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Decentralized Woo Hoo

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#51

Post by jrm4 »

fragmede wrote: post #41
jrm4 wrote: post #25

Criticisms here are correct: Look, decentralized here doesn't mean "decentralized" in the slightest. I think for - not just the people he's critcizing, but ALSO FOR HIM, "decentralized" really means "centralized differently." True "decentralization" means letting go of (at least some) exclusivity and ownership; and the current flavor of the crypto craze can't even conceive of it. Ironic, since a lot of it is built on…

> decentralized here doesn't mean "decentralized" in the slightest. That's a bit much. There is a bunch of weird crypto hype surrounding web3, but when I can use a website without having to create a login, and my data that its showing doesn't exist on their servers, that's fundamentally a different Internet than the one we've come to know.

But not fundamentally different from the one we had 20 years ago! Maybe that's my issue here. So many of these Web3 clowns are promising slightly worse versions of the web we already had a while ago (which, fair, might be necessary) -- but while pretending it's something new and, perhaps this is the worst part, apparently aggressively ignoring the extent to which "Information wants to be free"/ GNU Manifesto/etc" type ideas are at least PARTLY true.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#52

Post by jrm4 »

hamburga wrote: post #49

I've heard Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum creator) make the distinction between logical, architectural, and governance decentralization. Crypto projects tend to achieve the second, but not the first or third.[1] A blockchain tends to require centralized logic/code/data structures so that agents can communicate with the same protocol. Architectural means servers. As the OP mentions, this is really the only way in which blo…

And they never will the third. Never. Once again, this is thinking you can make humans act like robot computer code. You can't. So-called "smart contracts" (which are neither) will never helpfully substitute for humans doing dispute resolution by talking to each other.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#53

Post by serverholic »

21eleven wrote: post #37

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals…

This is why I support crypto. I view it as a laboratory where we can experiment with ideas around finance and governance.

Many of the currently accepted ideas around these topics came from a pre-internet world. However, myself and others think that certain technologies have changed the game.

Maybe we need government or maybe we don't. Maybe we need a centralized currency, maybe we don't. The thing is we won't really know what we need until we run the experiments.

Personally I think these experiments are too important to silence them.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#54

Post by Spivak »

pezzana wrote: post #46

> ... But crypto assets come with an attached narrative economics that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either libertarian politics or technology. If we venture down the technology arguments, at this point the discussion of intrinsic value of crypto assets reduces down to a rhetorical word salad of decentralized woo making all manner of appeals to alleged ideals of decentralization and networks, yet…

I don't think critics don't "get it", it's just that money exists in meatspace and if you're goal is to stop people with guns then you're gonna have a rough time unless you also have guns.

All that would be needed to completely destroy Bitcoin's censorship resistance is, say the US for example, creating and mandating the use of a blacklist of addresses (that updates on xfers). So if you found yourself on it no above-board business would legally be able to transact with you and no individual would dare touch you because their wallet would get poisoned, and your coins would be stuck in limbo. You couldn't send your coins to another wallet because that would be immediately blacklisted as well.

Money you can't spend anywhere except black markets is basically the same as having your assets frozen for basically everyone.

Edit: You could destroy it even more with KYC requirements.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#55

Post by stickfigure »

The exposition on quantum woo was lovely, but the analogy to decentralization falls flat. The difference is that when lay people talk about decentralization, they seem to have a pretty decent - though often imperfect - idea what they're talking about.

I think most folks who throw around the word "decentralized" use the term as a stand-in for some degree of "censorship resistance". Which is reasonably true! They might not understand the social consequences of this, or they might not care; maybe having free (as in speech) transactions between disparate people is worth the social cost of somewhat increased ransomware.

There are fair criticisms of people who talk about decentralization - I notice there are a lot of (facebook-hating, mostly) people who seem to think decentralization will bring privacy or control of your data - but overall I think most people use the word decentralization correctly.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#56

Post by k__ »

Xorlev wrote: post #27
capableweb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That centralized exchanges exists doesn't somehow make decentralized cryptocurrencies less decentralized. Just like how centralized social media doesn't make decentralized social media less decentralized.

Crytocurrencies are effectively useless without centralized exchanges. Change my mind. Social media doesn't need to interop between centralized and decentralized, but currencies do if they want to be useable. At the end of the day, someone will want to actually _buy_ something, and unfortunately I can't go to Petco and use my Dogecoin to buy dogfood.

Right now that is obviously true. If I want to pay for something, I need Euros here in Germany. But if I can pay with crypto that could change.

DAI and MIM are some examples of decentralized stable coins that could be used for payment.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#57

Post by timdaub »

scyclow wrote: post #29

I think the best examples of Decentralized Woo Hoo is the phrase "ownership over your data". When most people hear this they think of facebook selling their data to third parties, using it for targeted advertising, etc. But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data. From a read standpoint, all data is essentially open source. I have sole discretion to send you an NFT, but f…

> But in the context of blockchains, owning data only means that you own writes to the data.

I disagree in parts. In e.g. an app on Ethereum you own your and the app's data more than e.g. you do on Facebook. It's because there are no gatekeepers that'd stop you from creating an interoperable app using the original data or straight up downloading the data. There's sufficient historical precedence of FAANG platform risk.

But then also "just owning the right to writes" may sell the concept cheap considering that in the realm of "owning data," there isn't many concepts besides "reading", "writing" and "accessing". "Owning the write" may be as good as it gets?

We tend to look at data from a materialistic view and represent it in our heads as .zip files or csvs. But data really isn't that. Data is continuous and owning "the right to write" is pretty cool IMO.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#58

Post by 21eleven »

CJefferson wrote: post #47
21eleven wrote: post #37

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals…

Your last point (everything in smart contracts) I just can't understand. I personally wouldn't want to live in a world where the "computer says no", and even if a court and Jury disagrees, it's impossible to change. Similarly (and it's already happened several times), what happens when someone finds a loophole and drains the entire GDP of a country into their account? Do we say "Oh, well that's what the smart contrac…

I agree, you wouldn't want a world where either of those two scenarios you mention are possible. But are those examples inescapable risks inherent to having smart contracts? Or does the design of current smart contracts lack maturity in such a way that allows for problems similar to the ones you mention? Maybe better smart contract design could arise that prevents these issues.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#59

Post by Kalium »

21eleven wrote: post #37

I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don't have value beyond serving as gambling games. However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized. Achieving these goals…

> However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and "strongly typed"/formalized.

That's great! Could you provide some details on what these projects might be and how they aim to reshape political and economic life to be more open, formal, and participatory?

As others have noted, and indeed the author might point to, this kind of response is sort of a quantum woo dodge. It asserts that some of the quantum woo is genuinely helpful and useful and functional with clear mechanisms, but by coincidence fails to point to any in particular or specify mechanisms.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#60

Post by AnthonyMouse »

petesergeant wrote: post #34
whitepaint wrote: post #3

OP seems to have no idea about DeFI. You can lend and borrow on compound.finance, aave. You can play no-loss lotteries like PoolTogether. You can bet on your beliefs and hedge your investments on markets platforms like Polymarket. You can gamble. More on: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/ . All of this without any arbitrary restrictions imposed by governments or companies, you just need an internet connection. How can y…

> All of this without any arbitrary restrictions imposed by governments or companies Is that true? Is gambling now legal in jurisdictions where it wasn't before because it's being facilitated by unlicensed entities? Can I do an end-run against money-lending regulations in my country because I'm doing it online? To me it simply seems that enforcement hasn't (yet) caught up.

Many of the laws against things like gambling apply to the gambling establishment rather than the participant.

When the internet was new, people set up offshore gambling sites and people used them. Then the government started harassing payment processors to prevent people from transferring money there. Which doesn't work if there is no payment intermediary to pressure to cut them off, so now they're back.

Whether this is illegal or not depends on which law and jurisdiction you're talking about, but the whole concept is kind of ridiculous. If you can go to Las Vegas and legally place bets, you should be able to place bets at a Las Vegas casino over the internet from anywhere. The ability to do this is a feature of the internet, not a problem to be "solved" with more authoritarian control over everything.

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