241–250 of 442 posts
Is Web3 even a thing? Outside HackerNews, I only see it mentioned in crypto-circles, but on HN there’s another article at the top every day.
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Idk. I get my direct deposit into my account from my employer for free. I can transfer funds to pay bills for free. And I can go anywhere in the world and withdraw money for less than a 5$ fee in less than a minute. Try doing that with crypto.
"I can get my favorite articles delivered to my door, I can watch my sports games live, I can talk to my parent's across country instantly and cheaply over the phone. Try doing any of that with 'the internet.'" Sometimes you're just early, bud.
Scale comparison: Cryptocurrency-based technology has been publicly available for at least 12 years now. If I place initial public availability of the web at about 1992, we're currently in the equivalent of 2004, when two of the three described usecases were already widely available in developed nations. Amazon was maybe not a household name yet, but e-commerce was already an accepted purchasing model for several product categories, and Skype gave the world very cheap international phone calls. Only the video usecase was still terrible because of the available bandwidth.
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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 unfa…
What happens if you put in begonias and they wanted daisies? Or they just don’t want to pay you $200 and see they can back out and have you holding the bag.
More generally, I still don’t understand how the “third party oracle” issue (ie how do you make real world add to blockchain) doesn’t undermine the trust less idea.
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…
Don't forget the whole violent kidnapping thing your fellow citizens let governments do. The mythology of laws running society is cute but laws are made real by constant threats of violence and caging.
> 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…
Also, it is trivial to implement the same verification mechanisms in traditional databases, without the performance penalties of "blockchain", and transforming them in immutable, append-only storage systems that can't be tampered transparently. A good example of this is google trillian, the backend used by Certificate Transparency implementations.
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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 unfa…
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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…