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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

#281

Post by the_snooze »

Vetch wrote: post #235
the_snooze wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you elaborate more? It's unclear to me how a data storage technology has any bearing on trust and power relationships, especially in interactions that are largely in meatspace.

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

#282

Post by lui8906 »

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…

> What's the point of a distribute ledger that can only be used within a game controlled by a centralized company?

The game is made by a centralized company. The items and economy in the game are on chain. Gamers can sell their items to other gamers. Or items can be interwoven into multiple games because the items / economy share the same "backend".

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

#283

Post by vletal »

rbanffy wrote: post #277
vletal wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are cherry picking outliers to argue against a claim about a general trend. It really does not matter how hard this or that particular individual worked. What matters is statistics which describes the opportunity of an anonymous Joe in the society.

It really depends on what kind of mobility we are talking about. The wealth and influence of the individuals I mentioned is pretty much impossible to reach unless you have optimal initial conditions. As the saying goes, the easiest way to become a millionaire is to be born a billionaire. Even if you are born a mere millionaire, you can make many more attempts at becoming a billionaire than a person who needs to work…

I kind of expected that we are talking about the basic mobility, such as my wife coming from a low income blue collar family becoming an upper-middle class architect. Not the chance of becoming a super-rich or super-powerful.

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

#284

Post by askonomm »

wpietri wrote: post #279
askonomm wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any data points, but my own social circle, of which the majority uses Binance to buy crypto and uses Binance P2P to sell it to ARS (Peso). And since the transfer will be reflected on your bank balance as some regular person sending you money locally, it's not taxed either. The whole process of buying stablecoins USDC or Tether to it being sold to ARS and actually landing on my local bank account takes ab…

Thanks for the details. But I'm not quite following this bit: "The whole process of buying stablecoins USDC or Tether to it being sold to ARS and actually landing on my local bank account takes about 5 min maybe" This sounds like you are going from pesos to pesos in 5 minutes, but I assume that isn't the case. What are you buying the stablecoins with? Also, if I understand the use case directly, there's nothing here…

I'm buying the crypto with foreign currency, e.g USD or EUR. For example, since I have a U.S company, I effectively make dollars with my work, but to be able to live here I need pesos. And the same would be the case if you work for one of the local companies that pay you in USD, since you still need pesos for day to day stuff.

Now, I can of course convert my foreign currency to ARS via a central bank, or a regular bank transfer. But here's the thing: official central bank rate for 1 USD is around 100 ARS. The unofficial rate (Western Union, Xoom, Crypto P2P) gives me 200 ARS for 1 USD. Quite literally double the money. That's a very big deal.

And yes, you're right that there is no inherent need for the blockchain or crypto at all, but the lack of oversight is probably the only reason why it is so convenient, and the lack of alternatives, because Western Union and Xoom serve the same purpose, but are much slower (days instead of minutes) and are bombarded with government restrictions.

I could, of course, try to find people here directly who want to buy my USD for ARS, and it would function the same way, but Binance P2P offers a marketplace website for that without me needing to find any of the people myself, equipped with escrow functionality so I won't get scammed.

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

#285

Post by rbanffy »

vletal wrote: post #283
rbanffy wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what kind of mobility we are talking about. The wealth and influence of the individuals I mentioned is pretty much impossible to reach unless you have optimal initial conditions. As the saying goes, the easiest way to become a millionaire is to be born a billionaire. Even if you are born a mere millionaire, you can make many more attempts at becoming a billionaire than a person who needs to work…

I kind of expected that we are talking about the basic mobility, such as my wife coming from a low income blue collar family becoming an upper-middle class architect. Not the chance of becoming a super-rich or super-powerful.

It's kind of a caste society where you can have some mobility, but you can't really move out of your place in society.

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

#286

Post by lui8906 »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #84

One interesting misrepresentation is this: “ Several innovations in distributed consensus design make Solana’s performance possible.” Solana’s consensus protocol isn’t responsible for its performance, it’s the fact that they mandate higher performing machine SKUs and at least 500Mbs (recommending 1Gbs) internet speeds. They also had to largely centralizing and have around 1000 validators. Ethereum’s fees and performa…

> Solana’s consensus protocol isn’t responsible for its performance, it’s the fact that they mandate higher performing machine SKUs and at least 500Mbs (recommending 1Gbs) internet speeds.

While it's true that Solana nodes have higher requirements than Ethereum full nodes (though not sure about validators?) I think it's incorrect to say that Solana's consensus protocol is not responsible for the high performance performance. Solana's consensus protocol (Tower BFT) works tightly with Proof of History. These two elements coupled together allow that the validator leader can be rotated asynchronously allowing performance increases in block propagation, throughput and ledger storage. Have you really had a good read of how Solana works? For eg. Sealevel allows for parallel contract execution, something which to my knowledge no other chain is capable of. All these innovations combined with the higher node requirements allow for TPS that no other chain is even close to and the Ethereum Modular vision will not achieve for quite some time (assuming it works).

> They also had to largely centralizing and have around 1000 validators.

Not sure what you're pointing to here. There was 600 validators a few months ago. Now there is 1000. 2000 additional validators are on devnet and would likely go onto mainnet in the coming months. How else should a blockchain decentralize then to add additional validators and try and spread the delegated stake around to reduce the number of nodes required to halt the network?

The fact that Solana went down for 17 hours not too long ago and there was nothing Solana labs could do to bring it back shows the validators are not run by themselves.

> Ethereum’s fees and performance are due to a push for decentralization instead of cranking up the max gas per block to a level that wouldn’t be feasible for someone at home to run a node.

Ethereum's fees are due to its wild success + it's very low TPS on the L1 because it was more or less the first of its kind. Subsequent chains like Solana have made thousands of small or large alternative engineering decisions that in sum allow for much higher throughput and lower fees. Solana doesn't use gas, perhaps you're thinking of BSC or AVAX?

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

#287

Post by supernovae »

Vetch wrote: post #231
supernovae wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Crypto isn't an exception to any of your concerns. Easily manipulated by foriegn governments, no assurance in import/exports, no assurance on value for employment opportunities, ripe for fraud and as for inflation - until Crypto actually behaves like a currency all your doing is betting against the dollar and if the dollar collapses then all you're doing is ensuring instability and perptetuating exactly what you say you solve

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

#288

Post by lui8906 »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #95
wmf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1,000 validators is "centralized"? Don't look at how many Bitcoin pools there are.

1000 validators is very centralized. All you have to do is bribe 2/3rds of them control the chain. This is on top of Solana not having slashing in place to punish bad behavior, and the Solana Foundation hosting validators for people who want to delegate. Solana’s 1000 validators may not even be owned by 1000 different entities, which reduces the attack difficulty. Solana scales through centralization, not new ideas i…

> 1000 validators is very centralized. All you have to do is bribe 2/3rds of them control the chain.

The network can be halted when 1/3rd of the nodes collude. To my knowledge this allows you to halt the network but not reorg blocks or double spend.

> Solana scales through centralization, not new ideas in blockchain scalability.

Nonsense. They made different tradeoffs than Ethereum and a number of innovations were made possible by those different decisions.

Source: https://medium.com/solana-labs/7-innovations-that-make-solan...

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

#289

Post by Uehreka »

meheleventyone wrote: post #242
Uehreka wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can also do this with other decentralized tech like PGP for example: https://webauthn.guide/

My understanding is that you could use that to auth with a site where you already have an account or where you’re signing up. But if blockchain enables me to go to a site I’ve never been to and be already signed in with a unique name I reserved on the blockchain, I’m pretty sure that would be a novel thing.

Maybe not enough to swing me over to being a crypto-booster, but this is the first time that someone has shown me anything at all that makes sense.

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

#290

Post by eric_cc »

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…

Setup a MetaMask wallet. That's it! You don't even have to fund it in order to authenticate on web3 applications. MetaMask will allow you to authenticate on all the different chains that have EVM-based dapps including Ethereum, Fantom, Avalanche, & Moonriver

Polkadot.js for Kusama and Polkadot apps. You can also check out Fearless wallet on mobile for Polkadot & Kusama where you can participate in the ongoing parachain auctiona. Use the Phantom extension to authenticate on Solana dapps.

Hope you have fun!

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