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Web3 Is Bullshit

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#91

Post by drdeca »

jerojero wrote: post #61
drdeca wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my understanding is that much of the motivation for PoS is to avoid the electricity usage, and in some but not other ways of measuring it possibly has some better security properties, not really increasing the throughput or gas fees?

PoS is more scalable because if you need faster validation all you do is add more parallel nodes. With PoW all the validators are competing against each other to be the fastest whereas with PoS there is no competition but consensus. Eth2.0 is supposed to be much faster than Eth1.0 anyway, they say it'll be capable of doing thousands of transactions per second (as opposed to the ~15 it is doing right now). It's partly…

Ok, I may be wrong there?

By parallel validators, do you mean more validators for each block of the... beacon chain(?) or, do you mean like as validators on different shards?

As you can see I haven’t been keeping up with the details

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#92

Post by rasz »

crocodiletears wrote: post #30
diveanon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly this community is just an echo chamber of bad takes when it comes to web3. Kind of hard to recognize a problem when your salary is dependent on propagating it.

What are the best resources for learning about the current state of web3 projects? Most of what I encounter with respect to it seems like marketing copy, without good summaries of the pros and cons that come with the different technologies and their roadmap. There's clearly a lot going on in the space. But for someone who's at best adjacent to it, it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaffe.

>What are the best resources for learning about the current state of web3 projects?

https://cryptoscamdb.org/scams

https://twitter.com/scams_alarms

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#93

Post by SandB0x »

zelag wrote: post #6

The author has a huge conflict of interest whenever he writes about cryptocurrency, seeing as he's the founder of Adjoint, Inc, a company which digitizes cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates. The site in question: http://www.adjoint.io/ this was originally brought up by robot_no_419 in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27121532 all props go to him.

I think you mean: "Has relevant industry knowledge

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#94

Post by mattdesl »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #77
mattdesl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering BTC's network uptime has been about 99.9% for over a decade, I'd say the "here to stay" articles may have been relatively accurate? (I don't care much for BTC, though I do feel a narrow scope of its usage will probably persist in some fashion for many more years.) > Show me one blockchain application that has nothing to do with virtual assets that not only turns a profit but is provably more efficient tha…

A centralized database can handle the escrow too, and far more efficiently. The only reason decentralized crypto solutions have a head start is that people who work in crypto tend not to care about what is legal.

Yet there is a key difference in trust - that a centralized actor (say, Kickstarter) will not mutate their private database, will not go under, and will not fail to meet its promises in how the funds are managed.

There is also an ease of use (for developers building these applications), particularly in terms of finances: say, an escrow that holds $1M worth of value and may need to return those funds to 100K donors across the globe should the fundraiser not meet its goals before a set deadline.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#95

Post by mattdesl »

KarlKemp wrote: post #85
mattdesl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering BTC's network uptime has been about 99.9% for over a decade, I'd say the "here to stay" articles may have been relatively accurate? (I don't care much for BTC, though I do feel a narrow scope of its usage will probably persist in some fashion for many more years.) > Show me one blockchain application that has nothing to do with virtual assets that not only turns a profit but is provably more efficient tha…

That, like everything else in the space, breaks at the point where anything of non-virtual value needs to be returned to the buyers/investors/etc. That just happens to be impossible unless you allow for trusted people observing and certifying a part of reality. So they basically came up with a set of “crypto assets” to trade using the “crypto currencies”. Of course those are more or less the same concepts with differ…

These contracts intentionally only deal with tokens and virtual data/assets. A “web3” Kickstarter alternative built on a common set of OSS and fee-less escrow contracts does not need to manage anything other than tokens - that is the currency being exchanged.

If you are concerned about price fluctuations in the cryptocurrency, you could set this contract to operate only on a stablecoin like DAI.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#96

Post by Teever »

md2020 wrote: post #65
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this what the struggles of the transition from scarcity to post scarcity looks like? Building systems that simulate scarcity to generate the illusion of value and to front run that value?

I don’t understand how a post-scarcity society would even be desirable. For things like art and music, their creators need to be able to command a price on their creations. The digitization of these things removes their scarcity and essentially makes them function as a public good, making it impossible to set a price on them that will support the artist. If there’s no way for digital artists to support themselves, th…

> I don’t understand how a post-scarcity society would even be desirable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_gir...

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#97

Post by streamofdigits »

i386 wrote: post #27
streamofdigits wrote: post #13

if Web2 became a dystopic Zuckerbergia and Web3 is a disguised Cryptobrosia is there maybe a chance for a Web 2.5 that doesn't suck? Like something that isn't fake techno-solutionism on steroids? What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix? but more importantly what would be the governance and incentives that would prevent it from rapidly degenerating as with all other versions

> What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix? Wrong way of looking at it. What are people going to do differently and then what technology gets us there.

in principle, and in the long term, I agree that is the correct attitude. but in the short term the characteristics of the various tech building blocks shape what can be solved as "low hanging fruit" and that creates a dynamic of its own.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#98

Post by streamofdigits »

rslabbert wrote: post #57
streamofdigits wrote: post #13

if Web2 became a dystopic Zuckerbergia and Web3 is a disguised Cryptobrosia is there maybe a chance for a Web 2.5 that doesn't suck? Like something that isn't fake techno-solutionism on steroids? What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix? but more importantly what would be the governance and incentives that would prevent it from rapidly degenerating as with all other versions

The alternate path is one the free software community has been pushing towards for decades. The ability to voluntarily associate (and disassociate) from trusted communities, software and communities that works for users and not the other way around, and autonomy coupled with mutual aid/benefit. Compare the focus of the GNU, Mastodon, Matrix, etc. projects to blockchain world and the fundamental difference is they're…

> the fundamental difference is they're not trying to create a world in which we don't trust anyone

This. Massive effort and talent seems to be directed towards what is intuitively a dead end: trust is something between people, not something between devices. Any protocol no matter how ingeniously crafted will be subverted when it leaves the silicon layer and hits the human layer (unless you create the ultimate dystopia where people are collared and tracked on permanent basis or something equivalent)

Nevertheless, imho the human-centric vision of computing is misfiring, losing battle after battle (from self-sovereign computing, to social media, to mobile etc) and at some point it will lose the war. Maybe the silver lining of the cryptofunded "web3" marketing onslaught for "alternatives" is to give the real-deal one more window of opportunity...

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#99

Post by ghc »

jtsiskin wrote: post #46

The author seems to have no knowledge of Eth 2 sharding, zero-knowledge proofs, or ZK rollups. Or even basic encryption. “Who’s servers will have custody of your private family photos and who get’s to determine those access controls?” - I can send them to you using your public key. Or store then encrypted and selectively give out the decoding key. Or selectively choose one server to trust (or self host) with my unenc…

The author founded and ran a blockchain company for years, has done conference talks on modern cryptography you can find on youtube, and wrote an open source zero knowledge proof library.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#100

Post by streamofdigits »

mrkramer wrote: post #18
streamofdigits wrote: post #13

if Web2 became a dystopic Zuckerbergia and Web3 is a disguised Cryptobrosia is there maybe a chance for a Web 2.5 that doesn't suck? Like something that isn't fake techno-solutionism on steroids? What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix? but more importantly what would be the governance and incentives that would prevent it from rapidly degenerating as with all other versions

>if Web2 became a dystopic Zuckerbergia and Web3 is a disguised Cryptobrosia is there maybe a chance for a Web 2.5 that doesn't suck? Nobody is forcing people to use Facebook or any of Facebook's family of apps. I personally don't use FB or any of its apps for the last 10 years and I'm totally fine. >What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix? IP, TCP and HTTP are not going away anytime soon.…

> Nobody is forcing people to use Facebook or any of Facebook's family of apps. I personally don't use FB or any of its apps for the last 10 years and I'm totally fine.

Sorry, this so unbeliably the wrong attitude. Compare with food producers, car manufacturers etc building toxic, addictive, dangerous products and being allowed free access to the market on the basis that "nobody is forcing consumers to buy their products".

The vast majority of people cannot judge whether the use of a digital product is safeguarding their interests and welfare, both individually and as a society. Unless and until there is recognition of this fundamental fact we must acknowledge that one industry in particular has been excempted from oversight for reasons that are not doing the political class any favor.

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