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

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

#121

Post by hervature »

gotaquestion wrote: post #61
throwaway82652 wrote: post #29

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.

Building on this, what does that tell you about the state of crypto when the coins that actually have libertarian values built into them (Zcash and monero) have not exploded in value? That crypto is generally dominated by marketers and pump and dumps.

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

#122

Post by sli »

etchalon wrote: post #30
mediocregopher wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's what web3 is, that's just one direction some are taking it. Web3 is a move away from centralized platforms to ones which are either decentralized or more directly controlled by users (self-hosted, federated). > Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes. I don't understand this part. In pr…

We can have self-hosted, federated web sites with Web 1.0 technology.

I used to use this obscure little piece of software for that called Apache. Maybe y'all have heard of it. Though I think it's getting some competition from this unknown little project called nginx. Really looking forward to that stuff becoming mainstream, it'll be revolutionary.

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

#123

Post by spyspy »

vmception wrote: post #17

The original tweet was asking for "any future of python in web3 domain? specific in @ethereum @solana" Web3.js - the 7 year old library for communicating with any EVM has an actively maintained and fully featured python version. Solana.py is available for the Solana ecosystem These libraries typically make it very easy to connect to the nearest node, which you can treat as pay-once-read-forever compute instances. Whe…

> You can build lucrative businesses around the observation that long winded web 2.0 funnels have been shorted down to a single call to action that in itself is a payment, while again completely ignoring the ethos and ideology of the users and enthusiasts.

Sidebar: I love sentences like this that go on and on but say literally nothing. Nothing in the preceding or following context gives it any clarity. It feels like people are still trying to pad their college essays long since graduating.

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

#124

Post by dekhn »

Barrin92 wrote: post #53
dekhn wrote: post #3

My question is why Y Combinator funded anything related to web3 and why it seems to defend these ideas when they are attacked on HN.

Personal theory is that it's becoming obvious that the VC model is very limited, i.e. it largely works in sectors where you rapidly scale up a product with zero marginal costs of production which is pretty much only software, and they've run out of social networks to fund. In other sectors be it healthcare, construction, anything involving people or the 'world of atoms' as Thiel liked to put it things aren't going th…

when I worked at a VC (well, volunteered) I recall the tech investors looking at the health investors and boggling. "You ... want ... us ... to ... do ... what?" "Invest in a company and wait 20 years for it to go out of business? hell no, we invest in 10 companies, 9 fail and 1 makes a billion in their first year"

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

#125

Post by mcintyre1994 »

smt88 wrote: post #74
labrador wrote: post #60

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.

> For design reasons, no one can delete anything from it. This is factually wrong. 50+% of those miners could collude (or secretly be the same person) and change anything in the database. You would have no warning before this happened.

That's incorrect, you can't "change anything in the database" with a 51% attack. You can block transactions from being processed, reorder new transactions, and reverse your own (but not others) transactions to double spend. You can't just go arbitrarily deleting previous transactions, or modifying balances.

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

#126

Post by cableshaft »

ipaddr wrote: post #47
vmception wrote: post #17

The original tweet was asking for "any future of python in web3 domain? specific in @ethereum @solana" Web3.js - the 7 year old library for communicating with any EVM has an actively maintained and fully featured python version. Solana.py is available for the Solana ecosystem These libraries typically make it very easy to connect to the nearest node, which you can treat as pay-once-read-forever compute instances. Whe…

Pay once read forever is the latest scam. Pay once read until it stops working.

No different than any Web 2.0 website there. Except in Web 2.0 it's whenever the business decides to stop paying to keep the servers going and supporting that content (or until they go out of business), whereas for 3.0 it's when the whole network goes down, not a particular company.

Happens all the time. Nintendo announced they're shutting off their Wii U and 3DS eShops next March, for example. At that point players are on their own to hack their hardware so they can make backups.

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

#127

Post by awr »

I'm skeptical about the ecosystem as a whole, despite running a project myself, but a distinction needs to be made between web3 as a technology and web3 in its current iteration.

I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO). Concretely, if I can jump onto a website and consume content without having to go through the hassle of signing up to a monthly subscription and entering my credit card details, that's a step change improvement in my enjoyment of the web. Want to read a particularly interesting paywalled news article? Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on.

The other interesting application are the technological innovations brought on by smart contracts. Blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps. Instead of having to write a lambda on AWS, I can just submit a smart contract to the blockchain. Provided it's a read only use case, I pay once and can freely call the contract for as long as the network exists.

This might seem uninteresting but as the contract gives access to the current state of the blockchain, there are interesting applications that you can build on top of this [1], particularly if you combine it with oracles that give access to real world data.

Crypto as a financial revolution seems incredibly contrived but web3 as a tool has potential merit. Whether web3 is the best solution to such problems is a question worth exploring.

[1]. I use it to determine whether crypto tokens are honeypots or not by simulating a buy and sell.

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

#128

Post by reducesuffering »

akavi wrote: post #83
zelag wrote: 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.

Same thoughts but also Sam Bankman-Fried, although his is better understood as likely “billion $ grifting is worth it if it’s used to benefit humankind more than it harms”

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

#129

Post by spyspy »

blenderdt wrote: post #114
labrador wrote: post #60

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.

The link doesn't work and there's no record of what the image was on the chain. But believe me it was cool.

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

#130

Post by jcbrand »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #117
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

Hashing power is not the only line of defence. The (non-mining) nodes have the ability to reject blocks that they don't consider legitimate.

That's why it's important to the Bitcoin community that the average person can run a full node and that as many people as possible also do so.

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