Web3 is centralized • Hacker News Board

Re: Web3 is centralized

#411

Post by jakupovic » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

cuteboy19 wrote: post #273

jakupovic wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those platforms that let you use the scarce digital assets will. OT allow you to pull unlicensed copies from anywhere but from known endpoints, thus your digital copies are useless as none point to them. Similar to how you hosting www.google.com on your web server doesn't get any of the real Google traffic as none point to you.

So if the platform is doing all the heavy lifting, why do you need the blockchain again? i.e. what is the difference between this and YouTube? Blockchain is superfluous to this scheme

Blockchain is the immutable ledger, a place where if someone writes something down, it is guaranteed to not change, the immutable part. The difference between Blockchain/crypto/bitcoin and YouTube, is that the latter puts no guarantees about the content of a link, we trust Google.

If you go further, the content doesn't need to be a simple url, it could be data of any type. People get stuck on "who needs to pay for url, when I can copy the contents freely", but you're not buying simple url, you're buying a multidimensional point in the current manifestation of what we think as web3/metaverse. This point is the intersection of your private key, Blockchain used and the content(url). This is valuable because none can claim the same point, and it is guaranteed not to change.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#412

Post by macrolime » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

emerongi wrote: post #162

discardedrefuse wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not instant and the fees aren't always low. I was trying to transfer $10 USD in Bitcoin last May, when the BTC market was going insane, and it was impossible.

Additionally: can you make cryptocurrency transactions offline? In my opinion that is a crucial part of the "digital cash" idea. I don't know the technical details so it would be nice if someone more knowledgeable could answer. I'll even throw in a scenario that I've encountered: the card readers in a store aren't working, because there is a connection issue. Instead of using cash in my literal physical wallet, I'd l…

You can do an offline transaction, but there's no way to prevent double spend until it's online. If you gave some crypto to someone offline, you could double spend it until the recipient is online and publishes the transaction.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#413

Post by everfree » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

lottin wrote: post #341

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such requirement. The only requirement is that you be able to prove consistency and correctness of the ledger. The naive blockchain implementation needs transaction visibility but there isn't a hard requirement for it beyond that. Monero uses a system that at a high level is referred to as Ring Signatures (it's not too complicated but it's more than I want to get into at the moment). Zcash and other netwo…

I've spent the last 30 minutes researching how ring signatures can be used to prevent double spending without revealing the spender's balance, and I've found nothing. Do you know where I can find the details?

Here's a short explanation video to get you started. The general idea is that multiple signers are used, such that an outside observer doesn't know which signer is the "real" one, but only knows that "at least one of them" is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHN_B_H_fCs

Re: Web3 is centralized

#414

Post by jakupovic » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

notpachet wrote: post #275

jakupovic wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my reasoning it is illogical and meaningless. Pretty sure same logic as the poster. You on the other hand are not providing anything, but read of what I posted previously, please stop.

If you find something illogical and meaningless, take the time to explain why.

Will try to explain my reasoning better. Please see my reply to one of the comments where we compare youtube and web3. tldr; youtube/Google can change content of a link that points to them at will, but in web3 you cannot.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#415

Post by headmelted » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #245

jakupovic wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Adherents would have you believe that the current price, whatever it is at a given point, must mean some variant of “can all these people really be wrong? That’s ridiculous”. It’s not a reasonable starting point for a discussion, and then it immediately breaks down again. But it is reasonable to dismiss the whole field because you think it's a scam? Please read what you write before you post, as this is meaningless…

This is simply saying “can all these people be wrong?” in other words. What I wrote is absolutely logical as best I can tell. I didn’t say it’s a scam (although that community is riddled with those too). I said it’s a collection of ponzi schemes (for which there is far more evidence to support than it being a financial revolution). Charles Ponzi genuinely believed he had revolutionised finance, too. All you’ve essent…

The Ponzi comment above was a poor attempt at humour. He was a con artist who knew he was a con artist.

I do not believe the majority of people in the cryptocurrency space are attempting to harm anyone.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#416

Post by dlubarov » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

lottin wrote: post #341

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such requirement. The only requirement is that you be able to prove consistency and correctness of the ledger. The naive blockchain implementation needs transaction visibility but there isn't a hard requirement for it beyond that. Monero uses a system that at a high level is referred to as Ring Signatures (it's not too complicated but it's more than I want to get into at the moment). Zcash and other netwo…

I've spent the last 30 minutes researching how ring signatures can be used to prevent double spending without revealing the spender's balance, and I've found nothing. Do you know where I can find the details?

There are a lot of variations, but in Zerocash-style schemes (which can be viewed as massive ring signatures), each note has an associated 'nullifier'. Spending a note involves revealing its nullifier, and for the transaction to be valid, the nullifier must not have been used before.

A nullifier is derived deterministically from private account data, and zero-knowledge proofs are used to show that a nullifier was dervied correctly without revealing the private account data.

For more detail I think this is a good explanation: https://electriccoin.co/blog/zcash-private-transactions/

Re: Web3 is centralized

#417

Post by hinkley » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #9

The main issue with "Web3" is that it moves records of transactions from many private places to one public place. Sure this one place may not be controlled by a single entity, but it facilitates tracking at an unprecedented level. Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate example of this and are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters. In our current economy financial transactions are recorded…

Private ledgers are also sharded, which means they scale much higher.

When cryptocurrencies can handle 10% of Visa’s transaction rate, somebody wake me up and I’ll start paying attention to it. Until then a lot of this stuff is pearl clutching.

Visa is only a fraction of total money transactions worldwide. To be a replacement it has to be able to go an order of magnitude higher than Visa, and last I checked it’s still three orders of magnitude below Visa. That’s a lot of orders of magnitude to overcome. Too many by most accounts. People who make those sorts of improvements started out with a prototype that was already 20-50 times faster than the status quo.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#418

Post by hinkley » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #357

StingyJelly wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web3 is a buzzword that makes it sound like something which it isn't, same with AI - dumb but pattern recognition is still useful. I wouldn't call trustless programmable money with defined supply irrelevant since there is no alternative in the mainstream financial system. You are talking about just one function - transfer of value - but that already works just fine. For your points: You can have much lower transactio…

> You are talking about just one function - transfer of value I do not. I am talking of the only way money enters this system. If there would be no money in the system no one would care. At the end of the day, in this time and place, our society decided money is the ultimate goal. I don't like it but it's what it is. > You can have much lower transaction fees than in Visa / Mastercard First of all: it's nonsensical t…

Strictly speaking, if the issuer of the currency didn’t get fully on board with the transition, wouldn’t it be mayhem?

If I am a private financial institution, I’m having a grand old time converting the first 1% of dollars to crypto. I can still spend all of that money on salaries and construction and mega yachts. But when we are at 50%? You have half the dollars in the world. You can’t possibly spend them. This isn’t income any longer, it’s a liability. The only way to get to 90% is if you trigger hyperinflation.

Eventually to beat fiat currency you actually have to win the government over. They collected gold coins and issues dollars, because it’s fiat currency and you can do that. How do you collect all of the silver and not issue fiat currency? How do you collect all the dollars and not do the same?

Magic thinking. It’s all magic thinking, and I’m too old for this shit.

Re: Web3 is centralized

#419

Post by anchpop » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

davewritescode wrote: post #344

chrisco255 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are an absolute boon to tax collectors, forensic accountants and fraudsters Weird that it would be a boon for both forensic accountants and fraudsters. How do you reconcile that sentence? The fact that something is done in public does not mean that it is centralized. There is public and decentralized, public and centralized, private and centralized, and private and decentralized. Decentralization itself, is a spect…

> With the recent introduction of zk rollups on Ethereum, it's now possible to have the best of both worlds, in my opinion (see https://aztec.network/index.html ). Transactions that need to be private will be conducted on zero-knowledge rollups built for privacy. Mastercard is working on this with Consensys for Ethereum ( https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/12/16/consensys-colla ...). I can’t find any real technic…

This is a misunderstanding. The goal of cryptocurrencies is not to process transactions. The goal is to order transactions. The order is the hard part. (Notice that if I have one ETH, and I submit a transaction to send alice an ETH and to send Bob an ETH, alice and bob are both very interested in the order - only one transaction can go through, and which one is determined by which one comes first in the chain).

Fundamentally the order doesn’t really matter, as long as it doesn’t change retroactively. Once you have agreement on the order, anyone can process the transactions and know they’ll get the same final result as anyone else.

I’m not sure about this specific one, but most “rollup”s use the main chain for agreement on the order, and then outsource the actual processing to someone outside the chain. Some use cryptography from verifiable computing, so the off-chain person can also submit a proof that their processing is right and there’s no possibility of fraud. (the proof can then be verified extremely quickly.)

Re: Web3 is centralized

#420

Post by acdha » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 6:25 PM UTC

cassepipe wrote: post #408

acdha wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't about other block chains but that's a problem that Monero has (partially?) solved by tying transactions to two other wallets each transaction so that it is hard to follow your steps. I would be very hesitant to recommend that to anyone who lives under an authoritarian regime rather than casually giving you plausible deniability for buying weird porn. Large scale analysis of the entire network will see throu…

"I would especially question that being at all effective in an environment where clients are frequently compromised." Could elaborate on that ? I am curious. True enough although cash does not move by itself, you have to meet up and you can be caught with an unsual amount of cash with you.

A range of things we’ve seen in authoritarian regimes: sophisticated attacks like NSO, but also things like mandatory TLS CAs or government monitoring apps, police analyzing phones seized from dissidents or crossing borders, etc. or the very low-tech strategy of offering the guy you just nabbed a lenient sentence if he flips on his partners or having police informants pretending to be part of the underground economy (are you sure the local exchange isn't secretly compromised? That the app you're using doesn't have some intentional flaw?).

There are some people who’ll say their personal opsec is so good they’ll never fall prey to that but even if that was true it’s also everyone you transact with. If you’re living in a repressive regime, you have to worry about everyone you interact with as well, and that’s deadly for a currency network. It’s especially so for one nobody needs to use — if the police stop you and you have the equivalent of Venmo/PayPal on your phone, that’s not risky because millions of people use it and they follow local laws but if some cryptocurrency did successfully allow you to avoid government oversight simply having a wallet app installed would attract attention you don’t want. People who aren't trying to hide their activities won't want to risk that, which means that there'll be less volume in which to hide your transactions.