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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

#181

Post by skybrian »

DreamWalker1 wrote: post #151
skybrian wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ok maybe in the us. Anyway are you sure it is really free in regards that they don't give you a worse price or won't execute if things move in the wrong direction like Robinhood did...? My point is, its just inconvenient for me to rely on a third party without able to enter the "true" market on myself.

The question is, worse price than what? In the US you’re supposed to get at least the best price quoted at any stock exchange, the “nationally best bid and offer” (NBBO). Surprisingly, you can often do better, but this is still a good price. I don’t think you can easily do that with cryptocurrency where you normally only trade at one exchange?

Maybe relying on a third party is useful if they can get you better prices without needing accounts with all the exchanges? And brokerages normally give you a better price than any exchange. This is called price improvement. [1]

Robinhood got in trouble for falsely claiming that they get better prices than their competitors and not disclosing that they get payment for order flow, but their customers still got the NBBO I think? Although see [2].

People make a big deal about payment for order flow because they don’t like the idea of someone else making money off them, but that doesn’t mean you got a bad price.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/priceimprovement.asp

[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/matt_levine/status/13594921198162...

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

#182

Post by DreamWalker1 »

skybrian wrote: post #181
DreamWalker1 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok maybe in the us. Anyway are you sure it is really free in regards that they don't give you a worse price or won't execute if things move in the wrong direction like Robinhood did...? My point is, its just inconvenient for me to rely on a third party without able to enter the "true" market on myself.

The question is, worse price than what? In the US you’re supposed to get at least the best price quoted at any stock exchange, the “nationally best bid and offer” (NBBO). Surprisingly, you can often do better, but this is still a good price. I don’t think you can easily do that with cryptocurrency where you normally only trade at one exchange? Maybe relying on a third party is useful if they can get you better prices…

Actually you can do it for cryptocurrencies as well. There are a lot of aggregators that execute or split your order across different exchanges.

As you said yourself, brokers may offer somehow better prices. My point is just, it is not possible to interact directly with the exchange, even if it maybe for some people more convenient to use a broker. There is no free lunch, more third parties means in my opinion worse price or higher fees.

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

#183

Post by vmception »

> However: just because you don’t need a blockchain to do something doesn’t mean the industry won’t settle on using blockchains to do it anyway.

Exactly, both blockchain skeptics and one-blockchain maximalists miss that people are doing what the market can bare. Do what the market can bare. Why die on the ideological hill? What utility does that have?

The path for founders is simpler. The founders bring their whole network to their ventures over and over and over again. That is projects launched on blockchain platforms right now.

Unless the non-blockchain space magically becomes competitive for founders, globally, of any background, anonymously, overnight, then that world isn't competition. There are 3 trillion dollars within the crypto ecosystem that doesn't need to be converted to cash to be used to fund new ventures.

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

#184

Post by vmception »

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…

CREAM's Ironbank does undercollateralied/uncollateralized loans. They approve lending to protocols but they can easily decide to take risk on individuals if they want.

Likely there will be competition, and bad actors causing no recourse. But non-performing loans are easy to see so much faster than the traditional system, could easily limit losses with lending caps.

I didnt really understand the part about loans only usuable for financial speculation, you can cash those loan proceeds out for USD to do whatever you want. But even if you couldnt, financial speculation is called “good debt” anyway, compared to consumptive spending, so I dint understand the criticism standard here.

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

#185

Post by latchkey »

xmly wrote: post #152
latchkey wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solana and... EOS and... XRP...

But people seem not care that much about decentralization, as long as they could trade tokens.

Or the people who care aren't the loudest people in the room.

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

#188

Post by cblconfederate »

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…

> which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state.

Similar to how software ate the world while the state wasn't looking?

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

#189

Post by babyshake »

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…

Let's say you live in a country where the government carefully monitors all printing presses that publish newspapers and books. And once you see the world wide web, you might just see "trying to avoid the eyes of the state" but that's just a part of what makes it such an important revolution. In both cases, one person with an idea and a keyboard can create something new, or something new that interacts with other existing things. It's a paradigm shift.

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

#190

Post by riffic »

wyck wrote: post #136
riffic wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web3 movement should be be inclusive of IndieWeb and federated ActivityPub ecosystems. Interoperability and open standards paved the way for all of this, and it'd be a shame to toss that out of the window for some pie in the sky vapor. edit: by inclusive , I mean adoption and funding. The wheel does not need to be re-invented, poorly.

This is so wrong it's astonishing, web 3 is build build using principles and designs that are decades in the making, literally 30-40 years of cryptography, zero knowledge proofs, game theory, and advanced mathematics. It's incredible that these ideas and academic papers are finally becoming real. The web 3 movement is very inclusive, but technology moves forwards not backwards.

decentralization doesn't need a blockchain. A web3 which doesn't recognize this is a web3 I don't want any part of.
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