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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

#261

Post by reflexco »

ahtihn wrote: post #252
reflexco wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole selling pitch is about replacing intermediaries, and that's what most tech giants are.

P2P payment systems and P2P collateralized loans are already there more or less working with a clear path to scaling. If they gain adoption they directly obsolete existing fintech companies.

I'm not saying there's much concrete stuff there yet, but web3 has a clear MAGMA hostile discourse, so it's natural that reactionary feelings arise when web3 gets hype (deserved or not, that's not the point).

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

#262

Post by throwaway82652 »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #71
throwaway82652 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original definition of Web 3.0 (or Semantic Web) was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and meant something completely different, it referred to a web that had all information assembled into an open graph that was easily accessible and machine readable with the goal of leading to an AI revolution. AFAICT the "web3" moniker was co-opted by Ethereum developers to refer to something which is almost entirely opposed to tha…

I guess you were wise to use a throwaway to gamble on the theory that crypto currency is paywall-centric; as you very clearly missed the hoop.

I've looked at a ton of these "web3" startups and basically all of them are trying to build some form of payment system or financial service via smart contracts. Either that or they're making a less efficient version of a "web 2.0" company by forcing everyone who uses it to go through a blockchain first. If that's not true then please enlighten me as to what I missed. If you were trying to do something else then why even bother with blockchains? They don't bring anything of value if you're not trying to "keep score" and then make decisions based on that.

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

#264

Post by smt88 »

nomel wrote: post #171
smt88 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I want artificial scarcity in any situation? Scarcity is bad.

> Scarcity is bad. We could just print money and all be rich? If you value money, and you think that compensation for work can be paid with money, then compensating the work that went into creating digital goods seems appropriate. Should compensation for digital goods be through donations?

> compensating the work that went into creating digital goods seems appropriate. Should compensation for digital goods be through donations?

I consume digital goods all the time, and I pay for them with money.

Money is an inflationary asset that I keep in order to pay people. It is not an investment, it's value (in my country, the US) is stable, and I get paid in money.

There is no cryptocurrency that shares these characteristics and there never will be as long as people try to pitch it as both deflationary (good investment) and spendable.

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

#265

Post by throwaway82652 »

hervature wrote: post #121
gotaquestion wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small correction: some cryptos are anonymous, Zcash and monero for example. Bitcoin and ether are not, and once those have been rolled into something like the Winklevoss's Gemini, it is harder to follow them publicly.

Building on this, what does that tell you about the state of crypto when the coins that actually have libertarian values built into them (Zcash and monero) have not exploded in value? That crypto is generally dominated by marketers and pump and dumps.

This is not news to anyone working in cybersecurity. It's still very difficult to sell security technology to the general public. The only people who really want to use it is people who are either very smart technologically or they have a lot to lose. So that basically means only C-level executives, high ranking government officials, very wealthy investors and other rich people, major celebrities, and hardcore computer geeks. It doesn't matter if you try to incentivize it in some kind of money making scheme. And actually it would be very bad if these coins exploded in value because then they would become a bigger target for criminals and fraud just like bitcoin currently is.

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

#266

Post by DFHippie »

gojomo wrote: post #94
gotaquestion wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it endlessly amusing that the subset of libertarians who love to berate socialism "as never having worked" by pointing to Bolshevik Russia have limitless patience for the at-scale failures of crypto. Obviously not all libertarians, but quite I large number that I've bickered with on HN/Reddit.

Cryptoeconomics has been a mix of successes & failures, among the very-privileged who can afford to take financial risks, for just the last ~13y. Everyone involved knows there's a lot of things left to solve, but sees reasons for hope. For 100+ years, the most fervently 'socialist' regimes have promised various utopias but actually delivered famines, prison camps, pathologically dishonest & oppressive police states,…

The phrase "most fervently" is carrying a lot of weight in your argument.

ETA to make my point clear, it's an inverted "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

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

#267

Post by T_ReV »

metadat wrote: post #12
sprague wrote: post #9

The interesting thing about crypto to me is how there seems to be a deep divide among very smart people, some who think it's the greatest thing ever and some who think it's a fraud. I can't remember when there's ever been such a Bigendian-scale dispute in technology before. Can you?

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…

So the intelligent people that do open the PRs to fix the ethereum bugs. Are they hucksters or sorry saps?

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

#268

Post by smt88 »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #125
smt88 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For design reasons, no one can delete anything from it. This is factually wrong. 50+% of those miners could collude (or secretly be the same person) and change anything in the database. You would have no warning before this happened.

That's incorrect, you can't "change anything in the database" with a 51% attack. You can block transactions from being processed, reorder new transactions, and reverse your own (but not others) transactions to double spend. You can't just go arbitrarily deleting previous transactions, or modifying balances.

> you can't "change anything in the database" with a 51% attack

A 51% attack can't immediately change other people's history, but it can eventually[1][2]. You would not need to change transaction history very deeply to cause a lot of chaos.

1. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/101565/why-cant-...

2. https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/51-attack

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

#269

Post by gfodor »

kevingadd wrote: post #199
gfodor wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a feature, since it will force society to resolve a variety of incoherent laws.

Since when does the government willingly just throw out a bunch of laws because some techies put together a new algorithm? If the government decides that your crypto is a Munition or Child Porn, you're going to need a lot to convince them otherwise, and you're probably going to spend time in jail while waiting for your lawyers to deal with it.

There's probably already child porn on the ethereum blockchain. If not, there will be eventually. Then what happens? Is your argument that it's obvious they're going to jail anyone who has the chain on their computer?

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

#270

Post by gfodor »

throwaway82652 wrote: post #233
gfodor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming a technology is not a silver bullet is a statement that contains no useful information, because no technology is a silver bullet. However, blockchains do provide a very high level of durability across various dimensions, and some integrity failures reduce onto durability failures.

Yes but so does any other distributed consensus algorithm. Blockchains just happen to be based on the worst ones that don't have any good properties but still keep all of the bad ones.

Yes, but blockchains were first. If your point is that we should evolve to newer, better solutions sure. But I'm guessing you're arguing something else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_T0oq_rQ9s#t=9m8s

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