Live data from Hacker News

Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

twitter.com

111–120 of 316 posts

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency is not that, because it is not anonymous nor is it a cash replacement. I have sympathy for those folks who were led to believe those things, it's not their fault.

Small correction: some cryptos are anonymous, Zcash and monero for example. Bitcoin and ether are not, and once those have been rolled into something like the Winklevoss's Gemini, it is harder to follow them publicly.

But that's not true, even those privacycoins are still technically pseudonymous because transactions are still done by wallet ID. This fundamentally can't be fixed because otherwise you can't have something like a wallet that stores a balance which is assigned to you and only you.

Also I would like to point out that the idea you can ever be fully anonymous on the internet is a lot of bunk. Regardless of what kind of cryptography you use or how many obfuscation layers you put things through you're still generating a great deal of identifying data just by accessing other servers. This is a problem I have with most of the marketing behind any privacy technology, it's not just these privacycoins that are making false promises.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#112
post #101
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think there's any value in an open source system that proves scarcity in a digital universe?

Imagine you live in a country with abundant fresh water. You can just drink from a spring at every corner. A group of foreign investors comes in. “It’s shocking how the market for bottled water is completely inexistant here. Don’t worry, we’re going to teach you how to make money selling imported water! First thing, we’ll dynamite those springs that disturb the market…” Do you welcome these business gurus and their s…

Did...you just describe Nestle?

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#113
post #83
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like Ari Juels, Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin aren't intelligent to you?

Vitalik's the only person in the entire crypto space that gives me pause about my belief crypto is 90% a mixture of useless and fraudulent. He's clearly much more intelligent than me and much more thoughtful, and has come to the opposite conclusions about the topic. I really don't know how to square that with basically everyone else in the space being clearly morons or hucksters.

Smart as he is, Vitalik also has a massive financial interest in the conclusions he's reached being the correct one, which can lead to all sorts of biases.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#114

I just created the worlds slowest database. People will have to pay many dollars to specialists called "miners" to update it. For design reasons, no one can delete anything from it. It's going to change the world.

I just purchased the ownership of a crappy AI generated image for $$$. I am glad the ownership is now stored in your database because I think I can sell the ownership for $$$$.

By the way, do you know how I can view the image? The link doesn't work anymore.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#115
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think there's any value in an open source system that proves scarcity in a digital universe?

Absolutely not. Most of the appeal of digital comes from the lack of scarcity. Artificially introducing faux-scarcity is asinine.

the market has chosen faux-scarcity many many many times over (at least) hundreds of years. we live in a market based economy, the market doesn't care that your MySQL database can do it, the market is saying "I'll pay you to write to a public access database you set up, so quit with this Betamax technical superiority stuff, we don't care."

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#116
post #12
post #9

The interesting thing about crypto to me is how there seems to be a deep divide among very smart people, some who think it's the greatest thing ever and some who think it's a fraud. I can't remember when there's ever been such a Bigendian-scale dispute in technology before. Can you?

Where is the divide? Crypto is 99% full of hucksters, and the remaining 1% are the sorry saps. The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it. Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs. In ot…

> Crypto is 99% full of hucksters, and the remaining 1% are the sorry saps.

> The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it.

"political tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent – a 1/10^45 extent, I will never tire of hammering in – based on their implicit tribal characteristics." - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

> Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs.

Replace "risk taking" with "compliance" for outgroup point of view. (Being "into it" then meaning heavy investment into being opposed to cryptocurrency.)

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#117

I just created the worlds slowest database. People will have to pay many dollars to specialists called "miners" to update it. For design reasons, no one can delete anything from it. It's going to change the world.

I just created the world's most redundant and incorruptible database. People will have to pay many dollars to specialists called "miners" to add rows. For integrity reasons, no one can delete anything from it. It might change parts of the world where redundancy and integrity are threats to very powerful people who want to control transactions and corresponding data. -- Fixed it for you

> threats to very powerful people

Same people who also control the hash rate? :)

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#118
1) The governance problems of private money are incompatible with democracy and the rule of law.

2) There are irremovable privacy, scalability, and recentralization contradictions at the core of any and all permissionless blockchain solutions.

3) There are vast negative externalities that every blockchain-based investment inevitably entails.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#119
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of storage is not unlimited. The amount of goodwill from the nodes is not unlimited. The value of ethereum is not unlimited. The amount of reads can easily be “played with”

Thanks for coming to this thread, I'm curious what the other person meant though. Yes, there is a stack and heap limiting the amount of resources that a command can use. So what? Design your application with that limitation in mind. Focus on what you can control, its a one-step one-click funnel that is inherently a payment and insatiable demand right now from the users. A Web 2.0 dream, I've sat through so many usele…

I didn’t understand you.

But, imagine a DDOS attack on the nodes serving the blockchain. I don’t see why “pay once read forever” works financially.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#120
post #9

The interesting thing about crypto to me is how there seems to be a deep divide among very smart people, some who think it's the greatest thing ever and some who think it's a fraud. I can't remember when there's ever been such a Bigendian-scale dispute in technology before. Can you?

To its credit, Bitcoin and some of the other crypto implementations are very technically-clever Harder Drives ( http://tom7.org/papers/murphy2022harder.pdf ). And that will attract folks who like puzzles for puzzle's sake.

"Bitcoin would make a solid SIGBOVIK paper" is honestly one of the greatest put downs I've ever read on the topic.
Post reply on HN