The Web3 Fraud • Hacker News Board

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#171

Post by selestify » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:43 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #165

selestify wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're pretty off, yes. Censorship-resistance is one of the core selling points of Ethereum. :) > but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing There's no way for the blockchain to do that. The only way this is possible on ethereum is if the smart contract includes a self-destruct function, and the owner of the smart contract decides to call it (either because their private keys were c…

It's not always about censorship resistance. What if someone uploads child pornography on IPFS? Do we all just go "ah well, it's immutable" and live with it?

Well yes, you either play whack-a-mole with every single IPFS server, or you live with it, because you have no choice.

Like I've said elsewhere, this is "for better or for worse," depending on your political sensibilities. Again, I think Tor is a good example here. Lots of CP on Tor, or so I hear. But also persecuted journalists and whistleblowers, and safer drugs than you'd find on the streets. You can't realistically say "I want X to be outside the reach of tyrannical governments, but not Y." It's an all-or-nothing deal. By its very nature, these sorts of libertarian technologies will attract all the illegal parts of society -- for better or for worse.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#172

Post by aeturnum » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:45 AM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #72

H8crilA wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great, but I don't need it at 10^9 times the cost. Imagine if a single red apple costed about $100M, yet it had rather unique qualities such as indisputable, provable lack of contamination. That's the kind of cost difference we're talking about here.

Not the best example, since I’m pretty sure NASA has made similar tradeoffs.

I hope we can all agree that NASA pays NASA costs to solve specific, low-N problems. The problem with the blockchain is it wants to spend NASA money on basic translations.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#173

Post by selestify » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:45 AM UTC

seoaeu wrote: post #113

selestify wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you. Not everyone needs to use Tor -- slow and inefficient, can't even do a proper 1080p livestream. Good for them. But some people are willing to pay 10^9 the cost for certain guarantees. Good for them too, that such options now exist. Why the irrational hate?

10^9 time worse isn’t “can’t run 1080p livestream”. It is closer to “takes 30 years to load a webpage”.

I meant that with respect to blockchain specifically. So the relative costs are higher, but that's only a difference in degree, not in type. I mean

> This is great, but I don't need it at 10^9 times the cost.

Like I said, good for you. You don't need it at 10^9 the cost. Some others do. Why hate that a solution exists for those who do?

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#174

Post by unityByFreedom » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:46 AM UTC

> ... in ways that are several orders of magnitude more efficient and more capable.

Another thing that gets bandied about, emphasis mine.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#175

Post by selestify » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:46 AM UTC

esjeon wrote: post #75

v64 wrote: post #13

Many criticisms of blockchain apps, comparing their use cases to conventional technologies (databases, conventional separation of services such as that described in the article, etc) all seem to miss a major point: Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown. Immutability is important because it's guaranteed that no matter how many times you interact with a contract address, y…

> Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown. Yeah, and that's why we have Ethereum Classic , a remnant of its own shameful history. Dapps are still man-made, so can be faulty, but Ethereum doesn't have any recovery scenario for faulty dapps other than forking out. No one can save you from your own deadly mistakes. This simply can't scale.

> No one can save you from your own deadly mistakes.

Well yes, that's kind of the point. Freedom to choose what you want to do with your money -- including the freedom to make your own mistakes and shoot yourself in the foot.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#176

Post by jtgi » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:48 AM UTC

Every architecture makes trade offs.

Creatively showing how expensive and slow Ethereum is is entertaining but not entirely relevant. It's like comparing a passenger airplane and a tank, claiming transportation is their sole purpose and since airplanes are both faster and cheaper than tanks, tanks are fraudulent.

Ethereum is architected to be a decentralized, permissionless computing platform. Performance is one of the trade offs.

It's much more productive, and more challenging in my opinion, to discuss whether or not the trade offs being made are worthwhile.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#177

Post by smoldesu » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:48 AM UTC

selestify wrote: post #148

smoldesu wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, can you give me an example of some staple Web3 sites that exist today?

- Uniswap and Sushiswap allows you to trade different cryptos for one another. If you want to trade gold for some reason in a decentralized manner, you could do that by making trades between gold-pegged crypto and stablecoins - Aave allows you to lend and borrow different crypto assets. If you wish to short a crypto, or if you wish to borrow against your portfolio so that you're spending fiat rather than your portfol…

Where's your "Google"? Where's your "YouTube"? Where's your killer app? Everything you've listed is just different ways to throw away cryptocurrency. The average Joe is going to look at that list, chuckle, and go back to browsing Twitter on their iPhone. There's no main attraction here.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#178

Post by selestify » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:49 AM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #157

selestify wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel the same about Tor? That the anonymity is an implementation detail and you don't care?

> Unless there is a killer feature it enables... ... anonymity isn't a killer feature for me personally, but it is for some. Anyway, the parent post's point is just that it's not clear what the 'killer feature' that web3 is offering is. Without that, it's just expensive and pathetically underpowered compared to other platforms. You can use it to do crypto. hm... ok. I don't have crypto, and I don't have piles I money…

To copy paste other comments of mine:

> Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to.

> Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract.

> Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users.

> Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.

And when it comes to "That doesn't seem to leave any 'Killer features' for me to care about", I'll also say what I said to somebody else:

Good for you. These are not killer features you'd care about. They are, however, killer features that some others care out. Why is it a bad thing that an option exists for those that do care about these features?

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#179

Post by paxys » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:49 AM UTC

selestify wrote: post #171

paxys wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always about censorship resistance. What if someone uploads child pornography on IPFS? Do we all just go "ah well, it's immutable" and live with it?

Well yes, you either play whack-a-mole with every single IPFS server, or you live with it, because you have no choice. Like I've said elsewhere, this is "for better or for worse," depending on your political sensibilities. Again, I think Tor is a good example here. Lots of CP on Tor, or so I hear. But also persecuted journalists and whistleblowers, and safer drugs than you'd find on the streets. You can't realistical…

So then the ceiling of adoption for this entire ecosystem is Tor or BitTorrent at best. Far cry from the "next internet" it is being touted as.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#180

Post by Nursie » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 5:49 AM UTC

miracle2k wrote: post #154

Nursie wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KYC and AML are considered positives by most people, being great ways to cut down on fraud, make banking hard for criminal enterprises etc etc.

Legislation requiring a backdoor in e2e encryption, such as WhatsApp, is also considered a positive by most people even now, but wait after it's been in place for 10 years, it will be as universally unquestioned as KYC or AML policies.

I don't think that's an argument against KYC and AML, personally.