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Is Web3 anything?

chris-granger.com

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Re: Is Web3 anything?

#351

Post by biztos »

js4ever wrote: post #86
pengwing wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of course being that you would have to fully trust the programmer who reviews your contract.

Even if you trust the programmer, and even if he is competent he might still miss a very complex edge case ... and since there is no court / jury to take a human decision, you can be totally screwed.

Even worse (better?) no sane programmer is going to sign a real-world contract guaranteeing the code is bug-free, and if you trust the wrong programmer to work on your complex blockchain program they might put in a sufficiently complex exploitable code path, and be first in line to (anonymously) exploit it.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#352

Post by throwaway405769 »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #318
throwaway405769 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than 2 billions of people live in authoritarian regimes where the government rules exist only to oppress the population and make it more easily controlled. Bitcoin gives them the option to maintain their property rights, avoid financial surveillance and money controls. Saying that crypto is only used for ponzi schemes is simply false and disingenuous.

and Cryptos would help them, how? Authoritarian regimes are very good at filtering and blocking unwanted content. Bitcoin is as easy to block as any other traffic that's easy to recognize.

Have you heard about VPNs and TOR? What authoritarian regimes are we talking about?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#353

Post by biztos »

lentil_soup wrote: post #291
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 se…

I agree but there is one thing -- if enough of the crypto-rich convert enough of their crypto-money to "fiat" then eventually, we may have a class of billionaires even more disconnected from the traditions of society than the Silicon Valley crop has been.[0][1]

And these people may found universities, buy politicians, sit on the boards of art museums.

So, while I personally don't think it'd be a good thing, I think there's a decent possibility the "crypto people" will someday use the spoils of their business to dabble in large-scale social engineering, and in a roundabout way that's how the dudes with the bitcoins will leave their mark.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/business/elon-musk-philan...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_General_Hospital

...I could go on and on...

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#354

Post by roberrrrrrt »

throwaway405769 wrote: post #301
roberrrrrrt wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, it's running completely on smart contracts. You get the regular advantages of running on blockchain: permissionless and trustless access to finance. You don't have to trust the escrow holder, you don't have to worry about getting banned from Ebay.

> it's running completely on smart contracts

The human judges/arbitrators aren’t, and they’re what’s critical. The contract cannot be sensibly completed without their input.

So you have an escrow system where human judges need to supply critical information. I’m left having to trust the human judges, unsurprisingly. Running this basic escrow code on the blockchain means that I no longer have to trust the kind of basic escrow code that’s used in centralised escrows. My question now is whether the escrow code of centralised providers (if condition then funds.release()) is really so unreliable that I’ll get get tonnes of benefit using blockchain escrows. Whenever there’s controversy over escrows, it comes down to the arbitration, which as you admitted would still be performed by humans.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#355

Post by EGreg »

dmitriid wrote: post #174
EGreg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will quote from an article I wrote in CoinDesk last year: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block... For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before. Code isn’t law, code is better than law. I wondered what I would have done 300 years agi before computers, and realized I’d probably be an architect or one of those lawmaker guy…

> Just the community taking care of its business and its vulnerable. Until gas fees make it accessible only to the "out of touch elites"

"gas fees" are an abberation, the "world computer" is a glorified mainframe where you rent time.

Smart contract can be done in completely different ways, with no bottlenecks. If you notice point 2 of https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf .. I can send you the details if you're interested. I spent years speaking with the best teams around the world working on things beyond blockchain.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#356

Post by EGreg »

dmitriid wrote: post #172
EGreg wrote: post #31

[flagged]

> YOU CAN WRITE A PROGRAM THAT EVERYONE CAN TRUST TO DO WHAT THE CODE SAYS Ah yes. Because everyone is an expert in verifying programs written in esoteric programming languages. Oh. It's written by you ? Well, of course I can trust what you've written > It does to financial institutions and many others, what Web1 did to publishing. It doesn't. Case in point: enforcement of contracts.

That's not how it works. But I'm sure you'd be defending paper ballots for voting forever as well. You're used to whatever works now, and I'd say that's like Luddites (except the Luddites were actually reacting to the economics of industrialization, meaning the machines were actually replacing the human labor).

Look around you, in the last 100 years we got the ability to print and copy our own documents, to send emails and to write on forums, to use VOIP encrypted end to end, all without the permission of the government. It's based on open protocols that route around friction. Is it so far fetched that autonomous networks technology can also help obviate the need to trust intermediaries like we trusted the Post Office, the Newspaper Printers, Ma Bell and so forth? Really?

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#357

Post by dmitriid »

EGreg wrote: post #355
dmitriid wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just the community taking care of its business and its vulnerable. Until gas fees make it accessible only to the "out of touch elites"

"gas fees" are an abberation, the "world computer" is a glorified mainframe where you rent time. Smart contract can be done in completely different ways, with no bottlenecks. If you notice point 2 of https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf .. I can send you the details if you're interested. I spent years speaking with the best teams around the world working on things beyond blockchain.

Ah. So you propose a centralized intermediary that everyone should trust. Gotcha.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#358

Post by dmitriid »

EGreg wrote: post #356
dmitriid wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YOU CAN WRITE A PROGRAM THAT EVERYONE CAN TRUST TO DO WHAT THE CODE SAYS Ah yes. Because everyone is an expert in verifying programs written in esoteric programming languages. Oh. It's written by you ? Well, of course I can trust what you've written > It does to financial institutions and many others, what Web1 did to publishing. It doesn't. Case in point: enforcement of contracts.

That's not how it works. But I'm sure you'd be defending paper ballots for voting forever as well. You're used to whatever works now, and I'd say that's like Luddites (except the Luddites were actually reacting to the economics of industrialization, meaning the machines were actually replacing the human labor). Look around you, in the last 100 years we got the ability to print and copy our own documents, to send emai…

> That's not how it works.

That's exactly how it works

> I'd say that's like Luddites

Of course you'd say that. Because you have no arguments beyond flawed analogies.

> Is it so far fetched that autonomous networks technology can also help obviate the need to trust intermediaries

Yes. It is extremely far-fetched.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#359

Post by robbedpeter »

myownpetard wrote: post #153
onion2k wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As open source successes start to accumulate, the costs will go down. That hasn't happened in any other area of open source. Linux is supported by billion dollar companies with hundreds-of-millions in revenue. Container software is supported by tech giants. Browsers are the same. Web frameworks are either from corporations or they're built by people who are sponsored to build them. Most successful open source project…

I don't think they are talking about the cost of running an open source project. They are talking about the cost of creating and deploying a robust application. In that sense the cost has absolutely gone down. It's trivial to create a web application today in a way that would have been incredibly costly 20 years ago. You don't have to pull a Paul Graham and invent a the concept of a web application for the first time…

Yes, this exactly. Billion dollar companies contribute to open source because the model is a net economic driver. I can tap into decades long and billions of dollars of man hours of effort to offer systems admin consultation and earn a living deploying and managing open source software for people, or incorporate that into almost any business, or participate in hackathons that riff on the bleeding edge of ai or security or art. The only barrier to entry is ability and willingness to learn, and things like moocs and YouTube and Khan Academy have expanded the "open source" ethos into almost every real world endeavor.

Crypto is a nascent space that similarly enables people to bypass all the gatekeeping and institutional cruft in finance. It just turns out that a lot of the gatekeeping in finance is structurally important and intentional, so it may be a couple decades before any particular cryptocurrency is comparably robust and secure as well trusted fiat currencies like the usd or euro. A trustless and mature financial system that doesn't have the pitfalls of credit bureaus and arbitrary government policy chaos, that opens up microloans and honest banking for literally anyone, that gives opportunity to invest and trade and participate even at low levels of wealth - those are socially good things, in my view.

Re: Is Web3 anything?

#360

Post by throwaway405769 »

roberrrrrrt wrote: post #354
throwaway405769 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's running completely on smart contracts. You get the regular advantages of running on blockchain: permissionless and trustless access to finance. You don't have to trust the escrow holder, you don't have to worry about getting banned from Ebay.

> it's running completely on smart contracts The human judges/arbitrators aren’t, and they’re what’s critical. The contract cannot be sensibly completed without their input. So you have an escrow system where human judges need to supply critical information. I’m left having to trust the human judges, unsurprisingly. Running this basic escrow code on the blockchain means that I no longer have to trust the kind of basi…

> Running this basic escrow code on the blockchain means that I no longer have to trust the kind of basic escrow code that’s used in centralised escrows

Yes, it means that you will 100% know that the escrow website is not gambling your money away, that it won't out of the blue ask you to supply more documents when it finally comes the time for you to get paid, it means that the escrow won't get hacked and your PII won't be sold on darknet.

Smart contracts are just a simpler and more transparent way to deal with finance.

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