Why Web3? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Web3?

#491

Post by jboy55 » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 5:57 AM UTC

nfw2 wrote: post #401

girvo wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still think NFTs are a bubble that will come back down to Earth eventually. But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, and people don't discuss these phenomena with the same sort of skepticism. While I agree with basically all of your comment, I'd like to point out that plenty of people in the online space look at the sneaker market with the same skepticism... but that skepticism isn't stopp…

Skepticism was a poor choice of words on my part. I think skepticism is absolutely the right response for both sneakers and NFTs. What I should have said is that it seems a lot of people dismiss NFTs with a certainty that doesn't seem justified considering there are other collectibles like baseball cards without any inherently valuable physical properties that have retained their value long-term. I honestly don't kno…

Baseball cards now have value, in the period of 1990 to 2000 they were pretty worthless after the bubble of the late 80s crashed. They retain value though nostalgia, as soon as they become an investment again, and speculation starts, a new bubble will build, with a crash following.

Re: Why Web3?

#492

Post by pooper » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:00 AM UTC

bl4ckcontact wrote: post #392

gameswithgo wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can make a decent living in all kinds of nonsense if you can either find a way to predict collective mood swings or just get lucky. with millions of people scheming at blockchain stuff there will be thousands getting lucky over and over thinking they are smart

But at what point do we qualify something/someone as “smart”? I’d argue that someone that’s getting lucky over and over again are clearly on to something. As the saying goes: “You create your own luck”.

> But at what point do we qualify something/someone as “smart”?

That's a good point. We can only give our guess based on what we know. For example, people regarded Alan Greenspan as "smart" before 2008. I now think he is an idiot at best and a horrible, malicious person at worst (the truth is probably somewhere in between). Maybe things will change in a few decades and people will then recognize him as "smart" again? It is pretty silly trying to predict the future.

> I’d argue that someone that’s getting lucky over and over again are clearly on to something. As the saying goes: “You create your own luck”.

I present Sir Isaac Newton as a counterexample. Clearly a smart person but just because someone is smart does not mean he was right about everything. In fact, we know now that his nonsensical "work" with alchemy killed him. I am positive that this fad will fail. I am just annoyed that now the name web3 is taken by this nonsense.

Re: Why Web3?

#493

Post by jboy55 » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:01 AM UTC

doomrobo wrote: post #86

root_axis wrote: post #68

I'm not convinced. People talk grand about "permissionless data" but I fail to see any practical applications. NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures. All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain. DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2"…

> NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures I'm not one to ever defend NFTs, but this is not right. Suppose I bought an extremely trendy natural number k ∈ ℤ and I have a signature σ from its inventor that says "doomrobo owns k". Suppose in a year the trend has passed and I'd like to sell k. How do I transfer ownership to someone else? Clearly sending σ doesn't suffice, since σ is public.…

You bought a NFT on some blockchain that exists now, you didn't buy the number. I can sell that same number to someone else, and I could print a big picture of it on fancy paper in a nice frame and afix a hologram seal of authenticity. You owning the NFT of that number doesn't give you any rights to that sale, just as my framed picture doesn't give me any rights over the NFT.

Re: Why Web3?

#494

Post by shiohime » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

corobo wrote: post #140

davidhariri wrote: post #84

> Frankly, it is all too much for me. Same. I've been actively unfollowing people on Twitter every day to clean my feeds of it. I'm not anti-web3 or anti-crypto, but I definitely don't need to read the same rhetoric from 100 people a day. Decentralized trust could be great, but I wonder how much time actually needs to be spent talking about it vs. actually building it...

I do keep wondering if it's worth being first on the scene with a new idea People pushing image NFTs will likely be keen to promote anything that can ding an argument against the naysayers, especially if they're cryptographically compensated somehow (whatever the web3 version of affiliate links is, is it airdrops?) Might be some free real estate to be had if anyone's got any png-less ideas Side comment I do realise I…

I'm creating an NFT project that's doing something I've never really seen other projects doing in any capacity, and can confirm it's pretty hard doing something against the current perception of what is possible with the tech. It's been disheartening sometimes tbh because of the stigma the tech has currently, and I've been called a scammer more than a few times simply because I'm creating a project that utilizes NFTs, by people who only know of the current "link to png on cloud storage and nothing else" model that is most common.

Oh well, I just hope that when I release my project next month that I can prove that it's an incredibly unique experience that some group of people find it to be an exciting product.

Re: Why Web3?

#495

Post by jboy55 » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #216

quickthrower2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The genesis of this discussion is “NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures”. I basically said “how to avoid double spend in digital signatures”, someone replied “but you can clone NFTs!”. I said “yes but that is different”. You are correct double spend is not a problem with NFT because they piggy back on crypto layers. However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “…

> However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs. As I already stated, this is not true. Nobody can stop an author from minting two different blockchain NFTs pointing to the same content, there's no difference between that and "double spending" a digital signature NFT. At the end of the day, the only thing the NFT does is prove "the author authorized this verbal sta…

I think what you are missing is that for NFT adherents, they don't care about the original content, just the NFT.

btw, I own an NFT that represents all natural numbers, therefore all possible NFTs.

Re: Why Web3?

#496

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:10 AM UTC

xmly wrote: post #482

root_axis wrote: post #68

I'm not convinced. People talk grand about "permissionless data" but I fail to see any practical applications. NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures. All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain. DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2"…

One correctiong. NFTs is just a tool. I believe what you mean is that Digital Arts market based on NFTs is a bubble.

I agree and I wish more people understood this distinction.

To say that NFTs are all scams is like saying that pixel shaders are all games. One is often used to implement the other, but they're not the same thing.

NFTs will likely find niches outside of signifying ownership. For instance, I'd like to see them used to denote package maintainer status. That way you could have automation that allows package maintainers to do certain maintenance things like publish the hash of the next version, and if they transfer the token to a new maintainer, no permission rejiggering would be required.

Re: Why Web3?

#497

Post by mattwilsonn888 » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:10 AM UTC

FridgeSeal wrote: post #385

Kiro wrote: post #106

I don't like how the extreme hatred toward Web3 has spiraled into "I see no practical application for decentralization". Crypto and blockchain aside, how can you not see the utility in an open firehose database/API without gate keepers? Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain.

> Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain. Well it’d be easier if crypto wasn’t every second word out of someone’s mouth when they talk about “web3”. The technology to do pretty much everything “web3” promises already exists, and works better than it’s crypto-equivalent. The Local-First software movement is a good example of this. If the proponents of “web3”actually cared about decentralisation/federation/use…

So what is the solution to posting sensitive information on an open platform where people can easily lie or cheat? Your version of Web3, despite its head start, is no better off than the so called 'grifter version' (grifters dog piling innovation doesn't tell you anything about the legitimacy of that innovation; see "Dot-Com Bubble"[1]).

Let's start you off with the very basics; a low stakes example. What is a solution to email spam? You incur a small cost to honest senders and a large cost to mass senders. We'll call it Hashcash[2], and as a user you will only accept emails from senders with a header including your email and the date, which hashes to a sufficiently small value of your choosing, the smaller, the harder it was to send. Every sender gets a linear increase in amount of work to send, but for normal email users sending one email at a time its a small constant, while mass senders increase this value for each recipient. Because of the economics of spam email, where the profit is made off a few gullible recipients while the majority ignore it, Hashcash makes spam emails a losing strategy, at least in this simple example. This is an economic solution, and it is also exactly what the primary cryptocurrency does.

Bitcoin is primitive, and its data throughput reflects that. I won't be shilling or giving you tips, but imagine a blockchain system which ensures openess (no Infura Problem[3] as is common in Ethereum sized blockchains) and a scalable model for pricing and putting data on chain. It may be more expensive or slower than a federated system, but a system with the proper economic incentives and deterrents is now capable of doing something a centralized or federated system cannot: hosting data for which there is massive economic incentive to distort without a profitable way to actually do so, or more specifically, a predictable cost of attack that rises with subsequent block confirmations (just like Bitcoin's security model). Now you can price your data, and wait the amount of time that correlates to the cost of attack that would not be worth the money it takes to cheat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

[3] https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-...

Re: Why Web3?

#498

Post by hestefisk » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:20 AM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #68

I'm not convinced. People talk grand about "permissionless data" but I fail to see any practical applications. NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures. All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain. DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2"…

Largely agree with this. The big promise of defi was to “bank the unbanked”, but Eth is

- slow (15 txn/sec, 22-23 with the move to proof of stake) - expensive (I read somewhere that globally Eth users spend more on 30M USD in fees per day!) - too volatile to be reliable for everyday banking use cases - bad for the environment

Blockchain technology is interesting and very powerful, but VCs and founders have all too often put the cart before the horse. A few years ago I spoke to an Aussie tech entrepreneur who had raised funding for his “Airbnb for RV” platform. He didn’t get much attention until he said it was blockchain based. In 9.99 out of 10 cases there is no need for a blockchain when a trusted, centralised ledger will do just fine.

Edge cases I can think of where a blockchain makes sense is in cases such as post-trade activities or trade finance where multiple parties need to settle complex transactions in a distributed way (Contour is a good example of this). Disclaimer: I do not own shares in Contour; I just find it interesting.

Re: Why Web3?

#499

Post by hestefisk » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:21 AM UTC

everfree wrote: post #366

root_axis wrote: post #68

I'm not convinced. People talk grand about "permissionless data" but I fail to see any practical applications. NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures. All of the ideas about logistics tracking, deed tracking, etc etc are all rendered pointless by the oracle problem, you can get identical guarantees with digital signatures minus the blockchain. DeFi is DOA. Gas fees are insane, "layer 2"…

> "layer 2" is just a diplomatic way of saying "offchain centralization" Some popular types of Layer 2s, namely zk rollups, have on-chain data and on-chain transaction verification, so I believe you are wrong on this count.

Are you referring to the likes of Polygon / MATIC?

Re: Why Web3?

#500

Post by ipaddr » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 6:21 AM UTC

cercatrova wrote: post #300

ipaddr wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The approach to validate ideas with conversation with your target market when you are unsure if anyone will buy. But in this case you need to validate it by building it and proving it can be done. The market is already prepped.

> in this case In which case, Web3? If so, I don't think the market is prepped at all, I don't really see people using it for what proponents say it'll be used for. If some other case, please elucidate me, I'm not sure what you're referring to otherwise.

The market is ready for a product that hasn't come, so build it.