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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

#121

Post by aspenmayer »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #114
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.

It’s possible you’re thinking of Chia, IPFS, or FileCoin, all of which are “live” and “deployed” currently.

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

#122

Post by wpietri »

KallDrexx wrote: post #104
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…

Can you explain how web3 solves any of your bullets? If you are trying to say that web3 will prevent platform holders from banning you from their platform, then good luck with that. Any platform can and will ban you and have complete control over their platform. Thinking web3 is going to prevent that is naive for many many reasons. If Facebook bans me then web3 isn't going to allow me to post on Facebook still. Same…

This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain. But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey.

When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then asked, "Why would something that is definitionally a central authority need a trustless, distributed system?" They blathered and huffed for a while, but could never answer the question. They walked away thinking I was clearly not bright enough to see how it was all going to change.

A couple years later a friend asked me to set down with somebody who wanted to launch a startup. Their customers were companies who wanted employees to be able to safely report sexual harassment and other misbehavior. They had a few existing competitors, so I asked what made this new company different. The would-be founder explained that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain. I asked further, and it turned out that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain internally. So basically a database with extra steps. I pointed out that assault reporters wouldn't be able to see any difference; from the user perspective, all the companies in the market were just saying, "trust us, we definitely won't tell the people paying us anything". The entrepreneur was convinced that it really was different, but if so they couldn't make it clear to me.

So now we've had, what, 6 or 7 years where [jazz hands] blockchain was going to revolutionize things and it hasn't made a practical dent in any real industry. Originally I too was willing to call that naive, but it seems an awfully long time to accidentally maintain such perfect innocence.

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

#123

Post by wpietri »

Vetch wrote: post #118
DantesKite wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

Your poetic invocation of the theoretical glorious potential of crypto aside, what country do you live in?

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

#124

Post by skybrian »

thebean11 wrote: post #58
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…

Aren’t mortgages actually also examples of over collateralized loans? You borrow 80% of the homes value, and use the entire home as collateral.

A more important limitation for defi loans is that nothing other than blockchain assets can be used as collateral. You can't use the loan to buy anything real without having enough money to buy it already.

A mortgage lets you buy and live in a house even if you don't have enough money to buy the house.

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

#125

Post by uncomputation »

aspenmayer wrote: post #121
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s possible you’re thinking of Chia, IPFS, or FileCoin, all of which are “live” and “deployed” currently.

Filecoin is “live” only technically. There is no way for individuals to contribute, which seems to be intentional as the leadership is looking for corporate support first. It currently has no real use cases. I say this as someone who is also excited by the idea.

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

#126

Post by skybrian »

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…

I have trouble imagining who might want to do this. It seems like a really small niche? Normal people don't need to trade or move large sums of money 24-7. An ATM and/or credit card is good enough.

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

#127

Post by wyck »

Animats wrote: post #55
manbart wrote: post #19

‘Web3’ is just new window dressing on the same old crypto casino. “Get rich quick!” is the selling point

Exactly. If Bitcoin had not gone "to the moon", all of this would be a tiny niche, like Chaum's DigiCash was. The problem is all the junk riding Bitcoin's coattails. At some point, probably soon, the bottom will fall out of at least part of this. NFTs are already crashing. That's not too visible, because there's no "market price" across different items. But you can look at sales on OpenSea, and notice that the resale…

Chaum works on https://xx-coin.io/ which has some interesting tech, and no it's not about going to the moon.

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

#128

Post by aspenmayer »

frazbin wrote: post #63
jude- wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d put that in the category of code that really could benefit from carefully controlled upgradability. First, if you're saying that you need a way to upgrade your money-managing code periodically because you will likely ship versions of it with show-stopping bugs (such as those that enable the destruction or theft of the users' funds), then why should I trust that you will ship flawless code for upgrades? Second,…

> just deploy a new version of the smart contract, and ask users to use that one instead. If it gets confirmed, then an honest majority of block producers will ensure that it stays confirmed. I can't see how the operation you describe here is defined or possible for any blockchain that hosts more than one smart contract. Just for a start, how do you decide whether to include a smart contract upgrade that the majority…

Uniswap comes to mind. V2 is superseded by V3, and V3 is the default option of the web UI, but you can still use V2. There are no plans to sunset V2, and I’m not certain that V2 could be terminated at this point, as the signing keys were burned IIUC.

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

#129

Post by DreamWalker1 »

zhdc1 wrote: post #115
DreamWalker1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repe…

1% is true, for a lot of banks in my country. IB may be an exception, without going into details I had trouble with their kyc.

DeFi is a buzz word. Lets take Uniswap. You get direct access to an exchange. It works 100% of the time. You pay the same fees as everybody else. Traditional exchanges: try to get the same fees as a HFT shops. Yeah forget it. Even through IB you don't get direct participation on the exchange. So in my perspective the traditional system is kind of rigged in the way how different actors are able to participate. At least at the moment DeFi is fair in this regard. Also you get full access to the assets you are holding without any third party..

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

#130

Post by 7307d55853ee6b9 »

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…

> unwilling to exert a bare minimum level of effort to research other use cases?

What I'm unwilling to do is wade through the mountains of scams and get-rich-quick schemes to find novel applications of a distributed ledger. Games? Seriously? Show me a game that isn't just a vehicle for boosting the trade volume of some shitcoin.

It's all dystopian tech bro capitalism to me.

> There was recently a high-profile crowdfunded attempt to buy an artifact at auction. Feel free to be skeptical of all of these, but

Yeah, that one where half the people who want a refund will lose a significant chunk, if not all, of their donation in fees. I find it absolutely laughable that with all of the fancy "smart contract" tech out there someone couldn't figure how to hold these donations in cryptographic escrow and return them without a huge penalty if the transaction were to fall through. It's hard to feel bad for those who put money in. It should all be automated and foolproof, and I thought that was the point.

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