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An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

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Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#111

Post by luhn »

koboll wrote: post #83
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #73

Not going to lie, I thought and still think that the whole Web 2.0 thing was clever marketing and window dressing on top of fairly pedestrian but useful technologies. It was actually less of seismic shock than mobile first which despite being a bigger shift didn't actually get a number. As far as I'm concerned, Web3 is beyond this. It's what happen when you let Ponzi schemers write the marketing material. I can't for…

>It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. I mean, there's a domain name system. There are various games. There was recently a high-profile crowdfunded attempt to buy an artifact at auction. Feel free to be skeptical of all of these, but what's the point of posting that you "haven't see…

> I mean, there's a domain name system.

You mean ENS, the .eth domain registrar incorporated in the Cayman Islands? It doesn't matter what the blockchain says, my .eth domain is only good as long as the registrar agrees to honor it. Sounds like GoDaddy with more steps.

> There are various games.

What's the point of a distribute ledger that can only be used within a game controlled by a centralized company?

> There was recently a high-profile crowdfunded attempt to buy an artifact at auction.

You mean ConstitutionDOA, which imploded quite spectacularly? People are still wondering if that was a scam or just sheer incompetence.

Honestly it's hilarious that you would bring that up as a flagship example.

> you're unwilling to exert a bare minimum level of effort to research other use cases

I have exerted that effort and more, and still come up short.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#112

Post by kaetemi »

chrisfrantz wrote: post #86
practice9 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain isn't even central in Web3, but it surely helps. Web3 = decentralized identity, full data and connection graph ownership by user, reputation transfer, verification via zero knowledge proofs, support for VR/AR and 3D objects. All of this stuff is either in prototype or draft phase, but it's ok. These things need to be built to stop horror stories on HN about "algorithm justice" and "data kingdoms”: - Google…

Sure, but that’s replaced with user’s being in control of their identity (permanently). Lose your keys, you’re out of luck and locked out of who knows how many applications permanently. It might be fine for us, but just think of the less technically inclined folks in your life. Are they going to remember a 32 word phrase or use a password manager for a key? And what happens if they’re hacked? If google detects your a…

Then they can still use a middleman. The idea is that any data ownership can be transferred. No middleman monopoly or lock-in.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#113

Post by shiohime »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #84

One interesting misrepresentation is this: “ Several innovations in distributed consensus design make Solana’s performance possible.” Solana’s consensus protocol isn’t responsible for its performance, it’s the fact that they mandate higher performing machine SKUs and at least 500Mbs (recommending 1Gbs) internet speeds. They also had to largely centralizing and have around 1000 validators. Ethereum’s fees and performa…

Personally as a user of both ecosystems I strongly prefer the speed of transactions and minimal fees on Solana, despite it being more centralized. I like EVM from a dev standpoint, but for most applications I want to use a financially practical and scalable L1 personally. There are some very solid products on Solana as well. I think that both are gonna be around for a long time regardless.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#114

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #73

Not going to lie, I thought and still think that the whole Web 2.0 thing was clever marketing and window dressing on top of fairly pedestrian but useful technologies. It was actually less of seismic shock than mobile first which despite being a bigger shift didn't actually get a number. As far as I'm concerned, Web3 is beyond this. It's what happen when you let Ponzi schemers write the marketing material. I can't for…

I totally agree with you. The only Blockchain-first technology I got excited about was a system where people can put their free disk space for rent. They get paid in some coin, and that is how the coin gets generated. Sure, you can do it without the Blockchain, but the tech has some real added value.

Alas, for whatever reason, it never got deployed.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#115

Post by zhdc1 »

DreamWalker1 wrote: post #87
v_london wrote: post #16

Thanks for the great article! I wished the section on DeFi addressed the biggest elephant in the room, overcollateralization. A DeFi borrower always needs to lock in more assets as collateral than what they are borrowing, thus defeating the whole purpose for taking a loan aside from financial speculation. And there's no real way to solve it: all mechanisms I've heard of either try to replicate some form of background…

I think DeFi basically justifies the high market cap of ethereum. You have a decentralized exchange working 24h, with basically no downtime. Compare it to normal exchanges: - need to register - need kyc - hard to tranfer LARGE sums cheaply - your bank can block your assets as well as your gouverment - fees are sometimes very high as well. Example tried to convert one currency to an other 1% fees in europe. I think yo…

> your bank can block your assets as well as your government

It wasn't until recently that governments (arguably) became good at using technology to physically regulate banking activity, and it's only because the financial system became centralized enough for them to gain visibility into what was going on. Before then, and - to be honest, even now - government regulation was operationalized through the threat of repercussions and consequences for non-compliance.

Aside from reducing visibility into the transactions themselves, I don't understand what, exactly, DeFi or any of the other acronyms for ledger based systems do to stop this. Does DeFi, crypto, or whatever it's being called at the moment make it easier to avoid government oversight? Sure, but if you are doing something illegal in the process and get caught, there will still be legal repercussions.

> hard to transfer LARGE sums cheaply... fees are sometimes very high as well. Example tried to convert one currency to an other 1% fees in europe. I think you would pay less in a DeFi setup.

Is this still true? I'm pretty (very) sure that Interactive Brokers and other platforms allow for extremely cost effective currency transfers.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#116

Post by PretzelPirate »

shiohime wrote: post #113
PretzelPirate wrote: post #84

One interesting misrepresentation is this: “ Several innovations in distributed consensus design make Solana’s performance possible.” Solana’s consensus protocol isn’t responsible for its performance, it’s the fact that they mandate higher performing machine SKUs and at least 500Mbs (recommending 1Gbs) internet speeds. They also had to largely centralizing and have around 1000 validators. Ethereum’s fees and performa…

Personally as a user of both ecosystems I strongly prefer the speed of transactions and minimal fees on Solana, despite it being more centralized. I like EVM from a dev standpoint, but for most applications I want to use a financially practical and scalable L1 personally. There are some very solid products on Solana as well. I think that both are gonna be around for a long time regardless.

The problem is that Solana is much easier to attack. Imagine running a business on Solana and all an attacker has to do is bribe 700 (or fewer) operators to give your competitors a advantage. Those attackers can’t even be punished by slashing their stake.

Solana is attractive to everyday users because it’s cheap to use, but it’s security isn’t suitable for high-valued assets (even self-verifying the chain is expensive). They sacrificed security and censorship resistance for short-term low fees, but will suffer from the same scalability issues every other L1 will/has hit and will rely on rollups. Rollups with a highly-centralized base layer aren’t suitable. Even the ZKSync team has tweeted that using ZKSync on top of Solana is more secure than using Solana itself because the zero-knowledge proof will be validated by Ethereum.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#117

Post by wpietri »

koboll wrote: post #83
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #73

Not going to lie, I thought and still think that the whole Web 2.0 thing was clever marketing and window dressing on top of fairly pedestrian but useful technologies. It was actually less of seismic shock than mobile first which despite being a bigger shift didn't actually get a number. As far as I'm concerned, Web3 is beyond this. It's what happen when you let Ponzi schemers write the marketing material. I can't for…

>It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state. I mean, there's a domain name system. There are various games. There was recently a high-profile crowdfunded attempt to buy an artifact at auction. Feel free to be skeptical of all of these, but what's the point of posting that you "haven't see…

Please consider that they have seen those things. Is there any of those that couldn't be done without a blockchain? Indeed, wouldn't have been done better without a blockchain?

The "buy an artifact" thing ended up a total mess. To the extent any true distributed blockchain was used, it didn't help anything: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb8av/constitutiondao-after...

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#118

Post by Vetch »

DantesKite wrote: post #77
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #73

Not going to lie, I thought and still think that the whole Web 2.0 thing was clever marketing and window dressing on top of fairly pedestrian but useful technologies. It was actually less of seismic shock than mobile first which despite being a bigger shift didn't actually get a number. As far as I'm concerned, Web3 is beyond this. It's what happen when you let Ponzi schemers write the marketing material. I can't for…

Riding off a wave of addicts and their enthusiasm for gambling. Meanwhile, Cash App, Apple Pay, and Stripe have done more for fintech in the past month than all other cryptocurrency technologies combined in the last decade.

Where I live none of those services are available but cryptocurrency tech is.

Connecting to services like patreon or getting small amounts for games on itch.io are headache inducing high friction activities involving several extra third party services that are barely worth the effort. The attached risk is hard to state as better given all the fly by night operations in the local finance industry.

Even if very few people use crypto, it's orders of magnitude less stress to put up a link to a wallet for donations on say a page with a visual demo on how linear acceleration and light bending motivate gravity.

It's instrumental in financing sci-hub, which is also vital here.

You probably live in a country where central institutions are trusted. Probably without overwhelming levels of corruption actively antagonistic to citizens, or double digit inflation, or very high unemployment rates and a general lack of opportunity.

I don't think cryptocurrencies are some magical cure and can't say they will be part of a solution concept. Neither do I care for gambling and scummy activity on it. For some of us it isn't about inflation hedging (although it has a useful role if you can anticipate impending economic collapse) or anti-fiat or overthrowing governments.

It's about imagining a network of transactions where anyone can participate regardless of their country of birth, without a central synchronizing consensus mechanism and a strongly tamper resistant storage useful in coordinating economic activity. Blockchain free decentralized tech are preferable where possible but there are some things only blockchain structures (or even worse scaling massive communication overhead systems) can do.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#119

Post by drdeca »

necubi wrote: post #92
practice9 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain isn't even central in Web3, but it surely helps. Web3 = decentralized identity, full data and connection graph ownership by user, reputation transfer, verification via zero knowledge proofs, support for VR/AR and 3D objects. All of this stuff is either in prototype or draft phase, but it's ok. These things need to be built to stop horror stories on HN about "algorithm justice" and "data kingdoms”: - Google…

And that's an improvement how? At least with Google there's a chance you'll be able to get your account back. If it's "decentralized" (which in crypto land is apparently synonymous with "run by a cabal of miners in China") and you lose your private key, you're completely out of luck.

If it isn't relying on a blockchain thing, and it's based on you setting up a private key, there's no "run by a cabal of miners in China" issue.

And how is "google accidentally bans your account" and "you lose your private key" comparable anyway? In the first case, it isn't under your control, but under the control of some large organization, and in the second case it is because you messed up.

In addition, there are mechanisms being worked on (often in the context of on-blockchain stuff, but I don't see this as fundamentally necessary to it) for facilitating like, "I trust these people to authenticate whether someone is me, in the case that I lose my private key", in order to establish that a new key still corresponds to the same person.

Like, I'm less enthusiastic about this kind of thing than I have been in the past (and I've never spent money on it), but your criticism doesn't seem to be engaging in the ideas really.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#120

Post by shiohime »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #116
shiohime wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally as a user of both ecosystems I strongly prefer the speed of transactions and minimal fees on Solana, despite it being more centralized. I like EVM from a dev standpoint, but for most applications I want to use a financially practical and scalable L1 personally. There are some very solid products on Solana as well. I think that both are gonna be around for a long time regardless.

The problem is that Solana is much easier to attack. Imagine running a business on Solana and all an attacker has to do is bribe 700 (or fewer) operators to give your competitors a advantage. Those attackers can’t even be punished by slashing their stake. Solana is attractive to everyday users because it’s cheap to use, but it’s security isn’t suitable for high-valued assets (even self-verifying the chain is expensiv…

If you don't mind me asking, do you know of any good resources for learning more about the scalability solutions of Solana vs Ethereum? I've only been in the space for about 6 months as an engineer and almost every document I've read in regards to Solana scaling are sure that they will not encounter the same scalability issues that ETH has had. However, they are direct competitors so I wonder how biased these claims are sometimes, from both perspectives.
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