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Is Web3 anything?

chris-granger.com

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Re: Is Web3 anything?

#291

Post by lentil_soup »

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…

Not being happy with the status quo and not liking cryptocurrencies are not mutually exclusive. You can "hate" both.

My problem with "crypto" is that the industry is so focused on getting rich, is all about money. That's not changing the status quo, that's wanting to be a part of it.

If you TRULY want to change the status quo your focus can't be on how you can get rich quicker. There's been centuries of thought on self-sovereignty, of dictating your own terms, anarchism, freedom, etc. There's been literal wars about this all over the world and I just don't see how some dudes with bitcoins are really adding anything new to the table.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#292

Post by roberrrrrrt »

throwaway405769 wrote: post #282
roberrrrrrt wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Al…

Ok, but this isn’t purely a smart contract anymore. You’re describing a typical escrow (running on a blockchain, because ______) with human judges, conceptually identical to what goes on behind the scenes at EBay. What necessitates a blockchain here?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#293

Post by peoplefromibiza »

throwaway405769 wrote: post #282
roberrrrrrt wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Al…

what's the advantage for Bob here?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#294

Post by ogogmad »

immibis wrote: post #284
pennaMan wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Yes, and this will stop people from harming each other. Something something private keys.

Bring on the century of techno utopianism.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#295

Post by peoplefromibiza »

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.

> the person had to put up collateral until the work was done

So only the people with money can participate?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#296

Post by zaphar »

robbedpeter wrote: post #55
Fordec wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to the acceptance that lawyers are to the legal system as software engineers are to technical systems. You pay people who specialize in knowing the ins and outs of a complex system so you can get on with your life as a citizen, founder, etc. And people who espouse that we don't need laws or lawyers to run our society are making about as coherent sense as saying we can ship a unicorn entirely on no-code and…

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.

The solution to a broken system is not to replace it with another equally broken system. It is to replace it with a better one. The argument from people who are skeptical of the entire premise of smart contracts is that it looks to them like a worse not better system.

I am a software engineer. I know full well what it takes to design a well functioning software system. I also know that software tends to ossify processes. Anyone who has ever tried to work against the software of another business knows how straight jacketed that can get. Putting these together my only reasonable conclusion is that smart contracts look like a terrible idea and I would never in a million years trust one.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#297

Post by peoplefromibiza »

robbedpeter wrote: post #55
Fordec wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to the acceptance that lawyers are to the legal system as software engineers are to technical systems. You pay people who specialize in knowing the ins and outs of a complex system so you can get on with your life as a citizen, founder, etc. And people who espouse that we don't need laws or lawyers to run our society are making about as coherent sense as saying we can ship a unicorn entirely on no-code and…

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.

> There's a reason people are looking for alternatives

But is this true?

some people have always looked for alternatives throughout history, but very few of them have become popular, most of them were a failure and a bunch of them completely destroyed societies, sometimes for centuries.

I might be completely wrong, but in my eyes the crypto-optimism looks like reverse luddism.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#298

Post by gls2ro »

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…

Great example. I would add here a problem that blockchain solution does not solve and I might say it even makes it hard to fix (but I might be wrong as I don't work with blockchain so maybe I am missing something):

This Smart contract about fixing the park is a virtual thing. But if someones does this kind of job then in real life there is usually someone else who will accept and sign that the work was done accordingly with the requirements.

First, I don't understand how this works.

If everybody in the neighborhood needs to accept the work and sign it then I think it will be very difficult to be a contractor. Because you are suddently at the mercy of all residents to accept the work which is a nightmare as everybody could have a small things to change.

Let's say the residents there will delegate the acceptance to one single person. This case gets more interesting. What if the persone they delegate this acceptance is corrupted and will sign and accept the work but after 2 months the work will break. How do the residents recovery the loss? Will they go to the _centralised_ court? Will they go to the _centralised_ state to help them? And here goes the problem: what if the crypto dream gets implemented globally so no central authority. What then?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#299

Post by peteridah »

GVRV wrote: post #144
infinityplus1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can invest in mutual funds which invest in foreign companies. Creating online accounts for direct mutual funds investments is fully digital using Video KYC.

Yes, I'm aware of that. However, I need to go through a mutual fund and rely on their stock picking strategy and fees (we've had mutual funds default very recently). I want to enter into a position in a specific stock according to my strategy at a price I'm comfortable at. This again leads to the same point: why are we so _comfortable_ with the status quo? I want to think about what could be possible, not what sub-pa…

I understand your context 100% as I am an African currently living in Europe. It is almost impossible for anyone who has grown all their lives in the western economic system to fully grasp what is wrong with the status quo and the need to engage in a plausible alternative. Heck even I get so comfortable sometimes here and forget the context I grew in and question the need for change.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#300

Post by qaq »

lui8906 wrote: post #270
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? They are not mutually exclusive. However often retorts to Web3 or DeFi are along the line of "I can receive my salary for free" or "I can send a bank tra…

You are pretending things like Revolut, Venmo, Zelle etc. do not exist. They are centralized but solve most things an avg. person dislikes about their bank services.
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