Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why would you want your grade history to be public so that anybody can read it? And adjusting grades is a valuable feature, given that some teachers do really make legitimate grading mistakes that should be corrected.
The public aspect of the content is orthogonal to the public aspect of the data . E.g. let's say the grade record is encrypted. Anyone party to the key is able to verify that the record is (un)tampered, but the wide world cannot read your grade. And that is orthogonal to whether the content is mutable or not. It just means that mutation is deliberate and obvious.
Web3 is centralized
421–430 of 497 posts
Re: Web3 is centralized
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Web3" is about decentralization but it doesn't necessarily mean storing data on a blockchain. The most important aspect is that users no longer have to sign up or log in. They submit responses which are signed by a key pair, which is their identity instead of a record in a "users" table. It is a record in a "users" table. It is just that this table is the publicly readable blockchain.
Exactly. And, if everyone is using the same blockchain for names (to get the universal login experience), then that becomes centralized source for user accounts. Compare that to today where I have distinctly separate accounts on nearly all platforms.
Re: Web3 is centralized
#423In all seriousness, I do get a wiff of traditionalists complaining about an emerging change that isn’t a straightforward understanding. Take Tesla short sellers for example: they just can’t contain their frustration for all the billions they lost over the past years and love to tell everyone about it and the haters come out in droves with theory of X and Y but no real theory is proven without s proper set of experiments.
We’ll be playing the crypto experiment for decades.
Re: Web3 is centralized
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Democracy isnt free. Pay to play is exactly what makes it democratic. Free is more like a benevolent dictatorship.
Clarification? I can participate/play in my democracy with little to no cost. Unless you are arguing time (~20 minutes/year) commitments to vote?
Re: Web3 is centralized
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't talking about it as in copyright / legal sense, and more in the I can allow others to access a snapshot of it at a given time and/or remove access to it for future content if I wish to do so. Now the relationship is the reverse, I give content to some org and they can do as they wish with it; I'm surrending it for them to use in exchange of them allowing me to use their platform for free. e.g. from Twitter's…
> or I could revoke it in the future Unless whatever service accessed the tweet/image/text/whatever made a local copy and is displaying that once the "blockchain service" no longer allows access. An NFT doesn't confer access control. Its a certificate of ownership, the asset itself is infinitely reproducible.
if you are not aware of how something like what I described could work maybe have a read around on some simple smart contracts where there is hidden state (like guess the answer or contracts that implement role access/control for certain features)
Re: Web3 is centralized
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why not just a central database? I would have thought this to be obvious, but these chains, while anonymous still have the following attributes: - decentralized - permissionless - does not rely on third-party trust A central database has none of these attributes.
Really? So I can go onto one of these chains and transfer anything to a new address without a third party blessing my transaction? I was under the impression that nearly the entire thing is based on some form of consensus. Consensus is necessarily by third parties. So if the consensus drives decisions on what gets accepted and what does not, is that not a permission? If there is a single dominant consensus, is that n…
Re: Web3 is centralized
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the problem is centralization, which facilitates censorship and totalitarian control. This is a gross misunderstanding of both the current banking system (which is decentralized) and the degree to which using a slow database doesn’t prevent legal actions. Blockchains are very easy to monitor and censor: ideal for an authoritarian government to get a signed confession for every disapproved transaction you make,…
There are literally "central banks", and if banks don't want to give somebody a bank account, there is nothing these people can do about it. That is the result of centralized control. You can not prevent somebody from having a Bitcoin address. I know that transactions on the Bitcon blockchain are public. There are approaches to fixing it and several altcoins claim to fix it. It certainly isn't the last iteration of t…
Banks follow laws, which is also a hard requirement for cryptocurrency businesses. Very, very few people are banned from having an account and those bans are of categories which would also prevent a cryptocurrency exchange in that country from working with them. Note also that “centralized” is only true within a governmental boundary — a bank in Zimbabwe doesn't phone someone in the U.S. to ask whether they should allow someone to open an account, which is why I described it as decentralized because it lacks a central authority.
It's true that someone can try to circumvent those measures, which is a practice dating bank centuries, but there's an important distinction between being able to make a transaction and being able to avoid punishment for doing so. Just as most censorship happens because someone is afraid of the potential consequences for speech rather than prior approval of all communications, it's both possible and a natural extension of existing practice to start demanding that people in your jurisdiction disallow any transactions linked to a particular address or to punish people for accepting a payment after it's linked to a criminal activity. You'll never get that down to zero but cryptocurrencies make it a lot easier to block than real cash payments.
This is also the problem with anonymization schemes: governments don't say “he used Monero, guess we have to give up on law enforcement” but rather “Monero does not comply with our financial laws, any business or person caught accepting it will be fined and risk jail time”. Bitcoin laundering schemes are unproven at scale from a powerful adversary but also simply using a tumbler is risky because you're publishing a durable record of using a service designed to evade legal controls — if that's ever linked back to you, you've given the police a signed confession that you knew what you were doing was illegal. Legitimate users aren't going to pay a premium to take on that risk — especially since it would open them to charges of collusion on whatever anyone else using that service was doing — and that removes legal traffic volume, making it easier for analysis and blocking.
Re: Web3 is centralized
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Do you have an example of where something like this was actually deployed? How would a user moving one token would result in another token being moved? I can only imagine a situation where a user might be induced to install a compromised wallet, and then to give that wal…
To me this is like asking if I have an example of a phishing site, not off the top of my head? Just embed approval methods for a predefined external token contract address into the transfer() method of the airdropped token Then you can also chain the transfer within it or you can wait and transfer them all yourself Doing too much in one transaction will alert more users because the gas price will be unexpectedly larg…
https://blocksecteam.medium.com/unlimited-approval-in-erc20-...
But is it not the case that the approve() method must be invoked directly by the sender (i.e. by the account that holds the tokens that are the target of the theft)? Wouldn’t the invocation be rejected by the ERC20 token if it is made indirectly, i.e. if the invocation were made from within another method (provided that the target ERC20 token is coded properly)?
Re: Web3 is centralized
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
...Or you can use a cryptocurrency like NANO (I'm sure there are others very similar), which is feeless and has nearly no delay to transfer. If there is a scam hiding in there, I've yet to find it. Honestly I've stepped back from the entire crypto space for a while now, the whole space pisses me off, it's all hype and no progress. Or rather, the work that was needed to be done has now been done (feeless, near instant…
It’s funny, when I see critics of crypto currencies, there’s always one crypto currency which solves that particular problem. Crypto advocates always seem to have another argument in their toolkit. If you put forwards an economic argument against, they will rave about the technical benefits. If you bring technical arguments, they will shout about the economic benefits or how this currencies over here solves that prob…
Re: Web3 is centralized
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
People mostly email me about very specific topics. Nobody "still doing research™" about the broad topic of crypto is getting anywhere because they get bounced from the funnel immediately and paint the whole space with an equally as broad brush. Its decade 3 and this is where we are, so what do people really want to know? To me, there's lots of killer apps, to others I don't really care to debate any longer, who cares…
> or a thread every time a new version of one of those languages used in Ethereum Virtual Machines is out. But the majority of people interested in crypto don’t care about the technology, they are in it to get rich. Articles talking about the new technologies underpinning crypto do exist and get submitted, it’s just that to a rough approximation nobody cares about the actual technology. Look at the level of discussio…
There I disagree, my news feeds in other places are heavily populated by development discussion, and word travels fast in the crypto-sphere. So aside from noticing that HN consensus is distinctly not part of it, it would be hard for me to agree less or disagree more. But people are here, they just arent the active contributors and arent coordinated to elevate their posts and comments.
For example, I just had the realization that I could learn a new programming language to write smart contracts solely because I dont need to market myself to out-of-touch recruiters and hiring managers. Deploying stuff onchain is lucrative enough. This changes the entire incentive model of a software engineer, or even a founder’s new venture, as both would otherwise need to optimize for new and shiny web 2.0 frameworks just to attract talent or be attractive to the next company.