Is Web3 anything? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#231

Post by astoor » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:57 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…

I'd also add that one of the big fallacies/deceits of blockchain is that it does not allow trustless transactions as the article author suggests, it simply shifts the trust. In the author's example of gathering funds to renovate a neighbourhood park, you'd still need to trust that the contract developers hadn't made a unfixable bug or deliberate backdoor, you'd still have to trust your neighbours to not screw up when interacting with the smart contract, you'd still need to trust the blockchain platform because if your funds are lost or stolen transactions are by design irreversable and you have no recourse to the law, etc. In pretty much every case, you would be better off without the additional complexity, risks and points of failure of a blockchain solution.

What this is really about is that the cryptocurrency enthusiasts distrust authority. They would rather put their trust in anonymous developers, shady mining cartels, exchanges which clearly engage in front running and wash trading, cryptocurrency scheme leaders who are convicted fraudsters, etc. If people genuinely want to put their trust in the less trustworthy, even if for no other reason than trying to get rich quickly, then we have a fundamental problem with our society.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#232

Post by notahacker » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

CryptoPunk wrote: post #21

jolux wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The government, and all of its institutions, are indeed a third party. The government is not some representative of the collective will. Thomas Sowell provides his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 as a poignant demonstration of the fallacy of that notion: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38 Another example would be the latest $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It was 1,500 pages long and no legislator read…

The difficulty of parsing a 1500 page infrastructure bill isn't exactly reduceed by expressing each of its provisions and exceptions in a Turing complete programming language though...

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#233

Post by nathias » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #129

nathias wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of smart-contracts you at least have the possibility of knowing, with existing trust mechanisms this is impossible.

You can't ever be 100% certain - even if you analysed the smart contract completely correctly, there's always the possibility of an ethereum-style hard fork to change what your contract means. So you have to ask how confident you can actually be in whichever style of contract in practice.

sure, nothing is perfect, but its a considerable improvement

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#234

Post by newswasboring » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

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.

Do we really think everyone has money for collateral? Small businesses and individual people are already struggling with money, where will they get the collateral?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#235

Post by tim333 » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:07 AM UTC

The examples he gives don't work very well in practice:

>How do you prove you own a house?

The crypto idea of having a private key to a token goes wrong when you lose the key or get hacked, and then say to the court the house is still yours which it is in law

>you want to fix up your local neighborhood’s park. You have the time, but doing so will take a few thousand dollars in supplies. You could go to your neighbors ...

You might just get your neighbours to go on some fixmypark.com site and contribute normal dollars. Getting them all to buy crypto and transfer to smart contracts is not going to happen in the near future.

The whole interaction between crypto and the physical world is very clunky. It seems to work better for flipping virtual assets like jpegs and imaginary coins.

If web3 is a thing it'll probably be more stuff like funding websites by selling NFTs to have ape avatars by your account rather than interacting with parks and houses. But selling imaginary stuff and images and the like can be powerful. I mean US$ are largely imaginary things represented by 0s and 1s in some databases and they do a lot of stuff.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#236

Post by nudpiedo » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

TekMol wrote: post #213

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 sta…

Never forgetting the gold standard, that was just scandalous, against their own folk and allies. Not even against enemies, opinion or whatever geopolitical thing... not much margin here for flexible moral. They just do with us whatever they want, and forcing inflation onto the population is just as closed as evil an economy can be against the general interest of the whole population.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#237

Post by rdbell » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #180

nefitty wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You take the issue to a crypto court which controls the escrowed funds.

If the crypto court makes an unfair ruling, you tell everyone to never trust their judgement. Now they’ve lost credibility and nobody will want to escrow funds with them in the future.

Whichever court provides the most consistent fair rulings attains the best reputation and becomes the most utilized.

By contrast, if government courts make an unfair ruling, they’re still going to be in business tomorrow and there’s nobody that can stop their monopoly on broken justice.

Some people might argue that their western country has a fair justice system and that everyone should be glad to be subject to that system.

That argument would be overly generous to even the most fair countries, and completely falls flat in the many countries where corruption is rampant.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#238

Post by throwaway405769 » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

laserbeam wrote: post #110

I'm tired of circular web3 discussions. All I see is people arguing for "but, maybe you shouldn't trust the government, maybe you should trust some math that works like a government in this limited scope". All I see is markets which sidestep all the rules enforced by governments to keep them fair (which prevent things like trading with yourself to create fake transactions), and none of the "park renovation" or "enabl…

More than 2 billions of people live in authoritarian regimes where the government rules exist only to oppress the population and make it more easily controlled. Bitcoin gives them the option to maintain their property rights, avoid financial surveillance and money controls. Saying that crypto is only used for ponzi schemes is simply false and disingenuous.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#239

Post by roberrrrrrt » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:20 AM UTC

throwaway405769 wrote: post #225

roberrrrrrt wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “different approaches to solve this” part, if it ever arrives, would be much more revolutionary than the blockchain itself.

Aave has $11 billion deposited on it right now and safety of those funds depend completely on getting accurate price data to trigger liquidations. So you can say that the oracle problem is solved, at least for price data.

Getting data in isn’t the big issue though, and we’ve had market data streams since forever. I’m talking about the example above, where a smart contract would need some way of knowing when to flip the “Bob has satisfactorily finished community refurbishment” flag. This would require an abundance of interoperable data sources for bizzare things. Where do I subscribe to the count(dogshit_pile_in_the_playground) stream, and who or what is publishing to it in a trust-less manner?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#240

Post by bcrosby95 » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:25 AM UTC

Griffinsauce wrote: post #63

robbedpeter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that the systems are broken. The level of gatekeeping and lack of informed consent have made the legal system a mess. The lawyers are the ones writing the laws... for the benefit of the lawyers and the people with the highest bids. In a fair system, sure, but the American financial legal system is bonkers. There's a reason people are looking for alternatives.

Stated like this it comes across like a software rewrite, with all its inherent fallacies: underestimating the effort, misjudging the complexity of the original system and comparing known to unknown outcomes. That's not to say it's inherently a bad idea, rewrites are sometimes useful but you need to acknowledge those factors.

And the biggest one: anyone that undertakes it should be an expert in the existing system. Otherwise you're just the junior dev coming in and suggesting a rewrite in the language you know best.