Is Web3 anything?
chris-granger.com
chris-granger.com
The government is not some representative of the collective will. Thomas Sowell provides his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 as a poignant demonstration of the fallacy of that notion: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38
Another example would be the latest $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It was 1,500 pages long and no legislator read even an appreciable fraction of it. There were provisions in it that the public was discovering a week before it was voted on, like one threatening to classify cryptocurrency nodes as brokers with KYC requirements for any transaction they processed.
Apparently Treasury had worked behind the scenes to get this provision in the bill, to give DeFi the Patriot Act treatment: https://twitter.com/jswihart/status/1422785103386669058?s=20
The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system. The fourth and fifth estates need to play precisely this role, of parsing and communicating the actions of government and business.
Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice. Every segment of society decouples from accountability to any other: individuals hide from governments, governments hide from the press, business hides from government...
What exactly is the argument that you think would make that a worthwhile future to pursue?
>>The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system
Being discovered a week before the vote meant that there was no time for all those affected to study its effects, let alone to negotiate an amendment for it, and furthermore, that it came within a hair's breadth of NOT being discovered.
Other very worrying provisions were only discovered after the law's passing.
>>Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice.
Crypto systems are opt in. The government mandates are violently enforced on those who would prefer to opt out. This sophomoric socialist argument that private enterprise is fascist is totally shallow.
This leads to a more nuanced view of web3 and smart contracts: a way to acquire law-like order in business dealings at a vastly lower cost. Or put yet another way, if lawyers and the government got their act together and used technology to reduce the cost of their services (and actually passed on those savings) then smart contracts would never have been a thing.
Where exactly does the leverage of smart contracts come into play?
The biggest reason libertarianism is a nonstarter is that it outright rejects the state monopoly on violence. Without a lone arbiter, societies fragment due to intragroup competition and violence. As a society fragments, the size of the monolithic projects it can engage in become smaller and smaller.
International trade is already so fragile that a stuck tanker threatens swaths of the entire thing. Now picture how infinitely improbable a system like that is if there's no physical enforcement mechanisms backing contracts up.
If the crypto court makes an unfair ruling, you tell everyone to never trust their judgement. Now they’ve lost credibility and nobody will want to escrow funds with them in the future.
Whichever court provides the most consistent fair rulings attains the best reputation and becomes the most utilized.
By contrast, if government courts make an unfair ruling, they’re still going to be in business tomorrow and there’s nobody that can stop their monopoly on broken justice.
Some people might argue that their western country has a fair justice system and that everyone should be glad to be subject to that system.
That argument would be overly generous to even the most fair countries, and completely falls flat in the many countries where corruption is rampant.
The thing I don't understand about all of the cryptocurrency negativity on HN is nobody's forcing anyone to use decentralized products, but the naysayers seem to insist that everyone needs to continue use existing centralized solutions even if they're not happy with them. What's so bad about letting the nerds LARP amongst themselves even if you don't want to participate?
It's entirely possible it's the only thing that has prevented anti-discrimination lawyers from hollowing out corporate America with lawsuits
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
Most libertarians want the government to retain a monopoly on violence so that the institution that uses violence is accountable to the public.
So it seems like a good complement, not a replacement.
OTOH—without knowing many concrete details myself—seems like there would be plenty of room for reuse of contracts? Maybe even something like a storefront where you can grab one that matches your scenario
That hasn't happened in any other area of open source. Linux is supported by billion dollar companies with hundreds-of-millions in revenue. Container software is supported by tech giants. Browsers are the same. Web frameworks are either from corporations or they're built by people who are sponsored to build them. Most successful open source projects have revenue streams from outside the project paying people to work on them. I'd even suggest that might be a requirement for a successful project. As the project grows and gains popularity the costs of running it go up massively.
In the case of all of those projects the usefulness and utility of the projects also goes up, so people are able to make money with them that pays for the developers, and that could happen for web3 tech. I'm not suggesting web3 won't go the same way, just that economies of scale don't rrally work for software development. The more popular a software project gets the more it costs to run, forever.
You don't have to pull a Paul Graham and invent a the concept of a web application for the first time. You can piggyback on decades of development and open source software and frameworks and libraries. One developer and create and deploy an application in a weekend that would take a team of engineers months to build 2000.
Crypto is a nascent space that similarly enables people to bypass all the gatekeeping and institutional cruft in finance. It just turns out that a lot of the gatekeeping in finance is structurally important and intentional, so it may be a couple decades before any particular cryptocurrency is comparably robust and secure as well trusted fiat currencies like the usd or euro. A trustless and mature financial system that doesn't have the pitfalls of credit bureaus and arbitrary government policy chaos, that opens up microloans and honest banking for literally anyone, that gives opportunity to invest and trade and participate even at low levels of wealth - those are socially good things, in my view.
And people who espouse that we don't need laws or lawyers to run our society are making about as coherent sense as saying we can ship a unicorn entirely on no-code and without engineers. It's in the realm of possibilities, maybe, but it will be a house of cards ready to implode unless this mantra is, at best, sheepishly abandoned half way through the endeavor.
In a fair system, sure, but the American financial legal system is bonkers. There's a reason people are looking for alternatives.
That's not to say it's inherently a bad idea, rewrites are sometimes useful but you need to acknowledge those factors.
(I'd say this does't actually happen because lawyers aren't that daft, but then I remember really long EULAs with really silly clauses...)
It does not work for something like laws. You can't just go and change something the following month because you realized there's an edge case you forgot. All that constant churn will just erode the public's faith in the system.
To stick to the analogy I guess:
Lawyers -> Engineers
Policy Writers -> Architects
Politicians -> Executives, Directors, Sales and Marketing
Judges -> QA
Not to mention techno-libertarian anarcho-capitalism is the ideological driving force behind many decentralisation efforts (hello Bitcoin), which is kinda at odds with improving justice. Many people in the space actively wish to be outside the law. Those are the people who started looking for alternatives, everyone else will parrot any old extreme ideology like “get rid of courts” for a sweet well-paying gig.
I am a software engineer. I know full well what it takes to design a well functioning software system. I also know that software tends to ossify processes. Anyone who has ever tried to work against the software of another business knows how straight jacketed that can get. Putting these together my only reasonable conclusion is that smart contracts look like a terrible idea and I would never in a million years trust one.
But is this true?
some people have always looked for alternatives throughout history, but very few of them have become popular, most of them were a failure and a bunch of them completely destroyed societies, sometimes for centuries.
I might be completely wrong, but in my eyes the crypto-optimism looks like reverse luddism.
https://frostbrowntodd.com/wyoming-paves-way-for-dao-legal-c...
As with any complex rewrite I suspect we are doomed to rediscover the rationale for the original design. Hopefully it will end up meaningfully better, and not a Digg 3.0.
(I can’t comment on this without noting that of all the interpretations of the name web3 I’ve seen so far, “a cryptographic commitment scheme” is the least novel idea, and the least to do with “the web” or anything related to it that I have seen. There is simply no way that is what web3 means. The author is describing smart contracts, and if that’s what it is, it is intellectually dishonest to be promoting “web3” as a new idea when smart contracts have been around for years and have had very little impact on society due to fundamental limitations like “not being capable of adjudication by a court, which is actually desirable and basically non-negotiable for 99% of people and corporations alike”. Talk about whether attempting to put better UX in front of them (a much more plausible definition of web3) is capable of remedying the basic flaws. Otherwise talking about it like this is a dishonest attempt to skirt around the debate that’s largely been had already, much like Facebook rebranding itself just as the PR heat got too much.)
That’s nice when you and your counterparty are part of the same democracy, or potentially allied ones. But how do you enforce contracts when your government and their government are at war?
(The governments say “you shouldn’t; they’re the enemy.” Well, screw the governments, I want to make positive-sum trades in the hopes of increasing global GDP and ratcheting us up out of the need for wars over unevenly-distributed scarce resources in the first place.)
All the speculative value of cryptocurrencies is based on their utility in making and fulfilling the terms of contracts, when a government or governments don’t want to — or fundamentally aren’t able to — grant that contract any legal enforceability.
And much of the rest of the value derives from the ability of Proof-of-Work mining to be used to convert local export-controlled assets into exportable digital assets. (The whole reason PoW has stuck around as long as it has is that capital flight in China still needs it for a few years yet.)
There were no economic sanctions imposed between East and West Germany; but making a contract with someone on the other side of the wall was still impractical, due to lack of diplomatic relations. Smart contracts solve that problem.
Other angles on this: the regular financial system in the Western world doesn’t let anyone transfer fiat currency to countries like Nigeria “for your protection”, even if you’re literally trying to run payroll for the registered employees of your Nigerian subsidiary company. (In other words, a de-facto trade embargo, but not a legal one, and not one to do with a any war.)
The only good way to do that payroll at this point is to send them crypto.
The flaw is that a transaction isn't positive-sum just because you and your trade partner are both happy. Your transaction may well incur negative externalities that outweigh the total profit enjoyed by you and your partner. For example, the world is much worse off if you sell a button-that-destroys-America to North Korea, even though you and North Korea are both pleased at the arrangement.
I don't want to put activity out of the reach of governments. Governments are the organ by which we decide what is and isn't acceptable behavior. If our governments are behaving unreasonably, the solution is to fix them, not to pursue anarchy.
I am surprised at the political ideas on display in this thread. This isn’t even under the comment in which I described the influence of “techno-libertarian anarcho-capitalism” on the crypto community! If you are not part of a western democracy, of course you do not have to care, but if you are, then you should. (Moreover if you think war is bad, like that other commenter agreed before wondering how to erase the effect of sanction deterrents, you should also care.)
Sure I do, however I also get to choose who I care about, and it definitely doesn't include people who make policies which are extraterritorially enforced on me.
>If you are not part of a western democracy, of course you do not have to care
What do you do when a "Western" "democracy" enforces their laws on you and all remaining solutions point you to services that are beholden to a "Western" "democracy".
Correct the aberrant behavior that caused your nation to get kicked out of the global trade system, or move to a nation that hasn't gone rogue. That's what the sanctions are meant to encourage. Bypassing the sanctions with clever math is just going to get the clever math outlawed; exerting international pressure to keep countries in line is far more important than your coinbase account.
Edit to add: avoid phrases like "the West", it's very "Us and Them", it's much better to be explicit: is this about NATO? The US and its closest allies? The EU?
And the reason why the USistan should entangle itself in that mess is ... what exactly?
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances refers to three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary on 5 December 1994 to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
As a result, between 1994 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons. Until then, Ukraine had the world's third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile
[EDIT]: Whatever happens to nukes that are "given up on". That's a lot of fissile material.
(People are already doing the virtual equivalent for prediction markets: everyone who cares runs their own oracle agent to forward result data from web2 sources into web3. You “just” need computer vision + good optics to bring that paradigm into the physical world.)
Of course, that’s just the simple, “immutable logic” kind of smart contracts. The “updatable policy” kind of smart contracts are really just a way to encode and implement a legal system. (See: the regulation model in security tokens.)
In the real world, when disagreements arise, we have voting + due process + a hierarchy of courts. It could be argued that due process is an essential part of finding justice.
Baking due process into a smart contract is, although extremely interesting, probably impossible.
Smart contacts exists so that you don't need the heavies nor the guns, you can just exploit a "bug" in the contract and run off with the cash, preferably without anyone knowing who you even are.
It's nice when everyone abides by the same ruleset. But there will always be individuals that will behave outside of it.
Like, we can all play capitalism and try to outcompete each other, but eventually there's going to be someone that just abandons that ruleset and murders all competitors.
Smart contracts are just a better ruleset, still not enough.
I can still just seize the factory, ledger be damned.
Or deploy a military to seize your private keys. Unless you're sole copy is in your own head it's on a hard drive SOMEWHERE
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo...
It leads to the question of what is the real purpose and utility of a distributed blockchain? If the blockchain can willy-nilly be gamed and won't be enforced, why have it?
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...
You should look into actual historical examples here!
Who enforces THAT ? Who care about decentralising, we need to centralize violent enforcement or people will just scam each other. The problem in China is this one, not that they're not crypto-dumb dumb enough :s
That's a real nice justification for war profiteering ya got there. I don't think it'll convince too many people though...
You and what army? And I’m not even being facetious, you’d probably need an army to go against your government and economically aid an enemy like this. And therein lies your answer for who will enforce these contracts: those with the most capability for force.
In the material world, all the problems of e.g. being at war are identical regardless of the medium of your claims.
Can you "enforce" the flow of Ether? Oh yes. Enjoy.
Democracy is just two wolves and a lamb deciding on what's for dinner.
I mean, having a deed of owning some property on the blockchain is all cool and dandy. Provided that the polity where the property is located recognizes this. Otherwise you're still trespassing.
There’s problems with that particular mechanism, but in general if contracts can automatically decrease someone’s money, reputation, access etc, they can do enforcement.
This is part of the smart contract, which has to explicitly define the conditions on which the collateral is confiscated.
Getting real life data reliably into the blockchain is hard, but there are different approaches to solve this.
A more practical approach is to transfer the funds to Bob once he clicks on the checkbox and have some lock-up period, so that Alice has the opportunity to trigger a dispute if she needs to.
Then the dispute can be resolved by a private court (composed of humans) that both Alice and Bob agreed on beforehand. See: https://kleros.io
You don't have to trust the escrow holder, you don't have to worry about getting banned from Ebay.
The human judges/arbitrators aren’t, and they’re what’s critical. The contract cannot be sensibly completed without their input.
So you have an escrow system where human judges need to supply critical information. I’m left having to trust the human judges, unsurprisingly. Running this basic escrow code on the blockchain means that I no longer have to trust the kind of basic escrow code that’s used in centralised escrows. My question now is whether the escrow code of centralised providers (if condition then funds.release()) is really so unreliable that I’ll get get tonnes of benefit using blockchain escrows. Whenever there’s controversy over escrows, it comes down to the arbitration, which as you admitted would still be performed by humans.
Yes, it means that you will 100% know that the escrow website is not gambling your money away, that it won't out of the blue ask you to supply more documents when it finally comes the time for you to get paid, it means that the escrow won't get hacked and your PII won't be sold on darknet.
Smart contracts are just a simpler and more transparent way to deal with finance.
no, you won't
> Smart contracts are just a simpler and more transparent way to deal with finance.
no, they aren't
who's the one looking for miracles here?
the only thing you can be "100% sure" is that we're all going to die.
the second one is that cults will try to convince other people that they are the only true cult.
what's stopping him now?
> without having to deal with intermediaries and bureaucracy.
you mean laws?
edit: immagine this situation, Bob does the job, the other party never clicks on "done", Bob doesn't get the money, what Bob can do if there's no intermediary and/or bureaucracy protecting him?
> immagine this situation, Bob does the job, the other party never clicks on "done", Bob doesn't get the money, what Bob can do if there's no intermediary and/or bureaucracy protecting him?
As I said, there is a period of funds lock-up. In the worst case, Bob has to wait some time until the smart contract sends him his payment.
and your virtual ideology is better, how?
since nobody can enforce anything.
> As I said, there is a period of funds lock-up. In the worst case, Bob has to wait some time until the smart contract sends him his payment.
What if they payment is never sent and "some time" is forever?
You need laws after all (AKA a solution outside of the chain, or a deus ex machina if you want)
If I was Bob I would not see this thing you're talking about like a great advancement and would continue doing my job like I do it now.
I mean, I get you watched a lot of fiction and wanna feel like living as an outlaw, but even outlaws have laws and follow some of them.
You are trading mid to low trust in your local community for zero trust to some entity you'll never know, who'll never know you, couldn't care less about you and respecting the terms of some virtual contract and pretend we all should do the same.
Do you understand that this is the exact definition of "out of touch"?
The article said the neighbours first vote that work is done. Most of the time that could work. But it also mentions the neighbours could collude to steal the collateral. In that case courts could get involved and force money be returned etc.
I’m very far from a legal expert, but smart contracts seem like a potentially useful tool, within the current system. Not as a complete replacement.
So, it's the government enforcing the contract.
EDIT: Just wanted to add that I actually completely agree with your last sentence!
What happens next?
They don't use PoW or PoS. Instead they run on centralized servers like traditional databases. Only, they run on 10 or 20 or 50 centralized servers run by different people and processing the same input and cross-checking each other. Anybody who has money on the chain can stake it to vote for one of the servers (so I guess it is PoS really). Although anyone can connect to the chain and process input, the N servers with the highest stake-votes are the ones that actually count. Also the server owner has to put up some crazy collateral (currently in the realm of $500,000 I think, this is determined by market mechanisms, it used to be lower) and if they are caught cheating they lose it, a process called "slashing". Even having your server go down can cause you to lose some collateral. Conversely you earn collateral while it is up (like in PoS).
So it's really a lot like a traditional database cluster with an enforcement mechanism, and that enforcement mechanism makes all the difference unless your attacker has millions of dollars to waste.
So only the people with money can participate?
No, they cannot. They can reduce these values, but that by itself doesn't enforce anything in the real world. If the entitiy doesn't care about these values (for example because it was a fake account/identity/whatever) then the only enforcement can come from outside.
That's why the word "force" is in "enforcement". States work because, among other things, they ultimately have a monopoly on the application of force.
As someone who has been through this exact thing, it sucks, but it is possible in the current court systems. Courts have complicated "Discovery" processes explicitly for this reason: to find out not just the immediate problem (a bankrupt builder or a builder who would be bankrupt by the end of the court case), but the supply lines (what other warranties apply?) and the creditors (where is the bankrupt company's money going?).
A human run court is allowed to state "this bankruptcy looks fishy for this reason, and these people are owed damages, and some of the money that moved on already to these creditors is by rights should be paid for damages to these people". It's definitely not fun to be involved in such court proceedings, and it is and likely always be an inefficient human process, but it is a process as a society we've built to be mostly very trustworthy. A jury of peers to decide if damages are warranted in the first place; a human judge with reasoning to say "this shell company is bankrupt, but these other companies can and should pay, maybe with the money they took from this shell company" or "this shell company is bankrupt but some of this still applies to the warranty insurance product they purchased and the insurance provider needs to pay up even though their client is bankrupt".
It doesn't always work right/decide in your favor, and it is slow and expensive, but "smart contracts" offer no better and often a lot worse processes. A "smart contract" can't route around a shell company/wallet. A "smart contract" likely can't discover that other warranties may have applied or other insurance products existed (and if it can it's in a programming class all its own and likely a one off you can't expect to exist in general or to work if you need to actually rely on it).
Take a look at the Maastricht Treaty and what it says about government debt in the European union. The government broke this treaty that was the basis for the union in the first place.
You say "Your recourse when somebody runs afoul of these rules is the courts". For an individual this is not a practical approach. An individual has no way to get back financial stability and to undo the excessive government debt and inflation.
The individual who held Euros throughout this process now holds way less buying power than someone who kept their assets out of the reach of governments.
What this is really about is that the cryptocurrency enthusiasts distrust authority. They would rather put their trust in anonymous developers, shady mining cartels, exchanges which clearly engage in front running and wash trading, cryptocurrency scheme leaders who are convicted fraudsters, etc. If people genuinely want to put their trust in the less trustworthy, even if for no other reason than trying to get rich quickly, then we have a fundamental problem with our society.
I really think you hit the nail on the head with this statement. There are often so many hidden assumptions in anything that authorities by definition are bad. I believe the whole blockchain/crypto/web3 movement is more an idealogy than a solution to a problem.
This Smart contract about fixing the park is a virtual thing. But if someones does this kind of job then in real life there is usually someone else who will accept and sign that the work was done accordingly with the requirements.
First, I don't understand how this works.
If everybody in the neighborhood needs to accept the work and sign it then I think it will be very difficult to be a contractor. Because you are suddently at the mercy of all residents to accept the work which is a nightmare as everybody could have a small things to change.
Let's say the residents there will delegate the acceptance to one single person. This case gets more interesting. What if the persone they delegate this acceptance is corrupted and will sign and accept the work but after 2 months the work will break. How do the residents recovery the loss? Will they go to the _centralised_ court? Will they go to the _centralised_ state to help them? And here goes the problem: what if the crypto dream gets implemented globally so no central authority. What then?
Don't forget the whole violent kidnapping thing your fellow citizens let governments do. The mythology of laws running society is cute but laws are made real by constant threats of violence and caging.
[edit]
Just to check if you're serious or not, would you be happy to move next to a prison and then have all the inmates released?
This is, arguably, going to be better than violently caging people, in some circumstances.
I take the GF comment to be maybe virtue-signally, but mostly pointing out that our legacy law system has an awwwwwful lot of people in jail. Maybe that jail-shaped hammer is not as useful as you think it is?
To give another perspective on my "the current legal system exclusively works via the use of force" argument, look how effective the legal system is against banks, Google, Facebook, etc where use of forceful caging is not applied.
I was responding to the argument that "courts" and "fellow citizens" make the legal system work, when in fact courts are just proxies for use of force. Use of force makes the legal system work, everything else around it is just the cushy stories about law, order and justice we cooked up for ourselves to collectively agree with.
And this is in stark contrast to how a contract running on the Ethereum VM gets enforced.
I am certainly not suggesting we should implement laws against violence like the murderers you mention on a blockchain. I am talking about laws governing financial transactions, companies, and other economic related activities between nonviolent but nonetheless potentially fraudulent actors.
Bring on the century of techno utopianism.
It's "something something decentralized proof of trust" ;)
I said that the legal system works not because of it's complexities or how authoritative the costumes of law enforcement or judges look, but exclusively by the threat of having your liberty taken away from you.
Violent offenders should still be dealt with violence.
But voting? Public policy? Public spending tracking? Economic activity between two private entities? There is no longer need for the threat of a central authority with a monopoly on violence to ensure the proper functioning of those things. Satoshi showed we can have decentralized proof of trust.
Actually, you or your parents took action to apply for a SSN. No requirement to be American and have the mark. Once you take the mark, it is nearly impossible to undo it.
When did this happen?
Which by the way, I mean: I agree with you
I don't see people here getting riled up about the fact that many founders call their product "intuitive" either.
Neither can there be pre-born intuition for a tech product as anything human-made must be entirely non-natural.
I won't get into the weeds of whether you can actually trust math, just pointing out that this is what crypto proponents seem to mean when they say trustless.
Also, since we're in the weeds, you can ask yourself why you believe in math. Did someone tell you that Public Key cryptography works, or did you verify it yourself? I've read through a lot of crypto code, and in the end I can't say I really understand the details. I can point at the readings, but really, do I actually get what a pairing group is? Chances are I'm relying on authority.
Of course, with enough failures in the link, anything can be compromised.
With enough meet in the bone, bad actors will show up.
How can anyone claim that it will not be vulnerabilities is beyond me.
The whole thing is built on sand.
Suggesting that it is all verifiable etc is fine and dandy, but that is risky as the onus of proof falls to the victim. It is a bit like when Chip+Pin first came in for the UK way back when - there was this suggestion by the banks that fraud was now impossible, and the only possible way for the card to be used was by you the account holder as you are the only person that knows your pin is 1234.
Obviously that was bullshit and they have softened their line since, but I worry that we'd just go through this all over again "You are the only person who has your private key! It must have been you that sold your house to someone in Nigeria for $1! It is in the blockchain now - it is irreversible there is nothing we can do. Case closed!" ... ignoring all of the possible ways we can imagine in just 30 seconds for how someone could access your computer/phone without your permission.
Beneath all incumbent banking processes and redundancies, money and value is a bearer instrument. If someone takes it, it is their's (with some extra steps for reintegration back into the economy necessary, sometimes). Redundancies have been built on top of it to improve that user experience.
Crypto assets have accomplished the bearer level. The commodity raw resource that people then built value transfer on top of, and then credit-velocity based money, and then banking systems compatible with that. In the crypto-asset sector, additional private businesses and sector wide redundancies will be built to improve that user experience. They have been built and many compete directly with each other, if you find them laughably inadequate then congratulations, you've identified a market need. Obviously the conclusion that it is fundamentally and irreconcilably flawed and 'built on sand' won't necessarily motivate you to fulfill the market need, but others are motivated by it.
If there's anything that shows that Web3.0, smart contracts and so on are a bad solution in search of a non-existent problem, it's this.
The ``problem'' is apparently that we don't trust each other and our institutions. The ``solution'' is to create a protocol for trust-less commitments. The bug is that the protocol ultimately relies on the fact that we trust each other and our institutions.
Can Web. 3.0 remove some friction from the system? Maybe. Enough to revolutionize it? Highly doubt it.
Outside of “a few neighbors who all know/trust each other and the public key for each other’s wallets” example, this all falls apart.
I'm only half joking. This example is a bad use case and web3 isn't going to replace literally every aspect of society.
Uber removes some friction from hailing a taxi. AirBnB removes some friction from finding a room to rent. The internet removes some friction from sending messages.
Web3 (blockchain or not... the important feature is decentralisation) enables choice of governance - you can pick the "neutral third party". This destroys the governance monopoly and creates a marketplace.
That’s the part I’ve never understood. Sure, you could use a blockchain that is anonymous to try and avoid scrutiny and legal trouble, but at that point you’re basically just a criminal.
I think it would be interesting of governments started using this tech (Blockchain, smart contracts, etc) to improve existing systems. To me, I can see this tech being used to improve infrastructure in a lot of public services (library cards, driver license registry, etc)
Estonia has been doing that. I bet there is something that other countries can learn about what works and what doesn't
Libertarianism is so strong in the tech world that people have blinders on.
Designing hash/crypto functions is a very different story than implementing contracts. You would need to know basically 0 of the math that would be needed to implement a hash function.
Maybe there is room for a distributed service which specifically enables this trust you're looking for?
It feels like The United States unofficial 0th amendment is the enshrined concept of getting off on a technicality. It comes with the territory with a written constitution.
OJ, sexual relations with that woman, Capone’s unpaid parking tickets, hanging chads… or anything heard by the Supreme Circus.
A huge part of the legal system, or at least the part that goes to trial, is exploiting the equivalent of bugs in the legal code.
OJ was found not guilty by a jury of his peers who felt there was reasonable doubt to his guilt. Sure, to the vast majority of us, he obviously did it and skated, but I'd guess there are 100 or 1000 non-publicized cases of an innocent person getting railroaded for every OJ.
Clinton paid a massive political price for his weasel language and related evasions, and some people think that price included Gore's loss of the Presidency in 2000.
Capone was brought down for unpaid taxes, not parking tickets, and that was as a result of a federal task force brought about following years of incredible gangland violence in Chicago.
I wouldn't call these bugs.
All I see is markets which sidestep all the rules enforced by governments to keep them fair (which prevent things like trading with yourself to create fake transactions), and none of the "park renovation" or "enabling trade for people in oppressed regimes" hypothetical examples. Whatever crypto claimed as values they are not actually being used in practice. The only things it visibly succeeded at were enabling ponzi schemes, enabling dark web trade, making lives easier for ransomware, and using a ton of electricity.
I can't buy that web3 will deliver on any value it claims based on the monumental screw-up that industry did with cryptocoins. Especially when all values are hypothetical, and deal with abstract things like "trust".
Authoritarian regimes are very good at filtering and blocking unwanted content.
Bitcoin is as easy to block as any other traffic that's easy to recognize.
But a centralized database can also achieve this, right? The premise of the general public trusting a blockchain more than an established, centralized 3rd party (e.g. government) seems so feeble.
I think that one of the allures of the blockchain is that it’s publicly visible. This may or may not be a fallacy of reasoning but hey, we’re human.
For example, in Austria we have the "Grundbuch", a register of land ownership. Everyone can inspect the Grundbuch database. Authenticity is guaranteed by requiring a public notary or a court to confirm any changes in the database, and there is a paper trail for every change to a record.
It's boring old tech, but it works, and doesn't have all the gotchas of blockchains.
I can only imagine this ancient system to be a magnitude worse in those regards.
Transaction fees are high by design. They are a form of tax on property transactions that discourages short term investments.
The system works very well and I just don't think it needs fixing.
For the few use-cases that match it, yes.
The name Grundbuch itself puts a limit on its use, but we can imagine that there are many situations that call for the same amount of protection and trust, but which require a far higher throughput.
Back when Grundbuch was set up, ground and estate was probably the most valuable asset peopel can own. Today we have stocks, bonds, contracts, savings, companies, art, private-keys, hell; even cars, that are worth a multiple of a typical meadow in the Austrian hills.
Many of these classes cannot use the a system like Grundbuch because its fees are too high or its throughput too low. No-one wants to pay upwards of €600 just to sell some AAPL stock. No insurance company wants to drive to a notary for each contract they sign and then pay €600 upwards.
I'm not trying to say that blockchain is a solution for all these cases (It isn't). I'm saying that the system is limiting, problematic and unfit for many cases. That therefore, this system is unfit for the majority of cases that would need them 2021 (but for one specific case it works).
A centralised database is controlled and modifiable by the owner - government, private company or whoever. They will act on their best interest not yours.
I don’t personally have a problem with government having my dat although they’re usually useless at implementing technology, but a decentralised blockchain would be way more trustworthy than private companies..
Also, it is trivial to implement the same verification mechanisms in traditional databases, without the performance penalties of "blockchain", and transforming them in immutable, append-only storage systems that can't be tampered transparently. A good example of this is google trillian, the backend used by Certificate Transparency implementations.
Perhaps alternative structures of implementing governments should be explored.
* The source code of all websites would be open-source, and accessible to anyone. It could still be changed, but it could not be done secretly.
* All the actions of the users of the websites would be public.
* The algorithm behind the front page of social forums would be known. Administrators would have no way of secretly skewing it.
* When a moderator would delete a message, they would merely mark them as deleted in the blockchain, and they would merely be hidden in the UI that you use to see the blockchain. The message would still be accessible on the blockchain.
What about the right to be forgotten and GDPR laws?
A blockchain is essentially an Event Sourced system. And Right To Be Forgotton is a common issue in all event sourced systems.
Several technical and one non technical solution are common:
Encrypt events with per actor keys. Delete the key when user wants to be forgotton. Or encrypt just certain attributes in the same way.
Keep actual data outside of events but only include a link to the data and checksum of the data.
Avoid storing PII in the first place. Does your domain model really require an IPaddress or First Name?
All have tradeoffs, none are silver bullets. But it is a solved problem in Event Sourcing, so it is a solved problem with blockchains (if only new programmers new this and reused patters instead of continually reinventing them)
You're saying this:
> Encrypt events with per actor keys. Delete the key when user wants to be forgotton.
Blockchain is immutable. Which key are you going to delete? Or, wait, you're going to centrally store these keys?
No necessarily. Three alternatives are common:
Data is encrypted with a key only the actor owns. Works for cases where that actor is the only one who should access it (I Reveal My Attributes type of schemes)
Data is encrypted with a sum (combination) of the key from an actor plus some other actors have: only you and the recipient can decrypt. Works for cases like messaging or p2p data exchange.
Data is encrypted with a OR of the key from an actor plus one by a trusted proxy: proxy and actor have ability to decrypt. This is closest the "centrally" storing. With the difference that "proxy" allows for a little more flexibity -in theory-.
Similarly storing all the data off the blockchain just means you didn’t need a blockchain.
And the fee thing is why none of this will work in practice so it’s a really big negative. Who on Earth wants to be nickel and dimed across the Internet for really over expensive compute and storage?
But:
* The fact that the moderators have access to these mechanisms would be known by all users
* The use of these mechanisms by moderators would be public. If a topic is upped by a moderator, it would be logged in the blockchain. No moderator would be able to do it secretly.
You're providing a solution that doesn't fit the initial requirement of a system being trust-less. So, indeed, your solution works, but as you described, it requires trust in the administrators of the website. The idea of web3 is that you wouldn't. "Trust but verify", if you want.
This could be used for Facebook or Reddit (given that they solve or attenuate the issue of fees), where people might have less trust in the administrators.
For stuff at the scale of Facebook and Reddit you'd also probably end up needing caching as the chains would be too slow so you end up needing a layer of trust anyway.
I’d also add keeping an eternal, permanent, public record of everything as a big downside.
There's no way I'd want to create something that is similar to what you're thinking, because it's pointless as you are thinking. Nobody would pay for this. Also messages such as these have no reason to be on an immutable blockchain. But you can certainly create specialized services for people that support your projects using ideas like this quite seemlessly.
I already have a pretty hard time with SEO spammers rephrasing the content I live from and passing it as their own. I can't imagine people lifting the entire website and making a permanent copy of it, profiting from 4 years of my work.
That's for a 100% free website with no "secret sauce" besides hard work. I can imagine any other website might want to hold their cards even closer.
Then there's also the site owners being held responsible for hosting illegal content, and being powerless to delete it.
You either know very little about cryptography and game theory or very little about government to be asserting such doubt. Crypto-currencies have many problems, but finding ones where trust can be taken for granted is trivial.
There is a huge public, cryptographically secure, append-only, verifiable centralized database (in fact, they are several), used by Certificate Transparency. Spoiler alert: Its a sparse merkle tree in MySQL.
Databases as they’re usually designed today are updated in-place so they have no provenance of the data.
Blockchain data one written will exist in the history and cannot be changed. Unless specifically designed this way centralized db doesn’t work this way.
This is hardly true. It's easy to keep a history of query logs, which is enough to figure out 90% of data lineage. The rest 10% probably correspond to operations not even runnable on a blockchain.
I can mock a web3 application by opening a database to the entire internet. All edits logs will be visible, although edits will be access controlled. Now I'll claim this is observable. Some people would probably complain. But how in the world is the general public going to complain?
(I wonder if a network of such centralized DBs run by different parties might be enough to produce incentives among the different DB owners to behave in accordance to rules which they initially publish for themselves, etc. )
I get it, it's hard to see past the memes and bubbles and bullshit and buzzwords in the crypto industry. But there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea of self-sovereignty at the core to all this stuff. You dictate the terms of your data and your money and your stuff to an ultimate degree.
Try doing that with crypto.
I cannot hold stable, diversified collection of global currencies in my bank account and cannot invest in global markets without going to a branch in a bigger town and without significant paperwork. I cannot legally accept money from around the world for my software development skills without being a part of the existing banking system. My relatives in my native village just 100 KMs away don't even have a bank they can walk into (they have mobile phones with data though).
Do we just have to wait for regulated, for-profit entities to calculate when it will be profitable for them to provide us with services? What benefit did maintaining the status quo provide for people in countries where inflation wiped out savings overnight? If we have the skills and the opportunity to participate in an alternative, mostly open system, how long should we need to wait for permission?
This again leads to the same point: why are we so _comfortable_ with the status quo?
I want to think about what could be possible, not what sub-par alternative is available today.
I'm also glad other protocols exist and the market will ultimately determine adoption based on utility. We mostly used HTTP until FireSheep happened and now use HTTPS very widely and someday, if governments and organisations continue to pry on online activity, we might move to the protocols powering the dark web.
It's the same with crypto. I, too, feel a lot of the use cases being talked about right now are just words – but at the same time, I'm glad that people with the skills and the resources are making investments into coming up with these experiments and the experiments that will offer the most utility might get widely adopted in the future.
Cross border transactions are heavily regulated precisely because they cross jurisdictional boundaries - without regulation it becomes trivially easy to commit fraud and make the money effectively disappear. Does the current regulation come in the way of the average person trying to accept Paypal money? Sure. But that is not a technological problem - its a regulation problem, which is ultimately a social problem.
Take for example messaging – Jeff Bezos uses (used?) WhatsApp, I use it, you probably use it and my relatives use it as well. No matter what the geography or your social/financial standing, you probably have access to a world-class messaging product easily.
The same is true for a lot of things: Wikipedia, Linux, Bicycles.
Why should the same not be true for wealth protection and growth? If it is possible to come up with a such a system, shouldn't we at least give it a shot?
Scale comparison: Cryptocurrency-based technology has been publicly available for at least 12 years now. If I place initial public availability of the web at about 1992, we're currently in the equivalent of 2004, when two of the three described usecases were already widely available in developed nations. Amazon was maybe not a household name yet, but e-commerce was already an accepted purchasing model for several product categories, and Skype gave the world very cheap international phone calls. Only the video usecase was still terrible because of the available bandwidth.
In 2004 i was downloading textures and skins for the sims and xplane, and joining forums to chat and share music. Then there was a while imo where the internet felt dominated by facebook/google/youtube, but the past couple of years ive sunk into smaller communities making things in crypto/web3 and its fun and exciting. I spend most of my online time in that space. It feels more like being in a WoW guild than using twitter. There is profit/loss and speculation that excites/angers the masses, but theres also the best online communities ive ever been a part of, doing things like making games and custom skins and sharing music. Some things change and some things stay the same. Im pretty positive on the idea that making new tools, providing permissionless access, and building it with free open source software, people can do neat and surprising things. Till then people will see what they want to see, because its all there. Sturgeons law etc
Which is kinda cool. But also kinda depressing.
With e commerce you could view a dynamic catalog and place an order without a painful lengthy phone call.
Cryptos biggest innovation is not being a bank account. But DeFI. Uniswap is huge! And it solves a real pain. Crypto margin loans solve a real pain.
But crypto is not by any stretch better than a dollar for my day to day life.
> ...there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea...
There's very little about the way cryptocurrency and NFTs and even blockchains as a concept are presented that seems politically agnostic; "you shouldn't have to trust anything or anyone in order to complete a transaction" is not a conventionally partisan position, but when you're applying it to government institutions, surely it's political.
[1]: I would say this happens a lot with crypto-adjacent technologies -- sometimes it seems like the only two acceptable opinions are "this will revolutionize literally everything, how can you not see it" and "this will destroy the entire world, how can you not see it" -- but I think it happens a lot with everything right now. That's a different rant, though.
They are not mutually exclusive. However often retorts to Web3 or DeFi are along the line of "I can receive my salary for free" or "I can send a bank transfer for low fees and it settles in 24 hours" - the implication being, why do we need anything else this is fine. My question to those who roughly hold this position (whether they be haters, skeptics, curious, critical) would be, if we can agree that generically technology is improving many elements of our modern life, isn't it sensible that we should also be trying out new technologies for finance and banking? Banking and credit cards have largely stayed the same for decades, shouldn't we be innovating here? Regardless of whether you consider Web3 to be innovative or not, isn't it better that people are trying other ways to improve?
> There's very little about the way cryptocurrency and NFTs and even blockchains as a concept are presented that seems politically agnostic; "you shouldn't have to trust anything or anyone in order to complete a transaction" is not a conventionally partisan position, but when you're applying it to government institutions, surely it's political.
There's a line of argument that basically everything is political. But that's often kind of a pointless statement. I would say that Web3 is non-political in the sense that, if you have a credibly neutral trustless global operating system, secured by validators around the world and used by users around the world, this environment is apolitical. It's not Western, Chinese, Russian, no one is gate kept from interacting with it. It is open for all, transparent and unable to be censored. Having you're Paypal account locked because you're from Iran feels intuitively political in a way that the system I described above does not.
My bitcoin wallet isn't looking to trap me in a cycle of debt[1] if I run low on money; most banks are. My bitcoin wallet is auditable down to first mathematical principles, and will never steal my identity[2], create accounts in my name without my knowledge[3], etc. Nobody can cancel my access to my wallet because I said something politically incorrect[4] or because I tripped some opaque anti-fraud system.[5]
Banks are, as institutions normal people are expected to deal with at least, inherently exploitative and lack accountability.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/20/overdraft-fees-hit-another-r...
[2]: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bank-tellers-increasingly-in...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...
[4]: https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/jpmorgan-chase-accused-of-purg...
[5]: https://www.reddit.com/r/paypal/comments/niwiu1/paypal_took_...
All of your other criticisms are valid, but also exist in a system where you trust your wallet with a third party service. the majority of Americans would use a bank like service that manages their key instead of managing it themselves.
You also ignore the other risks that crypto introduces. Like losing your key, password, your exchange gets seized, your exchange just straight up steals your money, or having a 1 character bug in a smartcontract.
And I'd go so far as to call what the majority of Americans prefer wrt. key management a result of inertia due to a few centuries of having always done it that way. That's not necessarily surprising, a lot of this is new and doesn't have a good "real world" analogue to tie back to.
I really don't think you do get it.
My bank account is great. If I die there are clear procedures for getting my assets to my spouse. Even if I forget my account number or my password, my lifetime of earnings does not simply disappear. This can’t happen in crypto unless I trust a third party, in which case just using a bank in US dollars is much safer as there are actual laws and insurance covering it.
Maybe other countries are different,
You could use a scheme where two of three signatures allow transactions : you, your 'bank' and a notary. Or have such schemes for anything above a value. Or allow transactions by and to a list of whitelisted addresses after a certain date or event (such as a missed canary).
So now social engineering hits and someone convinces my ‘bank’ and notary to allow the transaction to a third party. Now my life savings are gone forever.
In my real bank (no quotes) you have regulation. Banks are liable for fraud. Blockchains aren’t.
Now you could have pre assigned addresses that the notary and bank are allowed to transfer to, but now you have to think about edge cases. Every time i update my will I have to hire a blockchain engineer to update my smart contract and then hire another firm to audit it for errors so a bug doesn’t drain my account. Huge headache and much more expensive compared to the status quo.
> Or allow transactions by and to a list of whitelisted addresses after a certain date or event (such as a missed canary).
whats triggering the canary? How can I trust that it will be accurate?
Also, my spouse can change or die. If my spouse and I died at the same time and my parent’s should get the money if they are still alive. now what happens? You have to map out hundreds of edge cases, like every permutation of my relatives wallets. Then I have to trust that the blockchain can tell these people are alive.
Current California State law takes all of that into account. It handles the edge cases in a way that code does not. Probate court is expensive but its better than everything going to zero.
My point is not that these three examples "solve all issues we have with Authority/Govt/BigFinance". Nor to prove that "Bitcoin Fixes this".
My point is to show that crypto-currencies, by design, are programmable, and this allows a lot of use cases to move from Authority/Govt/BigFinance to DIY. Not all cases, not everywhere, not for everyone. But in a spectrum.
To clarify with your refutations:
> Now my life savings are gone forever.
Which is why you probably want "your life savings" in a secure, goverened, trusted environment. For many people Blockchain or DIY is out of the question for "my life savings". But that leaves a giant spectrum of other use-cases. From checking accounts to saving-for-a-friends-present. Use your imagination.
> Then I have to trust that the blockchain can tell these people are alive
You are dismissing a giant set of use-cases on one that will, indeed, probably never work. I never mentioned that this the ultimate and only replacement for Deed. I deliberately did not, because I think this is a bad use-case for Blockchain for the reasons you mention and much more.
But this could be a "here's some money for when you turn 18" or "bonuses for managers which can only get extracted after a year", a "tip jar that pays out every month" etc.
My point was that trust is a spectrum, and not binary. Yet you take the most extreme outliers thinkable, refute those and then conclude that none of the cases in the broad spectrum can ever work. They can. And Blockchain is one of the tools. As are trust-funds, banks, payment-APIs, courts, notaries and so on.
You can own your own data, log in using a cryptographic secure identity and do many other awesome decentralised things through that without needing a blockchain. The latter I think does have value if you want to transfer funds without the government stopping you at the time (retrospectively though they might). That’s not very useful for normal people though.
The problem is that there is little thought outside of crypto for this digital self-sovereignty when the digital world is effectively post-scarcity. Which makes me think that most care more about the money to be made than the ideals they claim to hold.
As a smarter commenter than I said: crypto is the total privatisation of the money system, sold as democratisation.
Take this with a grain of salt, but I think all of this is about incentives. And so that stephendiehl.com fellow must have the same kind of stake in some technology as a crypto maximalist, but maybe directed elsewhere.
There are enough people in this world that are living a happy life without blockchains and for them, it looks like a threat so they belittle it and try to argue it away.
The people who are heavily invested in these technologies, like VCs, Banks, Social Networks, they all seem to love crypto.
My problem with "crypto" is that the industry is so focused on getting rich, is all about money. That's not changing the status quo, that's wanting to be a part of it.
If you TRULY want to change the status quo your focus can't be on how you can get rich quicker. There's been centuries of thought on self-sovereignty, of dictating your own terms, anarchism, freedom, etc. There's been literal wars about this all over the world and I just don't see how some dudes with bitcoins are really adding anything new to the table.
And these people may found universities, buy politicians, sit on the boards of art museums.
So, while I personally don't think it'd be a good thing, I think there's a decent possibility the "crypto people" will someday use the spoils of their business to dabble in large-scale social engineering, and in a roundabout way that's how the dudes with the bitcoins will leave their mark.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/business/elon-musk-philan...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_General_Hospital
...I could go on and on...
Try, absolutely! New tech is fun tech!
The problem is it's not about the tech is it? Lets be honest. It's just people trying to milk it for cash right now. Once they've all got theirs it'll evolve into something useful or just sorta be there now like Bitcoin
Web3 tech, from my perspective, is people promoting profile pictures of bored apes, pirates, robots and (new to me) snowflakes with varying accessories on Twitter. It's like a ridiculously expensive version of Pokemon except you can't even fight them against each other. It's a bit of a joke currently, I hope someone finds a decent use case
In any case whether I'm right or wrong, NFTs and web3s are something I'm too poor to understand right now. It's like watching an orgy of millionaires taking money from each other and patting themselves on the back if you're on the outside haha. It's so weird to come across an "open" tech you can't afford to learn
If my city has a hideous, impractical train station and you just take a wrecking ball to it overnight, I‘m not going to thank you, because I won‘t be able to ride a train for months.
Also consumer banking (in Europe) is great, I don‘t know what people are so mad about. If it‘s just "consumer banking sucks in the US" you have a much more straightforward improvement plan in "make it like Europe".
I have absolutely no problem with the banking system. Everything has worked, I can transfer money to everyone I know basically for free, and the few weird issues I've had in my life (messed up account credentials) have been easily solved by talking to an authorized person at a bank, and having them hand-edit my data in the system. My bank can be robbed, blown up, or go out of business, and all of my money is safe.
I don't want to manage my "financial infrastructure" for the same reason I don't want to host my own website. I want to pay other people with vastly better equipment, training, and around-the-clock availability to do a better job than me.
Replacing this with crypto — even a refined endgame version from half a century in the future, is a pure negative. And that's before we consider the people pushing it as a bad-faith ponzi scheme.
The Semantic Web was coming into prominence at the peak of Bittorrent and P2P. It allowed people to publish data in schemas without centralized databases. Protocols in markup. You could declare and share schemas for things, build on top of other people's schemas, and remix endlessly. It was powerful.
You could define your contact details in FOAF and a client could ingest that and make contacts.
You could consume articles as RSS or Atom and use any client you wanted. Clients that were faster and more performant than HTML-based websites. We could have shed HTML and Javascript for many schema-aware applications.
If we'd built Reddit back then, it'd have been topics and comments that were digitally signed and exchanged p2p, with signed voting, interest graphs, and curated peer groups.
Unfortunately, this was just as the VC and ad-money fueled Google and Facebook were coming into prominence. They built centralized systems that were easy to use faster than the Semantic Web community could move. (Semantic Web was much broader - some were interested in predicate logic distributed databases, which were a bit much.)
Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web. Do not forget. We can still use the lessons today. This is what the web could have become if the advertising gravity well hadn't sucked it in.
I still can do that today, granted on the sites that keep publishing feeds.
Wikipedia has two articles, it’s all about the “.0” apparently, see the page on Web3.0 [0] vs the page on Web3 [1]
I’ve seen plenty of crypto community content [2] claiming that blockchain is a key part of the original timbl vision [3], perhaps the missing piece of the puzzle.
I think it’s clear timbl’s “decentralisation” point meant “not Google”. It definitely didn’t mean “not http, use blockchain”.
You’re right that there was an opportunity where we could have delivered on the original vision of the semantic web but that time has long passed and Google have stepped into that void, to become the gatekeeper of the web.
The vision of the semantic web was supposed to make every organisation, person, place and thing machine readable. Twenty years later and we basically just use it to share pretty links on Facebook.
Plug: I’m working on a DNS-based protocol to fix this, making it easy for organisations to provide machine-readable data direct to users. We launched it in the UK last month and have machine readable data for 5m businesses. US roll out next year. I wrote up the launch in a blog post [3].
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3.0
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
2. https://www.coincarp.com/learn/what-is-web30-crypto/
3. https://www.num.uk/blog/we-crawled-5m-uk-websites-and-publis...
The primitives of web3 effectively enable the fine grained economic measurement and distribution of every element of value-exchange, and gives folks the ability to participate in these cashflows where they were previously not able to.
Now that there's standards for representations of value / governance / etc (ERC-20) now any protocol that supports ERC-20 tokens can be applied to any ERC-20 token. Ditto for NFTs.
As an example, if you want to split cashflows from any source based on some pro-rata ownership of tokens: there's a off-the-shelf battle tested contract for that. This composability and remixability of economic value flows has never existed before. Mix that with governance concepts in DAOs and you effectively have a parallel system of capital allocation and investment decision making.
p.s. Charles Stross was amazingly prophetic in Accelerando where the Superintelligent AIs create a system of economics called Economics 2.0, which is indecipherable to humans. Reminds me of smart contracts interacting :)
Economics 2.0 starts at "Welcome to decade eight, third millennium"
A bit further down:
> Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences – the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they're poor.
>How do you prove you own a house?
The crypto idea of having a private key to a token goes wrong when you lose the key or get hacked, and then say to the court the house is still yours which it is in law
>you want to fix up your local neighborhood’s park. You have the time, but doing so will take a few thousand dollars in supplies. You could go to your neighbors ...
You might just get your neighbours to go on some fixmypark.com site and contribute normal dollars. Getting them all to buy crypto and transfer to smart contracts is not going to happen in the near future.
The whole interaction between crypto and the physical world is very clunky. It seems to work better for flipping virtual assets like jpegs and imaginary coins.
If web3 is a thing it'll probably be more stuff like funding websites by selling NFTs to have ape avatars by your account rather than interacting with parks and houses. But selling imaginary stuff and images and the like can be powerful. I mean US$ are largely imaginary things represented by 0s and 1s in some databases and they do a lot of stuff.
What makes it worse is most of the web3 products are always centered around coins, why do I need a coin to use a decentralized social network? It makes users feel like it's a financial scheme and early adopters have incentives to sell it.
It will be a hard enough ask to ask the average non-tech user to dump whatsapp or tiktok for something else because of the network effect, then if you tell them "oh and you need to pay with this weird thing you've never heard of too" it will be impossible IMO.
People can go on about paying vs "users are the product" etc, but the truth of the matter is the average person doesn't seem to care that Google et al sells ads.
Not mentioned but I would argue as equally or of greater importance is interoperability. If you lose trust in the commitment you've made, you can move your capital/identity/etc. To the new thing relatively seamlessly. This is the DeFi experience already built that's so amazing to interact with relative to traditional banking and capital markets. If you apply that same functionality to other markets, such as social media or healthcare (using zero knowledge rollups to protect private data), I think that's inevitably an a-ha moment.
It's like the Amazon API mandate - https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes... - if you build with interoperability at the core, the knock-on effects can be exponential. It's a game changer. The consumer is no longer captive to walled gardens.
Drop play money into a low fee blockchain, stick to a stablecoin, and mess around with some of the DeFi apps. I think it's easy to become a believer if you do that and compare to your normal banking experience.
You don't need them for a bank account so if you don't like their services then you can take your funds elsewhere. In my opinion this is a critical piece of what is missing in our current society. These corporations and government agencies have become too entrenched and too big to fail. We need to inject competition back into the system.
In systems where transactions are reversable, such as credit cards, problems can be fixed up later. But with instant irreversible transactions, you don't have that feature.
There is a popular library called web3.js as well, which is used to find and communicate with nearby nodes of distributed ledgers. It’s pretty clever and convenient.
Since those kind of nodes store variables forever for free, developers dont need any other server side infrastructure and are able to make services extremely quickly, cheaply, and have a quick goto market strategy and it is extremely lucrative, and the users absorb all the costs of writing data. This is where things are 10x better than existing alternatives: revenue paths, overhead costs, speed.
not the user experience or the performance of the underlying technology.
To be fair: Not necessarily web3 but generally crypto, but still.
We're so used to financially being controlled by authorities so it's deemed normal. Governments can tax you however they want and that is "normal".
Coming from an extremely corrupted country/government I know how taking control of your assets is important, which web3 aims. To which extent it can succeed is another question though.
Crypto people will, of course, attempt to excuse this with "it's like the Internet in the 90s", but it is important to bear in mind here that (a) hundreds of millions of people used the internet in the 90s and (b) they have been saying this about _Bitcoin_, and other assorted blockchain-y things, for at least a decade, and no-one really uses those for anything as yet.
This is, essentially, the latest rebranding.
The issue is trust. Smart contracts as a solution are a sad attempt at solving that issue. There's always edge cases you can't code in.
E.g. in the example of the neighbour buying goods; What if the other neighbours don't really like this guy, and conspire against him?
The solution to trust, isn't codifying every possible variable and putting in on some silly unmodifiable chain. That solution just shifts the trust. Instead of trusting humans, we're now trusting some poorly written code...
The solution to the trust issue is good ethics, mindfulness and good upbringing. If someone violates your trust, it's probably due to some stress factor in that person's life. We need to create a better world for everyone and actually help the people that our violating our trust, and show them the way.
Just like VR/AR and ML/AI of yesteryear. Note that both of these examples are wonderful pieces of tech but they were blown wildly out of proportion by everyone.
More like the same silly blockchain ideas that didnt work X years ago, getting recycled with a new buzzwords.
I'm very skeptical about any claims about the correctness or the health of the blockchain ecosystem because, if you're interested in using flaws to take money, it's obviously much easier to scam people than to go after the fundamentals. Imagine you're a Superhacker who Only Cares About Money and you have found a flaw in crypto. You could make some money breaking the whole system, but you can probably make a lot more money taking crypto from poorly setup exchanges or individuals and maintaining the value of the things you took.
We are well aware of the problems of using legal and social systems to adjudicate disagreements. People feel excited because we have found math that helps us adjudicate disagreements in a new way and I also think it's exciting - but it all feels too early.
And if you e ever had to send money to a foreign currency and pay exchange rates then sending a bit of crypto is like “huh, so that’s how that should feel”.
However, the argument that you need it to be free from government and society troubles me because it all runs on electricity and other infrastructure. Maybe solar panels and satellites will help in the short term, but we’d need a bit more of a robust internet solution.
I really like cardano’s approach. Trial in places that aren’t developed countries. That will teach you a lot.
Everyday on hacker news there is a new shit-on-web3 post on the fp. To me this would be a strong signal to buy some.
It seems it is:
1: A very popular topic
For example, it comes up very often here at Hacker News.
2: A very controversial topic
On one side, there are many people who expect it to change the world in a fundamental way. Investors are investing billions of dollars into it.
On the other side, there are many people who call it useless, a fraud and outright evil.
3: This has been going on for years now.
Has there ever been any other technology for which 1,2 and 3 held true?
Small nitpick but this is not how deeds work, at least not in the US. In the US the seller provides you with a deed. The government simply records it, and the title company insures it based on their research of the chain of title. The government doesn't issue deeds unless they are the seller or grantor of the land.
This is magnitudes wiser than the typical sentiment of crypto here or in other skeptical communities. When the potential is first recognized, the criticisms then build toward that potential rather than simply having the purpose of tearing something down. Thanks for the piece, Chris.
It's supposed to mean anything, so your imagination, excitement and greed can inpaint the rest.
"Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.
When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353157 — Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001) (joelonsoftware.com)
That's exactly the change in focus needed in order for discussions of this topic to be more rational/sober/productive, imo.
1. many of the people doing originating work with the tech had deep understanding of the domain it applies to (and most software engineers to do not)
2. that gets diluted by people incentivized to shill for various reasons
3. so now we're not "in search of a problem" it's just been lost amid diverse noisy communication—and it's also defined in a domain unfamiliar to most programmers, so describing it is non-trivial
4. a good starting point for communicating this to programmers might be in terms of technical capability, then working toward more specific social/economic applications from there
I wish what people call web 3 would be called web 4.
For me, Web 3 was the (mostly failed) semantic web. That said, ideas and tech behind the semantic web are alive and well in knowledge graphs. Life is good.
I would welcome more opportunities for decentralization and privacy in Web 4, I hope it works out!
> This is ostensibly what the legal system provides, but anyone who’s actually tried to go through small claims court knows that the reality of that route is… painful. And it often ends unsatisfactorily
And it is in fact a key feature of the contemporary modern world: the people don't have a realistic access to court anymore, and this deeply undermines the legitimacy of the State.
This immediately reminded this article[1] which explained how the Taliban have rebuilt their power in Afghanistan in recent years, especially outside of their original ethnic group (Pashtuns): by appointing judges in every provinces, available for free, with no delay and hassle.
A quick DeepL translation of the most relevant part of the article:
> From a material point of view, these courts are rudimentary. The judges, dressed without distinctive signs, sit in village mosques, in private houses or under the cover of trees. “The Taliban courts operate in a very simple way, said one of them. The Taliban judge sits with a cup of green tea in front of him, he receives the requests in person. Then he calls a member of the movement and tells him to go and ask the people against whom a complaint has been filed to come the next day” The judges interview witnesses, examine the documents brought by the disputing parties, and render their verdict, often after a few days - at most a few months for the most sensitive cases. Most disputes concerned land or matrimonial matters, but judges also punished theft, murder and adultery, sometimes with very severe penalties (executions, amputations, stoning). […]
> The same motivation was found in a relative of Mr. Faizal Akbar, governor of Kounar province between 2002 and 2005. Despite his political opposition to the Taliban, he was forced to turn to them for a theft of cattle because, since the regime's judges were "corrupt," the costs of filing a complaint with the police and of an official trial would have far exceeded the value of the stolen cattle.
[1] https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2021/09/BACZKO/63487 (in French)
web 3.11 (crypto optional edition) as I see it is about decentralised services over p2p networks (which may include crypto/blockchain).
I hear there's something called "Web NT" (new technology) that'll be big in 5 years.
I think this is at the center of a lot of arguments. The proponents come from circles where trust is a dirty word, so they don't want to say too loudly that they need it. The critics see this as an unnecessarily extreme position, which isn't the kind of thing you back down from, so they end up arguing that new tech is unnecessary/incapable when applied to this task.
We already had databases for that, but OK, blockchain is decentralized.
The much harder problem of "how do we bridge data & reality?" is mostly unsolved, and sometimes especially unsolved when blockchain is involved. (eg. paying via Apple/Google Pay will generally go OK in many stores, but paying via a blockchain-based cryptocurrency not so much...)
What happens if you put in begonias and they wanted daisies? Or they just don’t want to pay you $200 and see they can back out and have you holding the bag.
More generally, I still don’t understand how the “third party oracle” issue (ie how do you make real world add to blockchain) doesn’t undermine the trust less idea.
Whether the work actually happens after that point, yes I agree, I don’t see a way for that to happen without human trust.
https://blockworks.co/polygon-acquires-mir-in-400m-deal-to-s...
This is indeed the core feature of this whole genre but arguably makes it easier to dismiss in its entirety as concept and philosophy.
Technology should enable building trust. Simply enabling a trust-less society to limb along in a transactional way reveals the libertarian bitcoin roots of web3 that actually believes "there is no such a thing as society".
Designing institutions that are authoritative while democratically accountable is a continuous struggle against power grabbing insiders but it is not impossible.
It’s the same technology as PGP signers use in their email for proving which relies on the impossibility of collisions.
You thought you had a rebuttal and walked right into why its working
Those users can learn not to get taken advantage of
Spoken like a true scammer. It is pretty obvious to anyone who is even vaguely aware of phone scams that this will never be enough.
Here, we are acknowledging thats there are humans that commit malicious actions and they shouldn’t do that, and also acknowledge that there are programs that exist in perpetuity to do this which means there is no malicious human to educate, and requires (not just advises) the potential and actual victims to have agency themselves and their victim status is prevented by actually following the best practices that all predate the malicious actors to begin with.
Blockchains, distributed ledgers, allow for us to reevaluate what governance is and entails. It is expected that some processes of existing governments because redundant, and that there is some kind of governance occurring to coordinate behavior.
So here we are actually agreeing, except on where the best practices come from, which would be cypherpunk mailing lists, old bitcoin wikis, and protocol specification drafts and ratifications.
What's happened is that a bunch of people who have zero understanding about what crypto is or how it works have been able to buy an asset because a bunch of people using pre-existing technological and legal frameworks created platforms for them to do so.
The "accelerated saturation" you are referring to relies on the very types of trust and authority that the article claims to obviate the need for.
in both there are opportunities for people with zero understanding to use a platform created by someone else. crypto asset sector has been more successful.
Of all the scams in Web3 (and there's quit a few) this is not one.
Web 3 is shaping up to be excellent for this! Prepare your resume. Start early, add Web 3 in there.
To marketers, it means better targeted advertising (more is just a side effect they love). To hackers, it means decentralization and going back to 1.0... IRC, but better, Usenet, but better, Blogs, but better... To Megacorps, it means more control, more moneeeeey. To governments, more control, more transparency. To humanists, absolutely nothing. This is shaping to advance humanity in absolutely no way better than 1.0 did.
So get the popcorn ready, update your resumes and join the penthouse of the jaded.
This is at the core of the issue: no technology, but especially not web3, is just a tool. Tech is inherently political because of both these kinds of underlying assumptions about the world, and how it shapes habits and beliefs of people using it.
Creating tech which accepts "trust is in low demand" and proceeds to fix it by making trusting people unnecessary, is a very effective way to promote right-libertarian policies.
So I understand why right-libertarian people support "web3". What I don't understand is why so many people with very different political values do.
IMO we need tech that promotes trusting each other, not tech where we can make do with a war of all against all.
You could create a viable investment strategy based around doing the opposite of what HN thinks and you would do extremely well.