291–300 of 319 posts
At least spend a week or two as a web 3 USER before you make your own conclusions. Forget the investment side for a minute and use the dapps.
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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…
[0] Or, to be more correct, the ActivityPub ecosystem which is bigger than Mastodon itself.
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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…
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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 ba…
I definitely agree that evading governmental controls on currency exchange can be beneficial, especially if one's income isn't local. And reasonable when the controls are used to cover up other problems. I also agree that in the short term using centralized digital services can help there, especially ones that don't worry much about fraud prevention or remediation, as they can be very quick. Doubly so if they're tuned for financial crime.
But by the same token, the centrality and convenience are major points of weakness if they are going to last. Binance is under regulatory threat the world over, and keeps withdrawing from markets one step ahead of regulators. I'd be very surprised if they are able to do that for you a decade from now. Especially as digital forensics and AML tooling will be a decade better.
Instead, I'd guess people in your situation will be doing what they've always done: building informal networks of collaborators so that the regulatory evasion happens offline in ways that are hard to track or limit. Perhaps it will be more like what I saw in Ecuador: friends of friends swapping envelopes of cash when it suits them both.
So to me this story isn't about the power of crypto, which is incidental here, or the magic of decentralization, which isn't much in play either. Instead it's about another temporary window where technology has gotten ahead of regulation.
Hi all — I wrote these notes with my colleagues at PSL while trying to wrap our heads around the madness that is Web3/Crypto. I’m an engineer by background and sort of a skeptic by nature; I think of this piece as a collection of loosely connected, hopefully pragmatic opinions from a builder’s perspective.
>Over time, Ethereum has proven to be sub-optimal for the incredible demand DeFi services have seen. The network has diseconomies of scale and, given its low throughput capability, gas fees (the cost of executing a transaction on the Ethereum network) have recently been over $150. This makes executing simple low-value transactions, such as swaps on Uniswap, prohibitively expensive! Since the emergence of DeFi, there are several other L1 chains (like Solana and Avalanche) that have become a popular place for DeFi developers to build with transaction fees. Ethereum itself is also in the midst of the infamous “ETH2” transition, which aims to solve this problem on the Ethereum network itself.
This is not correct in the sense that a) 'ETH2.0' is now deprecated term, and b) does not solve the gas fee issue by itself. Ethereum has pivoted to a modular rollup centric roadmap that solves the high costs of transactions already now (cf StarkWare and MatterLabs zkSync) while still keeping the secuirty and decentralisation of the main Ethereum settlement layer. This is in contrast to other L1s such as Solana which have sacrificed decentralisation for higher speed and throughput.
Check out this wonderful resource by @epolynya for the most comprehensive summary of this new roadmap
https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-...
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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,…
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> 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…
So when I point out that there are other use cases beyond "replicating an existing financial instrument while trying to avoid the eyes of the state", instead of walking back your claim that no other use cases exist, you simply move the goalposts and attack these use cases in other ways. They're all perfectly legitimate complaints. But the fact that you have to resort to them, rather than defending your original claim…
I wasn't the one who made that claim anyways, so let me make one: Beyond cryptocurrency, there is no problem that blockchain solves better (simpler, cheaper, more efficient, more practical, etc.) than "traditional" organizations and technology.
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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…
The reason in my mind is simple: a corrupt central system will never choose such technology.
In our human history we kept inventing technology but it (the technology) never fixed corruption. Of course maybe web3 is truly something special but I doubt this. Why: because I dont see how this techology changes fundamental human nature.
Here is an example: people were saying that internet (web1 or web2 not sure how to name this) will offer free access to knowledge thus making everybody smarter. But we see this not happening. It is true that more people are smarter or better but many many more are influenced by internet in bad (corrupted) ways.
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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…
We use email; it’s very much a crypto-less federated system that works at scale (of, more or less, every Internet user!)
And there are newer examples: while it’s by no means a Twitter, Mastodon (and the broader ActivityPub universe) is already at a healthy scale. I collected these stats three and a half years ago; the ecosystem has grown substantially since then: https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/
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1. Existing payment systems expose your entire financial history to the service provider (e.g.: your bank, your credit card company etc.). I don't understand how people can complain about surveillance and data collection by tech companies, and then be perfectly fine with consumer finance companies doing the same thing. 2. What is legal is not what is moral. E.g., outlawing sex work, which results in SWers in even Wes…
Honest question: What if coinbase is hacked, and the info connecting people's verified real-world identities to their wallet is revealed? Now everything is public - isn't that worse?