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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

#131
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.

I'm pretty bearish on crypto long term, but Vitalik is one of the few crypto people who has actually thought critically about crypto. Most people who try to defend crypto struggle to answer the fourth or fifth why when pressured (if you use the five why philosophy for example).

The problem (like many others) is that Vitalik doesn't necessarily think practically about the situation. For example, how do you explain to my grandma that the fork of BTC is the newly reached consensus or the original one? Vitalik would have an answer for this, but it's not a practical one.

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

#132

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

That’s a bad thing when you’re running programs on it that may have unintentional behavior aka bugs.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=beanstalk-farms-stablecoin-...

Who can afford to keep their money in a ledger that you can’t fix mistakes in? Not these people.

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

#133

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 a feature, not a bug.

It's a misfeature for everyone saying "let's put social media on the blockchain"; good luck telling Disney that when they DMCA one of your users.

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

#134

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

>It might change parts of the world where redundancy and integrity are threats

Sadly it won't. There is nothing about any kind of cryptocurrency that makes it incorruptible or immune to integrity problems. That's more myth-building that I hear quite often but it's not true. The hardest part in any data integrity problem is verifying that the data going into the system was correct in the first place, and blockchains cannot solve this. And actually they make it worse by making it prohibitively expensive to remove incorrect data from the database.

(Note that in general computers and automation cannot solve this because "correct" here refers to whatever the humans designing the system specified according to their human purposes)

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

#136
I love Python, but any definition of 'web3' broad enough to include the things GvR despises also includes many foundational things likely to outlive Python, with greater influence on human welfare, like:

* cryptographically-anchored decentralized identities

* content-addressed publishing

* natively-software-accessible incentive systems engineered with the same rigor, & productivity-multiple upside, as our personal-computers/mobile-devices, world-wide-web, & ecommerce/industrial automation systems

'web3' may even give a new life to the semantic-web vision TbL had under the name "Web 3.0", which "died in a flaming ball of fire" via the dominance of the Web 2.0 platform monopolies.

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

#137
post #123

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…

> 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.

So you don't actually love sentences like that. That's interesting, I don't see it as one of those sentences. I don't know what insight you are missing such that you can't apply it here.

Where would you like to start?

Do you know what a funnel is? Do you know how convoluted they have become as businesses compete for the future illusion of revenue?

Do you use any "web3" services? Is that a farfetched thing to consider for you because you are first waiting to understand why anyone would bother, while ironically limiting your ability to understand what I consider to be a simple sentence?

Maybe something else?

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

#138

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

Also, it runs a 2KHz and needs a constant flow of tons of coal to keep working.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

It's not about technical superiority … I think it's more about morality/ethics: is it _right_ that we should introduce scarcity artificially when it doesn't exist naturally, with the primary outcome being that a small group will exploit it at the cost of many who can't? Is that healthy?

Yes, it is a free market issue, and people will choose what they know, and will choose based on their fears.

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