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Is Web3 anything?

chris-granger.com

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Re: Is Web3 anything?

#281

Post by lambdadmitry »

rdbell wrote: post #237
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Imagine a court that consistently rules in favour of a richer party. Imagine that the richer party is not THAT interested in doing business with you, so they can tell you to take it or leave it. How do you think it will work?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#282

Post by throwaway405769 »

roberrrrrrt wrote: post #239
throwaway405769 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Getting all the data in the world into the blockchain and coding smart contracts to infer judgement from it would be too complex and expensive.

A more practical approach is to transfer the funds to Bob once he clicks on the checkbox and have some lock-up period, so that Alice has the opportunity to trigger a dispute if she needs to.

Then the dispute can be resolved by a private court (composed of humans) that both Alice and Bob agreed on beforehand. See: https://kleros.io

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#283

Post by ur-whale »

cormacrelf wrote: post #137
tsimionescu wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think the stated use case is bizarre and useless, I will note that economic sanctions are almost universally bad, used to hurt the populace of countries like Iran, North Korea, Cuba and others without doing anything to hurt the ruling elites. That said, the problem with such sanctions and trade embargoes is usually the flow of goods, which Bitcoin does less than nothing to solve of course.

I agree, but as we speak Russia has amassed 150k+ troops on the Ukrainian border and Putin is waiting to see whether the West can apply enough sanctions to make the whole effort a net loss before he gives the green light on an invasion.

> before he gives the green light on an invasion

And the reason why the USistan should entangle itself in that mess is ... what exactly?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#284

Post by immibis »

pennaMan wrote: post #246
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…

>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 decided to run society by these rules. 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.

what other enforcement mechanism do you suggest? The smart contract method call where Alice murders Bob should not validate unless signed by Bob's private key?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#285

Post by JohnWhigham »

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.

People need to stop using software analogies for everything.

It does not work for something like laws. You can't just go and change something the following month because you realized there's an edge case you forgot. All that constant churn will just erode the public's faith in the system.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#286

Post by immibis »

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…

Your comment gave me a neat idea that maybe smart contracts could be used for calculating blame and penalties in long supply chains. Vendor A promises to deliver the widget to Shipping Company B on a certain date who promises to deliver it on another date - but only if Vendor A receives the parts from Vendor X - but only if Vendor X receives the raw materials from Vendor Y - etc. That kind of transparency could be really interesting

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#287

Post by immibis »

notahacker wrote: post #232
CryptoPunk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

True, but maybe we could run some analysis tools against it.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#288

Post by immibis »

mmcnl wrote: post #261
lordnacho wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't the first question we should answer more whether math, cryptography and algorithms can actually replace authority, tradition and laws? I personally have my doubts.

In order to answer that we need to know what math, cryptography and algorithms can do and the cryptocurrency movement is doing a great job of exploring that space.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#289

Post by pjc50 »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #11
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…

The government encompasses all of those things, so I think when the author says "trust the government", it implies all of those things.

I think this is kind of a misconception about how unitary the unitary state really is. Which is especially weird coming from America with its zillion decentralized police forces. The government is not necessarily a single entity that behaves with one purpose, that's what allows concepts like an independent judiciary to exist.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#290

Post by bidder33 »

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…

DEXs(uniswap), Auction Houses(zora), Community Voting Systems(snapshot), Reputation and trust networks(circles), public goods funding(clr.fund), self publishing and fundraising(mirror, and now kickstarter), e2ee messaging and chat rooms(status/whisper), ubi and sybil resistance(proofofhumanity). These are all things I and lots of others are interacting with pretty much daily, it doesnt get so much coverage because its not all speculation and imo what people are actually angry about with crypto is more exposure to abusive capitalism games, money is a painful trauma so more of it in new forms is hard to imagine as positive. But there is plenty of useful stuff being built and I think it is progressing pretty well. 5 years ago the ideas of rights management combined with open distribution (rather than DRM that locks down distribution) was a strange idea we didnt know how to make work, now NFTs are mainstream.

In 2004 i was downloading textures and skins for the sims and xplane, and joining forums to chat and share music. Then there was a while imo where the internet felt dominated by facebook/google/youtube, but the past couple of years ive sunk into smaller communities making things in crypto/web3 and its fun and exciting. I spend most of my online time in that space. It feels more like being in a WoW guild than using twitter. There is profit/loss and speculation that excites/angers the masses, but theres also the best online communities ive ever been a part of, doing things like making games and custom skins and sharing music. Some things change and some things stay the same. Im pretty positive on the idea that making new tools, providing permissionless access, and building it with free open source software, people can do neat and surprising things. Till then people will see what they want to see, because its all there. Sturgeons law etc

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