Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web3 Is Bullshit

stephendiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 125 posts

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#61

Post by jerojero »

drdeca wrote: post #28
jazzyjackson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…how is efficiency different from scale? Right now Eth cannot accomodate the transactional demands of the world because it is extremely inefficient and costly (gas fees) I don’t claim to be an eth or PoS expert, but is it not the case that the transition to PoS is to lower transaction fees and prepare the network for sharding? Maybe sharding for scale is a totally separate issue, but I don’t understand why they would…

my understanding is that much of the motivation for PoS is to avoid the electricity usage, and in some but not other ways of measuring it possibly has some better security properties, not really increasing the throughput or gas fees?

PoS is more scalable because if you need faster validation all you do is add more parallel nodes. With PoW all the validators are competing against each other to be the fastest whereas with PoS there is no competition but consensus.

Eth2.0 is supposed to be much faster than Eth1.0 anyway, they say it'll be capable of doing thousands of transactions per second (as opposed to the ~15 it is doing right now). It's partly due to the switch to PoS.

This might also bring down costs, gas fees are high because when you have only 15 transactions that can go through every second and you have thousands, millions of transactions requested every minute... well, a lot of pressure is built and that pressure is reflected on the gas price. But if you were to have a system that is capable of doing thousands, even hundreds of thousands of TPS then you would have very quick transactions and very high availability which would bring fees down.

Really, the only people that don't want POS are miners, a node in Eth2.0 is meant to be run on any home set up. Even a laptop, the most important part is for it to never go down.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#62

Post by mattdesl »

leifg wrote: post #44
yannoninator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rebuttal? I agree with the post? I just want the common man to see crypto for what it really is with a balanced debate or interview, not just a blog post that only 'nerds' reads as Diehl states. > It’s almost only nerds who read my blog... After all, it would be more credible coming from him than me.

> I just want the common man to see crypto for what it really is with a balanced debate or interview, not just a blog post that only 'nerds' reads as Diehl states. I've been following this space for a while and honestly I don't see how a counterpart would actually look like. We had blockchains/crypto for almost 13 years and the only thing that came out of it is a speculative semi-unregulated asset market. Still Forbe…

Considering BTC's network uptime has been about 99.9% for over a decade, I'd say the "here to stay" articles may have been relatively accurate? (I don't care much for BTC, though I do feel a narrow scope of its usage will probably persist in some fashion for many more years.)

> Show me one blockchain application that has nothing to do with virtual assets that not only turns a profit but is provably more efficient than a database based solution.

The only thing ledger specifies is virtual state and virtual assets (ie: tokens). A simple example of an application that is easier with a smart contract than traditional financial services and a plain old database is an escrow agent for handling a significant sum across hundreds or thousands of global participants (and thus potentially currencies). In practice; a smart contract application built on this may look like a time-constrained Kickstarter campaign, but using a trustless/ownerless escrow contract to accept and manage payments.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#63

Post by diveanon »

shiohime wrote: post #39
kinakomochidayo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really minor to worry about funds being inaccessible for who knows how long when Solana is down. I'd rather go with Polygon or Arbitrum for now since it's fast, and wait until zkEVM like zkSync is out. Same with StarkNet. The quick and cheap transactions of Solana with Ethereum's decentralization is what I'm looking for, and that'll only be possible with zk rollups.

Polygon's a pretty good chain, but I have had issues with it before with essentially a traffic jam where my tx got locked up in a queue and took 30 minutes to process. But it's nice to be able to use the chain and it is quite cheap. Arbitrum is pretty expensive per tx still though right? I haven't used the chain too much because the native bridge takes about a week to get funds over IIRC. And Solana's only been down…

Polygon has become my go to chain over the last 6 months.

Even during yesterday’s crash I was able to execute trades at reasonable gas prices (I’ve developed a couple of dapps that run on polygon, and while the docs could use some love the overall experience was pretty frictionless.

Crypto.com now supports deposit/withdraw directly to polygon making it possible to skip ETH altogether.

For bridging I recommend Relay if you are setting up on a new chain for the first time, then xpollinate for later transfers of just stables. Fees are super low to go from L2 to L2 these days.

Rabby is a really nice web wallet the replaces metamask and supports all the L2 chains by default, built by the guys at debank.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#64

Post by diveanon »

c-cube wrote: post #54
diveanon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah most of these posts start with a straw man and try to work their way backwards from there. What I think it really boils down to is that web3 represents a shift away from the centralized dystopian organizations that employ most of the people in this community.

Away from centralization and straight into energy inefficient pyramidal schemes.

Thank you for that insightful and not at all cliche response.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#65

Post by md2020 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
Barrin92 wrote: post #12

"The Ethereum virtual machine has the equivalent computational power of an Atari 2600 from the 1970s except it runs on casino chips that cost $500 a pop and every few minutes we have to reload it like a slot machine to buy a few more cycles. That anyone could consider this to be the computational backbone to the new global internet is beyond laughable. We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where t…

Is this what the struggles of the transition from scarcity to post scarcity looks like? Building systems that simulate scarcity to generate the illusion of value and to front run that value?

I don’t understand how a post-scarcity society would even be desirable. For things like art and music, their creators need to be able to command a price on their creations. The digitization of these things removes their scarcity and essentially makes them function as a public good, making it impossible to set a price on them that will support the artist. If there’s no way for digital artists to support themselves, then they’ll cease to exist. Extend this to any other proposed “post-scarcity X” and you get a society I wouldn’t really want to live in. This isn’t meant to be flippant, I’m genuinely curious if there’s something here I’m missing.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#66

Post by shiohime »

rvz wrote: post #59
kinakomochidayo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really minor to worry about funds being inaccessible for who knows how long when Solana is down. I'd rather go with Polygon or Arbitrum for now since it's fast, and wait until zkEVM like zkSync is out. Same with StarkNet. The quick and cheap transactions of Solana with Ethereum's decentralization is what I'm looking for, and that'll only be possible with zk rollups.

> I'd rather go with Polygon or Arbitrum for now since it's fast, and wait until zkEVM like zkSync is out. I don't think the local supermarket would be pleased to hear that if they were going to adopt Ethereum for shoppers to pay for their groceries, they would need to approve + switch to layers like Polygon, Arbitrum just to reduce the already high fees on ETH. Even if they did, it's still very expensive and not ver…

This summarizes my viewpoint on ETH quite well. I think it's a really technologically sick platform that has a lot of potential, and I do believe in the future when these scalability solutions are in place and have mass adoption, then the ecosystem really can be excellent. However, today, it's not there, and I cannot recommend using base ETH for anything other than if you are a large corporation or generally wealthy and want to capitalize on the large amount of liquidity in the ecosystem compared to others.

ETH, as a base layer, is financially impractical. The native L2 solution in Arbitrum is also too expensive, I believe it's like a quarter of the cost? That is still absolutely unacceptable. Also I don't have any faith in advertised timelines or scalability solutions until they are in place, I saw slides and discussions around sharding, layering, and off-chain computation solutions like Truebit back in 2017. Fast forward to today and the system is still unusably inefficient, so yeah, I'll believe it when I see it.

I'm fairly certain that the majority of holders in ETH are treating it purely as a stock that only goes up, never moves their ETH off of the exchange (or even better it's not able to move off as it's a closed system like Robinhood), and actually are not using the ecosystem. If they were, then the average person would quickly realize how absurd it is to burn through their ETH for simple transactions.

I truly hope that the scalability solutions in development now pan out, because it will never succeed long term imo if they cannot solve this. If the scalability solution ETH proposes is simply use different chains, I'll do that, and they won't be in your ecosystem.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#67

Post by shiohime »

diveanon wrote: post #63
shiohime wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polygon's a pretty good chain, but I have had issues with it before with essentially a traffic jam where my tx got locked up in a queue and took 30 minutes to process. But it's nice to be able to use the chain and it is quite cheap. Arbitrum is pretty expensive per tx still though right? I haven't used the chain too much because the native bridge takes about a week to get funds over IIRC. And Solana's only been down…

Polygon has become my go to chain over the last 6 months. Even during yesterday’s crash I was able to execute trades at reasonable gas prices ( I’ve developed a couple of dapps that run on polygon, and while the docs could use some love the overall experience was pretty frictionless. Crypto.com now supports deposit/withdraw directly to polygon making it possible to skip ETH altogether. For bridging I recommend Relay…

Yeah polygon does seem like a nice chain to develop for, I'm assuming the same frontend packages like ethers.js / web3 work seamlessly since it's EVM? The thing I like about working in the Ethereum ecosystem is it is more mature as a whole despite the scalability issues, and there are some very cool projects out there.

If you are looking for other bridges too I recommend checking out Synapse, they let you bridge between a good number of EVM chains and I haven't had any issues with them at all.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#69

Post by robbedpeter »

md2020 wrote: post #65
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this what the struggles of the transition from scarcity to post scarcity looks like? Building systems that simulate scarcity to generate the illusion of value and to front run that value?

I don’t understand how a post-scarcity society would even be desirable. For things like art and music, their creators need to be able to command a price on their creations. The digitization of these things removes their scarcity and essentially makes them function as a public good, making it impossible to set a price on them that will support the artist. If there’s no way for digital artists to support themselves, th…

The artist won't starve if all the basics of living are free. Universal basic income or some other scheme could maintain the means of economic transactions, but post-scarcity fundamentally means that everyone is taken care of to a minimum basic standard of living. Food, water, healthcare, shelter, sanitation, and safety are available by default to every citizen. An artist would only ever starve or suffer if they renounced the basics.

The nature of economics and markets changes radically in ways we can't predict. Post-scarcity systems could be fundamentally unstable concurrent with fungible currencies of the type we use now. New mechanisms of valuation based on time and so on might take hold, or it might require distribution of resources in ways not yet considered. The point being that incentives and accumulation of wealth will be radically different to the extent that there's not a clean or obvious connection to current incentives that drive human behavior.

Re: Web3 Is Bullshit

#70

Post by maccolgan »

Barrin92 wrote: post #12

"The Ethereum virtual machine has the equivalent computational power of an Atari 2600 from the 1970s except it runs on casino chips that cost $500 a pop and every few minutes we have to reload it like a slot machine to buy a few more cycles. That anyone could consider this to be the computational backbone to the new global internet is beyond laughable. We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where t…

The author beautifully missed the point of having a EVM in the first place, he missed the "it's trustless" memo. EVM is slow because it runs the same code in millions of computers where no computers are trusted and only the consensus of the computers are trusted. You won't be running Firefox or Linux on EVM.

I like how even the most educated and experienced people in the world can't bother to read the bitcoin whitepaper with no reservations.

Post reply on HN