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The Web3 Fraud

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Re: The Web3 Fraud

#211

Post by smoldesu »

selestify wrote: post #186
smoldesu wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Where's your "YouTube"? Where's your killer app? Where's the "Youtube" of the dark web? The famed red rooms don't even exist. What's the "killer app" of the dark web? Doesn't even exist, unless maybe you count the drug markets. I'd hazard a guess that they're by far the most popular. > Everything you've listed is just different ways to throw away cryptocurrency. I literally gave as an example how you could use fiat…

If you've reduced your argument to "people shouldn't use it if they don't know what it is", have you considered that you might not be talking about the future of software? Nobody sold iPhones because it "exists for those who actually find a use for it".

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#212

Post by selestify »

withinboredom wrote: post #210
selestify wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then that'll be the day proof of stake cryptos rise to the occasion. Also, just use a friggin VPN.

IMHO, VPNs scare me more than ISPs spying on me. I ran a small ISP (<100 subscribers) and the sheer amount of data you could collect on a single person was mind boggling. This was pre-https-all-the-things, so I’m sure it’s better these days. Still, do I really want my traffic to go through some unregulated entity? Not really…

Hah! That's fair. I'm just saying, if you still wanted access to your crypto assets after the ban, they should likely still be quite accessible.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#213

Post by selestify »

smoldesu wrote: post #211
selestify wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where's your "YouTube"? Where's your killer app? Where's the "Youtube" of the dark web? The famed red rooms don't even exist. What's the "killer app" of the dark web? Doesn't even exist, unless maybe you count the drug markets. I'd hazard a guess that they're by far the most popular. > Everything you've listed is just different ways to throw away cryptocurrency. I literally gave as an example how you could use fiat…

If you've reduced your argument to "people shouldn't use it if they don't know what it is", have you considered that you might not be talking about the future of software? Nobody sold iPhones because it "exists for those who actually find a use for it".

I never claimed it's the be-all future of software. It's got its uses and its uses are here to stay, that I'm sure of.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#214

Post by abaga129 »

pavlov wrote: post #70
ar7hur wrote: post #10

This article misses the point, it sees web3 decentralization as purely technical and makes performance comparisons with existing systems. The power of web3 decentralization is about control, not more powerful computing. Yes your raspberry pi runs faster than the EVM, but can you give me any guarantee about what code it runs?

The comparison between Raspberry Pi and EVM is off by many, many orders of magnitude. What Ethereum marketing likes to call a “global supercomputer” is slower than a 1950s computer built out of vacuum tubes, and running programs is more expensive than it was in 1955. (Programming ergonomics are also nearly punch card level.) There are very few applications you’d actually want to execute on a platform like that. And e…

Most layer 1 Blockchains are trying to replace the existing payment processing systems such as visa. Not replace all of our computing infrastructure (although some are trying to do this such as ICP)

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#215

Post by miracle2k »

withinboredom wrote: post #184
miracle2k wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can communicate, but if they want to agree on shared state between them, they have to solve the same problem that blockchains seek to solve, and the options available to you there are essentially on a spectrum of how many people are going to participate and to what extend you can vet them.

I don’t think multiplayer games are running a blockchain and they agree on shared state. Humans being humans tend to reject cheaters who manipulate the state in their favor. But you don’t need a blockchain for any of this, and in fact, it’s too slow to have shared state /in real time/.

Not really; it is the server that tells all clients what the state is.

I know "there is nothing new that blockchain does" has become a meme among sceptics, but with respect, I am getting a bit tired of it.

It's just not accurate. You can argue that what the way blockchain allows for shared state is useless all they long, or that the financial use cases are undesirable, and that's all fine. But you simple cannot run the kind of apps that are running on Ethereum right now, enabling financial transactions, with the same guarantees of décentralisation and permissionless access, w/o a blockchain.

It may be useless and/or criminal, but it is certainly new and it works.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#216

Post by nihonde »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #158
dang wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't break the site guidelines like this. I realize it's frustrating when you feel surrounded by a lot of people who you feel are wrong, but there's a guideline for that too: " Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As my post was one of the first in this these threads, the topic had not yet gotten divisive. Moreover, my comment about moderation did not regard my comment but regarded the parent comment, which I felt made a substantive contribution and got downvoted for it for, I am guessing, ideological reasons.

Thanks, anyways. Ironic that they effectively "censored" my comment rather than engage with it.

Prompts a few thoughts for me: (1) coming to HN is like time-traveling ~10 years back, (2) HN today reminds of the late stages of after slashdot, digg, etc. peaked, and (3) decentralized projects have real incentives with "points" that mean something, so losing some silly HN points to moderation seems more meaningless than ever before.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#217

Post by smoldesu »

selestify wrote: post #209
toomuchtodo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m am specially speaking about blockchains, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the like, not IPFS, DHTs, or improvements to existing internet technologies (mutable torrents, webtorrent) to support decentralized storage, discovery, or name resolution. The “web3” nomenclature throws it all together, which is annoying. DeFi =! Dweb

What's the difference between the first group of technologies you mention, and the second, other than the fact that a large group of investors has piled onto the first, whereas the second is basically non-profit? Do you refuse to acknowledge the value-add to decentralization that the first group brings?

The difference is that decentralization doesn't have a system of inequality built into it's core principles. Web3 inherantly and explicitly refers to things that integrate with blockchain technologies, and more often than not, cryptocurrency. Of course investors would be more interested in a platform where their financial superiority carries over, it lets them game the system unlike an ambiguous decentralized protocol.

> Do you refuse to acknowledge the value-add to decentralization that the first group brings?

Decentralization needs the blockchain less than the blockchain needs decentralization.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#218

Post by lumost »

v64 wrote: post #93
lumost wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a dapp dependent on sufficient mining/distributed compute being in the network?. Of the network becomes small can someone attack it and change past transactions/hijack apps?

Yes, these are the failure scenarios I had in mind when I wrote "the ability to shutdown these apps would rely on somehow breaking the blockchain itself". It's possible that bugs in the blockchain software can cause blocks to no longer be produced, essentially halting the network until the problem is resolved. So-called 51% attacks are also a failure possibility.

I'd suspect that the longevity of a cloud provider or self hosted environment would be higher than the time miners are willing to support a new block chain (I'm not paying a btc transaction fee everytime I update an app).

How will miners be paid to host apps? Given that app usage concentrates into winner take all groupings wouldn't we except the web 3 winners to be paying for the vast majority of any web 3 mining?

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#219

Post by y4mi »

miracle2k wrote: post #215
withinboredom wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think multiplayer games are running a blockchain and they agree on shared state. Humans being humans tend to reject cheaters who manipulate the state in their favor. But you don’t need a blockchain for any of this, and in fact, it’s too slow to have shared state /in real time/.

Not really; it is the server that tells all clients what the state is. I know "there is nothing new that blockchain does" has become a meme among sceptics, but with respect, I am getting a bit tired of it. It's just not accurate. You can argue that what the way blockchain allows for shared state is useless all they long, or that the financial use cases are undesirable, and that's all fine. But you simple cannot run t…

> Not really; it is the server that tells all clients what the state is.

Not with realtime action games, nope. The server hopefully verifies, but not even that is a given... Just look at New Worlds immortality bug from a few weeks back for a pretty large budget game that forgot to do that to a sufficient degree.

Re: The Web3 Fraud

#220

Post by selestify »

smoldesu wrote: post #217
selestify wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between the first group of technologies you mention, and the second, other than the fact that a large group of investors has piled onto the first, whereas the second is basically non-profit? Do you refuse to acknowledge the value-add to decentralization that the first group brings?

The difference is that decentralization doesn't have a system of inequality built into it's core principles. Web3 inherantly and explicitly refers to things that integrate with blockchain technologies, and more often than not, cryptocurrency. Of course investors would be more interested in a platform where their financial superiority carries over, it lets them game the system unlike an ambiguous decentralized protoco…

> Of course investors would be more interested in a platform where their financial superiority carries over, it lets them game the system unlike an ambiguous decentralized protocol.

Short of a worldwide communist revolution, that's just going to continue to be the case for any up and coming technologies that make money. Who benefitted most from the enormous gains in tech stocks over the last 25 years? I'll wager it isn't the minimum wage employees.

> Decentralization needs the blockchain less than the blockchain needs decentralization.

Name for me any other way of transferring money to a stranger over the internet in a decentralized fashion. Name for me any other way of executing Turing complete code in a censorship-resistant fashion. These are two big parts of decentralization that crypto solves. Do you refuse to acknowledge that?

There's a reason the Silk Road only appeared after Bitcoin came on the scene. Tor's been around a long time, PGP's been around a long time, but Bitcoin was the missing puzzle piece. I'm not saying drugs are good, I'm just saying decentralization tech didn't reach the level required to implement Silk Road before crypto came on the scene.

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