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Web3 is going just great

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Re: Web3 is going just great

#201

Post by ipaddr »

erulabs wrote: post #139
pcwalton wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. It's easy for me to make that case. Ransomware aside, there's no underlying value in cryptocurrency, unlike currencies which have the full faith and credit of governments. This is a fundamental problem that I see no way around.

I'm sure you'll roll your eyes at this response, but a large chunk of economists don't believe there is value in anything. Your definition of "value" might mean "utility" or "what the US treasury says this is worth", or something else entirely. Starting a discussion with "well, it doesn't have any value" is more or less meaningless, and borders on economically illiterate, excuse the harshness. My stuffed animal from…

Move value to me to value to many within a society and everyone can be on the same page

Re: Web3 is going just great

#203

Post by nathias »

lapinot wrote: post #171
emptysongglass wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also fatal flaws at the heart of capitalism and a centrally controlled currency whose value is manipulated at will completely outside a citizen's power to control. These fatal flaws have not prevented capitalism from blooming all over the world. Lest you think I'm some species of these crypto libertarians, I believe it's an imperfect solution to hand humans more greed levers to go about life dictating their a…

> Capitalism needs to be ripped up from its roots before we can have a hope of a free in all senses world for all. Until then, maybe we first take control of the machinery by replacing the currency with which the state does its business of violence. I agreed up until your last sentence: is the state the bigger problem (versus multi-billion corps and capitalists)? is currency the main lever of states (versus diplomacy…

Let's just say that the geostrategically important states that tried to move away from the dollar got freedomed very quick.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#204

Post by acdha »

sneak wrote: post #166
acdha wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of disingenuous, since when is log4j “web 2.0”? > The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2 (are we just ignoring Log4j, which is a huge deal and happened 2 days ago) That’s also worth thinking less shallowly about for a second reason: if a cryptocurrency service, wallet, etc. you used was hacked due to log4j, you’d lose everything without recourse. This is not true of the mat…

"web 2.0" = centralized web application servers providing usually-json API backends for javascript clientside applications running in a browser. Usually written in Python, Ruby, Java, or PHP. Sometimes written in Perl or Go or Rust. Clicks are not usually full pageloads (that is, SPAs). Many (maybe even most?) of those web 2.0 applications are written in Java and those that are, almost all of them use log4j. (web1 wa…

I’m quite familiar with web 1 & 2’s meaning having worked on both so while I’d want to fix that definition it’s really distracting from the main point: log4j has nothing to do with either, as evidenced by the many projects which didn’t even use Java.

It’s just a library, and compiling into byte code for some blockchain VM wouldn’t make it a cryptocurrency library, either.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#205

Post by lapinot »

erulabs wrote: post #139
pcwalton wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would hard for me to make a case that eventually cryptocurrency will fail. It's easy for me to make that case. Ransomware aside, there's no underlying value in cryptocurrency, unlike currencies which have the full faith and credit of governments. This is a fundamental problem that I see no way around.

I'm sure you'll roll your eyes at this response, but a large chunk of economists don't believe there is value in anything. Your definition of "value" might mean "utility" or "what the US treasury says this is worth", or something else entirely. Starting a discussion with "well, it doesn't have any value" is more or less meaningless, and borders on economically illiterate, excuse the harshness. My stuffed animal from…

> I'm sure you'll roll your eyes at this response, but a large chunk of economists don't believe there is value in anything.

Food and shelter have value which is pretty near to objective. In fact it is routinely used to compare economic levels throughout history or societies. In fact it's quite useful to distinguish market price from usage (intrinsic) value. Usage value is variable from individual to individual, but there is a hierarchy of things we usually agree on, at the bottom being water, then food, then light, ... (biological stuff) then social interactions, intellectual stimulation, ... (more complex social stuff), then things like healthcare or gun access which will obviously depend on your political ethic (but which still are largely clustered, just not universal). So sure market price doesn't denote value, and intrinsic value is a fuzzy hierachy that is more and more precise given more and more assumptions on social norms, but the bottom of this hierachy is non-trivial (not everything at 0) and the top isn't that diverse.

Marx & Engels had a (critical) theory of capitalistic value where value is actually pretty well defined, as the amount of human work which has gone into something. That may be seen as an extension of what i first said (the value of human time being at least cost of life for that time).

Re: Web3 is going just great

#206

Post by [deleted] »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #116
beachy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What people are really excited about is the exchanges and the on-ramps and off-ramps, which have nothing to do with the blockchain or cryptography. Isn't that like saying that what gets people really exciting about beer is the euphoric feeling after consuming it, which has nothing to do with the liquid itself? If it wasn't for the exchanges and on- and off-ramps then cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist at all. Potentia…

> If it wasn't for the exchanges and on- and off-ramps then cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist at all. Potentially spending it one day is the only thing that makes the crypto world go around. "Spending" it doesn't require cashing it out in a hypothetical cryptocurrency future. People can, and do, transact in cryptocurrencies. Though it's actually quite painful, slow, expensive, and lacks all of the benefits of tradition…

[deleted]

Re: Web3 is going just great

#207

Post by yakkityyak »

kmlx wrote: post #95
dumbfoundded wrote: post #72

As someone building in web3, I'll give an example. When I sold my first business, escrow.com wanted >$20K for the domain transfer from godaddy. If you sell a domain on ethereum (ENS), the escrow requires only a smart contract and fees scale with the network so like $50 right now. I'm working on connecting the two. Intermediaries are a huge reason the web is the way it is. If we can eliminate them, the internet looks…

> If you sell a domain on ethereum what’s the incentive to sell a domain on ethereum? > TLS will altered to integrate with blockchain protocols. you mean the Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic key exchange protocol? what’s the advantage to integrating with a blockchain compared to the way the current protocol works? > It will take at least a decade what’s stopping the community from doing it faster? and woul…

> you mean the Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic key exchange protocol? what’s the advantage to integrating with a blockchain compared to the way the current protocol works?

Sort of lends to be like PGP Web of Trust doesn't it?

Re: Web3 is going just great

#208

Post by ahtihn »

sneak wrote: post #166
acdha wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of disingenuous, since when is log4j “web 2.0”? > The claim that Web3 is rife with hacks, when you have daily hacks of Web2 (are we just ignoring Log4j, which is a huge deal and happened 2 days ago) That’s also worth thinking less shallowly about for a second reason: if a cryptocurrency service, wallet, etc. you used was hacked due to log4j, you’d lose everything without recourse. This is not true of the mat…

"web 2.0" = centralized web application servers providing usually-json API backends for javascript clientside applications running in a browser. Usually written in Python, Ruby, Java, or PHP. Sometimes written in Perl or Go or Rust. Clicks are not usually full pageloads (that is, SPAs). Many (maybe even most?) of those web 2.0 applications are written in Java and those that are, almost all of them use log4j. (web1 wa…

Web 2.0 predates SPAs and has basically nothing to do with that.

Web 2.0 is basically websites with user generated content.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 and most other sources you find when googling "what is web 2.0"

And by the way, a significant number of java backends don't use log4j2 as a logging backend (the vulnerable part).

Re: Web3 is going just great

#209

Post by Yizahi »

satyrnein wrote: post #71
fab1an wrote: post #48

I'm flabberghasted at the amount of hate this space is getting from parts of the dev community and in particular HN. Web3 has its fair share of issues, but there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web. Consider this: if you are absolutely, 100% convinced that all of this is bogus, is going to go nowhere (despite the high number of talented individuals…

Like Pascal's Wager, but denominated in ETH.

Precisely. Very good comparison.

PS: and for some reason I still don't see need to believe, even for an off chance of going to heaven. Same with crypto.

Re: Web3 is going just great

#210

Post by exdsq »

not2b wrote: post #113
exdsq wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue there’s an underlying value in tokens like Ether that is similar to paying for compute power and storage on AWS. I’m not saying the price right now is correct, but that there is an intrinsic value.

It cost compute power to produce the tokens, but that's sunk cost, not intrinsic. All that matters afterward is whether people want the tokens and will exchange things of value for them.

I mean the use of those to power arbitrary computation on the network. It’s not dissimilar to AWS tokens.
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