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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

#141

Post by DreamWalker1 »

skybrian wrote: post #126
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…

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.

I mean 24-7 comes for free. Security comes in some way for free as well. Large amount: its relative, so even for 10k USD you would pay 100 USD as fee. You get similar fees for purchasing stocks and many have more then 100k in equity. So it isn't really a small niche. Rather a huge market that may get more simple and cheap through DeFi.

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

#142

Post by shp0ngle »

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…

web3 is whatever you want it to be

They call it "web3" when it's not web, as in, world wide web... so it really means nothing.

There is nothing there. It's all just random imagination an ponzi schemes. Good luck getting anything useful out of this.

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

#143

Post by shepardrtc »

uncomputation wrote: post #125
aspenmayer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you want something similar to Filecoin that is live and in use, check out http://siasky.net/

Siacoin has been around for a while and approaches things differently. Plus its already being used by people.

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

#144

Post by the_snooze »

wpietri wrote: post #122
KallDrexx wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At its heart, the strongest claim blockchain technology offers is pretty good data consistency assurances between nodes that don't trust one another. I guess that's kind of interesting as a technical demonstration, but it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that. This has been around and under continuous development since 2008, and still no actual use case.

It seems like the space is full of hype-bro crooks and hype-bro dupes who feed off one another, warping a niche technical toy into whatever get-rich-quick revolutionary fantasy they want.

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

#145

Post by nemo44x »

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…

Why wouldn’t this primitive thing we call the web have massive and frequent revolutions? You can’t discern the value but creators and their consumers will and will again.

Web 2 is distinct from Web (AJAX, SaaS. Cloud, Mobile). I’m sort of shocked it’s even brought up as a fuzzy distinction.

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

#146

Post by skybrian »

DreamWalker1 wrote: post #141
skybrian wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean 24-7 comes for free. Security comes in some way for free as well. Large amount: its relative, so even for 10k USD you would pay 100 USD as fee. You get similar fees for purchasing stocks and many have more then 100k in equity. So it isn't really a small niche. Rather a huge market that may get more simple and cheap through DeFi.

The major brokerages have let you buy and sell stocks for free for a couple years now. (Not just Robinhood, though they started it.)

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

#147

Post by shiohime »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #135
shiohime wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here is a great article to read on why layer1 blockchain scalability isn’t sustainable long-term (for any layer 1): https://polynya.medium.com/why-rollups-data-shards-are-the-o... When reading about competing blockchains, it’s important to figure out if someone you’re reading values money or decentralization (and therefore individual’s digital autonomy once we enter the Metaverse). Polynya (Liberosist on Reddit) is i…

Thanks for sharing that article and for the insight, I appreciate it! I'm trying to learn the pros and cons of a lot of chains and agree that a lot of articles come across as marketing focused, so it's been hard for me to learn about each chain other than being a user and working with each chain creating simple dapps or other projects.

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

#148

Post by euske »

Every time I read about decentralization, I remember this episode from NPR Planet Money (one of the best podcasts, btw). It's about Libertarian Summer Camp where they tried to spend a day without fiat money. Gold standard everything. Turned out it's actually pretty hard because you have to get gold, and make sure the gold isn't fake, all by yourself. You bought a hotdog with the gold and now you have to worry about if it contains anything FDA-banned substances, etc etc.

cf. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/06/28/534735727/epis...

Being decentralized means that all the efforts that a central government is currently taking will be distributed to everyone, and now everyone has to worry about things that were taken granted before: basic safety, security and trust. This is why there aren't many decentralized systems that caught on because their usability is pretty bad for most people.

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

#149

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

Web3 requires retrofitting the web to use blockchain technologies to do what the web can mostly do already.

In "Blockchains Are a Bad Idea", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin:

See his presentation here: https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI

1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions.

2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections.

3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.

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