Web3 is going just great • Hacker News Board

Re: Web3 is going just great

#171

Post by lapinot » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

emptysongglass wrote: post #119

trunnell wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the math and incentives are there. Can you elaborate on this? The best critiques of blockchain tech, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi, etc. describe fatal flaws at the core of those technologies. For example, the lack of monetary policy and regulations, privacy and security shortcomings, and high transaction costs. It'd be great to read a positive analysis of the core merits (the math and the incentives) and how th…

There's also fatal flaws at the heart of capitalism and a centrally controlled currency whose value is manipulated at will completely outside a citizen's power to control. These fatal flaws have not prevented capitalism from blooming all over the world. Lest you think I'm some species of these crypto libertarians, I believe it's an imperfect solution to hand humans more greed levers to go about life dictating their a…

> Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence.

I agreed up until your last sentence: is the state the bigger problem (versus multi-billion corps and capitalists)? is currency the main lever of states (versus diplomacy, infrastructures, military, etc)?

Re: Web3 is going just great

#172

Post by hvgk » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

DantesKite wrote: post #13

All the Web3 criticisms remind me of my experiences with Star Trek. For context, I never watched Star Trek. I'd read stories about fans and it always struck me as the dorkiest possible show, with unabashed nerdiness making something like the Big Bang Theory look like a sophisticated work of art. But one day, I listened to a podcast about strength training and a question came up about which Star Trek leader the host l…

I’ve spent enough time in fintech to know where this ends.

The interest in it is purely because of the vast problems it creates are opportunities to gain something. These are numerous compared to the roughly single benefit and the technology itself.

It’s yet another market created to manipulate arbitrary wealth tokens. The masters are different that is all.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#173

Post by malermeister » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

fab1an wrote: post #48

I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web. Consider this: if you are absolutely, 100% convinced that all of this is bogus, is going to go nowhere (despite the high number of talented individuals…

What if we think it might succeed and the world would be worse for it?

That's where I'm at. I don't want that vision of commercialization and commodification of everything.

I think there is a possibility that all of that crypto stuff might succeed and I'm terrified of it throwing us into an even worse capitalist dystopia than the one we already live in.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#174

Post by dvt » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #104

dvt wrote: post #87

I'm not a Web3 shill, but this is so insanely disingenuous it's not even funny. First of all, the argument that web3 is the biggest ecological problem of our time -- when essentially all of Asia is contributing 80% of ocean pollution, and the supply chain contributes to more than 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, is just straight-up delusional. The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2…

Speaking of disingenuous, since when is log4j “web 2.0”? > The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2 (are we just ignoring Log4j, which is a huge deal and happened 2 days ago) That’s also worth thinking less shallowly about for a second reason: if a cryptocurrency service, wallet, etc. you used was hacked due to log4j, you’d lose everything without recourse. This is not true of the mat…

> Speaking of disingenuous, since when is log4j “web 2.0”?

Let's assume Web 2.0 is 2008 to the present day. Every single big corp I worked at during that time was a Java shop (serving via Tomcat/Jetty), and log4j is ubiquitous in every Java shop. Minecraft (a gaming epitome of Web 2.0), basically blew up because of Log4j.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#175

Post by gowld » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

antupis wrote: post #33

bawolff wrote: post #18

I hate this web3 bs as much as the next guy But, this seems more a list of people doing stupid shit with blockchain-y things, and not an argument against it as a whole. That doesn't distinguish blockchain that much from other technologies (e.g. consider WWW during the hype of dot-com bubble). I pretty much believe its all absolute bullshit, but picking some egregious examples, while amusing, doesn't really show that.

This pets.com was bullshit but selling pet supplies at online definitely is not.

pets.com was just a bit early, so the economy of scale didn't kick in. chewy.com made the same model work 20 years later, with 100x the potential userbase people comfortable shopping online.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#176

Post by jazzyjackson » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

___q wrote: post #137

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask yourself, who is the most affected by these 2 technologies existing? Speculators? Seriously though, can you tell us which Web3 technologies, specifically, are disrupting existing technologies in a way that really benefits the end users instead of speculators? > I hear you about the electricity usage, but Bitcoin Lightning will drive down the usage so much that it will become a moot point anyways. That's not how…

> which Web3 technologies How does self-sovereign identity exclusively benefit speculators?

how come you need a blockchain to assert your identity, doesn’t public key cryptography solve this?

Re: Web3 is going just great

#177

Post by carlosdp » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #89

dumbfoundded wrote: post #72

As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two. Intermediaries are a huge reason the web is the way it is. If we can eliminate them, the internet looks…

> As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two. A quick look at https://www.escrow.com/fee-calculator shows that fees only reach $20K if you're sellin…

> At that level, lawyers should be involved on both sides anyway and your $20K fee is better spent on proper legal services to get it done. Escrow.com is notoriously expensive.

Yea so, that's kinda the point of what he's saying. Why is it that a domain transfer for $2M is so much more expensive than one for $2? Intermediaries.

Smart contracts eliminate the intermediary. Whether you are selling for $2 or $2M, it's gunna cost the same small fee (and the fee is going to be negligible within a year).

> this means that a single security slip-up or even a single disgruntled employee with the right access can forever destroy your company's internet presence with no recourse

This is actually extremely easy to avoid, to the point that it's far more secure than DNS (domain names get compromised via social engineering of registrars all the time, btw). With ENS, for example, the "owner" can be divorced from the "controller", so you can "own" it with a multi-signature smart contract wallet, or even lock it into a smart contract and make it non-transferable with a time-lock and require a quorum of signatures to unlock.

Any mechanism you can imagine basically, but you have full control of how it works. Point is, it's entirely possible, and easy even, to make your crypto assets VERY secure from hacks, it's just the current market isn't that interested in it yet (most easy solutions would be too gas expensive atm).

Re: Web3 is going just great

#178

Post by ThalesX » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

I think web3 is still a fuzzy concept, but if it's less divisive maybe it would be better to call it a possible evolution of how we share cat pictures.

The boom of cryptocurrencies, and NFTs, and all the jazz, sparked a need for thinking about data differently. We already had much in terms of traditional protocols, and there was already work in the space in terms of IPFS, so we already had some tools for reasoning about the data.

What's important for a decentralized internet, is learning to stop referring to data by location, and instead, refer to it by its contents. This is an interesting shift in thinking about accessing data, the integrity of data, and other things which can yield real benefits in certain areas.

So my bet is, whatever this web3 / possible next step of the way we distribute cats between ourselves is, it will involve a lot of immutable data structures, a lot of hashing, of merkle trees, a lot of consensus building, p2p routing, encryption, the jazz, and I think our infrastructure will become more resilient and scalable for that.

This might be a new internet, this might be a side-thing with web2 still going strong, but there is work being done in the space, there are a lot of traditional data structures and algorithms and it's exciting to reason about data in a new way after all these years.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#179

Post by ahtihn » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

not2b wrote: post #113

exdsq wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue there’s an underlying value in tokens like Ether that is similar to paying for compute power and storage on AWS. I’m not saying the price right now is correct, but that there is an intrinsic value.

It cost compute power to produce the tokens, but that's sunk cost, not intrinsic. All that matters afterward is whether people want the tokens and will exchange things of value for them.

I think the intrinsic value is coming from the fact that you need to spend eth to run smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#180

Post by valeness » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

fab1an wrote: post #48

I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web. Consider this: if you are absolutely, 100% convinced that all of this is bogus, is going to go nowhere (despite the high number of talented individuals…

What net-beneficial applications of crypto would you suggest I look at if I wanted to re-evaluate my perspective on crypto?

I was a very early crypto fan, loved talking about decentralized trustless networks, legal smart contracts, that kind of thing. But after years and years of just getting burned by the space being taken over by financial people spouting cultist rhetoric, the space has lost it's shimmer to me.

Asking somebody to join a community and look around themselves is a huge demand of trust when the industry has coordinated rugpull after rugpull using social tactics very similar to your own.

I would very much like to hear about promising applications of crypto and blockchain outside of some esoteric financial ploy for more money.

What I am most interested in is making something like game cosmetics into NFTs that can be traded around players. For example: Imagine getting a rare Season 1 helmet in the new Halo game, and then being able to trade it with your friends in season 2 for something else. The blockchain is actually useless here aside from the fact that it's a protocol that defines ownership outsde of the game so that the central authority can't place limits on trading.

But I just haven't seen anything in that capacity so you'll still have to color me cynical