Are we getting one of these every day now? They all use the term Web3 unironically, which means in my opinion they’ve already lost.
Is Web3 anything?
381–390 of 442 posts
Re: Is Web3 anything?
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idk. I get my direct deposit into my account from my employer for free. I can transfer funds to pay bills for free. And I can go anywhere in the world and withdraw money for less than a 5$ fee in less than a minute. Try doing that with crypto.
You must live in a developed nation. I'm from one of the tier-2 cities in India. I cannot hold stable, diversified collection of global currencies in my bank account and cannot invest in global markets without going to a branch in a bigger town and without significant paperwork. I cannot legally accept money from around the world for my software development skills without being a part of the existing banking system.…
India Post offers savings accounts services through its post offices. Non-profit public enterprise and a post office is available in every PIN code. There is probably one within walking distance of your relatives in your native village.
Cross border transactions are heavily regulated precisely because they cross jurisdictional boundaries - without regulation it becomes trivially easy to commit fraud and make the money effectively disappear. Does the current regulation come in the way of the average person trying to accept Paypal money? Sure. But that is not a technological problem - its a regulation problem, which is ultimately a social problem.
Re: Is Web3 anything?
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh cool, how many people in your community do you know who are comfortable using PGP in their email?
Thats kinda the point, PGP had 25 years to get any use and failed, this form of crypto reached accelerated saturation very quickly You thought you had a rebuttal and walked right into why its working Those users can learn not to get taken advantage of
Accelerated saturation!?!
What's happened is that a bunch of people who have zero understanding about what crypto is or how it works have been able to buy an asset because a bunch of people using pre-existing technological and legal frameworks created platforms for them to do so.
The "accelerated saturation" you are referring to relies on the very types of trust and authority that the article claims to obviate the need for.
Re: Is Web3 anything?
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those users can learn not to get taken advantage of Spoken like a true scammer. It is pretty obvious to anyone who is even vaguely aware of phone scams that this will never be enough.
Debit cards, credit cards and ATMs came with new best practices to be aware of. And no, not all gaffs result in reimbursals from the bank. Here, we are acknowledging thats there are humans that commit malicious actions and they shouldn’t do that, and also acknowledge that there are programs that exist in perpetuity to do this which means there is no malicious human to educate, and requires (not just advises) the pote…
But where do all those best practises and recourses and advice and learning come from? It's trust and laws and government and society. Crypto enthusiasts claim that these can be solved independently of any governing framework, but my point is that you can only solve it for a given blockchain, and anyone can create a blockchain, so what's the process by which any blockchain becomes the de-facto standard? And if your answer is "Everyone just settles on that one" then what you have just described is government.
Re: Is Web3 anything?
#385Earlier 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…
_But muh hashes_ is not going to help you "enforce" anything as soon as any of this enters the material world.
In the material world, all the problems of e.g. being at war are identical regardless of the medium of your claims.
Can you "enforce" the flow of Ether? Oh yes. Enjoy.
Re: Is Web3 anything?
#386Authors point about trustless commitments, ignoring the semantic arguments posed in the comments, is important.
Not mentioned but I would argue as equally or of greater importance is interoperability. If you lose trust in the commitment you've made, you can move your capital/identity/etc. To the new thing relatively seamlessly. This is the DeFi experience already built that's so amazing to interact with relative to traditional banking and capital markets. If you apply that same functionality to other markets, such as social media or healthcare (using zero knowledge rollups to protect private data), I think that's inevitably an a-ha moment.
It's like the Amazon API mandate - https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes... - if you build with interoperability at the core, the knock-on effects can be exponential. It's a game changer. The consumer is no longer captive to walled gardens.
Drop play money into a low fee blockchain, stick to a stablecoin, and mess around with some of the DeFi apps. I think it's easy to become a believer if you do that and compare to your normal banking experience.
Re: Is Web3 anything?
#387I do think that the best critique of "web3" is that it's shifting the trust into a different and less well understood space. There are advantages and disadvantages to using computers instead of analog processes to resolve conflicts, but biology is kind of unavoidably analog. In the long term I'm bull(ish) on blockchains - I think they have some uses, but most of the excitement I'm seeing now feels like it's scammy or mistaken.
I'm very skeptical about any claims about the correctness or the health of the blockchain ecosystem because, if you're interested in using flaws to take money, it's obviously much easier to scam people than to go after the fundamentals. Imagine you're a Superhacker who Only Cares About Money and you have found a flaw in crypto. You could make some money breaking the whole system, but you can probably make a lot more money taking crypto from poorly setup exchanges or individuals and maintaining the value of the things you took.
We are well aware of the problems of using legal and social systems to adjudicate disagreements. People feel excited because we have found math that helps us adjudicate disagreements in a new way and I also think it's exciting - but it all feels too early.
Re: Is Web3 anything?
#388Authors point about trustless commitments, ignoring the semantic arguments posed in the comments, is important. Not mentioned but I would argue as equally or of greater importance is interoperability. If you lose trust in the commitment you've made, you can move your capital/identity/etc. To the new thing relatively seamlessly. This is the DeFi experience already built that's so amazing to interact with relative to t…
The important part is the network itself. Bank of America is free to build on top of the network but by doing so it enters into competition with the rest of the network.
You don't need them for a bank account so if you don't like their services then you can take your funds elsewhere. In my opinion this is a critical piece of what is missing in our current society. These corporations and government agencies have become too entrenched and too big to fail. We need to inject competition back into the system.
Re: Is Web3 anything?
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you just not care about anybody else in the world? We live in a society. I am surprised at the political ideas on display in this thread. This isn’t even under the comment in which I described the influence of “techno-libertarian anarcho-capitalism” on the crypto community! If you are not part of a western democracy, of course you do not have to care, but if you are, then you should. (Moreover if you think war is…
>Do you just not care about anybody else in the world Sure I do, however I also get to choose who I care about, and it definitely doesn't include people who make policies which are extraterritorially enforced on me. >If you are not part of a western democracy, of course you do not have to care What do you do when a "Western" "democracy" enforces their laws on you and all remaining solutions point you to services that…
> What do you do when a "Western" "democracy" enforces their laws on you and all remaining solutions point you to services that are beholden to a "Western" "democracy".
Correct the aberrant behavior that caused your nation to get kicked out of the global trade system, or move to a nation that hasn't gone rogue. That's what the sanctions are meant to encourage. Bypassing the sanctions with clever math is just going to get the clever math outlawed; exerting international pressure to keep countries in line is far more important than your coinbase account.
Re: Is Web3 anything?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
In OP article the interfacing with real world is solved by some group voting. In the real world, when disagreements arise, we have voting + due process + a hierarchy of courts. It could be argued that due process is an essential part of finding justice. Baking due process into a smart contract is, although extremely interesting, probably impossible.
Great, but take the example in the article. I roll in with my heavies and at gun point force enough of you to vote that the contract was complete even if it wasn't. You can't engineer people away and when you try you've undoubtedly missed something.
I always roll my eyes when crypto bros roll out the argument that BTC would bring peace because there's an immutable record of who owns what.
I can still just seize the factory, ledger be damned.
Or deploy a military to seize your private keys. Unless you're sole copy is in your own head it's on a hard drive SOMEWHERE