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Is Web3 anything?

chris-granger.com

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Re: Is Web3 anything?

#11

Post by CryptoPunk »

jolux wrote: post #9

All of the examples of having to trust the government in this article neglect the fact that trusting the government is not just trusting the government, and it’s not just the government storing a deed or giving you a Social Security Number that makes it real. It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively…

The government encompasses all of those things, so I think when the author says "trust the government", it implies all of those things.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#12

Post by dzonga »

jolux wrote: post #9

All of the examples of having to trust the government in this article neglect the fact that trusting the government is not just trusting the government, and it’s not just the government storing a deed or giving you a Social Security Number that makes it real. It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively…

succinctly said. all these web3 / crypto folks forget complex laws exist to prevent and remedy situations that can't be simply solved by smart contracts. most of the laws are so complex, we've professionals who specialise in them.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#13

Post by jolux »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #11
jolux wrote: post #9

All of the examples of having to trust the government in this article neglect the fact that trusting the government is not just trusting the government, and it’s not just the government storing a deed or giving you a Social Security Number that makes it real. It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively…

The government encompasses all of those things, so I think when the author says "trust the government", it implies all of those things.

Right, but the government is not just some unaccountable third party that sits between you and the rest of society. It is meant to embody the society, and, in a democracy, represent its interests effectively.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#14

Post by brotchie »

I feel like web3 continues the trend (in a good way) of the financialization of everything.

The primitives of web3 effectively enable the fine grained economic measurement and distribution of every element of value-exchange, and gives folks the ability to participate in these cashflows where they were previously not able to.

Now that there's standards for representations of value / governance / etc (ERC-20) now any protocol that supports ERC-20 tokens can be applied to any ERC-20 token. Ditto for NFTs.

As an example, if you want to split cashflows from any source based on some pro-rata ownership of tokens: there's a off-the-shelf battle tested contract for that. This composability and remixability of economic value flows has never existed before. Mix that with governance concepts in DAOs and you effectively have a parallel system of capital allocation and investment decision making.

p.s. Charles Stross was amazingly prophetic in Accelerando where the Superintelligent AIs create a system of economics called Economics 2.0, which is indecipherable to humans. Reminds me of smart contracts interacting :)

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#15

Post by jen729w »

tracyhenry wrote: post #3

> Once submitted, that “contract” will be carried out exactly as specified. It is observable to everyone, debuggable, and non-falsifiable. But a centralized database can also achieve this, right? The premise of the general public trusting a blockchain more than an established, centralized 3rd party (e.g. government) seems so feeble.

Isn’t it the visibility thing? Yeah a centralised database can do this. Good luck getting access to it. “Security” says you can’t.

I think that one of the allures of the blockchain is that it’s publicly visible. This may or may not be a fallacy of reasoning but hey, we’re human.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#17

Post by pjmlp »

echelon wrote: post #4

Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web was coming into prominence at the peak of Bittorrent and P2P. It allowed people to publish data in schemas without centralized databases. Protocols in markup. You could declare and share schemas for things, build on top of other people's schemas, and remix endlessly. It was powerful. You could define your contact details in FOAF and a client could ingest that and make co…

> You could consume articles as RSS or Atom and use any client you wanted. Clients that were faster and more performant than HTML-based websites. We could have shed HTML and Javascript for many schema-aware applications.

I still can do that today, granted on the sites that keep publishing feeds.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#18

Post by aardvarkr »

I have yet to see a good example of what “web3” is useful for… honestly this just smells like it’s going to be the next major hype train of 2022.

Just like VR/AR and ML/AI of yesteryear. Note that both of these examples are wonderful pieces of tech but they were blown wildly out of proportion by everyone.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#19

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

tracyhenry wrote: post #3

> Once submitted, that “contract” will be carried out exactly as specified. It is observable to everyone, debuggable, and non-falsifiable. But a centralized database can also achieve this, right? The premise of the general public trusting a blockchain more than an established, centralized 3rd party (e.g. government) seems so feeble.

Exactly. Case in point: GitHub. We trust it to provide consensus on the latest hashes that branches point to, and if you use signed commits, then you don't even have to trust it to ensure integrity. The identity used to sign is completely controlled by you, and you can easily move to a self-hosted solution if GitHub loses your trust. Distributed consensus mechanisms are not worth it if you just design your system to (a) be auditable and independently verifiable (b) support identities controlled by the users.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#20

Post by ssss11 »

tracyhenry wrote: post #3

> Once submitted, that “contract” will be carried out exactly as specified. It is observable to everyone, debuggable, and non-falsifiable. But a centralized database can also achieve this, right? The premise of the general public trusting a blockchain more than an established, centralized 3rd party (e.g. government) seems so feeble.

Well not exactly. The blockchain is distributed and you effectively can’t modify it (let’s not get into 51% attacks etc)

A centralised database is controlled and modifiable by the owner - government, private company or whoever. They will act on their best interest not yours.

I don’t personally have a problem with government having my dat although they’re usually useless at implementing technology, but a decentralised blockchain would be way more trustworthy than private companies..

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