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Welcome to Web 3.0

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Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#261

Post by breadbreadbread »

MadSudaca wrote: post #32

Never forget that cryptocurrencies are essentially software, therefore it can most likely change to overcome its present pitfalls. You don’t like the negative environmental impact that PoW has? There are many eco-friendly cryptocurrencies that don’t use PoW. Don’t like that the fees are too high? There are feeless cryptocurrencies. Don’t like that many cryptos are VC money schemes? There are many with fair distributi…

Listen, people understand that technology has value outside of the scams and stupid memes. The problem is that crypto-evangelists seem to think that good intentions are all you need to build a functioning alternate economy. "Don't mind the bugs, we'll fix them later, for now entrust us with all of your money and information". It is precisely because it is flawed software that people hate on NFTs and blockchain and web3. Fix your shit and self-regulate before you promise the future to people who are already struggling in the existing economy.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#262

Post by samhw »

MadSudaca wrote: post #260
samhw wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. B…

The first version of the internet was called Arpanet and it was apparently released in 1969 according to Wikipedia. It only became widespread in its current incarnation much later. Moreover, there was an immense amount of hype around the internet during the 90s that culminated in the dotcom bubble, wiping out most ventures and leaving only few companies which still exist today. If you ask me, the story of the interne…

Yeah, Arpanet was definitely a wide-area network, but the Internet Protocol was standardised in '82 and that was what created the Internet: a public network that was capable of spanning the globe. (I used the words "became publicly available" advisedly!)

Aside from that, I very much agree with you. I think digital cash has great promise - I can't imagine Visa and Mastercard still being a thing in 20-30 years. Some implementation of digital cash - I happen to think Bitcoin and its current siblings are not fit solutions - seems highly likely to proliferate in actual means-of-exchange usage. (In plain English: for buying stuff at supermarkets.)

But I think people like the commenter above are the obstacle to progress. We need motivated but rational innovators, who can analyse solutions through clear eyes, soberly and without dysfunctional ego investment in one technology or another.

These weird crypto stans are not technologists, they're fanboys, they make real innovators look bad, and they retard real progress by dementedly screaming at anyone who makes cogent criticisms of a given implementation. Those critics are our greatest asset and friend, not our enemy.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#263

Post by falcolas »

abiro wrote: post #259
falcolas wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A merkle tree that uses cryptographic signing instead of hashing is still a merkle tree. Though if we really feel it's necessary, we could simply say "a merkle-tree like implementation that uses cryptographic signatures in place of a hash function". Pedantry about the difference between hashes and signatures doesn't change the validity of the structure as a response to the original question.

I challenge you to build a Merkle tree using a digital signature scheme in place of a cryptographic hash function where a Merkle tree constructed by Alice can be used by Bob without revealing Alice’s secret key.

OK. Challenge accepted.

Alice and Bob both use asymmetric keys, and use one of a thousand different methods to exchange their public keys (hey, they can even go in the Merkle tree). Alice signs a transaction using her private key and publishes it. Bob can now use Alice's public key to verify the signature on the transaction. No private/secret key exposure.

Asymmetric encryption is a fairly well explored field, which is what makes the above both easy to reason about and secure.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#264

Post by vgel »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #106
vgel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little unfair. Niche hobbyists will build the alternative UI, and regular people can choose to use it. Like Youtube Vanced or all the Wordle clones (yes those are both normal web. open / accessible data is orthogonal to blockchain, IMO)

How does one discover these alternative UIs? How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated? How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs? More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?

> How does one discover these alternative UIs?

Social trust networks -- they get recommended by friends or shared online by someone you trust.

> How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated?

Those same social trust networks -- someone realizes what's going on and shares it, people start telling other people to stop using it. There's no technological solution to prevent technological abuse -- the abuse can be built into the system, after all. Half the warnings about "stop using this site" are warnings about a first party UI -- "Facebook is reading your messages!" or "Youtube is hiding dislikes!" or whatever. Social networks (as in, networks of people, not websites) are the only way this sort of knowledge is ever spread.

> How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs?

Not long, of course. I'm not sure if this is an argument in favor of Web3, though, since that can work the same way -- a startup needs to move fast and frequently change things to iterate, which means they will be changing the data representation on the blockchain frequently (going forward, of course they can't change past blocks), which means alternative clients will need to keep up with those data changes same as with API changes on a normal website.

> More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?

? Web3 is just as for-profit as the normal web, if not more since every database interaction is monetized? YT and the like aren't on it because there aren't that many users.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#265

Post by dlubarov »

MadSudaca wrote: post #170
audunw wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The underlying technology is valuable Is it though? Valuable how? Has it been proven? The core of the issue is that PoW is fundamentally a sort of algorithmic cancer that threatens to basically take over on the order of half of the worlds computational power to fuel worthless speculative trading. IMO there's an important argument to be had that trading on PoW blockchains should be outright banned. Yes, you can't ge…

> But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could. Could you direct me to some of these arguments? My thought is the opposite, that something in the lines of PoS is more secure in the long-run because it tends towards decentralization. I guess the devil is in the details.

The main security difference is that with PoW any attempt to create a fork has a cost. With PoS, slashing can be used to impose a similar cost. But that doesn't work for very that long forks (longer than it takes for stakers to unbond), since the accounts being slashed might no longer exist on the main fork.

In order for validators to distinguish the main fork from any malicious long forks, they must start with a trusted checkpoint that's less than X days old, then sync at least every X days, where X is the unbonding period.

The "trusted checkpoint" notion seems to cause a lot of concern, but in my mind it's relatively harmless to just bake checkpoints into the client code (if done carefully - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370309). Most clients already have some form of trusted checkpoints (even Bitcoin Core does, though they're deprecated), or at least a genesis block, which is effectively a checkpoint.

More here: https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs#what-is-wea...

And some good discussion here: https://twitter.com/zooko/status/1045807027992182785

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#266

Post by abiro »

falcolas wrote: post #263
abiro wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I challenge you to build a Merkle tree using a digital signature scheme in place of a cryptographic hash function where a Merkle tree constructed by Alice can be used by Bob without revealing Alice’s secret key.

OK. Challenge accepted. Alice and Bob both use asymmetric keys, and use one of a thousand different methods to exchange their public keys (hey, they can even go in the Merkle tree). Alice signs a transaction using her private key and publishes it. Bob can now use Alice's public key to verify the signature on the transaction. No private/secret key exposure. Asymmetric encryption is a fairly well explored field, which…

Ok well played, you’ve trolled me masterfully.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#267

Post by cuteboy19 »

can16358p wrote: post #96
RedBeetDeadpool wrote: post #49

This is just a hater hatin, coming up with the worst ways to make web 3.0 look bad. An example of a real value proposition of web 3.0 is spam protection and reduction of fake reviews. Much like how bitcoin itself cannot be counterfeited, utilization of the blockchain enables some guarantees in a digital world of endless copying. The only thing I got from it was that the creator hates crypto bros so much he's willing…

Just with everything with potential revolutionary impact, it will be hated with harsh criticism. We're exactly at that period with web3: haters gonna hate and early adopters will be rewarded.

> haters gonna hate

This is a thought terminating idea, as much as I like TS. There is a good reason why people dislike it. Maybe consider understanding their points

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#268

Post by legutierr »

nicbou wrote: post #254
legutierr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to share control of that data with me—and say that the data represents something valuable (or is itself valuable somehow) and we don’t really trust each other not to tamper with it—then the classic “single server hosting data on the internet” doesn’t really do the trick. If the number of people needing to collaborate is arbitrarily large, and includes people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each…

Does that happen a lot?

Does what happen a lot? People who might not know or trust each other needing to collaborate in updating and maintaining some kind of shared database? Yeah, it happens every day, everywhere, all the time.

In fact, it is exactly what you and I are doing right now. In our case, though, we happen to trust Y Combinator to mediate our exchange.

If our exchange were hosted on a blockchain, we wouldn't need to rely on Y Combinator to keep track of the upvotes and the downvotes, and to preserve our comments in their original form.

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#269

Post by autoexec »

samhw wrote: post #262
MadSudaca wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first version of the internet was called Arpanet and it was apparently released in 1969 according to Wikipedia. It only became widespread in its current incarnation much later. Moreover, there was an immense amount of hype around the internet during the 90s that culminated in the dotcom bubble, wiping out most ventures and leaving only few companies which still exist today. If you ask me, the story of the interne…

Yeah, Arpanet was definitely a wide-area network, but the Internet Protocol was standardised in '82 and that was what created the Internet : a public network that was capable of spanning the globe. (I used the words "became publicly available" advisedly!) Aside from that, I very much agree with you. I think digital cash has great promise - I can't imagine Visa and Mastercard still being a thing in 20-30 years. Some i…

> I can't imagine Visa and Mastercard still being a thing in 20-30 years.

You think the blockchain is going to give you a credit limit?

Re: Welcome to Web 3.0

#270

Post by legutierr »

falcolas wrote: post #229
legutierr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire world is running on either no coordinated mutations, or batched mutations that are spreading over time. Every financial transaction that requires settlement between institutions is a “coordinated mutation.” And while it is true that financial transactions are often synced between institutions via a “batched mutation” approach (especially when coordinating settlement), the delay that batched settlement re…

> the delay that batched settlement represents Bitcoin transactions can take anywhere from 10 minutes to upwards of 16 hours for minuscule volumes of transactions. It's not solving that problem for certain. > extremely costly The cost is built into the transactions. Just like it is with blockchain transactions. Now then, which has higher per transaction costs?

Assessing the future prospects of blockchain technology based on the performance characteristics of Bitcoin is like assessing of the future prospects of general computation based on the performance characteristics of the UNIVAC III.

As a factual matter, settlement costs are not fully embodied by transaction fees, and include such things as, for instance, financing and opportunity costs and the cost of supporting an organization that is more complex than it otherwise needs to be. If settlement delays were entirely eliminated, new business models would emerge that are not even possible under the current regime.

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