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Web 3.0 – The Great Con

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Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#161

Post by bertman »

zeroclip wrote: post #154

This post is mostly about Bitcoin and Proof of Work. Currently "Web3" tech is being built on Ethereum, Proof of Stake, zero-knowledge proofs, rollup sequencers, data availability sampling, and multi-party computation. The recent advances are not like the earliest iterations; a harsh critique of Bitcoin is not equivalent to the harsh critique of Web3. The post is riddled with fallacies. For example: > Imagine, for exa…

>while meeting the promised goals: a set of trustless, permissionless, and decentralized tools for transferring and owning value on the internet.

I'm sorry, I know this isn't reddit, but: fucking lol.

What do you even mean? What does "owning value on the internet" mean? This is exactly the kind of handwaving the article is about.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#162

Post by JohnFen »

ThomPete wrote: post #97
bebtrrr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1% pure gold Exactly which part of Web3 are you referring to here? I've not seen anything that matches your assessment.

This is the thing. You either understand it or you don't. I can get you to see it. I don't have to, in the future it will be just there. Web3 is a special case of wild wild west in a market with way too much money inflating it all, but the fundamental principles about having an open database accessible to everyone is here to stay. The stock market is down up to 90% in some cases. You need to think about this when som…

> I've just seen this so many times before and I can personally see the use cases, they are just not what most people think they are.

Then what are they?

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#163

Post by illiac786 »

bertman wrote: post #159
illiac786 wrote: post #157

I agree with the bottom line, but the form, why does the author have to exaggerate like this? Cryptocurrencies are not "useless except for criminals"... Blockchain is also not useless. It's just much less useful than the hype makes it out to be. Making absolute statements like this isn't helpful, it makes it easy to demolish the argument for the actual scammers.

>Cryptocurrencies are not "useless except for criminals"... Blockchain is also not useless. You say this, and yet fail to mention a legitimate use case, which is exactly what a big part of the article is about.

I thought that was obvious, apologies: anonymous payments.

Do you also require an example of why anonymous payments are useful to non-criminals?

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#164

Post by ethanbond »

illiac786 wrote: post #163
bertman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cryptocurrencies are not "useless except for criminals"... Blockchain is also not useless. You say this, and yet fail to mention a legitimate use case, which is exactly what a big part of the article is about.

I thought that was obvious, apologies: anonymous payments. Do you also require an example of why anonymous payments are useful to non-criminals?

But actually conducting an anonymous payment, even on a blockchain, is not straightforward at all, and it’s almost certainly a bad idea to do so on a permanent public ledger.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#165

Post by illiac786 »

ethanbond wrote: post #164
illiac786 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was obvious, apologies: anonymous payments. Do you also require an example of why anonymous payments are useful to non-criminals?

But actually conducting an anonymous payment, even on a blockchain, is not straightforward at all, and it’s almost certainly a bad idea to do so on a permanent public ledger.

Well I am not super savvy and I managed to use MobileCoin in Signal...

What other mean of online anonymous payments exist? I'm not very up to date on this front.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#166

Post by ethanbond »

jeroenhd wrote: post #57
Gigachad wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin advocates are angry about the fact that central banks create and destroy money regularly to control the market. And usually that there is some big doomsday financial event coming up that only “hard money” like bitcoin can avoid.

I always wonder how crypto doomsayers are going to pay the power bills keeping their network alive once the financial doomsday finally arrives. If everything goes tits up as badly as they say, I wouldn't rely on digital currencies to still be viable, especially with the incredible energy and hardware costs associated with proof of work blockchains. Blockchain may be a good way to hide money (i.e. in a country with ru…

You just put your InternetCoins on a thumb drive, label it with the amount (and the most recent known conversion rate) and then you try to pawn it off at the apocalypse general store by just saying “trust me as soon as the internet starts working again you’ll be super rich.”

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#167

Post by ethanbond »

illiac786 wrote: post #165
ethanbond wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But actually conducting an anonymous payment, even on a blockchain, is not straightforward at all, and it’s almost certainly a bad idea to do so on a permanent public ledger.

Well I am not super savvy and I managed to use MobileCoin in Signal... What other mean of online anonymous payments exist? I'm not very up to date on this front.

Neat! I haven’t tried that, and someone above said Monero is actually pretty easy. But people imagine e.g. Bitcoin transactions to be anonymous (they’re not), and zcash is (last I saw) the most private option but also (last I saw) it was extremely nontrivial to actually set up a transaction.

Edit: Going through MobileCoin info it’s not super clear to me how you deposit/withdraw currency but keep in mind that this is historically a plenty sufficient amount of information to put your entire transaction’s privacy at risk (from certain adversaries anyway). I.e. if you are suspected of a crime but the only info available to prosecutors is you deposited $N and then your alleged conspirator withdrew $N out the other end, the fact the transaction itself was private is not going to save you.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#168

Post by afiori »

hrbf wrote: post #158
orwin wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of good ideas in the space. Even NFTs are a good idea overall, when you remove the human greed part. But you're totally right, only monero have a 'legitimate' usecase (bypass the taxation laws).

> when you remove the human greed part So they are theoretically a good idea with no practical application in the real world.

The problem with good applications of NFTs is that we still do not know what an NFT is.

In particular there are a lot of variables around reselling restrictions, profit sharing, meaningful ownership, copyright, etc.

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#169

Post by jiggawatts »

djbusby wrote: post #137
jiggawatts wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you're talking about something totally unrelated with the same acronym. DID is absolutely, first-and-foremost, about individual personal identity. One of the use-cases listed is that it could be used as a replacement for ID cards such as drivers licenses, passports, etc...

I'm talking about https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ "A DID refers to any subject (e.g., a person, organization, thing, data model, abstract entity, etc.) as determined by the controller of the DID." So, is for anything (where persons are in the set of anything)

The first item in that list is "a person".

Re: Web 3.0 – The Great Con

#170

Post by jiggawatts »

lioeters wrote: post #144
jiggawatts wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example of this is Azure jumping on board the Distributed Identity (DID) bandwagon. The only reason DID exists is to push crypto. Nobody wants their identity to be put on a public ledger. That's has identity theft built-in as a "feature"!

It's the first I've heard of it, but apparently DID (W3C Decentralized Identifiers) is an underlying standard that's separate from what Microsoft is building on top of it. > 2. Trust System. In order to be able to resolve DID documents, DIDs are typically recorded on an underlying network of some kind that represents a trust system. Microsoft currently supports two trust systems, which are: > - ION (Identity Overlay…

If you read through the DID/ION, etc... standards, you'll quickly notice the Blockchain / crypto pedigree once you start looking for the keywords.

"Trustless", "decentralized", "ledger", etc... all make a regular appearance.

> Introduction to Microsoft Entra Verified ID

In a similar discussion I tried to politely make the point that despite over two decades of "identity" experience under my belt, I have literally no clue what any of this technical gibberish is trying to solve (other than making crypto a mainstream thing).

I've read the entire Entra document. I've read most of the backing standards papers, like ION.

It's wall-to-wall gibberish.

I won't go through the criticism in detail, but let's just look at the the practical example shown in this section: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/ver...

What. The. Eff?

Why would anyone solve this problem with blockchain!? Or "distributed" anything?

This is a Solved Problem with vastly simpler and more direct (not distributed) solutions.

For example, similar discounts are offered to students and education staff by various shops. They simply ask students to sign up with an email that has an ".edu" or similar suffix.

For this specific example, the shop could simply use any identifier that is PKI-signed by the employer! A simple 2D barcode would do, shown via a simple phone app. Literally just a public key and a barcode. No ledgers, IPFS, wallets, distributed this, trustless that.

A printout on dead trees would suffice.

This all feels like boiling the ocean to make a crypto pot of tea.

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