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

An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

psl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 319 posts

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

#211

Post by mrfinn »

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…

Blockchain wasn't at first about avoiding eyes of the state, but tyranic control of the state, or any other authority. Then projects allowing secrecy appeared.

Coins like Ethereum pushed way forward, via smart contracts, the possibilities available in cryptocurrencies. Then others like Chainlink added again a whole new level of possibilities connecting the smart contracts to trusted real world data. That goes way beyond the scope of financial instruments, a whole world of automated business can be built on top of that. BTW blockchain is outdated technology, is doesn't scale enough for being able to handle a massive use of cryptocurrencies.

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

#212

Post by nadahalli »

davepeck wrote: post #57
manbart wrote: post #19

‘Web3’ is just new window dressing on the same old crypto casino. “Get rich quick!” is the selling point

Original author here. Totally. I’m old enough to remember when Web 3 was the semantic web, so I guess I don’t put much stock in the label. And, personally, I’m really interested in crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and some of the stuff the Indie Web community has built. I have no idea if those are, uh, web3 enough for web3.:-) As for the question of casinos, I think @pinboard’s description of Web 3 as “an…

As for "Crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and friends" - you have to ask yourself why they don't work at scale. That's the key insight of Bitcoin. You need to have a system-native incentive for the nodes to do their thing, and this system-native thing (BTC the currency, in Bitcoin's case), should have outside value. Many wiser people have said this (not on HackerNews maybe), that money is the only use case for a blockchain.

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

#213

Post by kelnos »

viksit wrote: post #22
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…

This is a great point. Some ways I'm seeing this addressed are in the form of, - Credit ratings from the real world being moved on chain, both by startups and by established companies (see Fitch report from Oct 21, pay-to-access only). - Credit ratings across and on chains ( https://www.credprotocol.com/ ) to make sure that a defi OG on eth can have access to collateral on other chains. - Chainlink and others are wor…

Why would anyone want their credit history on a public blockchain?

Besides, credit histories often have incorrect information that needs to be corrected, and often creditors will cut you a deal or just be nice ("goodwill adjustments"). Blockchain history is immutable, so how do you handle this? Sure, you can write something to the blockchain that amends an existing entry, but the existing entry is still there to see, even if it was erroneous. I would bet that some lenders would use "has more than $SOME_NUMBER amended entries in history" as a negative signal, even though it's not necessarily fair to characterize them that way.

Hell, negative things on credit reports (in the US) disappear after 7 years. Sure, you can tell lenders to disregard negative things older than 7 years, but do you really expect them to do that?

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

#214

Post by philwelch »

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…

> It doesn't help that I personally have yet to see a use for a blockchain which isn't replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state.

Is that not enough for you? Just because you think you live in a time and place where the eyes of the state are kind and benevolent?

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

#215

Post by BatteryMountain »

mattlondon wrote: post #71

So .. TL;Dr web3 is nothing to do with the web , and is just the same old smart contract crypto hype we've all seen before? No mention of the actual distributed web protocols like IPFS or Dat as far as I could tell. Have I massively missed something or has the crypto community just co-opted the name web3 for their own non-web related stuff? How does the web factor in to crypto?

So I attended a year end function last month and there was an independent financial advisor present (CFP straight-arrow-type-guy that was reluctant about crypto's a few years ago). During a conversation he expressed regret that he didn't get onto the crypto train 3 years ago and that he is going alllll in on web3 and threw the word nft's around a bit and that he has some more web3/nft webinars lined up for the coming week. Mind you, this guy manages about $50M for his clients (it's true, I saw his dashboards on a third party website - he knows his shit). He told a whole bunch of people at the event about nft and how it will put spotify and youtube out of business.

But the thing is, he is not tech-inclined at all and spends most of his time on excel and on third party platforms (as in, fund manager platforms, insurance platform, medical aid, taxation etc). So what I took away from his talking about this stuff is that financial advisors are being "educated" to think that web3 = crypto = new 4th industrial revolution etc and everyone will get rich as hell very quickly so we all have to do it NOW. It was a huge wtf moment for me because I was mostly ignoring this stuff and the whole web3 umbrella and here I have a legit CFP guy talking about this stuff. All while I'm standing there not knowing wtf he is going on about, most of it sounding extremely dodgy from a software developers perspective.

Make of this what you will but I think a lot of people will get hurt, esp non-tech people. I feel like these people live in an alternate universe and they've built a whole ecosystem of webinars, trading platforms that they are trying to sell onto normal people that doesn't know better; that doesn't seem to be used for the greater good (most of it scammy or used for crime etc).

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

#216

Post by thefounder »

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…

Getting rid of the banks and paypal/visa like services should be enough .

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

#217

Post by emillime »

skybrian wrote: post #124
thebean11 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t mortgages actually also examples of over collateralized loans? You borrow 80% of the homes value, and use the entire home as collateral.

A more important limitation for defi loans is that nothing other than blockchain assets can be used as collateral. You can't use the loan to buy anything real without having enough money to buy it already. A mortgage lets you buy and live in a house even if you don't have enough money to buy the house.

That is a bit too simplified. You can add yield bearing tokens as collateral. That basically means that as long as the yeild is more than the cost of the loan the loan wil pay back it self.

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

#218

Post by austincheney »

danjac wrote: post #205
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…

When upward mobility has been stymied for generations (the US has the lowest upword mobility among Western nations, outdoing even the class-ridden Brits) and insane house prices, student loans and cost of living increases have cut all the bootstraps, people are looking for anything - anything - that offers the slimmest of opportunities, because education and hard work don't cut it any more. Hence the crypto nonsense…

So much wrong with that.

Education and hard work drive labor. These aren’t qualities respected by any kind of wealth generators or management. If anything they are unrewarded implicit requirements except for labor where there aren’t other more substantial qualities to rate individual contributions.

In most of the country house prices remained low and stable until very recently. Only a few coastal areas have seen decades of out of control pricing.

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

#219

Post by sdn90 »

I think if you take a Western/developed country centric view, all of crypto seems pretty useless. In the rest of the world, you probably dealing with some or all of the following:

- Dysfunctional government - Hyperinflation - Limited access to financial/investment products if any

The crypto space does have a huge amount of problems, but I think there's some innovative stuff going on in crypto. You'll end up writing it off if you just fixate on the speculators and the "blockchain everything" people.

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

#220

Post by vletal »

danjac wrote: post #205
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…

When upward mobility has been stymied for generations (the US has the lowest upword mobility among Western nations, outdoing even the class-ridden Brits) and insane house prices, student loans and cost of living increases have cut all the bootstraps, people are looking for anything - anything - that offers the slimmest of opportunities, because education and hard work don't cut it any more. Hence the crypto nonsense…

I can clearly see a strong correlation between both education and hard work vs. social status and income. I come from Europe though. Is it really not the case in the US? Is it because of student loan barrier?
Post reply on HN