Live data from Hacker News

Web3? I have my DAOts

networked.substack.com

471–480 of 636 posts

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think instead of reading what I wrote, you read "you need a blockchain to do this". The anti-blockchain narrative on here is constantly attacking the strawman of "literally everything must be decentralised". I'm arguing that a decentralised medium of exchange through which separate points of centralisation can interact is still a useful construct. You're comfortable with your assets being codified in a thousand dif…

So... Why did you write it? Of course you don't need blockchains to do this. To reiterate: 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.

I don't quite agree with everything the person you are responding to is saying, but it's clear you aren't really reading what they have wrote.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#472
Just give up, crypto-kiddies. Your decentralized crypto fantasies will not materialize without exponential fraud. Do scientific level financial and legal-financial research to grasp the impossibility of your methods. Use your STEM education to review the methods this decentralized effort plans to employ and compare that against economic graph theory - they do not gel.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#473
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a strawman. The entire ecosystem does not have to be 100% decentralised. There is massive utility in a trustless, permissionless, censorship-resistant contract layer connecting disparate centralised entities. A centrally managed registry would never be suitable for this task for a multitude of obvious reasons.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#474
post #120

It's disingenuous for the author to present instances where some level of trusted actors is required in the near-term to make a service operational as voiding any claim of decentralization; obviously, the centralization of a network exists on a spectrum and where it's present in Web3 tech it's almost invariably more limited in scope than the centralization of their Web2.0 counterparts. Likewise his claim that APIs re…

Arguments about blockchain here on HN are frustrating. There are plenty of good examples of where it works very well but the mental gymnastic people go through to deny the obvious are incredible. The most basic to me is the Automatic Market Maker system. For example Uniswap is a system with only a few (relatively speaking) lines of a code at its core and a team of a couple of dozen. The system does billions of dollar…

> The system does billions of dollars worth of trades every day.

Billions of dollars? Ha. Uniswap does none of this. Uniswap allows you to convert one cryptocurrency to another.

Example:

Bill creates a coin called $FOO, it has 1,000,000 tokens and I give Mary one token in exchange for $100

My friend Josh creates a new coin called $BAR, it has 1,000,000 tokens and I give Steve one token in exchange fro $100.

Josh now gives one of his $BAR tokens to Bill for one of his $FOO tokens using uniswap 1:1. In theory $100 was "traded". Was it though?

> If anybody can point out to me a broker that does similar volumes that would allow me to make million-dollar trades with a few lines of code with no possibility of censorship I will happily concede that web3 is a failure.

If you can tell me how I get the USD that comes from my paycheck into a system that uses a few lines of code I'll be happy to concede that web3 is not a failure. Bill can't use his new $BAR token and Josh can't use his $FOO token to pay for groceries. So this whole premise is entirely useless.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#475

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.

> In fact, a SQL DB has worked quite well for many years now.

When you allow people to write their own smart contracts, bugs will happen. This can't be fixed, only dampened with a weakened interface to the blockchain.

When a bug in a smart contract happens you may now have a dispute, across borders, over the intent of the smart contract and the actual behavior.

Who handles this situation?

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transf…

People buy unbottled wine all the time, so maybe?

https://www.winemag.com/2019/10/01/a-beginners-guide-to-wine...

I’m not saying blockchain makes this any better, except in one sense: a lot of people with a lot of money are enthusiastic participants. If I had a winery you bet I’d be selling wine future NFTs, just to try and get the price bid up.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin can be shorted. Bitcoin prints money ( eg tether) Bitcoin just doesn't work. It's centralized now to fix it's issues. Best of all, none is regulated and the whales hold the power. Even more in the future with proof of stake. There is more dilution and misunderstanding with crypto in general then I've ever seen.

Bitcoin is completely unrelated to tether. Bitcoin is highly decentralised. Bitcoin is not moving to PoS. I'm not sure what your actual gripe is, but you certainly have no idea what you're talking about.

Bitcoin is absolutely related to tether. Tether mints a billion coins and then exchanges them for bitcoin, voila, bitcoin price goes up.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#478
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 as…

In the case of wine, the real-world version of “going bad” is just that it’s not very good. When you bought the future wine, you were betting that it would be very good wine and you could resell it for more. The winery was selling it to you for “cheap(er)” because you assumed that risk.

So for actual wine, right now, you have no recourse: you bought the risk. I don’t think this would be any different with NFT-wine. Now and in the NFT case you already paid the winery, you owe them nothing more.

Now if they cheat and give you water instead of wine… I guess whatever real-world contract says you can exchange this token for wine would say which wine?

Most likely the first N wineries to do this would do it as a publicity stunt, and if it proved useful then there would be some precedent. Much of the wine world operates on reputation and trust.

For the vast majority of physical products that are not like wine: you’d need real-world contracts to back your smart contracts and the latter would only be useful for decentralization of the secondary market.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#479
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just a derivative, bitcoin itself can be inflated via partially-backed bitcoin deposits at exchanges. In other words, the moment exchanges decide to lower their reserve ratio from 1 to less than 1, the supply of bitcoins in circulation will increase as a result. And, as you point out, we don't know that this hasn't already happened.

However at least with bitcoin you can easily self-custody, and be sure you're holding a real bitcoin and not a fractional one in an exchange

Shove some cash under a mattress or store it in a vault and you can be sure you are holding real dollars not fractional ones. Just holding a real dollar says nothing about the value of the dollar you are holding. Same as just holding a real bitcoin says nothing about the value of the bitcoin you are holding. Outside forces affect the actual value of what you hold fractional or not. The ability to self-custody affords you nothing. The value in either case can plummet completely outside of your control.

Re: Web3? I have my DAOts

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trillions of dollars that tether has minted Tether has "only" minted $78 billion, not trillions

Sorry, tens of billions of dollars, not trillions, my mistake. They are currently adding 1 billion a day at times, where does that money come from? Does anyone really believe 78,423,306,967 USD are currently invested in Tether?

I don't know anything about anything, but I see Wikipedia says Tether is 65% "backed by commercial paper". Which as far as I can tell basically means IOUs, but IOUs that are considered somewhat legit. It definitely seems questionable, but I'm not really sure how to assess how bad it is or isn't.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency)

Edit: I see elsewhere somebody saying "nobody in the commercial paper markets have heard of them"

Post reply on HN