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An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

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Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#51

Post by davepeck »

Animats wrote: post #47
davepeck wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original author here. I strongly disagree. While it’s certainly true that firmware on many devices can’t be or simply isn’t updated, it’s also the case that bugs ship. Because of this, engineers design and ship their more complex devices with the facility to upgrade firmware. Even my ages old stereo receiver is upgradable (although painfully so). But this is about smart contracts: code that in many cases moves money.…

For instance, the primary USDC contract on Ethereum is a proxy contract — it’s upgradable by design. By whom? "Upgrading" a contract should require the approval of all parties to the contract.

Right. In the case of USDC, whoever has the private key to their proxy contract’s owner account. You’re trusting their engineering team to do the right thing.

(EDIT: if I’m reading my etherscan correctly, it’s account 0xfcb19e6a322b27c06842a71e8c725399f049ae3a with upgrade rights. Sorry, I’m in transit so tapping on my phone.)

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#52

Post by davepeck »

krrrh wrote: post #44
wmf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fat protocol hypothesis hasn't been proven. If your app has value, why would you let a protocol take any of it?

It still really depends how far down the stack you go. One of the better observations Eric Raymond made in his essay The Magic Cauldron was that the closer you get to infrastructure the stronger the demands become for open protocols (emphasis added): > The network effects behind TCP/IP's and Linux's success are fairly clear and reduce ultimately to issues of trust and symmetry -- potential parties to a shared infrast…

This is great! I remember Raymond’s post from my distant past. Thanks for bringing it to my attention again — it’s very relevant.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#53

Post by jude- »

davepeck wrote: post #50
jude- wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d put that in the category of code that really could benefit from carefully controlled upgradability. First, if you're saying that you need a way to upgrade your money-managing code periodically because you will likely ship versions of it with show-stopping bugs (such as those that enable the destruction or theft of the users' funds), then why should I trust that you will ship flawless code for upgrades? Second,…

> why should I trust that you will ship flawless code You shouldn’t, because no code of sufficient complexity is flawless. > just deploy a new version of the smart contract On the Ethereum blockchain (for instance) storage and smart contracts are tightly coupled. If you move to a new smart contract you may well lose your state. This is fine in many cases and preferable in some. But not in others!

> You shouldn’t, because no code of sufficient complexity is flawless.

So why build an upgrade procedure at all, when you don't have to?

> On the Ethereum blockchain (for instance) storage and smart contracts are tightly coupled.

Sounds like an unforced error on these smart contracts' authors parts, and should not be used as an excuse to compromise the principle of code immutability.

If the possibility existed that they need to replace the business logic at a later date, then they should factor the storage logic so as to avoid this coupling. It can be done -- for example, a smart contract dapp can leverage a shared contract that only implements a public key/value store, where the keys are prefixed by the calling contract's address. Then, when the business logic contract changes, it can access any old versions' state with the old versions' contract address, apply any migrations on-the-fly, and store new state that will not overwrite old state due to this key prefixing.

In the Stacks blockchain (which I work on), we go one step further by making it so you can run an arbitrary read-only code snippet on the state of the blockchain at any point in the past (as given by a block hash). Then, you don't even need to do any migrations -- you can just query the historic state of your old contract and only store new data once it's necessary.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#54

Post by pcthrowaway »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #37

I think the biggest potential might be in creating companies and contracts. I would love smart contracts that with given payment also give me some shares of company. Also investing in pre IPO for retail investors in scam-resistant schemes. Public funding of projects. Voting with ones wallet but formalized and outliers and spam resistant. Ability to profit from and measure public goods thus allowing to employ Capitali…

These things already exist in forms. Take a look at DAOs

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#55

Post by Animats »

manbart wrote: post #19

‘Web3’ is just new window dressing on the same old crypto casino. “Get rich quick!” is the selling point

Exactly. If Bitcoin had not gone "to the moon", all of this would be a tiny niche, like Chaum's DigiCash was.

The problem is all the junk riding Bitcoin's coattails. At some point, probably soon, the bottom will fall out of at least part of this. NFTs are already crashing. That's not too visible, because there's no "market price" across different items. But you can look at sales on OpenSea, and notice that the resale prices are mostly lower than the previous price.[1] Smooth Love Potion [2], part of the Axie Infinity Ponzi, already crashed.

The big moment will come when Tether comes un-tethered. It cannot survive a net outflow, because it has very little asset backing. Something is going to crack in the Tether/Binance area. Binance is giving some people 200x leverage.[3] That never ends well.

[1] https://opensea.io/collection/collectvox?search[sortAscendin...

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/

[3] https://www.coalexander.com/post/the-tether-binance-axis-and...

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#56

Post by davepeck »

clpm4j wrote: post #41
davepeck wrote: post #6

Hi all — I wrote these notes with my colleagues at PSL while trying to wrap our heads around the madness that is Web3/Crypto. I’m an engineer by background and sort of a skeptic by nature; I think of this piece as a collection of loosely connected, hopefully pragmatic opinions from a builder’s perspective.

Thanks to you and your colleagues for writing this - the best writeup I've come across so far. This puts all of a16z's crypto marketing babble to shame.

Thanks; I’m really glad to hear that!

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#57

Post by davepeck »

manbart wrote: post #19

‘Web3’ is just new window dressing on the same old crypto casino. “Get rich quick!” is the selling point

Original author here. Totally. I’m old enough to remember when Web 3 was the semantic web, so I guess I don’t put much stock in the label. And, personally, I’m really interested in crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and some of the stuff the Indie Web community has built. I have no idea if those are, uh, web3 enough for web3.:-)

As for the question of casinos, I think @pinboard’s description of Web 3 as “an unregulated casino with a hip bar scene” (sigh) strikes me as… about right?

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#58

Post by thebean11 »

v_london wrote: post #16

Thanks for the great article! I wished the section on DeFi addressed the biggest elephant in the room, overcollateralization. A DeFi borrower always needs to lock in more assets as collateral than what they are borrowing, thus defeating the whole purpose for taking a loan aside from financial speculation. And there's no real way to solve it: all mechanisms I've heard of either try to replicate some form of background…

Aren’t mortgages actually also examples of over collateralized loans? You borrow 80% of the homes value, and use the entire home as collateral.

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#59

Post by dang »

danr4 wrote: post #9

Why in the name of the lord would you block my ability to open links in new tabs (on the main site) Edit: this site navigation experience is one of the worst i've ever encountered. I'm really interested in looking around but it's so painfully slow. Edit 2: the new tab is blocked on the main site, not on the blog post

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities

#60

Post by newacc9 »

davepeck wrote: post #49
inshadows wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything is about capturing value and extracting profit. There had been something like hacker culture back then, Mr. Serious Business Ventures on HACKER News. Also, the page requires JS to render, so it's probably crap anyway.

(Original author here: I agree completely. I’m… one of those older hackers. That said, I’m also fascinated and, frankly, a bit alarmed by this sudden change in the balance of value capture and creation. I think it’s worth looking at and contemplating face-on. That doesn’t mean I like it!)

psl.com has a beautiful chocolate background, easy on the eyes, but this link in particular blasts my retinas with whitespace. Consider darkmode.
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