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Web3? I have my DAOts

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Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#341
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Tethers relationship to Bitcoin? I thought they had their own coin.

One Tether is the supposed to be = to one USD which is supposed to be in Tether's bank account somewhere. They have like 16 people total and are based in a mailbox in the Caribbean and nobody in the commercial paper markets have heard of them, despite them being one of the largest buyers in the world (in theory). Their "audits" aren't really audits and there's a ton of sketchiness with the firm they chose last time t…

> nobody in the commercial paper markets have heard of them

You've spoken to Evergrande and friends?

> to buy BTC you really first bought Tether (or USDC) and then traded your tether for BTC a minute later

Nnnnno, not everyone uses sketchy and/or first-gen CEXs...

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that for every dollar someone takes out of the crypto eco-system someone else has to put one in. With miners taking their own cut that means the game is actually negative sum for normal people trading in crypto currencies.

Speculation is zero sum ignoring adding liquidity to the market in a positive sum game Everything else is positive sum. Trading, moving money, storing wealth...

But it's not stable enough to be terribly useful for storing wealth or moving money, at least by the standards of normal legal assets. So most of the value must come from crime and speculation.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#343
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse my ignorance, how does the buyer of the token know it hasn't been redeemed yet?

Embedded expiry, it can't be redeemed before the wine is ready anyway.

What happens if the wine goes bad? Who/what arbitrates in that scenario? Because from the winery's perspective, whoever currently holds that contract owes them money for the wine at a fixed price that was determined and sold in the past.

If I hold that contract and have to take delivery of rancid wine instead of fresh wine like I imagined, what's my recourse?

Basically how do you ensure the state of the real-world asset remains fixed throughout the duration of the contract?

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say everyone on the planet is Ethereum enabled tomorrow. What is the business case for the winery to use it in your example? I get that Ethereum or any other crypto can be another payment option for their customers. Beyond that what use does a winery have for a programmable substrate underlying its transactions with customers or suppliers? I'm not saying there is none but if you're going to rip on HN users, fra…

I’ll bite. A winery could sell ownership of wine stored or wine yet to be made. The purchaser, if sold via an NFT, could resell that ownership with no interaction with the winery until claiming the wine at a later date. This means both parties no longer need any relationship between the initial sale and claiming the eventual goods. The winery will simply be able to wait for someone to return with proof of ownership a…

Is this secondary market of goods yet to be produced something that people actually want to have?

Today the way this works is usually with a ticket or a receipt. The guy with the email receipt on his phone gets the food he ordered. The guy with the ticket gets into the concert.

There IS a secondary market for event tickets. Legitimate transfers frequently happen everywhere else e-commerce happens. Questionable transfers happen on the street in what I assume is low volume.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you rely on a trusted entity (winery) you don't need a blockchain to do anything you just described.

How are you going to transfer the right to have a wine bottle? By continuously signing legal documents?

Stock brokers track perfectly the transfer of people rights to stocks millions of times a day without any decentralized ledger. In fact, a SQL DB has worked quite well for many years now.

If the wine cellar wants their customers to trade wine, I'm sure a centralized ledger based on a SQL DB would be much easier and cheaper to implement and scale to millions of transactions.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#346
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would any of this need cryto? If you trust the winery to hold the wine you could trust them to rule the exchange. Each bottle could still have a token. Values could still rise and fall. All stored on a central exchange. These tokens issued by a trusted entity could perform the same function and can be cashed out. The key feature of cryto is around connecting trustless entities. Once you centralize on a physical p…

> Why would any of this need cryto? If you trust the winery to hold the wine you could trust them to rule the exchange. That’s a little like saying “why would the winery need Apple to make computers for them, the winery could just develop their own computer hardware and software.” It doesn’t make sense for most wineries to develop its own online exchange system, and the fact that it’s technically possible for a winer…

The critique being made in the original article, I think, is that it's extremely hard to find a hypothetical use case for blockchain technology that can't be done without blockchain technology. A wine exchange seems to pretty clearly fall into the "things we can do pretty well without crypto" category, so one needs to explain what crypto is bringing to the party that makes it a marked improvement. In this particular example, both "trustlessness" and "decentralization" are off the table (e.g., there is only one winery and you are trusting them to hold the physical goods).

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#347

Cryptos and Web3 are currently there where Web 1.0 was in the nineties. It was silly to order Pizza over the Internet like it was laughable listening to a baseball radio transmission over the internet instead using a … radio. LOL 20 years later everybody‘s ordering food over the internet while watching Netflix.

It wasn't silly to order Pizza over the internet. In fact, it was maybe the first example of a web order form on the world wide web [0]. And this is after the existing 20-year widespread success of pizza delivery by phone. I don't know why so many people willfully ignore history here.

[0] https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#348
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still zero-sum - I'll illustrate with an example: Imagine you and your friends collect and trade rocks you find on the beach. The more rocks you pick up and put in your personal baskets, the scarcer they become (just like mining bitcoins), so the work of finding more rocks becomes harder. This makes all the rocks you've already found "worth" more. Let's say for this thought experiment that there are 1000 rocks o…

> Well not necessarily - nobody actually paid them anything yet, so they have realized exactly $0 in gains. Except that they still have a rock that the market currently values at $10. The value of that clearly isn't zero, because it's $10. The argument that not everybody could sell their rocks all at once and still get the same price is only relevant if that's what happens. It's like saying your shares in an S&P 500…

And you've set me up perfectly for the real point: stocks generate dividends.

Dividends mean that the "rocks" you hold spit out a few pennies magically every so often. While fewer stocks today pay a dividend, many still do.

For holding bonds you get the coupon payment, which again is like your rocks spitting out pennies every so often.

In the real world, companies and governments are paying you to hold their rocks.

That's why the stock market/bond market isn't zero-sum.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#349
post #99

OK. The reason all this happening is that Bitcoin really did go to the moon. That's what powers all this speculation. If the price of Bitcoin had been stable for a decade, and it worked reliably, it would be a useful medium of exchange, but nobody would care. This is all about MAKE MONEY FAST. Bitcoin found some early use cases. Drugs first. Then getting money out of China. Money laundering. Tax evasion. Scams. Bitco…

Not only this, Satoshi had even predicted that the price would be very unstable and grow exponentially before it became stable.

Early Bitcoiners have known this and predicted it several times. See this post from a decade ago for reference:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c5j46/you_people_...

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Blockchain says I own this case of wine... but the other guy wont give me my wine! Who do I call? The physical, centralized police and the centralized legal system that back it. Without that legal system recognizing and honoring it, it's worthless. And if it all depends on my centralized legal system, then who cares about the decentralized blockchain. Might as well put it in a table in a database instance runnin…

You could say the same thing about property deeds, contracts, etc. The fact that the laws of physics still apply in the world and thus people can still physically take things from you, harm you, etc. is hardly an argument against any specific method for establishing and recording ownership or contracts.

> You could say the same thing about property deeds, contracts, etc. The fact that the laws of physics still apply in the world and thus people can still physically take things from you, harm you, etc. is hardly an argument against any specific method for establishing and recording ownership or contracts.

On the contrary, it's a strong argument for using those methods of establishing and recording ownership that are blessed by the relevant local legal system (or, sure, ultimately by those who control local violence, if you want to go all the way down). It's the reason why you get lawyers still insisting on using faxes rather than emails.

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