351–360 of 384 posts
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I hadn't seen Axie before, but I have seen a few other blockchain games. They seem to suffer the same pitfalls as the whole gamification trend that went around a few years ago, in that the game part feels tacked on, which of course completely misses the point. I have no doubt a good game could be built around the blockchain, as are my thoughts on gamification for fitness or whatever else, but the game has to come fir…
I don't share your optimism. Just as most smart contract/web3/crypto developers fail to understand political science, economics, physics, and software engineering; fewer seem to understand game development -- yet are happy to blithely repeat the same myth that game assets will somehow live on the block chain and be use-able in different games! Imagine owning Mario! There are a ton of great games being made today with…
I didn't say anything about ownership, I said the blockchain. Surely you're not saying its impossible to make a good game that makes use of the blockchain? Maybe that will never happen, but it seems odd to discount it entirely.
I get HN's negativity when it comes to the blockchain and crypto and all of that, I share it a lot of the time, but it feels like people here are just a little too jumpy when it comes to its very mention.
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I follow plenty of things Google as a company just does due to the money they have. Undersee cables for example. Project Zero. Secure by default. 2FA. Google even gives you now the option of configuring your ads. Realistically speaking some entity with a monetary motivation is solving hard problems for us. Who will solve this issue in web3 and with what motivation? If it is monetary (as it will be) do I now should st…
> the etherium company LOL
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Faster to accept payment? How is it easier for me to accept payment in eth and use it to pay my energy bill than it is to set up stripe? Also, you claim a better path to getting payment? What is better about it? As far as I can see either I trust a third party to act as an intermediate to save in gas tax, or I charge multiple dollars to verify payment "immediately" - i.e. anytime in the next few hours if imlucky, dep…
OP might be living in the future a bit, because yeah, fees are still too high right now, and there's too much friction. For now. But in principle I agree. If you have a wallet set up and are used to using it, it's pretty quick and easy, and the money settles faster than ACH in the US which take at least a day if not 3-5? Although in Canada settlement with Interac is almost instant, maybe 3 minutes to an hour. Setting…
Once you've overcome all the hurdles it's quick and easy isn't exactly encouraging. I'm not going to claim that it's easy to open a bank account/get a debit card, but they're pretty close to required in the western world these days so people have already overcome that hrudle.
> and the money settles faster than ACH in the US which take at least a day if not 3-5
This is a US problem that can be solved by regulation, not a technical problem. SEPA transfers clear in seconds in the EU. If you're using a payment network like Visa or Mastercard, you don't need to wait for processing (which can be 5-10 days), you only need authorization which is normally in the order of seconds. There is an element of trust here for sure, but you're trusting your Merchant Provider, and if you don't trust them to pay you you need another Merchant Provider _anyway_.
> Setting up Stripe is something you can only do with approval from the authorities, though, so e.g. sex workers can't use it.
Coinbase requires you to go through a KYC too, meaning it's unlikely that a person who is currently unable to use an existing Merchant provider will be able to use any of the larger exchanges.
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Uber is the polar opposite of what web 3 purports - it's a closed garden of a standard that allows other members to play by their rules.
That's fair, I was just using them as an example of a share economy
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It is my (largely uninformed) opinion that the greatest barrier to an open web is the difficulty in securing a static address for a device that remains consistent regardless of the currently connected gateway address. So much of what third party web services actually do is simply offering a static address for routing traffic.
... huh. I had not thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right. Not even a DNS thing. The entire concept of third party messaging platforms is because we can't just send data directly at another internet user unless they've done all the requisite setup to reliably receive it.
I _can_ send a file from my phone to another friend's phone via ftp for example, but only if both are on WiFi, have port forwarding turned on on the router, and either just have the most up-to-date dynamic IP stored, or are using dynamic DNS, or have a static IP allocated from their ISP, which is less common at least here in the UK.
If you're using a cell tower, forget it.
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Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake. Or maybe it's just paid out on a long delay. Now spamming costs quite a bit. Add to that a blacklist feature and a shared consensus on spamming addresses and it starts to work a little better.
> Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake. Oh, so, if I have $1m I can register a bunch of accounts and kick people I don't like off the platform? You said this thing was supposed to be censorship-resistant, right? Hell people will do it for free if they disagree with someone, you don't need $1m of accounts, you just need to say som…
You seem to have interpreted what I said slightly deeper than what I meant. I didn't mean to suggest there could be some widespread censorship. I imagine you could stake to create an account and then you could vote someone as a spammer - voting causes you and the person you voted to have to wait N more time before withdrawing (harms both accounts). If many people vote V for someone as a spammer that account would have V*N delay. I'm not saying they're censored, I'm saying they just have to wait longer before withdrawing to make a new account.
Add to this a simple blacklist system like how some antivirus tools collaborate, sharing hashes. You can pick your own third-party list of spam hashes based on different rules, or modify/build your own. Using your example of an account getting 100k spam reports on-chain; auto-add them to such a blacklist. Realise your favourite person has been spam-attacked in the way you describe? Whitelist that account. Like how you allow some apps you know are safe to run on your computer.
This is super rudimentary and pretty quickly thought of, but I feel like you could get halfway and that's all I'd really care for. No-one here is censored btw, as in like how Trump was kicked off Twitter, they're simply blocked by default for you based on an algorithm you choose and can be whitelisted again if you want.
You could add smarter methods like checking strings for common spammy terms, such as all those fake Elon accounts on Twitter saying the same things, and auto add them to a list. You could have a quadratic spam voting system where if someone is voted repeatedly the wait they have to withdraw gets longer and longer. You could have a reputation system based on the number of people who say someone is spamming where others have too, but who has never been called spam themselves, who then gets more weight for future votes to blacklist someone.
You could even create psudo-private groups on the system by adding your own accounts to a primary blacklist and then whitelisting each other. Obviously not private because someone could just not use a list, but you'd only see each other to make things easier, like a subset of Twitter.
I don't know, there's loads of small tweaks you can make here, but it feels like you could get a P2P application working better than Twitter in terms of spam if you have the ability to pick your spam prevention model and accounts cost a deposit to setup. Maybe you've worked on this way longer and have thought about these all before and they're provably wrong! FWIW I quit working in crypto earlier this year and am far less invested than others, I'm just also less dismissive of it off the bat.
What is the value proposition of web3 to the user? JS web apps offloaded the compute and memory onto the browser/client, web3 to offload storage costs onto the user. You will up pay for every click. web3 and metaverse feels so dystopian. but the young generations that were raised by tiktok will probably accept it.
Story time. About 20 years ago, when dialup was introduced where I grew up, my uncle called me to show him what this new internet thing is. As soon as I opened "yahoo.com", he asked "how am I paying to view Yahoo?". I said you're not paying anybody, you're just paying for the Internet connection. He nodded. I then showed him Hotmail. He kept asking "ok so now, how did they charge me to view this page?". I kept tellin…
But crypto is not the answer for micropayments, if that’s the goal we can do it without all the blockchain nonsense.
Where is Web3 P2P? Decentraland is centralized. The Sandbox is centralized. OpenSea is centralized. Metamask is centralized. Bitcoin and Etherium mining depend on big server farms that are more centralized than Akamai.
That just seem stupidly wasteful approach. I have nothing against actually p2p where everyone controls and runs the parts useful for them, even if there is some duplication. Think of Bittorrent. You don't download entire bittorrent network, but parts that you want...
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I think the main reason it won't be successful is because people simply don't care about decentralization/privacy. Historically, there have only been a handful of successful social media companies. Starting a new one with the key differentiator being decentralization, while also adding the onboarding friction of crypto wallet management, is essentially a guarantee of failure. Mastodon tried this, without the unnecess…
Same reason crypto won’t take over for payments (even if it could scale). We already have payment networks that work well. People aren’t going to switch to a less convenient solution to what they already have for . That’s not always good but it’s the reality.
I assume you don't live in a country built around M-Pesa or EVC Plus, but it's very hard to build banking records around mobile credit. For example, in Somalia which uses the USD, has US, UK, and many other countries financial sanctions. So you trade airtime in the form of USD, but without a real banking infrastructure behind it. There is an increase in moving from this to a crypto-based system over SMS that allows for unique accounts, credit histories, international payments for remittance and micropayments (these SMS tools don't work out of the country), etc... So here Crypto might be the better payment network. Here's a guide for EVC Plus to understand how they trade there:
https://www.hormuud.com/personal/services/evc-plus.aspx
Crypto, in the way I think it was meant to be 7+ years ago and how I still want it to go as an industry, solves these issues quite nicely :)