Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Welcome to Web 3.0

welcome2web3.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 309 posts

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#241

Post by falcolas »

IanCal wrote: post #232
falcolas wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention that trading/selling items is something that - within individual games - has been done for decades now. Diablo II anyone?

Yes, you can build all these things yourself. That's not the question (and it's what I was expanding on in the comment). The question is should you, given that there is an existing layer you can build on top of that already handles that?

Yes. Because block chains are relatively slow when compared to in-memory and normal databases. Those databases already need to track "Player X has item Y" just to run the game. Same with adding items to and removing items from a player.

From there, implementing "Player X has given item Y to Player Z" is pretty straightforward. It's even built into most RPG multiplayer games by default, unbound to any form of external payment.

Multiplayer games also add event logs - creating a immutable record of all inventory changes - just so customer service (CS) can do their job. For example, in Everquest, GMs (aka CS) were able to see that yes, indeed, a player did get the drop from the dragon, even though it later glitched out of their inventory, and re-gifted the item to the player.

So, for a single game, a blockchain only adds a second, delayed (and relatively expensive, since it requires extra compute resources to create) record of events that are already recorded.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#242

Post by malermeister »

simonw wrote: post #207
sergiosgc wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a public ledger, where any public record can be kept without the need of a central authority certainly has value. The fact that current tech solutions are not efficient, and thus expensive, should not hide that value. Instead of going through offshoots trying to find the killer app, I'd much prefer to see cryptocurrency tech evolve in order to bring costs down. Take the base use case of keeping "bank acco…

> The idea of a public ledger, where any public record can be kept without the need of a central authority certainly has value. Based on what we've learned over the past few years, I'm not sure I believe that any more. Without a central authority, there's no way to be confident that anything is "true". Partly because it's impossible to correct mistakes. So you get NFTs of stolen art, because there's no authority to v…

This! The lack of a central authority to fix things is an anti-feature sold as a feature to libertarian-minded folks.

Even account balances are a bad idea to do on the block chain. Ever had to dispute a credit card charge when you dealt with a sketchy vendor? Well too bad, all sales are final now in this new immutable world.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#243

Post by malermeister »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #88
chmod775 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have paid to write this comment? Would someone who has a monetary incentive to comment pay to do so?

Depends on the price. $10-$50 for a standard eth tx surely not. But say the equivalent of ~$0.01, probably yes. This might be enough to disincentive _some_ (a lot of?) spamming (unfortunately it's all theory as no network works like this yet)

Now imagine living in Bangladesh, where the average yearly wage is around 1000 USD.

Is the opinion of some tech bro in the Bay Area making six figures really worth a hundred times as much? Do they have a hundred times as much to say or are they a hundred times as insightful?

Or maybe, just maybe, tying all participation to a monetary transaction is an incredibly classist thing to do that will shut out vast portions of the world so the rich and privileged can feel "free".

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#244

Post by Double_a_92 »

kderbyma wrote: post #235

Crypto was not supposed to be about paying people...it's about owning content ... people who want to monetize the process will always see flaws in something which is beyond the scope of just finance. crypto was ruined speculators and will find no saviors from them. but trusting all crypto as speculation is just as speculative

How do you own your content if you can't even delete or edit it? At best the content gets "signed" by your account, but what's really the point of that?

Also this was not about monetization, it's just about the costs of simply using the blockchain.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#245

Post by samsonradu »

falcolas wrote: post #221
samsonradu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With no authority that decides whether I can send money to/receive from someone. That’s actually a good point and Bitcoin/crypto solves this. Why doesn’t it stop there though, what does web3 solve?

> That’s actually a good point and Bitcoin/crypto solves this. For now. Governments are catching on, and since the transactions are public, they can (and are putting the building blocks in place now) easily apply the same regulations to international bitcoin transactions as they do traditional money transfers. Basically, folks today are taking advantage of a blind spot in government oversight. They're aware of it and…

Yes, that’s true but for the sake of the argument lets say it solves that problem. What do web3 and NFTs solve?

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#246

Post by abiro »

falcolas wrote: post #233
abiro wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to hear about any solutions to enforcing invariants on state transitions in a decentralized manner pre 2008.

Markov chains (cryptographic signatures on a linked list of transactions) have been around for much longer than 14 years. There's your "decentralized invariants on state transitions". The "magic" provided by bitcoins was the "proof of work" part - basically trying to create only one "real" trusted branch of the markov chain at any point in time. But that "reality" has been broken multiple times by both the miners and…

Assuming you mean a Merkle tree (a Markov chain is a statistical concept). A Merkle tree provides an efficient way to compute hashes (not signatures) of data. It provides neither properties that you claim for Markov chains.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#247

Post by falcolas »

IanCal wrote: post #231
falcolas wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What more detail would you need? Implementing the weapon. Paying for that implementation. Concrete example: I buy an NFT for a sword in World of Warcraft. I want to take it with me to FFXIV. Now FFXIV has to implement the sword. Its looks, its behaviors, its power, in a completely separate engine and world. They - Square Enix - also probably have to pay Blizzard for the trademark and copyrights to the sword. Yet wh…

> Implementing the weapon. Implementing an in game item? That's already part of your game, right? > Paying for that implementation. You can buy an NFT entirely on chain, that's surely not in doubt. > Plus, implementing a "yes, person with email address N owns sword X" rest API is pretty straightforward. You could even implement public/private key signatures for authentication of the receipt. It just would be stored i…

> That's already part of your game, right?

Nah, not for the usecase of moving items between games - one of the biggest features touted by NFT enthusiasts.

But that aside...

> get people to manage their own public/private keys

For a receipt, the individual users don't need keys. For proof of ownership, that ship has already sailed off into the sea of fraud and pyramid schemes, and we don't expect to see it again. When people are trying to sell NFTs of artwork to the original artist (aka blackmail), you know it's jumped all the sharks.

> They already exist if I manage that part with an NFT.

Most of this already exists in a system regardless. Adding a rest endpoint on the top of a database entry is usually pretty trivial - especially for something as basic as "retrieve and display this row in the DB" - and "already exists" in the form of libraries. And by using a blockchain as a database, I'm actually adding a lot of complexity to my system.

> Why not use existing, working infrastructure?

One, the existing and working infrastructure already exists. All the elements of a purchasing stream are implemented as libraries.

And it's not as if you can stop caring about how money flows, because there are laws that require you to do a lot of bookkeeping and pay taxes on that money (no matter the form the transaction initially took).

Why not use a blockchain as a distributed DB? Because it's slower and more expensive. Because it provides no functionality you don't already want or need to have locally, especially when we're discussing a game.

In other words, NFTs - from a company's point of view - provide the same benefits and detriments as a normal event-stream DB, but it's slower, more expensive, and it includes transactions from every other company using that blockchain.

> What the global shared database part solves is that either game can easily check, if this was something they wanted to do.

Why would the first party need to check an external database, when their game engines literally require them to implement it internally?

Why would a second party check the external database when there are licensing issues that require them to talk to the first party in the first place?

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#248

Post by falcolas »

samsonradu wrote: post #245
falcolas wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s actually a good point and Bitcoin/crypto solves this. For now. Governments are catching on, and since the transactions are public, they can (and are putting the building blocks in place now) easily apply the same regulations to international bitcoin transactions as they do traditional money transfers. Basically, folks today are taking advantage of a blind spot in government oversight. They're aware of it and…

Yes, that’s true but for the sake of the argument lets say it solves that problem. What do web3 and NFTs solve?

IMO, nothing.

NFTs are already centralized and primarily used as scams. If your non-scam NFT is blocked by OpenSea, it might as well not exist for the purposes of selling and re-selling.

Where NFTs are not used for scams, they're being implemented in a proprietary blockchain and used as a method of extracting more money from customers with no new benefits (it's not like customers can re-sell their NFTs; see: proprietary blockchain).

The only thing I potentially see as valuable from web3 is cryptographic customer identification - but this is something we've had for years (client certs), but which never took off. I don't see how "web3" will change that.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#249

Post by falcolas »

abiro wrote: post #246
falcolas wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markov chains (cryptographic signatures on a linked list of transactions) have been around for much longer than 14 years. There's your "decentralized invariants on state transitions". The "magic" provided by bitcoins was the "proof of work" part - basically trying to create only one "real" trusted branch of the markov chain at any point in time. But that "reality" has been broken multiple times by both the miners and…

Assuming you mean a Merkle tree (a Markov chain is a statistical concept). A Merkle tree provides an efficient way to compute hashes (not signatures) of data. It provides neither properties that you claim for Markov chains.

You're correct - Merkle tree. Words are hard some days.

> A Merkle tree provides an efficient way to compute hashes (not signatures)

A signature is a hash, in that it is effectively unique for the content. It simply has the additional property of being generated using cryptographic keys, proving that not only is the hashed content what's expected, it was generated using the specified key.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#250

Post by samhw »

rvz wrote: post #105
MadSudaca wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I can honestly tell you such a cryptocurrency exists. Cryptocurrencies are byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus algorithms. These are tricky algorithms to get right, but I can assure you that Bitcoin is not the only viable solution. In fact, I don't understand people's pessimism. In the universe of all possible algorithms of this kind, known and unknown, I find extremely unlikely that Bitcoin-like ones would be t…

There you go. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay no matter how much they hate it or continue to waste time on repeating the same old arguments even though there are far better cryptocurrencies out there that already exist. The fact that they are unable to ignore them and continue to spread the same debunked nonsense tells you that it is not going away and it is getting boring. Just look at the first few sentences: > a…

> The internet isn't new. Its 'killer app' (The world wide web) came decades afterwards and took decades more for adoption.

The Internet started in the mid 1980s and became available to consumers in about '89[0]. The WWW was created in '90. By '94 it was wildly popular. Netscape IPOed the next year, with millions of users.

Generously, you could call that about 5 years from public availability to cultural dominance. Bitcoin has existed for three times that, and still doesn't have a use case that Beanie Babies didn't have.

I'm a believer in cryptocurrencies - or, I should say, in decentralised digital cash. But people like you are hurting it, not helping it. We need rational discussion that can soberly evaluate the flaws of a given implementation, not unthinking heavily-emotionalised tribalism.

[0] Incidentally, David Chaum founded DigiCash, the first cryptocurrency company, the same year.

Post reply on HN