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Is Web3 anything?

chris-granger.com

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Re: Is Web3 anything?

#171

Post by meheleventyone »

latchkey wrote: post #148
fatbird wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners choose where it's profitable to mine, which will always be the more active blockchain. It's called voting with your feet, and clearly Ethereum miners followed the quorum of powerful individuals. What matters your massive holdings of ETC when there's no buyers?

Disclosure: I'm a very very large miner and I've been doing it across many protocols over the last 7 years. You're right that miners choose profitability, but we also choose technology. I don't mine BTC any more, I mine with GPUs (and thus ETH). There are a dozen chains I could mine with these GPUs, but I'd like to see the success of ETH over others. I can tell you with certainty, no quorum of powerful individuals in…

Random question but as a large miner and supporter of ETH how will the proposed switch to PoS next year impact you?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#172

Post by dmitriid »

EGreg wrote: post #31

[flagged]

> YOU CAN WRITE A PROGRAM THAT EVERYONE CAN TRUST TO DO WHAT THE CODE SAYS

Ah yes. Because everyone is an expert in verifying programs written in esoteric programming languages. Oh. It's written by you? Well, of course I can trust what you've written

> It does to financial institutions and many others, what Web1 did to publishing.

It doesn't.

Case in point: enforcement of contracts.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#173

Post by XorNot »

fnoof wrote: post #170
jgilias wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's important to realize the core reason why people trust the government with these things. It's because the government has the ability to actually _enforce_ the contracts if required. I mean, having a deed of owning some property on the blockchain is all cool and dandy. Provided that the polity where the property is located recognizes this. Otherwise you're still trespassing.

The example in the article had a way to enforce contract breaking - the person had to put up collateral until the work was done. There’s problems with that particular mechanism, but in general if contracts can automatically decrease someone’s money, reputation, access etc, they can do enforcement.

No they can't, how could they? How is actionable events in the real world going to be translated without trust to a smart contract except by assessment by a third party?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#174

Post by dmitriid »

EGreg wrote: post #66
fatbird wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum has twice hard forked the blockchain to revert the results of "code is law", clearly saying that code is only law when a quorum of powerful individuals accept the outcome. Code isn't law, "code is law" is a slogan with as much veracity as slogans usually have.

I will quote from an article I wrote in CoinDesk last year: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block... For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before. Code isn’t law, code is better than law. I wondered what I would have done 300 years agi before computers, and realized I’d probably be an architect or one of those lawmaker guy…

> Just the community taking care of its business and its vulnerable.

Until gas fees make it accessible only to the "out of touch elites"

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#175

Post by soco »

fnoof wrote: post #170
jgilias wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's important to realize the core reason why people trust the government with these things. It's because the government has the ability to actually _enforce_ the contracts if required. I mean, having a deed of owning some property on the blockchain is all cool and dandy. Provided that the polity where the property is located recognizes this. Otherwise you're still trespassing.

The example in the article had a way to enforce contract breaking - the person had to put up collateral until the work was done. There’s problems with that particular mechanism, but in general if contracts can automatically decrease someone’s money, reputation, access etc, they can do enforcement.

So I have to trust the other party they will report in good faith on my delivered work. How is that trust working for Amazon product reviews? Why would be that net of lies any different for smart contracts?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#176

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

fnoof wrote: post #170
jgilias wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's important to realize the core reason why people trust the government with these things. It's because the government has the ability to actually _enforce_ the contracts if required. I mean, having a deed of owning some property on the blockchain is all cool and dandy. Provided that the polity where the property is located recognizes this. Otherwise you're still trespassing.

The example in the article had a way to enforce contract breaking - the person had to put up collateral until the work was done. There’s problems with that particular mechanism, but in general if contracts can automatically decrease someone’s money, reputation, access etc, they can do enforcement.

All these schemes always still might need some higher authority in the end e.g. who decides when the work is done? Putting up collateral only ensures that someone has the money, it does not ensure that one actually gets the money. Because defining when "the work" is done, can be really complicated in real life projects. Contracts in real life are complicated. Real life is messy etc.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#177

Post by latchkey »

fatbird wrote: post #158
latchkey wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I'm a very very large miner and I've been doing it across many protocols over the last 7 years. You're right that miners choose profitability, but we also choose technology. I don't mine BTC any more, I mine with GPUs (and thus ETH). There are a dozen chains I could mine with these GPUs, but I'd like to see the success of ETH over others. I can tell you with certainty, no quorum of powerful individuals in…

I understand. What did influence that decision? I expect it would be your overall appraisal of the viability of a particular blockchain and future expectations of activity. Is that accurate?

ETH is where the mindshare and developer resources went. ETC became too fringe. BETA vs. VHS. It really had very little to do with some quorum of powerful people.

Many people don't understand that GPUs don't have the same hardware race war as bitcoin ASICs. Older GPUs actually have better ROI because the ethash algo is constrained by memory controller speed, not as much by nm scale or clock rate. The GPUs we use today were new old stock from many years ago. This is why we don't see a large influx of ASICs for ethash... it just isn't profitable.

We can sell (or use) the GPUs at a later date for other purposes than just mining. In fact, as we race towards "the merge" and PoS, it astounds me that someone isn't working on something all these miners can switch their compute resources to mine profitably.

It is crazy to think that ETC could actually become a viable chain again (but they have some plans to switch a more friendly ASIC algo, which I don't think will work out well for them). Note that ETC is a mess right now, exchanges have 6+ day holds on transfers because nobody trusts the chain.

I'll be transparent and admit that there are some other significant non-technical factors as well, but can't discuss them here.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#178

Post by Longwelwind »

meheleventyone wrote: post #162
Longwelwind wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those moderator actions you described would still be possible in web3. Moderators would still be able to up a topic, merge a topic, delete topics, ... But: * The fact that the moderators have access to these mechanisms would be known by all users * The use of these mechanisms by moderators would be public. If a topic is upped by a moderator, it would be logged in the blockchain. No moderator would be able to do i…

Or they could just publish a log of actions, this isn’t such priceless information that we couldn’t just rely on trust like we already do in the current situation that seems to work well.

I don't understand the point of your comment.

You're providing a solution that doesn't fit the initial requirement of a system being trust-less. So, indeed, your solution works, but as you described, it requires trust in the administrators of the website. The idea of web3 is that you wouldn't. "Trust but verify", if you want.

This could be used for Facebook or Reddit (given that they solve or attenuate the issue of fees), where people might have less trust in the administrators.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#179

Post by xwolfi »

derefr wrote: post #101
cormacrelf wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy solves the Byzantine agreement problem just fine already. I like the aspects of decentralisation that help you preserve democracy, but beyond that it’s not necessary to replace every single aspect of a functioning democracy with a cryptographic commitment scheme. It would be worse if you did. That vision of society sounds terrible. (I can’t comment on this without noting that of all the interpretations of t…

> Democracy solves the Byzantine agreement problem just fine already. That’s nice when you and your counterparty are part of the same democracy, or potentially allied ones. But how do you enforce contracts when your government and their government are at war? (The governments say “you shouldn’t; they’re the enemy.” Well, screw the governments, I want to make positive-sum trades in the hopes of increasing global GDP a…

You miss something, imagine a world where crypto is finally used to pay for services. How do you enforce that when you give an advance to your house builder so that he can start building and contracting out and paying his own people by the hours, that he wont build you something that eventually crumbles as soon as you open the door?

Who enforces THAT ? Who care about decentralising, we need to centralize violent enforcement or people will just scam each other. The problem in China is this one, not that they're not crypto-dumb dumb enough :s

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#180

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

nefitty wrote: post #130
infogulch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes in theory. In practice, justice is expensive to procure even when you're in the right, and sometimes even then you can lose just by being out-monied. This leads to a more nuanced view of web3 and smart contracts: a way to acquire law-like order in business dealings at a vastly lower cost. Or put yet another way, if lawyers and the government got their act together and used technology to reduce the cost of their s…

So like, if you don't deliver those shipping containers of hot sauce, I just click the "I was scammed" checkbox on my smart contract dashboard? Where exactly does the leverage of smart contracts come into play? The biggest reason libertarianism is a nonstarter is that it outright rejects the state monopoly on violence. Without a lone arbiter, societies fragment due to intragroup competition and violence. As a society…

I think you hit the nail on the head. In my experience, if both parties are happy payment isn't really a problem anyway. Trouble always comes up when there is disagreement e.g. buyer claims that the hot sauce is not spicy enough and the seller says it's exactly as spicy as ordered. Now what?
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