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Web3? I have my DAOts

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381–390 of 636 posts

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A winery could sell ownership of wine stored or wine yet to be made. Ah. You mean "a centralized entity creates a centralized way of providing and verifying ownership of wine"? 1. How does blockchain factor into this? 2. As always, descriptions like this betray how little crypto-peddlers know about real world. Buying future wine has been a thing as long as there has been wine https://www.winespectator.com/articles/…

That's great! Hey look I would like to send you the rights to my crate of wine. You're the 1000th customer to my site. Or maybe you want to trade it for your in-game weapon. Or I just like you and it's a gift, anonymous internet user. Of course I could just transfer directly to your Ethereum wallet. But why do that when I could explain you need to sign up to 'winespectator.com', I'll email them to arrange the ownersh…

> Hey look I would like to send you the rights to my crate of wine.

You truly believe this can't be done without blockchain?

> You're the 1000th customer to my site.

You truly believe you can't track customers without blockchain?

> Or maybe you want to trade me for that in-game weapon.

You truly believe it's impossible to implement in-game trading without blockchain?

> Of course I could just transfer directly to your Ethereum wallet.

The only thing you could transfer is some meaningless numbers. What makes them meaningful is some central, trusted authority that will accept these numbers as proof of something. But then, since you depend on that authority to verify this... you don't need blockchain.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#382

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.

It is an argument against unnecessarily elaborate and complex methods of recording contracts like crypto.

A lot of important, trusted systems often don't have particularly sophisticated security in every single layer. Homes and mailboxes have simple locks. Online transactions have fairly basic digital integrity checks (ie. you connected to a bank's server using HTTPS with a secret cookie). Credit card chips and card readers are riddled with vulnerabilities. We still sign legal documents with like, pen and paper and a scribble that even children can forge.

These systems are still trusted because trust isn't established by infallible recordkeeping processes, it's the humans and the organizations and the written/spoken promises we make that matter. A legally recognized scribble is as trustworthy and useful as a foolproof NFT. Crypto's complexity adds very little in practice.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said you need to only have one ENS name either? You could have one that you use for personal tech-related stuff, one that you use for work stuff, one that you use for gaming-related stuff, etc. (although for that kind of usage to really take off, Gas fees will need to come down).

Then why aren't you just using old school signature based auth? What does having your public key stored on the ethereum blockchain accomplish?

Your public key is available to everyone on the internet so anyone can verify your signed message. You can't do that without a blockchain unless a trusted third party is used.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#384
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…

> This is all about MAKE MONEY FAST. Which area of modern tech is not about "make money fast" ? Lol You're ngmi amigo

Exactly. The whole dotcom was also about making money fast. But that doesn't invalidate real uses-cases.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenSea is an online market for digital goods. A majority of the prices are denominated in cryptocurrencies (ie an item is priced at 1 ETH). As measured in USD, OpenSea did 8% of Amazon's volume in a month.

Had anyone tried to convert those fictional tokens to actual usable money, you'd very quickly find out that the actual volume is about 0%.

Off-ramping is a non-issue. It's like saying the stock market is worthless because its value is predicated upon keeping capital tied into it. Really, you can extend the same reasoning to any market. It's fine being a nihilist, but not very realistic.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#386
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

Satoshi also predicted hyperinflation in 2008 after central banks intervened to mitigate the financial crisis. He was most likely a computer scientist, definitely not an economist.

He was most likely this computer scientist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scienti...

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can I trade my wine in the weekend? Ah no, sorry, stock market is closed then.

Can I trade my wine at 5pm? Ah no, European wine stock market is closed then.

When you really 'own' the ticket, you can trade it anywhere you want, without being dependent on some exchange that's only open whenever and takes some fixed cut without any competition.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#388
There are two logical somersaults embedded with the crypto scene in its various mutations over the last decade that undermine the whole proposition irrespective of any other value system or vision.

* That digital decentralization is somehow equivalent to the tightly coupled blockchain architecture. In fact, if people were empowered to run their own "nodes" in a display of increasingly scarce digital self-sovereignty, there are infinite possible ways to connect devices over http (or gopher or ftp any other protocol the future may spawn). NB: The web was born decentralized. Many of those ways will arguably be much more useful in solving real problems as they do not put artificial constraints on how information flow is organized.

* That one can create artificial digital scarcity and put the genie of zero marginal cost back in the bottle. In fact already the very proliferation of thousand of cryptocurrency variants shows that digital scarcity could only ever be achieved by oppressive means. This is the very social malfunction purportedly (some) adherents of crypto are fighting against.

Why are we still talking about a set of ideas that is so distorted and orthogonal to both the true nature of the digital medium and our needs? Blame it on the self-financing juggernaut of bitcoin that triggered every possible speculative instinct out there, whether a new generation of noise day-traders, widows or orphans or professional blood-suckers.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#390

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.

No, the basic problem is ownership rights over physical objects can't be enforced without coercive power, but blockchains and smart contracts can't use coercive power, therefore they would have to rely on an external entity to enforce such rights. But then the system is no longer "trustless", "permissionless", or "censorship-resistant", and therefore we have none of the supposed benefits of blockchains but we do have all of the inconveniences, which means at this point we're better off with a centrally-managed registry which at least is cost-effective.
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