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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

#231

Post by Vetch »

supernovae wrote: post #165
Vetch wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live none of those services are available but cryptocurrency tech is. Connecting to services like patreon or getting small amounts for games on itch.io are headache inducing high friction activities involving several extra third party services that are barely worth the effort. The attached risk is hard to state as better given all the fly by night operations in the local finance industry. Even if very few peo…

For some reason, i just can’t fathom that it would be wise for a stable economic system to connect to such an unstable system - the only reason to champion such would be to create instability at larger scale.

Unsure about what you mean but the current instability of this type of economy is already very high.

What with double digit inflation being hard to tackle due to the feedback loop of corruption fueling too few employment opportunities, being import dependent amid rising costs everywhere and then noting the large divergence between black market and official rates, it cannot be said with certainty which is more stable and less risky in the long run. Things are bad enough that putting some money in crypto as a makeshift uncorrelated hedging instrument makes sense.

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

#233

Post by Tom4hawk »

babyshake wrote: post #189
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 exi…

Just look at China and their access to WORLD wide web. If crypto gains any traction it will also be treated that way.

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

#234

Post by dgb23 »

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…

The people who put their hope into blockchain and crypto currency technology are missing a fundamental point that would have _catastrophic_ consequences on social mobility, exploitation and oppression in the long term: You don't actually want a decentralized, persistent log of all transactions, especially if that also includes credit and debt.

The financial market is going out of hand because since the 70's/80's it isn't serving it's purpose anymore, which is regulating and allocating resources and credit. Instead it is disjoint from actual value and productivity, so it has started a life of its own.

People and entire nations are being held down by financial obligations while not benefiting from the increase in productivity and profit because the connection between finance and value production is almost completely severed.

The only non-violent way out of this is forgiveness. Which acknowledges that exact monetary value and debt in any form and especially in it's current form is just a highly volatile figment. And that's only possible if we can actually _forget_ transactions.

An eternal, cryptographic, decentralized transaction log might just be the perfect tool for long term financial oppression and exploitation. And the more convenient it gets the more exchange will flow through it. Well at least until the people start magnetizing and burning down data centers and PCs. But I think there are less destructive ways forward.

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

#235

Post by Vetch »

the_snooze wrote: post #144
wpietri wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-b…

> it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that

Its utility is much easier to see if you're stuck in a system rife with corruption and have a general lack of trust in central institutions. A key aspect of corruption is that central authorities are not accountable to anyone.

With blockchains, you can design systems where game theory via what's encoded into system design, can limit what concentrations of power can do. The centralized powers in bitcoin for example, can't rationally act in way that destroys the value of the system they're participating in. This is totally not true for many developing economies; just that property is already an encouraging one.

Working on scaling these systems, making them less resource intensive and proving stronger more formal bounds for open peer to peer friendly non-discriminatory systems that are harder to corrupt and more robust to bad actors is a not a solution in search of a problem.

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

#236

Post by antihero »

The "delightfully weird" aesthetic is MARKETING. The "culture"? Compromised.

In the same way that legitimate artistic spaces of old are just capitalised upon and harvested to make that "hip bar", which is but a pale imitation designed to trick us. "Web3" is the Shoreditch of Web 1.0. There are no real things in it any more, no real culture, only rehashes created for profit!

People who are creating "Web3" content are doing it in order to capitalise on the throwback culture, the "geekiness", it's all done purely to further the cash grab, it's co-opting and appropriating geek culture for personal gain.

It's almost an artistic statement upon itself. Almost.

> Protocols like SMTP (1981; email), TCP (1983; reliable packet transmission), HTTP (1991; web), and XMPP (1999; chat) all created immense value while capturing little for their inventors.

GOOD. "Web3" will be rightfully choked to death by greed.

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

#237

Post by fastball »

Uehreka wrote: post #229
djohnston wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to a web3 site and use your wallet as your identity without any signin flow, don't click on any asinine cookie prompts, and you'll see it's already bringing improvements. Or you can just write comments like this.

OK, NOW WE’RE TALKIN. In years of talking to blockchain people about this stuff, no one has ever given me a use case description that succinct and concrete. A decentralized SSO is the kind of thing that would seem useful on it’s own, even without the other stuff. So let’s say I want to try this out this weekend. Do I just download MetaMask and make a wallet? Do I have to go somewhere or pay someone to inscribe my use…

Decentralized SSO is a great use case for blockchain tech and there are so many ways you can do it. There has been a lot of hype around NFTs due to the crazy prices we've been seeing for "digital artwork NFTs", but you can also use them for auth and it's actually pretty slick.

Here is a project[1] that a friend of mine is building that does exactly that. It's basically a collection of TailwindCSS components that he originally built in the "web 2.0" way, as in: buy a subscription (via Stripe) and now you have access to his collection of pre-built components. But then he realized this is actually a great use-case for web3. So instead of signing up for an account with an email + password then using your credit card to buy a lifetime deal, you can connect your MetaMask wallet to his website and "mint" a pass for 0.08 ETH (approx ~$350 atm) which is just an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Then as long as that NFT is owned by your wallet you can use it to login to his website. The benefits are: it's actually faster for the user (your wallet is your identity and you access pass is attached directly to that wallet on the blockchain) and also pretty simple for him to integrate on his end. The other benefit is you can trade these passes at will without his oversight – so if he adds more and more Tailwind components to the collection the value of this lifetime access to them hypothetically goes up. But let's say you no longer are interested in building anything with Tailwind components – well you can just sell the NFT that gives you access to someone else via any of the 3rd party decentralized marketplaces.

Anyway there are a lot of cool ideas and use-cases that aren't just decentralized lending (which I'm still pretty skeptical of) or generic gambling (still most of crypto). The main problem right now is that a lot of the coolest stuff has been built on Ethereum (due to the flexibility of its smart contracts) but the transaction fees and throughput are pretty terrible at the moment.

Finally, it gets a lot of hate here on HN, but Brave Browser actually has a MetaMask-equivalent (I think it might actually just be a fork of MetaMask) that is built right into the browser, alongside best-in-class ad-blocking so I'd consider using that too. Though installing MetaMask is super easy as well.

[1] https://rareblocks.xyz/

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

#238

Post by blatchcorn »

dgb23 wrote: post #234
danjac wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The people who put their hope into blockchain and crypto currency technology are missing a fundamental point that would have _catastrophic_ consequences on social mobility, exploitation and oppression in the long term: You don't actually want a decentralized, persistent log of all transactions, especially if that also includes credit and debt. The financial market is going out of hand because since the 70's/80's it i…

You make a large assumption that people don't want a permanent log. If the system works then you do want it to be permanent. The only reason why you propose forgetting the transactions of the current system is that it is distorted by politicians. Politicians cannot distorted crypto markets in the same way they can with the USD, therefore is no need to ever forget crypto transactions

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

#239

Post by fastball »

luhn wrote: post #111
koboll wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I mean, there's a domain name system. There are various games. There was recently a high-profile crowdfunded attempt to buy an artifact at auction. Feel free to be skeptical of all of these, but what's the point of posting that you "haven't see…

> I mean, there's a domain name system. You mean ENS, the .eth domain registrar incorporated in the Cayman Islands? It doesn't matter what the blockchain says, my .eth domain is only good as long as the registrar agrees to honor it. Sounds like GoDaddy with more steps. > There are various games. What's the point of a distribute ledger that can only be used within a game controlled by a centralized company? > There wa…

Regarding ENS, it actually does matter what the blockchain says, because everyone that has integrated ENS (like IPFS or MetaMask) are using the records in the blockchain to resolve which name.eth is connected to which wallet.

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

#240

Post by Vetch »

outside1234 wrote: post #180
wpietri wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair - it probably has revolutionized money laundering and government bribes.

> government bribes

Governments mired in corruption, embezzlement of public funds, dumping toxic waste and ignoring infrastructure and human development are not banning crypto out of the goodness of their heart. They're banning it because it erodes and threatens control of their mismanaged currencies.

If we required governments and large corporations to use identifiable addresses then the traceability and immutability of public blockchains makes bribes and corruption much harder to hide. Government spending, which is not used to being held accountable would of course not take kindly to this.

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