. There is nothing about any kind of cryptocurrency that makes it incorruptible or immune to integrity problems. That's more myth-building that I hear quite often but it's not true. The hardest part in any data integrity problem is verifying that the data going into the system was correct in the first place, and blockchains cannot solve this. And actually they make it worse by making it prohibitively expensive to remove incorrect data from the database.
(Note that in general computers and automation cannot solve this because "correct" here refers to whatever the humans designing the system specified according to their human purposes)
Claiming a technology is not a silver bullet is a statement that contains no useful information, because no technology is a silver bullet. However, blockchains do provide a very high level of durability across various dimensions, and some integrity failures reduce onto durability failures.
Yes but so does any other distributed consensus algorithm. Blockchains just happen to be based on the worst ones that don't have any good properties but still keep all of the bad ones.
Yes, but blockchains were first. If your point is that we should evolve to newer, better solutions sure. But I'm guessing you're arguing something else.
Many cryptography books will include a brief mention of "Rubber-hose cryptanalysis", pointing out the gap between theoretically sound crypto-systems and realpolitik. Everyone in the cryptography community knows that, no mater how secure your system, if a powerful state actor really wants to get you, they will.
It's surprising to me that anyone taking blockchain technologies seriously for "standing up to power" fails to recognize some basic realities of how power works in practice.
Blockchain is an obstacle to no real power, since real power does not care if some external source disagrees with it. There is no dictator that is going to say "damn, got me with that blockchain stuff *sigh* you win", they'll just torture you until you agree that you don't see anything troublesome in the ledger either.
As we've seen from cryptocurrencies rampant use in scams and ransomware it is absolutely impotent in the face of real corruption and power.
Ironically for crypto to work at all for these idyllic cases it requires a remarkably stable civil society, in which case a piece of paper in the public square works as well.
> It might change parts of the world where redundancy and integrity are threats to very powerful people who want to control transactions and corresponding data.
There is not mechanism in Bitcoin for the non-mining nodes to somehow agree in the case of a 51% attack though so I am not sure what you are trying to prove here
I just purchased the ownership of a crappy AI generated image for $$$. I am glad the ownership is now stored in your database because I think I can sell the ownership for $$$$.
By the way, do you know how I can view the image? The link doesn't work anymore.
> For design reasons, no one can delete anything from it.
This is factually wrong.
50+% of those miners could collude (or secretly be the same person) and change anything in the database. You would have no warning before this happened.
That's incorrect, you can't "change anything in the database" with a 51% attack. You can block transactions from being processed, reorder new transactions, and reverse your own (but not others) transactions to double spend. You can't just go arbitrarily deleting previous transactions, or modifying balances.
> you can't "change anything in the database" with a 51% attack
A 51% attack can't immediately change other people's history, but it can eventually[1][2]. You would not need to change transaction history very deeply to cause a lot of chaos.
I'm curious, if you owned 51% of the network what's to stop you from rebuilding the entire history of the chain and then adding new transactions (including any of your new fraudulent ones) on top?
Nothing, mcintyre1994 is simply wrong about this. You don't need 51% to block transactions, any miner who completes the proof of work can legitimately block a transaction and Bitcoin went long periods of time where various miners blocked transactions and just took the mining reward.
As for deleting, unless you want to enter a philosophical argument on the nature of deleting, and whether anything in the universe can truly be deleted [1], for all practical purposes a 51% attack does allow one to delete transactions off the blockchain but the older the transaction is the more expensive and impractical it would be to do so.
A 51% attack does not allow someone to create new bitcoins or spend coins they don't have the keys to, but they could double spend coins or delete existing transactions.
The bug part comes in when someone stuffs a few child porn images into the chain, making mere possession of a full node carry jail time in the US. Even better, due to strict liability, "I didn't know" or "It's not mine" aren't valid defenses.
I wouldn't want to have to tell a judge "I can't remove it" in a libel proceeding, either.
Since when does the government willingly just throw out a bunch of laws because some techies put together a new algorithm?
If the government decides that your crypto is a Munition or Child Porn, you're going to need a lot to convince them otherwise, and you're probably going to spend time in jail while waiting for your lawyers to deal with it.
There's probably already child porn on the ethereum blockchain. If not, there will be eventually. Then what happens? Is your argument that it's obvious they're going to jail anyone who has the chain on their computer?
the market has chosen faux-scarcity many many many times over (at least) hundreds of years. we live in a market based economy, the market doesn't care that your MySQL database can do it, the market is saying "I'll pay you to write to a public access database you set up, so quit with this Betamax technical superiority stuff, we don't care."
It's not about technical superiority … I think it's more about morality/ethics: is it _right_ that we should introduce scarcity artificially when it doesn't exist naturally, with the primary outcome being that a small group will exploit it at the cost of many who can't? Is that healthy?
Yes, it is a free market issue, and people will choose what they know, and will choose based on their fears.
there are plenty of crypto (and non-crypto but tech) projects that opted not to introduce scarcity, or simply failed to while they intended to. the market ignores them. you can praise them if you want. the teams ran out of money and did something else for food and shelter and nobody in the community wanted to use their own resources to continue. the survivorship bias goes to the what you see, the high flying things that galvanize participation and the human element well, which is based on current and increasing and sustained scarcity.
Imagine you live in a country with abundant fresh water. You can just drink from a spring at every corner.
A group of foreign investors comes in. “It’s shocking how the market for bottled water is completely inexistant here. Don’t worry, we’re going to teach you how to make money selling imported water! First thing, we’ll dynamite those springs that disturb the market…”
Do you welcome these business gurus and their scarcity-introducing ideas with open arms?
Honestly, not really. Scarcity only means something by enforcement. A record is just half the battle. However, enforcement is by its nature centralizing.
The NBA NFTs, for example. Why NFT? If the NBA is running the enforcement, you'd de facto have to trust them to be in the system, and if you trust them, then surely you'd trust their MySQL database just as much.
Why would you want to prove scarcity in a digital world? That's precisely the opposite of what you should be doing in a digital world. And currency isn't a reason.
Proving scarcity in a universe where copying data is nearly free may swing all the way around to an actually evil construct.
If we're trying to do accurate record-keeping on the scarcity of tangible artifacts using digital means... That's useful, but it's not the problem BTC or its ilk solves.
Requiring a transferable license to use IP in a locked-doen metaverse (say, having permission to play a certain album in your "public" space) is the only use case I can see for NFTs and also the reason I'll be using exclusively pirate-friendly metaverses
Economic value, perhaps. But clearly economic value and true value to people are completely divorced in this modern day and age, artificial scarcity is a disturbing concept and not one we should laud, and it is foolish or malicious to dedicate efforts and literal energy to such that we waste more on speculators gambling in this artificial scarcity space than medium-sized countries use to exist.
We could just print money and all be rich? If you value money, and you think that compensation for work can be paid with money, then compensating the work that went into creating digital goods seems appropriate. Should compensation for digital goods be through donations?
Banks pretty much can. The only real limit on bank money is the banks ability to find a credit worthy borrower. There's far more of that in the system than central bank money. Of course the issued currency is balanced with a liability. In the case of normal banks this liability is generally taken by a person or entity in the system. For the central bank it's marked up as not-yet-taxed-away money. Crypto currencies are just silly and absolutely rely ultimately on social stability, which essentially means the state.
> compensating the work that went into creating digital goods seems appropriate. Should compensation for digital goods be through donations?
I consume digital goods all the time, and I pay for them with money.
Money is an inflationary asset that I keep in order to pay people. It is not an investment, it's value (in my country, the US) is stable, and I get paid in money.
There is no cryptocurrency that shares these characteristics and there never will be as long as people try to pitch it as both deflationary (good investment) and spendable.
The original tweet was asking for "any future of python in web3 domain?
specific in @ethereum @solana"
Web3.js - the 7 year old library for communicating with any EVM has an actively maintained and fully featured python version.
Solana.py is available for the Solana ecosystem
These libraries typically make it very easy to connect to the nearest node, which you can treat as pay-once-read-forever compute instances. Where reading and and all bandwidth is free.
You can completely ignore the cringy ideology if you prefer to and just accept that people are willing to store your crap for free forever.
You can build lucrative businesses around the observation that long winded web 2.0 funnels have been shorted down to a single call to action that in itself is a payment, while again completely ignoring the ethos and ideology of the users and enthusiasts.
This kind of question doesn't need input or gracing from a web 1.0 developer that people respect. when people say decentralization they mean "no opinion of any individual or entity matters" (of course many conflate permissionless with decentralization, but the degree of permissionlessness is derived from the degree of decentralization.) Individuals are free to respect or assign more weight to the opinion of someone they like, when that opinion matches what they want to hear, its just not necessary for an outcome.
> You can build lucrative businesses around the observation that long winded web 2.0 funnels have been shorted down to a single call to action that in itself is a payment, while again completely ignoring the ethos and ideology of the users and enthusiasts.
Sidebar: I love sentences like this that go on and on but say literally nothing. Nothing in the preceding or following context gives it any clarity. It feels like people are still trying to pad their college essays long since graduating.
> Sidebar: I love sentences like this that go on and on but say literally nothing. Nothing in the preceding or following context gives it any clarity.
So you don't actually love sentences like that. That's interesting, I don't see it as one of those sentences. I don't know what insight you are missing such that you can't apply it here.
Where would you like to start?
Do you know what a funnel is? Do you know how convoluted they have become as businesses compete for the future illusion of revenue?
Do you use any "web3" services? Is that a farfetched thing to consider for you because you are first waiting to understand why anyone would bother, while ironically limiting your ability to understand what I consider to be a simple sentence?
I think the criticism is due to your use of buzz words, broad sweeping claims and abstract concepts that require knowledge of and acceptance of lots of supporting concepts that are highly contested; you then combine these semantic tools in to some apparent theory of how things should be but without a concrete conclusion that is clear in terms of what your recommendation actually is so it feels like a lot was said but nothing actually communicated.
For example, what is “future illusion of revenue”. Why is the word illusion there? Are you challenging the existence or classification of revenue? Of money? Of commerce? Or accounting? I can’t tell. Why is the word future there? Are you challenging old business models that will be replaced by web3? Highlighting the emergence of a post money economy?
I don’t know what you mean by including you those buzz words. So they feel like fluff to create apparent sophistication but in reality have no meaningful conceptual value. They don’t move the argument forward towards a conclusion.
Thanks for breaking that down from your perspective. It wasn't a reference to any crypto/money ideology at all. It was a reference to how many companies had or have zero revenue but would imagine gaining great valuations based on the existence of users, and their ability to monetize those users, and acquiring those users cheaply. This is pretty much a hallmark of Web 2.0. This had the competing goals of having a funnel or path of users to become interested and follow to merely signing up (or actually paying for something), while also counting how long those users stayed with the goal of increasing how long they stay while reducing the areas they drop off or bounce, investors know there isn't revenue and also are in line with the idea that users will be monetized in the future. A lot of times it never happens, hence illusion. The KPIs are metrics used to woo investors based on the data collected about how users stay in the funnel. OKRs are meetings about how to increase the KPIs. I don't consider those buzzwords, I consider them actual words/acronyms referring to useless drivel in that industry.
The unbridled optimism of the crypto space is crazy. Few other tech products would claim they'll be around "forever", where in crypto this is often treated as a given.
really interesting thats the point people are choosing to get out of this.
just mentally replace "forever" with "unlimited" or just "free". reads are free. a lot of services meter that for developers. that's all.
just a weird assumption to skip straight to unbridled optimism about a system where thousands of nodes functioning as backups might be available for a while. I've seen torrents with less redundancy remain available for decades now.
No different than any Web 2.0 website there. Except in Web 2.0 it's whenever the business decides to stop paying to keep the servers going and supporting that content (or until they go out of business), whereas for 3.0 it's when the whole network goes down, not a particular company.
Happens all the time. Nintendo announced they're shutting off their Wii U and 3DS eShops next March, for example. At that point players are on their own to hack their hardware so they can make backups.
right! and from the developer's perspective - who needs to either host a web 2.0 website or connect to a service from a compute instance that developer set up somewhere - the costs are very competitive and extremely attractive when it comes to utilizing nodes in a blockchain. You write once which is just a transaction fee to the network (formula can be complex and expensive, or pretty cheap, but just once) and are not billed for reads or the bandwidth used.
Can you elaborate? None of these Virtual Machines go away because so many people run them and can run them, including yourself. You can branch off the current state or any prior state and run/execute it locally at any point in time, without needing the resources to run the whole blockchain. This is enough for you and your community/clients to have the data to move it all somewhere else, if necessary. If you need all the prior states for some reason, someone will have it for you to bootstrap from. What would stop working?
and when you mean latest scam ... how? all - or all major - blockchains have had this feature since day 1. reading is free, writing is not. now all the nodes in most networks can function as event-driven compute services, similar to aws lambda and other products, except reading and bandwidth is free.
The amount of storage is not unlimited. The amount of goodwill from the nodes is not unlimited. The value of ethereum is not unlimited. The amount of reads can easily be “played with”
Thanks for coming to this thread, I'm curious what the other person meant though.
Yes, there is a stack and heap limiting the amount of resources that a command can use. So what? Design your application with that limitation in mind. Focus on what you can control, its a one-step one-click funnel that is inherently a payment and insatiable demand right now from the users. A Web 2.0 dream, I've sat through so many useless OKRs and KPIs meetings trying to figure that out, and now its just here for any individual willing to look, apply the same concepts and use it.
What do you mean about the amount of reads can be played with? I don't see how it matters. You can read the state of a smart contract or any account for free. Not really sure how this is a point.
>Focus on what you can control, its a one-step one-click funnel that is inherently a payment and insatiable demand right now from the users
right now is the really, really big issue here. We're talking about pay once read forever, not pay once read right now, or pay once and read while there's still interest or demand in running nodes.
Can you elaborate on what your concern/criticism/cynicism is?
What use case are you trying to imagine?
I think its been very easy and very competitive to design applications around using these redundant blockchain nodes as event-driven compute nodes, when compared to AWS Lambda or even addons to a paid Vercel plan or hosting my own microservice somewhere. The uptime has been on-par and the system design gives some assurances of the ability to maintain the uptime where it could theoretically be a concern.
> But, imagine a DDOS attack on the nodes serving the blockchain.
Okay.
> I don’t see why “pay once read forever” works financially.
A separate issue thats not really your problem. Its the node operators problem. When your use case expands to that being a viable problem for you, then you'll need to become a node operator or at least keep a copy of the state yourself. You can design applications around that. Or maybe you can't. Just rule those out or keep using AWS or some other company for those applications?
got it. okay. you can make a backup and continue executing in a smaller environment even if the rest of the network falls apart. I feel like that would be really hard to do with like AWS Lambda. Altneratively you can have just enough information to store the last relevant state and migrate to another system.
in the meantime you won't be charged for how much you read or how often. which was my main point. before this conversation, did you know that?
> These libraries typically make it very easy to connect to the nearest node, which you can treat as pay-once-read-forever compute instances. Where reading and and all bandwidth is free.
> You can completely ignore the cringy ideology if you prefer to and just accept that people are willing to store your crap for free forever.
These are extremely strong and unusual claims. Computers and storage and bandwidth and power all cost money. Very very few things in life are free - even things that you might think of as such, such as libraries, which are funded or subsidized through other means. "people are willing to store your crap for free forever" is so hard to believe as to almost sound like satire.
Well, its whats happening. Its really important for you (and others) to have assurances that it will keep happening. Not really sure where to start there.
What I described is actually a cynical description of blockchains, but blockchain nodes store everything written in perpetuity. a subset of that information is necessary to sustain the blockchain, there are reasons why some nodes store more than what is necessary. if you are willing to pay to store more information, there are a lot of free backups of it automatically, which are also free to recover from, as many times as you want. that competes directly with the SaaS model that charges or meters uploading the information, reading the information, downloading the information, storing the information, accessing the information or some combination thereof. those SaaS services also come with the questions of how long that information will remain available.
Honestly the older I get, the more absurd the world seems to become. Things like NFTs, an utter and total April's Fools joke of a concept that nevertheless people are now building six-figure careers on top of. Was it like this during the first dotcom bubble? I was a highschooler back then, so not yet totally "in" in the scene. Surely the current bubble must burst at some point as well?
Was it like this during the first dotcom bubble?
I was a highschooler back then.
No, because the internet had obvious practical potential to pretty much anybody who'd ever used a computer before.
And if somebody didn't get it yet you could show them a webpage or something. You could pull up a news site - "see, it's like your regular newspaper, except on the computer... plus a zillion other online newspapers, and weather, and shopping" etc. Very few people would fail to get the general concept (even if they had no interest in it) after a few minutes of that.
Ordering things from a catalog over the phone (Sears, etc) had existed for a century already, and online shopping was a fairly obvious extension of that.
The internet was also an idea that all manner of media had primed us for. Since, what, the 1950s? 1960s? movies and television and World's Fairs had all been promising us that someday we'd be able to do actual useful shit through our TV screens and that computers were "the future."
So once that all arrived it all felt pretty obvious. Both to tech-savvy types, and the general populace.
But... Web3?
There's nothing simple you can show an Average Joe. Even most tech-savvy people I know fall somewhere between thinking it's utter garbage and having no clue what it is on any kind of practical level. That's something you absolutely did not hear from tech-savvy folks in the 90s.
Yeah, I mean I guess back the there was the actually gonna-change-the-world part of the internet, and then there was the hyperinflated hype train that made millionaires out of twenty-plus people who had nothing but a catchy domain name and some rudimentary marketing skills, no business model, never mind anything resembling a real product. Then they'd spend the money on cocaine and Lamborghinis. This time, there doesn't even seem to be the former part.
Everyone here debating this is ignorant. Everyone here is using a different definition of Web3 and pretending they can brute force the meaning on to the other side's definition. Its pathetic.
Guido is obviously a talented PL designer but I’d wager he knows very little about the crypto space. Not sure how this is interesting enough for front page HN but I guess it’s fun to see how emotional people are about this topic.
Works for me. We enjoy the same benefits high capital enjoys when investing on crypto. Saves lots on paperwork and taxes. Plus, now I can save my wealth from being stolen by the govt when it decides to print it's way into our 6th currency.
I'm not sure what country you're in, but in the US at least, BTC is taxable. The fact it's somewhat simpler to hide from the IRS doesn't mean you're safe when they audit you and ask about the movement of cash to / from exchanges.
The quality of arguments against web3 seem related to a trend where smart people indulge in acting dumb on twitter because it feels powerful. It's just an off the cuff tweet by a giant of our age, not some ex cathedra papal bull.
The basic innovation of proof of work is that it sidesteps the need to solve hard economic problems of energy storage and transmission and lets you turn energy where you find it into fungible, valuable compute and transmit it back as information. Economically, this means if you can find power, you can refine and sell it in the form of mining compute, which means I can make money that enables a supply line to wherever I can harvest an energy source.
Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple.
Maybe I'm being dumb and web3 dies in a fire, but if it sucks that badly, maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet. Even though I like who web3 annoys and why, seeing them at less than their best is unsatisfying.
> When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple.
What? Just use an RDBMS, it'll "refine" that electricity to the same end product millions of times more efficiently. That's the argument most Web3 critics have.
The efficiency of an RDBMS treats trust as both an assumption and an externality, and that's not efficient in any risk adjusted model.
An RDBMS depends on trust, where web3 uses consensus, and that consensus is a different product, which also has some useful anti-technocrat and anti-leviathan properties. Are all these kids writing crypto protocols for smart contracts just too dumb to spin up postgress? Doubtful. The ideology behind it is from a generation raised on narrative and they are inventing a way to relate based on something concrete that requires proofs and truth.
The problem I think web3 techs solve is the forfeit of trust that institutions and platforms have engaged in over the last decade. There's no point in even talking to anyone involved in them because there's no reason to believe they would argue in good faith. Consensus protocols and proofs provide stability and some of that trust the culture has lost.
The people who still believe in those institutions are just clinging to a precarious bourgeois and managerialist aspiration to become a part of them, where it's people from wealth (material and cultural), and working class people with less education and money who are the marks of those institutions who are typically the ones flocking to cryptocurrencies and now web3. They're also where growth comes from. In this sense, web3 is less ideological than just a polarized class strategy.
The question isn't why not use an RDBMS, it should be, can you reasonably expect that anyone involved in the EMV payments partners, banks, government, social platforms, google, media(hah), non-stem academia, etc, are willing or able to act or debate in good faith? Consensus protocols route around that problem.
> It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple.
I guess that's the case if your refinery is producing absolutely nothing of value.
That's the overall point of critics: web3 has huge costs for tiny (and disputable) benefits.
Even your comment lacks any benefits of web3. Making electricity more expensive isn't a benefit at all. It sure won't put a colony on the moon. And we were already able to turn electricity into "information" using an invention called a "computer."
I had a friend in college say to me, Web 2.0 is "more than rounded buttons". But, if you looked around in 2009, 2010... well, Web 2.0 was mainly crapware covered in rounded buttons. I guess we got... Farmville?
Similarly, if Web3 wants to be taken seriously it has to provide more than access to private Discords. NFTs are basically a digital lanyard, they get you in and around some niche areas of the web's convention center but once the big show comes and goes what's left? Web3's value prop needs to be greater than "we can see your coins".
> Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing.
No, we can't. Becuse all energy is going towards bitcoin mining.
> maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet.
