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Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

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Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#251

Post by metadat »

flotzam wrote: post #116
metadat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the divide? Crypto is 99% full of hucksters, and the remaining 1% are the sorry saps. The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it. Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs. In ot…

> Crypto is 99% full of hucksters, and the remaining 1% are the sorry saps. > The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it. "political tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent – a 1/10^45 extent, I will never tire of hammering in – based on their implicit tribal characteristics." - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... > Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all…

I'm having a hard time following your message, are you saying people who don't like crypto are intolerant and narrow-minded?

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#252

Post by ahtihn »

reflexco wrote: post #218
Frondo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on smart people in the crypto space comes down to the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Ironically the same quote also describes the extreme feelings of the opposite camp. Established tech companies and their employees have a lot to lose if web3 and related tech would actually become successful.

Really? Why? I don't see anything concrete coming out of web3 that would threaten the established big tech companies.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#253

Post by vmception »

ipaddr wrote: post #238
vmception wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? None of these Virtual Machines go away because so many people run them and can run them, including yourself. You can branch off the current state or any prior state and run/execute it locally at any point in time, without needing the resources to run the whole blockchain. This is enough for you and your community/clients to have the data to move it all somewhere else, if necessary. If you need all…

They go away when people stop running them or the system fails to function which is not forever but sometime in the future. It is a scam to promise forever. AWS doesn't promise forever. It's free reads until one day.

got it. okay. you can make a backup and continue executing in a smaller environment even if the rest of the network falls apart. I feel like that would be really hard to do with like AWS Lambda. Altneratively you can have just enough information to store the last relevant state and migrate to another system.

in the meantime you won't be charged for how much you read or how often. which was my main point. before this conversation, did you know that?

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#254

Post by awr »

Loughla wrote: post #209
awr wrote: post #127

I'm skeptical about the ecosystem as a whole, despite running a project myself, but a distinction needs to be made between web3 as a technology and web3 in its current iteration. I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO). Concretely, if I can jump onto a website and consume content with…

>Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on. 1. Couldn't this be done with just a credit card if companies took micro payments? My browser will save my cc details, so if they accepted micro payments, I could just click one button to get it. 2. Why would companies, who do not accept micropayments now, suddenly accept them just because crypto? 3. Wouldn't I still have to enter information into th…

Probably not today but there's a future where this could be done without crypto (hence my comment re whether web3 is the right tech).

1. Fixed payment processing fees make it unfeasible. Minimum credit card fees are 10s of cents, so anything sub a dollar becomes unpractical.

2. Viability of micropayments is proportional to the fees charged by the payment processor. If the processor charges 1c, then 10c micropayments are feasible. If they charge 30c, it makes much more economic sense to charge larger amounts in bulk (as a business, a 40c microtransaction means I'm giving up 75% revenue to the payment processor). Sure, you could always charge in aggregate at the end of the month but the experience to me as a user is worse.

3. What information? If I'm reading an article on a news website, what more information do they need then my wallet address to identify me (if that)? If they require name, that can be linked my wallet address and I can decide whether I give access to that information (no different to SSO today or app store permissions).

Can it be done without crypto? Absolutely, but it requires a lot of change to make it feasible. It's one application that does seem ideally suited to crypto and web3.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#255

Post by forty »

akavi wrote: post #83
zelag wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like Ari Juels, Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin aren't intelligent to you?

Vitalik's the only person in the entire crypto space that gives me pause about my belief crypto is 90% a mixture of useless and fraudulent. He's clearly much more intelligent than me and much more thoughtful, and has come to the opposite conclusions about the topic. I really don't know how to square that with basically everyone else in the space being clearly morons or hucksters.

I believe there are a few intelligent people who have seen the opportunity to make money off the morons :) you know, someone has to sell the pickaxes :)

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#256

Post by flotzam »

metadat wrote: post #251
flotzam wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto is 99% full of hucksters, and the remaining 1% are the sorry saps. > The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it. "political tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent – a 1/10^45 extent, I will never tire of hammering in – based on their implicit tribal characteristics." - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... > Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all…

I'm having a hard time following your message, are you saying people who don't like crypto are intolerant and narrow-minded?

Those character traits are well represented in both the pro- and the anti-cryptocurrency crowds, no doubt. But it was more of a meta comment on GGP saying "there's a deep divide" and GP responding "what are you talking about, every good person I can see is anti"

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#257

Post by Sharlin »

JohnBooty wrote: post #236
Sharlin wrote: post #186

Honestly the older I get, the more absurd the world seems to become. Things like NFTs, an utter and total April's Fools joke of a concept that nevertheless people are now building six-figure careers on top of. Was it like this during the first dotcom bubble? I was a highschooler back then, so not yet totally "in" in the scene. Surely the current bubble must burst at some point as well?

Was it like this during the first dotcom bubble? I was a highschooler back then. No, because the internet had obvious practical potential to pretty much anybody who'd ever used a computer before. And if somebody didn't get it yet you could show them a webpage or something. You could pull up a news site - "see, it's like your regular newspaper, except on the computer... plus a zillion other online newspapers, and weat…

Yeah, I mean I guess back the there was the actually gonna-change-the-world part of the internet, and then there was the hyperinflated hype train that made millionaires out of twenty-plus people who had nothing but a catchy domain name and some rudimentary marketing skills, no business model, never mind anything resembling a real product. Then they'd spend the money on cocaine and Lamborghinis. This time, there doesn't even seem to be the former part.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#259

Post by golf1052 »

reflexco wrote: post #218
Frondo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on smart people in the crypto space comes down to the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Ironically the same quote also describes the extreme feelings of the opposite camp. Established tech companies and their employees have a lot to lose if web3 and related tech would actually become successful.

Large companies try not to be stupid. If they had a lot to lose if web3 became successful wouldn't they invest resources into it?

See Facebook trying to make a cryptocurrency and then abandoning their plans.

Re: Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire

#260

Post by metadat »

flotzam wrote: post #256
metadat wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having a hard time following your message, are you saying people who don't like crypto are intolerant and narrow-minded?

Those character traits are well represented in both the pro- and the anti-cryptocurrency crowds, no doubt. But it was more of a meta comment on GGP saying "there's a deep divide" and GP responding "what are you talking about, every good person I can see is anti"

Haha, now I got it! Thanks for clarifying. Salient point for sure, and thanks for the interesting article.
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