Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

But, aren't you folks web2?

nadh.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 191 posts

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#161

Post by hocuspocus »

sdiacom wrote: post #151
hocuspocus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't really worry about people with a college degree. At one point or another you remember you classes on distributed systems and you realize the entire space is bullshit. I agree we'll see bootcamp grads and other people from non-traditional backgrounds get burned but it also gives them opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise, so I'm not sure it's a net negative overall. The much bigger issue lies within p…

I'm not so sure about this. I don't have a college degree, but I don't think the issue with crypto/defi/web3 is a lack of understanding of distributed systems or cryptography. I'd say they're doing alright in the purely technical aspects, although I'm nowhere near an expert. Rather, I think the fault lies in their understanding of economic and societal concepts: money, debt, what it means to own something. I think th…

You need a reasonably good understanding of the technology to know what it does, what it cannot do, and most importantly, where it's useless.

Even if you know very little about the business domain and all its social/societal/political aspects (and I perfectly agree, most of these problems don't have technical solutions) the space is filled with charlatans who don't even understand what a blockchain is.

You'll see plenty of people pushing blockchains where they literally want a centralized DB with a PKI, since they don't need (and don't want) a trustless permissionless system.

You also see blockchains pushed in situations where the weakest link is the human interface that inputs data. Yet the oracle problem gets swept under the rug.

Finally you see vaporware projects that go against 40+ years of research in distributed consensus.

I need to give credit to Bitcoin maximalists, some of them are very vocal about the non-sensical blockchain solutionism.

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#162

Post by AlexandrB »

"Wow you guys are still doing $old_marketing_buzzword? Why aren't you doing $new_marketing_buzzword."

This is nothing new. The same played out with agile/waterfall, rails/django/node/whatever, and many other technologies. The key takeaway is that young people are suggestible and fall for marketing.

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#163

Post by searchableguy »

dmitriid wrote: post #147
searchableguy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you deal with domain squatting or trademark violation? In practice, it rarely works. Only big corporations have money to actually sue and win these cases. They usually prefer to pay however. Same with regards to other reasons people give for lack of adoption of crypto alternative. For example, lack of reversal and dispute handling is cited as the major reason why crypto currency isn't used for payments. That…

> UPI in India does not have ability to reverse transactions either. So does not countless p2p payment systems. UPI alone processes billions of transactions weekly. There's a dispute mechanism which will eventually be escalated to a bank which does have the power to revert transcations https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/dispute-redressal-mec... Same with "countless p2p systems" because the majority of them are ju…

There's very limited area where banks can refund the transaction where they are at fault. It is not reversal.

For reversing, they have to contact the receiving bank and person to send back the money which in case of scam is low. You can do that with crypto too. Contact the person and ask them to send the money back.

You also need police report and the sum has to be big enough for them to bother.

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#164

Post by dmitriid »

searchableguy wrote: post #163
dmitriid wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UPI in India does not have ability to reverse transactions either. So does not countless p2p payment systems. UPI alone processes billions of transactions weekly. There's a dispute mechanism which will eventually be escalated to a bank which does have the power to revert transcations https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/dispute-redressal-mec... Same with "countless p2p systems" because the majority of them are ju…

There's very limited area where banks can refund the transaction where they are at fault. It is not reversal. For reversing, they have to contact the receiving bank and person to send back the money which in case of scam is low. You can do that with crypto too. Contact the person and ask them to send the money back. You also need police report and the sum has to be big enough for them to bother.

> There's very limited area where banks can refund the transaction where they are at fault. It is not reversal.

If we're talking in general, no, banks can revert transactions when you pay for something and that turns out to be a scam, or goods/services are not delivered.

I don't know how it works in the case of P2P transactions, but I expect many of the protections to still apply.

> For reversing, they have to contact the receiving bank and person to send back the money

> You can do that with crypto too. Contact the person

There's a big difference between a bank contacting another bank to revert an incorrect or frauduent transaction, and trying to contact a stranger to send your money back.

> You also need police report and the sum has to be big enough for them to bother.

Compare this to crypto where if your money's gone, your money's gone, regardless of the sum or the intent.

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#165

Post by searchableguy »

dmitriid wrote: post #164
searchableguy wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's very limited area where banks can refund the transaction where they are at fault. It is not reversal. For reversing, they have to contact the receiving bank and person to send back the money which in case of scam is low. You can do that with crypto too. Contact the person and ask them to send the money back. You also need police report and the sum has to be big enough for them to bother.

> There's very limited area where banks can refund the transaction where they are at fault. It is not reversal. If we're talking in general, no, banks can revert transactions when you pay for something and that turns out to be a scam, or goods/services are not delivered. I don't know how it works in the case of P2P transactions, but I expect many of the protections to still apply. > For reversing, they have to contac…

The topic was UPI. Not general.

You can ask bank to reverse card transaction and certain form of transfers but for UPI, there is no automatic reversal. Your bank needs to contact other bank after receiving police report to freeze the account and then sort it out. The scammer will take out the money before that or move it.

It is not reversal and it is not an option in practice unless the amount is very big which is rare for P2P. There is an upper limit on transactions enforced on UPI.

The point still stands that reversal is not a significant problem for adoption when it's such as an edge case. UPI added dispute handling standard process only after it was processing more than billions of transactions monthly.

There is something else holding crypto back from being used for payments.

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#166

Post by akaij »

yao420 wrote: post #145
D13Fd wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, “yes I’m helping grifters scam people, but it sure pays well.”

Pretty much. After watching the Sackler family escape with billions despite destroying America with opioids I’ve come to the conclusion that America is garbage and there is nothing important here except money. I’m securing my family and their future, nothing else. But yeah crypto grifts sucks but my college roommate now works at Goldman Sachs, an old university TA works Exxon offshore drilling, a couple of classmates…

This reminds me of the speech in The West Wing, where the president explains his reasoning for accepting the censure.

No one takes responsibility for anything anymore. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalise. "Everybody does it." That's what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame so no one's guilty. I'm to blame. I was wrong.

If at the end of the day you can sleep well, more power to you! But things will continue to decline if everyone's only looking out for themselves.

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#167

Post by web3isgoing »

acdha wrote: post #139
web3isgoing wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a decentralized protocol need to be amenable to these disputes? Saying “we will have a jury of appointed authorities to manage disputes” defeats the point, and is what ENS tries to avoid. If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralizati…

> If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralization and integrity of the protocol. How exactly do you think this works? With DNS, there's a trusted third party who can help recover from errors — if you lose access, you might have to prove your…

I understand how DNS works. The design goals of ENS are not the same as DNS. There is no "trusted third party" in ENS because the system aims to be trustless, decentralized, ownerless, and censorship-resistant. Even in extreme scenarios like a US sanction, tornadocash.eth domain is still functioning[1] but tornadocash.com has been revoked by Google registrar[2]. Not everybody in the world feels that the current US government administration should be able to dictate and censor worldwide internet protocols in this way.

> Maybe you can track them down and get a legal action strong enough that they honor it

That's fine, it's how our legal system works. Using a bank as an example: they can eject you as a customer if you do something they think is criminal, even before you have had a fair trial that might prove you innocent. ENS and crypto both ask: what if you create protocols where users actually do have complete ownership over their assets, and no single entity has more control over the ledger than another?

[1] https://etherscan.io/enslookup-search?search=tornadocash.eth

[2] https://www.whois.com/whois/tornado.cash

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#168

Post by dist1ll »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #76
dist1ll wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federation is a very weak form of decentralization. In practice, many federated platforms turn into cartels of giant centralized providers. It's better than Twitter, but not something I'd call decentralization.

> Federation is a very weak form of decentralization ... not something I'd call decentralization ... is not decentralized Uh, OK; this is not all the same claim. > In practice, many federated platforms turn into cartels of giant centralized providers Sure that's a worry; for example: email is global, so lets all use GMail. git is decentralized onto GitHub and a few other providers. I think that this tendency is not j…

I thought a bit more about it.

I stand by my statement that federation is not decentralization. Federation is a pre-requisite for decentralization, but not a sufficient criterion. (I said weaker form, what I meant to say was necessary condition)

Federation gives you an opportunity to develop a decentralized ecosystem...but that depends entirely on how users use the platform, or what rules the platform enforces.

Decentralized platforms are always federated, and on top of that have strong fault-tolerance, redundancy and democratic control mechanisms. This may be enforced by a protocol, or it may also be enforced by the people (the latter is highly unrealistic because human trust doesn't scale)

So I'll revise my statement to: Mastodon is not decentralized by default, but at least it is federated.

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#169

Post by web3isgoing »

teraflop wrote: post #114
web3isgoing wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a decentralized protocol need to be amenable to these disputes? Saying “we will have a jury of appointed authorities to manage disputes” defeats the point, and is what ENS tries to avoid. If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralizati…

> If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? If the holder is using it maliciously to scam people by tricking them into thinking it's the real Apple, then yes! In that situation, revoking their ability to use the domain is a much better outcome for everybody except the scammer. > In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanism…

ENS avoids this dispute mechanism by design, to avoid the need for a central third party.

> If the holder is using it maliciously to scam people by tricking them into thinking it's the real Apple, then yes!

Try applying your logic to Twitter and its current situation. Is it a good thing that accounts impersonating others are being suspended from the network?

Mastodon does not have this same centralization, so @teraflop@teraflop.xyz could impersonate your @teraflop@teraflop.com account. There is no centralized entity that controls the whole Mastodon and ActivityPub network, which I think is a good design decision for a less centralized protocol.

And see my sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626408

Re: But, aren't you folks web2?

#170

Post by acdha »

web3isgoing wrote: post #167
acdha wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If apple.eth is held by a squatter, should courts be able to override the protocol to send it to trademark holder Apple? In the end this can get resolved by regular dispute mechanisms but without compromising decentralization and integrity of the protocol. How exactly do you think this works? With DNS, there's a trusted third party who can help recover from errors — if you lose access, you might have to prove your…

I understand how DNS works. The design goals of ENS are not the same as DNS. There is no "trusted third party" in ENS because the system aims to be trustless, decentralized, ownerless, and censorship-resistant. Even in extreme scenarios like a US sanction, tornadocash.eth domain is still functioning[1] but tornadocash.com has been revoked by Google registrar[2]. Not everybody in the world feels that the current US go…

I’m aware that it’s a thought experiment but it’s weird to have that combined with unhappiness that few people are using a system which is designed to prevent real world problems from being solved.

I’d also lay off the marketing-speak and think about what tangible benefits ENS provides in your example: yes, tornadocash.eth resolves but most people cannot use the service safely and even your link shows the content as blocked – not exactly a meaningful anticensorship advance.

If you were actually concerned about censorship, an expensive service which leaves a public audit trail for prosecutors would not be the optimal starting point.

Post reply on HN