91–100 of 497 posts
It's fascinating how on hacker news one typically finds detailed, reasoned and thoughtful comments. However on the topic of crypto and web3 the comments reliably degenerate into partisan tit for tat, consisting mainly of poorly researched, unreasoned sound bytes. It's a pity because I'd love to hear quality thought on the space. My personal view is that crypto and Web3 "are a thing" (Mean Girls) and will continue to…
It's fascinating how on hacker news one typically finds detailed, reasoned and thoughtful comments. However on the topic of crypto and web3 the comments reliably degenerate into partisan tit for tat, consisting mainly of poorly researched, unreasoned sound bytes. It's a pity because I'd love to hear quality thought on the space. My personal view is that crypto and Web3 "are a thing" (Mean Girls) and will continue to…
That said, the hype seems a little bit overblown. When people are so focused on "overthrowing Big Tech" as to why web3 will be the next wave, it just seems like hype over substance.
I forgot what the name of it was, but I tried to sign up to some web3 social media site. In order to even post, you had to drop $80 on the relevant crypto to post on the site. I understand the justification but that made me immediately just lost interest in the web3 space. Seems kinda like a pyramid scheme. The people who are already in get richer while the newcomers just get magic beans.
My main concerns with Web3 are that it is "pay to play" in many aspects and it's less democratic than the existing Internet.
Agreed. The one dollar-one vote concept is fundamentally flawed, but has become the main model for crypto community governance. There aren’t a lot of viable alternatives, especially as there is no concept of a person, just free, infinite wallets and limited coins. As such, the interests of the wealthiest steer the entire community, and a bad actor could derail a project with malevolent use of voting powers. Democracy…
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That is not exclusiv to web3 and is not new. If I buy a house, I can take a credit on that house. If I bought some stock, banks will let me take a loan on them afaik. I can also borrow some money and choose something expensive that I own for a collateral. Maybe crypto makes the last one easier, but then it will lead to a lot of fraud, because veryifing that the item I set as collateral is the difficult and expensive…
Sure, but that information today is gatekept quite well and impossible for you or me to pull or integrate without partnerships or paying up heavily. For example, plaid is a company worth 13.4b where largely all they do is log in to your financial accounts on behalf of another (usually financial) institution to scrape your account data. If you try doing that yourself, you will be blocked by the risk systems of the var…
Maybe they don't offer the information in the specific way that you want, but that can also happen in web3(Propertery API, OAUTH2 which means you have to have static ip server for authentification,etc.).
You pay for the convenience of having your data aggregated in the specified format.
That aside, banks in the EU are forced to offer api services, as specified in the PSD2 standard.
I just don't see how doing everything in a web3 solves anything better than regulations.
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The existing internet is dominated by trillion dollar monopolies. How do you reconcile that Web3 is less democratic than a megacorp oligopoly than can unperson people at will? Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core.
For one, the author pointed out that Opensea NFTs are stored on the Google Cloud Platform, one of those trillion dollar monopolies. Proof of stake means the largest stakeholders can unilaterally reject transactions. Technically the chain could fork. Practically, convincing everyone to move to a new chain seems about as difficult as everyone moving off Facebook because a few people get banned. Proof of work means the…
> Proof of stake means the largest stakeholders can unilaterally reject transactions. Technically the chain could fork. Practically, convincing everyone to move to a new chain seems about as difficult as everyone moving off Facebook because a few people get banned.
> Proof of work means the richest people can afford more miners and completely control the chain.
> So where is the decentralization? The only realistic decentralization I can make out is that its possible to build alternative chains, but that very thing is possible today. Its possible to build an alternate payment processor or social network if Visa bans your business, the really hard part is building it and getting the entire ecosystem to actually use it.
On a POW system such as Bitcoin or ETH1, you'd need 51% or more of the hash power on the network, which is more than a hundred Google datacenters worth of hashpower, and you'd have to spend a vast amount of energy in order to execute the attack, and at the end of it all, the community would mount a fork and initiate a change that left your attack out of history. It is quite difficult to coordinate a vast amount of people to fork a major chain and have that fork be recognized as the New Bitcoin or the New Ethereum. That is where the decentralization comes in and where the guarantees of execution comes in. Blockchains are protected by cryptography and economics (game theory) as well as social consensus.
From V. Buterin: "Theoretically, a majority collusion of validators may take over a proof of stake chain, and start acting maliciously. However, (i) through clever protocol design, their ability to earn extra profits through such manipulation can be limited as much as possible, and more importantly (ii) if they try to prevent new validators from joining, or execute 51% attacks, then the community can simply coordinate a hard fork and delete the offending validators’ deposits. A successful attack may cost $50 million, but the process of cleaning up the consequences will not be that much more onerous than the geth/parity consensus failure of 2016.11.25. Two days later, the blockchain and community are back on track, attackers are $50 million poorer, and the rest of the community is likely richer since the attack will have caused the value of the token to go up due to the ensuing supply crunch. That’s attack/defense asymmetry for you. [1]"
[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-p...
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You pay now by paying with your privacy. Someone makes great money by tracking you and selling it but it isn’t you.
not sure how web3 would solve any of that
My main concerns with Web3 are that it is "pay to play" in many aspects and it's less democratic than the existing Internet.
The existing internet is dominated by trillion dollar monopolies. How do you reconcile that Web3 is less democratic than a megacorp oligopoly than can unperson people at will? Web3 has decentralization, freedom of speech, anti-gatekeeping, permissionlessness and inclusiveness, at its core.
No, web3 has "make as much money as possible" at its core - any of those other tertiary values are expendable in the name of getting rich. The trillion dollar companies also only care about getting rich, but they at least produce useful products, unlike the cryptocurrency ecosystem which is overwhelmingly made up of scams and vaporware.
[This is not necessarily about web3] I've said it before, and it needs repeating: we >need can't But there will not be any progress to any decentralized internet unless we get solutions to the average joe, the consumer, to do this.Obviously this is not in the interest of corporations, governments, and other entities that have control, but in the case of a disaster or collapse of a society, a change of regime towards…
Hardware to do this kind of thing is commercially available and some people are doing it, e.g.: https://www.nycmesh.net/ The main problem is that unlicensed spectrum has limited range and most places don't have enough density to make it work when only For longer range there is still Ham Radio. Check if they give the ham radio exam at your local hackerspace.
Also if I recall there are some interesting projects like Helium but those are not necessarily about creating the networks but providing access and "getting the coin" by providing internet access to others.It's interesting but not that much, considering it's somewhat reliant on "the current internet" itself,the hardware is realistically somewhat expensive, and also given that the incentive is to "mine the coin" by providing access to a centralized service, there can be ulterior motives to it.
As for the laws & licenses for certain spectrums and allowed bands, I think ultimately people will not really care when "sh*t hits the fan".It's good right now to keep things tidy and not get chaotic, but i think the important thing is the availability of the devices themselves.
I think this is a pretty weak article regarding web3. The author wants to claim Ethereum or Bitcoin are more centralized than HTTP, but that isn't a valid comparison. Anyone can spin up their own blockchain exactly in the same fashion of spinning up their own webserver. It's more comparable to something like AWS or Discord or Twitter. Now, I would still say the majority of all things developed on the blockchain are v…
I recommend looking into BSV, as you can store data on-chain for cents, but it looks like any comment mentioning it will get automatically moderated for some reason.
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> Weird that it would be a boon for both forensic accountants and fraudsters. How do you reconcile that sentence? It is very common to track people by the tokens they hold and target them for theft and fraud. One example is to airdrop a backdoored token, and when the user tries to move it they wind up authorizing movement of their other valuable tokens. Or to just use the airdrop to lead a curious user to the airdrop…
Tracking partial identity through tokens is actually a very common concept amongst the newer blockchain platforms which also have addressed such topics as the drawback you describe. While said attack is theoretically possible it only is applicable to tokens managed by the same contract and only on platforms which do manifest tokens as script state (think erc20). Platforms with native assets (Cardano and some others)…
What would you consider Solana's approach to assets? I was surprised to find that each address has another unique address for its balance and possession of any asset issued on that network.