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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

#301

Post by thebean11 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #133
thebean11 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t mortgages actually also examples of over collateralized loans? You borrow 80% of the homes value, and use the entire home as collateral.

You can live in the home while it is collateral. You can’t use your collateralized coins.

Not totally true. You could, for example, use as collateral tokens that represent staked Ethereum (rocket pool ETH for example) so you are effectively using the ETH to generate staking yield, and also using it as collateral simultaneously.

The ability to wrap ownership in a smart contract can extend to pretty much any use case, as long as the lending protocol supports using the wrapped token as collateral.

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

#302

Post by davepeck »

jules-jules wrote: post #295
davepeck wrote: post #6

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.

thanks for the well-written primer. Just one observation. You write: >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…

Thanks. This is good detail. I may go back and revise this corner of the post.

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

#303

Post by jules-jules »

shiohime wrote: post #147
PretzelPirate wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a great article to read on why layer1 blockchain scalability isn’t sustainable long-term (for any layer 1): https://polynya.medium.com/why-rollups-data-shards-are-the-o... When reading about competing blockchains, it’s important to figure out if someone you’re reading values money or decentralization (and therefore individual’s digital autonomy once we enter the Metaverse). Polynya (Liberosist on Reddit) is i…

Thanks for sharing that article and for the insight, I appreciate it! I'm trying to learn the pros and cons of a lot of chains and agree that a lot of articles come across as marketing focused, so it's been hard for me to learn about each chain other than being a user and working with each chain creating simple dapps or other projects.

Do check out r/ethfinance, it's the most rational sub related to all things Ethereum.

Brand new, blockchain-based reddit/twitter hybrid gm.xyz looks interesting as well.

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

#304

Post by skybrian »

emillime wrote: post #217
skybrian wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more important limitation for defi loans is that nothing other than blockchain assets can be used as collateral. You can't use the loan to buy anything real without having enough money to buy it already. A mortgage lets you buy and live in a house even if you don't have enough money to buy the house.

That is a bit too simplified. You can add yield bearing tokens as collateral. That basically means that as long as the yeild is more than the cost of the loan the loan wil pay back it self.

Hmm, that's sort of interesting but it seems like it presumes you own the income stream to begin with, and that it's already been turned into a cryptocurrency token. What are some examples?

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

#306

Post by Animats »

omarfarooq wrote: post #210
Animats wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For instance, the primary USDC contract on Ethereum is a proxy contract — it’s upgradable by design. By whom? "Upgrading" a contract should require the approval of all parties to the contract.

USDC is upfront about being centralized.

"Centralized" is not the same as "terms alterable at sole discretion".

(Obvious Darth Vader reference).

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

#307

Post by wpietri »

Vetch wrote: post #240
outside1234 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 immutabilit…

This seems very whataboutist. Is your serious claim that Bitcoin, et al, aren't increasing bribery? They're helping out other sorts of financial crime quite handily, so this is a claim that would require a lot of evidence.

And as to your second paragraph, [citation needed]. As long as we're imagining central authorities mandating the sort of transparency that would make it harder for corruption, we could just use the existing financial system, which is already reasonably well tied to real-world identity. Cryptocurrency in no way helps here.

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

#308

Post by undefuser »

lui8906 wrote: post #286
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 perf…

Could you provide some pointers to resources that explain clearly how Solana's consensus protocol and its Proof of History work? I read the whitepaper, watched a couple of videos but still find it unclear. As some other people said, it is not different from Bitcoin's mechanism with difficulty of zero.

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

#309

Post by omarfarooq »

Animats wrote: post #306
omarfarooq wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USDC is upfront about being centralized.

"Centralized" is not the same as "terms alterable at sole discretion". (Obvious Darth Vader reference).

In the case of USDC, it is: https://www.circle.com/en/legal/us-user-agreement

See 25. Amendments.

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