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Is Web3 anything?

chris-granger.com

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Re: Is Web3 anything?

#341

Post by mattsahr »

costac wrote: post #58

> what if the neighbors collude and vote that you failed to improve the park despite having done what was specified. The contract could further specify that some neutral third party acts as an arbiter in that case. If there's anything that shows that Web3.0, smart contracts and so on are a bad solution in search of a non-existent problem, it's this. The ``problem'' is apparently that we don't trust each other and our…

I think you're right that Web3 won't come close to displacing existing last-resort dispute handlers (courts, laws, etc). But it's dangerous to overlook the revolution lurking in "remove some friction from the system."

Uber removes some friction from hailing a taxi. AirBnB removes some friction from finding a room to rent. The internet removes some friction from sending messages.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#342

Post by aklemm »

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…

My skepticism comes from a belief based on observation that messy human collaboration is the name of the game, and our job is to merely move the needle in the right direction. Removing the messiness is not possible, may not even desirable, and so grand theories aimed at fixing the entire problem of politic, financial, and legal work are likely fool's errands.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#344

Post by Karunamon »

hansonkd13 wrote: post #338
Karunamon wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, one bank and 2 transfer services with patchy compatibility? I disagree. My bitcoin wallet isn't looking to trap me in a cycle of debt[1] if I run low on money; most banks are. My bitcoin wallet is auditable down to first mathematical principles, and will never steal my identity[2], create accounts in my name without my knowledge[3], etc. Nobody can cancel my access to my wallet because I said something politicall…

I’m not sure about patchy. I transferred money about 10 times this year and all the recipients wanted Zelle. All of your other criticisms are valid, but also exist in a system where you trust your wallet with a third party service. the majority of Americans would use a bank like service that manages their key instead of managing it themselves. You also ignore the other risks that crypto introduces. Like losing your k…

All of those failure cases you mention have mitigations. Dealing with banks? Not so much.

And I'd go so far as to call what the majority of Americans prefer wrt. key management a result of inertia due to a few centuries of having always done it that way. That's not necessarily surprising, a lot of this is new and doesn't have a good "real world" analogue to tie back to.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#345

Post by CryptoPunk »

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…

Libertarianism != anarchism. It does NOT reject the state's monopoly on violence. It argues it should be used sparingly

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#346

Post by CryptoPunk »

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...

Agreed

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#347

Post by CryptoPunk »

nefitty wrote: post #147
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…

1500 pages to govern 330 million people. Was there ever a time in history when an individual understood all the laws of a country? The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system. The fourth and fifth estates need to play precisely this role, of parsing and communicating the actions of government and business. Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fasci…

One government should not be governing at such a micro-level for 330 million people. It's absurd and in practice becomes totally corrupt and undemocratic.

>>The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system

Being discovered a week before the vote meant that there was no time for all those affected to study its effects, let alone to negotiate an amendment for it, and furthermore, that it came within a hair's breadth of NOT being discovered.

Other very worrying provisions were only discovered after the law's passing.

>>Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice.

Crypto systems are opt in. The government mandates are violently enforced on those who would prefer to opt out. This sophomoric socialist argument that private enterprise is fascist is totally shallow.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#349

Post by fatbird »

latchkey wrote: post #177
fatbird wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand. What did influence that decision? I expect it would be your overall appraisal of the viability of a particular blockchain and future expectations of activity. Is that accurate?

ETH is where the mindshare and developer resources went. ETC became too fringe. BETA vs. VHS. It really had very little to do with some quorum of powerful people. Many people don't understand that GPUs don't have the same hardware race war as bitcoin ASICs. Older GPUs actually have better ROI because the ethash algo is constrained by memory controller speed, not as much by nm scale or clock rate. The GPUs we use toda…

Thanks for the detail. BTW, "quorum of powerful individuals" (QOPI) means the core ETH people who decided to execute the hard forks. I think you're demonstrating my point for me. It's not that QOPI led you all by the nose or that you acceded to a vote; it's that the core ETH people decided to hard fork and you made a pretty rational business decision to stick with ETH and not ETC in part because, as you put it, "nobody trusts the chain".

It's about trust because "code is law" is pretty obviously marketing rather than foundational principle.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#350

Post by CryptoPunk »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #249
rdbell wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When looking at the whole binding arbitration fiasco, it doesn't seem like this system would work out too well for the average person.

Binding arbitration is not perfect, but to deem it a failure based on a few melodramatic accounts of it producing unfair outcomes is premature.

It's entirely possible it's the only thing that has prevented anti-discrimination lawyers from hollowing out corporate America with lawsuits

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...

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