Is Web3 anything? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#211

Post by ohgodplsno » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:30 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #133

jayd16 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the thought experiment of a true anarchy, how do you ultimately enforce the off-chain part of a transaction? If BTC is traded for goods or services, how do you enforce that the goods and services have been sufficiently provided?

Presuming this is a fancy sci-fi kind of anarchy: multi-sig escrow wallet requiring a 2-of-3 quorum of oracle triggers from observation cubesats owned by both parties plus some disinterested third party. (People are already doing the virtual equivalent for prediction markets: everyone who cares runs their own oracle agent to forward result data from web2 sources into web3. You “just” need computer vision + good optic…

So, the only thing required is corrupting/intimidating a single party ? You're just straight up making things easier to be problematic.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#212

Post by adenozine » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

This is the guy who ditched light table. Personally, I can't think of someone I despise more. I thought light table was the most innovative and slick products I'd ever seen on a computer.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#213

Post by TekMol » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:32 AM UTC

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…

Governments constantly break the contracts they sign.

Take a look at the Maastricht Treaty and what it says about government debt in the European union. The government broke this treaty that was the basis for the union in the first place.

You say "Your recourse when somebody runs afoul of these rules is the courts". For an individual this is not a practical approach. An individual has no way to get back financial stability and to undo the excessive government debt and inflation.

The individual who held Euros throughout this process now holds way less buying power than someone who kept their assets out of the reach of governments.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#214

Post by latchkey » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

meheleventyone wrote: post #188

latchkey wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for asking. My business model has always been larger than just mining ETH. I'm focused on building data centers for providing decentralized compute to all these web3 applications being built today. Mining (aka: being paid to validate anonymous transactions) is just one use case. You see all these articles about how a dApp went down because AWS was down? I'd like to help solve that issue. It isn't just about re…

Thanks for the answer it’s very interesting to see how the infrastructure spin off of mining could lead to more conventionally useful hosting. So in some sense you intend to be multi-region without the eye watering data transfer costs?

You're into gaming, GALA nodes are a great example.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#215

Post by classified » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #139

lmm wrote: post #7

But is there any case where you'd actually trust a pile of blockchains more than an existing trust mechanism (whether that's neighbourliness, contract law, or something else)? If you're not a programmer, getting a programmer to review your smart contract probably costs more than getting a lawyer to review your regular contract. If you are a programmer, you probably know better than to rely on some code being bug-free…

Have you ever heard of a better use case for clamped down functional languages? The only issue with crypto right now is how infantile it is - that's what most critiques boil down to (especially on this site). Any long term speculator is happy to see it, so long as they see the same problems the forever skeptics see but with a dash of optimism rather than arrogance.

Ah, the solution to all of mankind's problems is so simple, really. (Where have we heard that one before?) Technology can solve all problems in human society, just be optimistic! Also, you'll get rich quick.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#216

Post by newaccount74 » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

berkes wrote: post #122

newaccount74 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of government databases are publicly accessible. For example, in Austria we have the "Grundbuch", a register of land ownership. Everyone can inspect the Grundbuch database. Authenticity is guaranteed by requiring a public notary or a court to confirm any changes in the database, and there is a paper trail for every change to a record. It's boring old tech, but it works, and doesn't have all the gotchas of block…

Many people complain about transaction fees and limited throughput of a blockchain. I can only imagine this ancient system to be a magnitude worse in those regards.

The system is optimized for security, preventing fraud is more important than throughput in this case. Registering something in the Grundbuch is fast enough for property transactions.

Transaction fees are high by design. They are a form of tax on property transactions that discourages short term investments.

The system works very well and I just don't think it needs fixing.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#217

Post by soco » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:36 AM UTC

costac wrote: post #58

> what if the neighbors collude and vote that you failed to improve the park despite having done what was specified. The contract could further specify that some neutral third party acts as an arbiter in that case. If there's anything that shows that Web3.0, smart contracts and so on are a bad solution in search of a non-existent problem, it's this. The ``problem'' is apparently that we don't trust each other and our…

It also assumes that neutral third party (should we call them judges, or jurors?) would act in good faith. What's stopping them from rolling with the majority? And how exactly is the problem of trust solved by trusting a third party? It would be laughable if it wasn't a straight faced affirmation. The "radically new" proposal is basically to recreate the old structures, just with new web3 labels. Is there a reason this would work better, only because it's proposed by software folk instead of politician folk? Or is it better only because it's proposed by "my gang"?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#218

Post by soulofmischief » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:36 AM UTC

laserbeam wrote: post #116

ahussain wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, we already trust programmers enough to design our cryptography (hash functions and such)

With millions of dollars being stolen from various smart contracts every other week... No, I don't trust those programmers. Designing hash/crypto functions is a very different story than implementing contracts. You would need to know basically 0 of the math that would be needed to implement a hash function.

Would you trust them if programmers you did trust trusted them? A developer web of trust? An example of this would be followers/stars/forks on GitHub.

Maybe there is room for a distributed service which specifically enables this trust you're looking for?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#219

Post by maccolgan » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:37 AM UTC

cormacrelf wrote: post #156

maccolgan wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do I have to care about that? Due to the overreach of US policies even companies in countries which don't have sanctions against Russia have to worry about the efficiency and performance of payments going towards Russia. SEPA and ACH may be marginally performant but SWIFT is incredibly expensive, which is the only option you have for international transfers that doesn't depend on an American monopoly of power…

Do you just not care about anybody else in the world? We live in a society. I am surprised at the political ideas on display in this thread. This isn’t even under the comment in which I described the influence of “techno-libertarian anarcho-capitalism” on the crypto community! If you are not part of a western democracy, of course you do not have to care, but if you are, then you should. (Moreover if you think war is…

>Do you just not care about anybody else in the world

Sure I do, however I also get to choose who I care about, and it definitely doesn't include people who make policies which are extraterritorially enforced on me.

>If you are not part of a western democracy, of course you do not have to care

What do you do when a "Western" "democracy" enforces their laws on you and all remaining solutions point you to services that are beholden to a "Western" "democracy".

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#220

Post by soco » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:38 AM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #57

CurrentB wrote: post #43

Nice read. What I don't get about all the crypto haters, who will probably make up the majority of replies here, are they really just happy with the status quo? Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying? That usernames and passwords given to each of a million different companies are so great, why would people want to manage…

As a crypto skeptic, which I think is not fairly categorized as "hater," I think you're painting this in far too black and white terms.[1] "The current financial system is not great" and "cryptocurrency is not great" are not mutually exclusive propositions, right? > ...there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea... There's very little about the way cryptocurrency and NFTs and even blockchains as a…

I think it's very easy for people to categorize you as "hater" because it makes their argument much easier, no need to argue with "haters" and just easily build a strawman to fight.