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Is Web3 anything?

chris-granger.com

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Re: Is Web3 anything?

#251

Post by meken »

partido3619463 wrote: post #245

With the neighbors example, don’t you need to trust your neighbors to actually confirm you did the work? 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…

I don’t know anything about blockchain, but setting up beforehand some kind of auto trigger to buy daisies with the funds would seem to solve that problem.

Whether the work actually happens after that point, yes I agree, I don’t see a way for that to happen without human trust.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#252

Post by aforwardslash »

maccolgan wrote: post #150
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.

A centralized database can't achieve being public without putting trust in a third party (and no Web3 developer seem to eminently trust the government) to verify the double spend problem, otherwise blockchain is just a database. Non-falsiability can be verified through cryptography, yet we have no centralized but non-falsiable database system ready to use.

Well, you mention double-spend problem, that is a very narrow scope of applicability for a centralized database.

There is a huge public, cryptographically secure, append-only, verifiable centralized database (in fact, they are several), used by Certificate Transparency. Spoiler alert: Its a sparse merkle tree in MySQL.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#253

Post by lordnacho »

padolsey wrote: post #167

People keep saying 'trustless', without realizing the upsetting and very real truth that no mechanism is trustless. Even if you can, if well informed, verify the cryptographic integrity of any communication or data, you are also relying on and trusting the device, UI, and OS that you're using (+myriad stacks, libs, protocols). You are relying on every single medium between you and whatever it is that's verifiable. Le…

Maybe it's a bit of a marketing sleight-of-hand, but the difference is the nature of what you trust. Authority, tradition, laws, that kind of everyday thing, or math, cryptography, algorithms?

I won't get into the weeds of whether you can actually trust math, just pointing out that this is what crypto proponents seem to mean when they say trustless.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#254

Post by meken »

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…

Yes, it seems like we need some kind of crypto police to enforce that people actually do what they say they will do on the blockchain.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#255

Post by np- »

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…

> Well, screw the governments, I want to make positive-sum trades

You and what army? And I’m not even being facetious, you’d probably need an army to go against your government and economically aid an enemy like this. And therein lies your answer for who will enforce these contracts: those with the most capability for force.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#256

Post by mmcnl »

Implicit assumptions always seem to be that trust authorities are a bad thing, something that exists for the lack of a better alternative. It is kept implicit that if we can go around trust authorities, we definitely should. But should we? I truly wonder if that is actually the case. I can imagine there to be also quite some benefits to trust authorities. This whole web3 thing seems very similar to centralized/decentralized movements that always end up being a sine curve. For me any analysis like this always ends up with the same question in my mind: what problem are we trying to solve here?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#257

Post by mmcnl »

astoor wrote: post #231
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…

> What this is really about is that the cryptocurrency enthusiasts distrust authority.

I really think you hit the nail on the head with this statement. There are often so many hidden assumptions in anything that authorities by definition are bad. I believe the whole blockchain/crypto/web3 movement is more an idealogy than a solution to a problem.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#258

Post by [deleted] »

majewsky wrote: post #242
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

How many more decades until we're there? 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…

[deleted]

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#259

Post by soco »

hansonkd13 wrote: post #165
berkes wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are middle grounds here. Sovereignty, like security, is not binary, it's a spectrum. You could use a scheme where two of three signatures allow transactions : you, your 'bank' and a notary. Or have such schemes for anything above a value. Or allow transactions by and to a list of whitelisted addresses after a certain date or event (such as a missed canary).

> You could use a scheme where two of three signatures allow transactions So now social engineering hits and someone convinces my ‘bank’ and notary to allow the transaction to a third party. Now my life savings are gone forever. In my real bank (no quotes) you have regulation. Banks are liable for fraud. Blockchains aren’t. Now you could have pre assigned addresses that the notary and bank are allowed to transfer to,…

If you notice the phrasing, all the crypto arguments are in the realm "it could be...". The major difference is that all the legislation, be it good or bad, "is". Which makes crypto very convenient to paint imaginative rosy futures, and actual legislation very convenient to point out actual flaws and dark patterns.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#260

Post by mmcnl »

padolsey wrote: post #167

People keep saying 'trustless', without realizing the upsetting and very real truth that no mechanism is trustless. Even if you can, if well informed, verify the cryptographic integrity of any communication or data, you are also relying on and trusting the device, UI, and OS that you're using (+myriad stacks, libs, protocols). You are relying on every single medium between you and whatever it is that's verifiable. Le…

Just wondering: is it objectively better to rely on a complex technical cryptographic chain rather than a person or entity with representatives someone who you can drag over a counter if necessary?
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