The Web3 Fraud
usenix.org
usenix.org
Immutability is important because it's guaranteed that no matter how many times you interact with a contract address, you can be assured that at no point has the code in that contract ever changed. This is not an assurance you can typically get, as backend code for traditional endpoints can change at any time.
Even more important IMO is the difficulty in shutting down a contract that's deployed to the blockchain. In the case of this article, the reliance on external services such as AWS opens up possibilities for your app to be shut down, whether it's through non-payment to your AWS account, AWS decides you've violated their terms of service, or legal action compels AWS to shut down your app.
In the case of dapps deployed to the blockchain (combined optionally with frontends deployed to a service like IPFS, but this isn't a requirement, as one can always interact directly with contracts), the ability to shutdown these apps would rely on somehow breaking the blockchain itself.
Whether or not you see these aspects as bugs or features is a matter of opinion. Yes, blockchains are slower and more expensive. This is the current cost of enabling the two facets above. If we're not comparing blockchain dapps to other systems that offer the same assurances, then we're comparing apples and oranges.
> Yes, blockchains are slower and more expensive. This is the current cost of enabling the two facets above. If we're not comparing blockchain dapps to other systems that offer the same assurances, then we're comparing apples and oranges.
Could you please respond more meaningfully to the conversation?
You can't wave away the serious issues by saying "there's no point in comparing them"
Lots of things offer different functionality and tradeoffs. If you want to play in the space of "web app", you can and should be compared to things that are solutions for producing "web apps". We compare codeless web apps to code ones, etc.
The same way people compare gas and electric vehicles. Or minivans and suvs and trucks. Or, well, everything in a solution space.
Any solution for a given use case can and should get compared with other solutions for that use case.
I'm really sorry that it doesn't seem (judging by this thread) to compare particularly well for most developers, but that doesn't invalidate the comparison.
And the current use cases are sufficiently different that it's like comparing apples and oranges.
> I'm really sorry that it doesn't seem (judging by this thread) to compare particularly well for most developers, but that doesn't invalidate the comparison.
Again, do you think the same of Tor? It doesn't compare particularly well by most mainstream metrics. High latency, low bandwidth. And yet it serves a lot of value to a lot of people.
But then some smartass goes and says "It's completely useless tech, I can host a simple static website on clearnet for much less hassle." Yeah, duh, but that's not the point of Tor. Go use the clearnet if that's what you're looking to do.
Uh, what? This whole thread and post is about the argument that replacing existing apps with dapps will be better (or worse).
They specifically said that it has advantages over current apps, and compared what happens with your current apps when you don't pay your AWS bill.
They then later, after lots of comments pointing out that nobody cares, said "well you can't really compare it to any of those things".
You seem more sane in the sense of what you think this stuff will do.
Immutability and resistance to shutdown are not features that the vast majority of apps, present and in the future, will ever need. My main dispute with the original article is that the author argues every single use case of a Web3 app can be done with a traditional app, and I argue that's simply not true. The case where that breaks down is precisely when your app requires immutability and resistance to shutdown.
To use an analogy: Most people will never need to own or use an armored car, and if you evaluated an armored car based on its viability as a consumer vehicle, you would say that its fuel requirements and maintenance costs are impractical, because you don't need the assurance of having a bulletproof vehicle in your everyday life. It would be overkill.
Similarly, these Web3 technologies are not being designed to replace YouTube or Facebook. If you're building a service like that, you don't need the armored car. On the other hand, if you're designing an app that performs financial transactions, then the armored car may be something you can use. Or not! But the option is there.
99% of developers will never need to build an app this way. But there are use cases outside of ponzi schemes and fraud that seem to be overlooked and which I think are worth drawing attention to.
Likewise, there always exists the possibility that your server can be compromised and the code can be altered. The immutability of the blockchain guarantees that your code cannot be changed, with or without your knowledge.
What? Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to.
Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract.
Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users.
Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.
I'm my only user, that's why I'm discussing self-hosted apps here...
I mean, yes, but if your use case is only yourself as the sole user, that's quite different from the majority of businesses out there who need to service many users. This is truly like comparing apples and oranges.
I’m just waiting for the day when governments decide that all this crypto is hurting the environment more than necessary for no real gain and forces ISPs to block this traffic. Similar to how many ISPs block serving DNS or SMTP from residential IPs.
Also, just use a friggin VPN.
How would you propose to ban all cryptos? We haven't even been able to ban torrents.
ISPs could simply run honeypots that in real time sniff out who is running a blockchain node and block traffic to those IPs. These nodes must broadcast publicly to other nodes to even function, so they can't hide the fact that they are a blockchain node: they are forced to peer with whoever else is... peering in the same direction, pun intended.
I'd love to know what gaps in my knowledge invalidate the above thesis, though.
Phrased another way, “bug immortality guarantees.” What is the use case for completely immutable software? Even Ethereum smart contracts do not actually guarantee the compiled byte code matches the supposed source of the contract, so while it might be immutable, it is not free. I think the bigger concern is not that the code will update - updates are good, especially ones for bug fixes like the log4j vulnerability recently - but that the code they say is running, is not actually running.
And let’s assume that we need to update our code. You need to pay to deploy an entirely new contract and then have some sort of “pointer”/gateway that redirects all your users to the new patched contract, and then we’re right back where we started where this gateway can be forced by law to not direct people to your contract much like Google can be DMCA’d to not show copyright violations.
What? You don't have to publish your smart contract code for the public to verify, but you absolutely can. And once you do, the public can absolutely verify that the smart contract code you provided does in fact compile to the byte code deployed to the blockchain.
> and then we’re right back where we started where this gateway can be forced by law to not direct people to your contract much like Google can be DMCA’d to not show copyright violations.
You don't have to include that upgrade functionality in your smart contracts. Or if you do include upgrade functionality, you can limit what sort of functionality can be upgraded. Otherwise, yes, it's no different than just running your own server and changing the code all of a sudden with the users being none the wiser.
Question is, if you don't limit your upgrade functionality, are your users going to trust you not to rugpull?
The point is simply to be able to make certain immutability guarantees, if you do want them. The utility is very evident in that something like a Uniswap pool a) works and b) cannot be stopped, so people who do find a Uniswap pool useful, are able to rely on the guarantees made by the smart contract, including of course any potential bugs.
For Uniswap pools, you’re referring to smart contracts that allow people to take out or provide funding for loans, right? So the immutability of the contract may be appealing in terms of interest rates or loan duration/terms/etc. But this option already exists outside of DeFi (fixed rate loans). It is cool that we can offer these in a decentralized manner, but the possibility of a bug affecting my mortgage or another sizable loan is a huge, huge deterrent and I am also sure that, if DeFi “takes off,” there will be solutions implemented that completely remove all immutability guarantees.
You can do all that, but then who but the most gullible will use your smart contracts?
I literally explained a few comments ago how that's not the case. Did you forget what you read already? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588550
In a trustless environment like defi, why would anyone other than the most gullible put their money in any smart contract that doesn't have open sourced code?
> When a company open sources some code, we assume and trust they are not keeping a separate, evil branch running in production unbeknownst to us.
We assume and trust because we have to. With crypto, you can trust and verify, as the Russians say.
So... this is a thing for techies only? The rest of the world that can't read the code will have to trust the techies that say "this is good".
As a not-JavaScript-devleoper, open sourced optimal written JavaScript is only slightly less inscrutable than minified or compiled JavaScript.
So, would I be gullible to put my money into a smart contract written in JavaScript?
Most of the world can't verify the code and will need to trust someone. I hope that isn't the password verification commission that calls grandmothers offering to help check out their bank account security.
I haven't scrutinized the code for major flagship apps like Uniswap either. But plenty of others have, including paid auditors.
With open-sourced code, you can actually do this. You can actually get semi-reliable signals that others have scrutinized the code and found it to be fine. Not completely reliable, because sometimes auditors also miss subtle exploits. But you know, everyone's risk tolerance is different. Decide for yourself what degree of trust you're comfortable with, and put or don't put your money in accordingly.
This isn't specific to crypto, this is true for open source in general.
> So... this is a thing for techies only? The rest of the world that can't read the code will have to trust the techies that say "this is good".
But yes, as of now pretty much. The average Joe who cannot remember their own passwords should not be using crypto, IMO. With freedom comes the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot, and unless you understand basic digital safety procedures, you are best off not shooting yourself in the foot.
They won't have to. It's like putting absurd security on your door yet leaving the windows as open as always.
If you ever want to move value out of your virtual economy and into the real, they can and will be there waiting for you, with all their unreasonable demands.
It's possible that bugs in the blockchain software can cause blocks to no longer be produced, essentially halting the network until the problem is resolved. So-called 51% attacks are also a failure possibility.
How will miners be paid to host apps? Given that app usage concentrates into winner take all groupings wouldn't we except the web 3 winners to be paying for the vast majority of any web 3 mining?
Bitcoin doesn't technically solve this either, its just that its data growth rate is small enough to be trivial in comparison to storage costs. Ethereum and other classical distributed ledger systems cannot fulfill the true vision of Web3 (it can and will continue to do a fraction of that vision) because they have no affectual economic functions for data rent or data handling in general. Mining/staking is paid for and everything else is an economic after-thought. Ethereum's Infura Problem is a quick way to see the consequences of these poorly suited economic incentives.
Bitcoin is about stability, but Web3 is about data, so I believe its fair to say that a distributed ledger technology built for "Web3" (which is quickly becoming a dirty word) will have its economic components focused on data. This is different from keeping the traditional Nakamoto Consensus (which judges value based on somewhat arbitrary measures) but deriving tricks to push more data - this means maintaining or exceeding the security guarantees of Nakamoto Consensus while incentivizing data routing-work and storage rather than number crunching.
> The immutability of the blockchain guarantees that your code cannot be changed, with or without your knowledge.
There's been a lot of examples lately why this is not a desirable feature at all for most purposes.
I know "there is nothing new that blockchain does" has become a meme among sceptics, but with respect, I am getting a bit tired of it.
It's just not accurate. You can argue that what the way blockchain allows for shared state is useless all they long, or that the financial use cases are undesirable, and that's all fine. But you simple cannot run the kind of apps that are running on Ethereum right now, enabling financial transactions, with the same guarantees of décentralisation and permissionless access, w/o a blockchain.
It may be useless and/or criminal, but it is certainly new and it works.
Not with realtime action games, nope. The server hopefully verifies, but not even that is a given... Just look at New Worlds immortality bug from a few weeks back for a pretty large budget game that forgot to do that to a sufficient degree.
Ever heard of dns or IP addresses?
What about bittorrent, tor, i2p, ipfs?
Blockchain products are write once, read free, persist forever for free.
Your users pay to interact. Every SaaS funnel person knows that of you get users to pay at all then you have filtered the funnel to larger payments already. Blockchakn projects are that funnel in warp speed.
Imagine if a single red apple costed about $100M, yet it had rather unique qualities such as indisputable, provable lack of contamination. That's the kind of cost difference we're talking about here.
But some people are willing to pay 10^9 the cost for certain guarantees. Good for them too, that such options now exist. Why the irrational hate?
>Why the irrational hate?
you’re coming off as too mean and I think you’d do well to avoid that tone.
This is imo the best case scenario with web3. Which would mean that most of the current "value" is a bubble.
> This is great, but I don't need it at 10^9 times the cost.
Like I said, good for you. You don't need it at 10^9 the cost. Some others do. Why hate that a solution exists for those who do?
Because from where I am it looks more like it exists for charlatans and scammers to draw more people in and exploit them. Also, why do cryptocurrency fanatics so frequently accuse anyone critical of them as being hateful?
Yes, "charlatans and scammers" are definitely part of the demographic that would benefit from crypto. But you're really going to ignore every other use case I've mentioned?
From where some people stand, it looks more like Tor exists for pedophiles to draw other pedophiles in. They're not wrong, but they're also not acknowledging the full picture of what Tor and privacy in general enables.
> Also, why do cryptocurrency fanatics so frequently accuse anyone critical of them as being hateful?
Because the critics, as you can see over and over again in this very thread, are being completely dismissive to the actual use cases and benefits that crypto brings. Never acknowledging the minority of people for whom it actually brings real value to (granted, they've become a minority now that there's a lot of speculative dumb money in the market), never acknowledging the points that are being made, and also calling crypto advocates MLM schemers who just want to draw more people in to make money off of them.
It's one thing if the critics take a look at it and say "Oh that's not really for me" or "Oh I don't know if censorship resistance is an attractive enough incentive for people to keep running Ethereum nodes long-term." Then we could really have a conversation. But they don't say it like that. They say everything with disdain and a sneer. So I respond in kind.
What would you call that other than "hate"? If you kept criticizing something your friend likes despite them telling you all the reasons they like it, and you only ever saying how much it sucks and how nobody should like it, doesn't it make sense for them to ask you "Dude, why do you hate it so much? What do you have against it?"
Vacuum tubes gave way to the silicon transistor, which immediately moved the idea of "personal computing" from a complete impossibility to something that was a pipedream that was technically possible to do. From there things like the Apple II made paths to make personal computing actually usable and affordable. The iteration cycle continues, drives demand for new things to do, which drives demand for the internet. Eventually we arrive at the iPhone where I can now have a low-latency, high definition, video call for (basically) free with anyone in the world. Try explaining that vision to someone in the 90's who has a pager, pays for long distance, and buys stamps and they'll tell you it's impossible or a pipedream.
The crypto/web3 industry is just finding its feet with some new tools in the proverbial toolbox (distributed consensus and smart contracts). There's a lot of people building on it and iterating every day, but in the same way that the IETF were unsung heros of bringing everyone Youtube, there are a lot of folks hard at work at making things usable and practical for mass adoption. Mass adoption just comes last.
Is this a big worry for a lot of people or is just one of the possible things that can go wrong incidental to doing business, like a traffic ticket is to driving?
It's also a worry for people who are traditionally blocked from doing business -- for example, anyone who's got some sanctions placed on them. Again, could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your political opinions. But some people find it valuable, that's for sure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/world/asia/north-korea-kp...
Again, not saying this way is the right way. Just saying, there's a lot of value in such tech -- for better or for worse.
Maybe it will be someday, but it definitely isn't today, nor does it seem to be happening particularly soon!
Until developers feel like that day is coming, this neither makes sense, nor will it go anywhere.
(as an aside, the non-payment one seems kind of silly, since the blockchain apps don't work without payment either - network fees, etc. Sometimes they are covered, sometimes not)
You can't define away comparisons with how things are done now by saying it can only be compared with things that offer the same assurances. That makes no sense - all software architectures are tradeoffs of these sorts. Privacy vs Security vs Ease of Use vs Cost vs Performance vs ...
People are quite literally going to ask themselves whether it is worth getting those features for the current cost. They aren't going to say "well, we can't compare the cost because the current system doesn't do that". They are going to say "is it worth <cost> to get these things".
There's a subtle difference here though: So long as I use AWS, I'm responsible for funding the account, and my non-payment means the app goes down. I have to continue to pay for the app to run, even if no one uses it.
On a blockchain, once I've deployed my app, I can walk away and never think about the app again. I only have to pay for the initial deployment of the contract without any further ongoing cost. The app will always be there ready to be used by an end user who's willing to pay to interact with it.
I pointed out it appears to not solve any problem that currently exists, yes. But I also qualified it by saying it doesn't solve a problem that people seem likely to have anytime soon, ie the future, either.
So the latter statement you try to prop up doesn't change anything - it does not have obvious value compared to today's standard, but it also doesn't have obvious value in the future, either.
So no, the latter statement is not a thinker in comparison. In fact, as i said elsewhere, there appears to have been zero diligence on product/market fit. This appears to be something that was done because they could, not because anyone actually seems to want it.
Good luck on turning that vision that solves nobody's problem into a thing anyone cares about!
And so will everyone else that isn't blinded by fanaticism.
- Aave allows you to lend and borrow different crypto assets. If you wish to short a crypto, or if you wish to borrow against your portfolio so that you're spending fiat rather than your portfolio (a feature offered by traditional assets as well), this lets you do both of those.
- Tornado cash allows you to anonymize your Ethereum, because unfortunately Ethereum just doesn't have strong built-in privacy guarantees like Monero
- All the gambling websites. If gambling is illegal in your jurisdiction, but you'd like to gamble anyway, it's hard to stop you from doing so. Depending on your political sensibilities, this could be a good or bad thing. Personally, I say let adults do what they want, including making dumb decisions for themselves. (Of course, if you want to hide your tracks well, you'd probably want to use the aforementioned Tornado Cash.)
Where's the "Youtube" of the dark web? The famed red rooms don't even exist.
What's the "killer app" of the dark web? Doesn't even exist, unless maybe you count the drug markets. I'd hazard a guess that they're by far the most popular.
> Everything you've listed is just different ways to throw away cryptocurrency.
I literally gave as an example how you could use fiat-backed crypto to buy gold-backed crypto. These assets literally track their real-world equivalents. Or do you have an issue with modern banking and the stock market too, because it's "just different ways to throw away" fake fiat money?
> The average Joe is going to look at that list, chuckle, and go back to browsing Twitter on their iPhone.
Good. The average Joe has no business using Tor. Hell, the average Joe doesn't even care enough about privacy to stop using Facebook. The average Joe doesn't need a lot of things. Who cares what the average Joe wants or doesn't want, unless you're trying specifically to market a product to the average Joe?
Crypto exists for those who actually find a use for it. You seem either unable or unwilling to acknowledge this fact. Which is it?
If the only people using Tor are people who actually need it, then 'using Tor' becomes a very dangerous marker.
- Trade blockchain tokens for other blockchain tokens. Or trade blockchain tokens for tokens that claim (with dubious, temporary and totally non-cryptographic evidence) to be backed by something else.
- Lend and borrow blockchain tokens.
- Try to launder your blockchain tokens. They have to be really dirty for it to be worth it, since obscuring how you got hold of something valuable is already a crime in itself.
- Give your blockchain tokens to blockchain casino owners.
The Perth Mint is "dubious" and "temporary" to you?
If you dislike examples of assets backed by centralized entities, then look at decentralized algorithmic stablecoins.
> - Lend and borrow blockchain tokens.
Yes, including tokens that track "real world" assets. Lending and borrowing is afater all an integral part of the modern economy. This bulletpoint stands by itself.
> - Try to launder your blockchain tokens. They have to be really dirty for it to be worth it, since obscuring how you got hold of something valuable is already a crime in itself.
Just because you don't see any value in money laundering doesn't mean others don't. It's a billion dollar industry.
> - Give your blockchain tokens to blockchain casino owners.
If you want to, yes, you should absolutely have the freedom to do that. Alas, some jurisdictions in real life prevent their people from doing just that.
And yes, it is actually a surprisingly dubious organization (that corporations fully owned by a state and performing some minor official service for it, can still be extremely dodgy, should not come as a surprise).
They seem to be profiting off the assumption that from the name, they would be as tightly controlled as a central bank. But it's very clear from dodgy stuff they've already been involved in, that they're absolutely not.
But of course, I wasn't first and foremost talking about them, I was talking about the 800 dollar gorilla, Tether. They're now where Mt Gox was ca. mid-2013, with "everyone" knowing they're extremely dodgy and likely to collapse, but hoping to make money off those who haven't realized it yet.
As to "tracking" real world assets, that mechanism of tracking is a weak point, rendering all the other "guarantees" moot.
> Just because you don't see any value in money laundering doesn't mean others don't. It's a billion dollar industry.
So is other fraud. Doesn't mean it isn't money out the window. For that matter, you don't know how much of the economic activity is real. Saying "this laundromat must be really good, see how much money is going through it" is a lot like saying "this service for purchasing fake reviews must be great, look how many 6 star reviews it has".
Alright, then don't trade in their token. Or short it, if you think it's going to collapse in value anytime soon.
> But of course, I wasn't first and foremost talking about them, I was talking about the 800 dollar gorilla, Tether. They're now where Mt Gox was ca. mid-2013, with "everyone" knowing they're extremely dodgy and likely to collapse, but hoping to make money off those who haven't realized it yet.
Well yes, the whole point of a decentralized ecosystem is that it gives people the freedom to do things without government stepping in and telling them no, for better or for worse. Tether is free to print as much Tether as they want, and everyone else is free to hold or not hold USDT if they want. Caveat emptor.
> As to "tracking" real world assets, that mechanism of tracking is a weak point, rendering all the other "guarantees" moot.
Sure, that is still a centralized point of failure. But the other decentralized benefits still hold. No government sanctions can prevent you from buying this gold-backed crypto, if you so wish. Or if you have it already, from selling it for something else. Nobody to enforce pattern day trading rules on you. For better or for worse, it still gives you all the benefits that decentralization entails.
> So is other fraud. Doesn't mean it isn't money out the window.
It's money circulating through a different part of the economy than it would've otherwise. It's valuable to the people participating in it. Not to you, obviously. To other people.
> For that matter, you don't know how much of the economic activity is real.
Of course, that's the whole point. But you can still make educated guessing. Looking at the size of various illicit businesses, money laundering is obviously a billion dollar global industry. Why? Because a lot of people find it valuable. Not you, obviously. Other people.
... anonymity isn't a killer feature for me personally, but it is for some.
Anyway, the parent post's point is just that it's not clear what the 'killer feature' that web3 is offering is.
Without that, it's just expensive and pathetically underpowered compared to other platforms.
You can use it to do crypto. hm... ok. I don't have crypto, and I don't have piles I money lying around I want to throw away gambling or turning into crypto.
That doesn't seem to leave any 'Killer features' for me to care about.
> Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to.
> Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract.
> Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users.
> Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.
And when it comes to "That doesn't seem to leave any 'Killer features' for me to care about", I'll also say what I said to somebody else:
Good for you. These are not killer features you'd care about. They are, however, killer features that some others care out. Why is it a bad thing that an option exists for those that do care about these features?
Also I hope you can understand that leading the conversation with these "fight the government" sentiments really sours the debate on crypto, to me that only cements the idea that this stuff only appeals to other nation-state actors, activists, journalists, and scammers/criminals. Which I suppose is fine, except for the criminals, but at that point it's the same niche that Tor fits into.
Yes, that would cut off most of the fiat on/off ramps, but your assets there are still untouched. You could still, if you wanted, go to another country that hasn't banned crypto and exchange it for other assets in those countries. That's far different from the US freezing your US bank account, in which case it doesn't matter which country you go to, your assets are still locked in the US bank.
And even in the US, I'm sure there will still be people on the street willing to exchange cash for crypto, albeit obviously at a markup. Like I said elsewhere, we've been unable to stop the billion dollar drug trade. What makes you think we will be able to completely stop a trillion dollar crypto market from within our borders?
> There's no need to take down every node; I can't see how any of those translate to killer features for this reason.
Because you need to take down every node (or prevent anyone in your country from accessing any node) before the smart contracts stop executing. So long as that's the case, it's a killer feature for anyone who is concerned about traditional financial services shutting them off. You can't see how any of these are killer features because that is presumably not you.
> For PGP, I don't understand why the user isn't encrypting them on their own machine. That seems like an incredible waste to implement encryption in a smart contract.
I didn't mean that PGP would be implemented on the smart contracts, I meant that functionality wouldn't change from under you like they did with the darknet markets. The functionality you see in a smart contract is the functionality you get, and it'll stay that way forever unless you built your smart contract to allow for such change in the future.
> As far as sanctions go, the fact that criminals and ransomware and other fraudsters can't be stopped or sanctioned is an anti-feature if you ask me.
That's fine. It's a feature for others. In other words, it creates value for people who are not you.
> but at that point it's the same niche that Tor fits into.
Well yes, I do strongly believe this is the case. Which is why I make repeated references to Tor. Do you also think that Tor's strong anonymity guarantees protecting pedophiles is an anti-feature too?
>I meant that functionality wouldn't change from under you like they did with the darknet markets
I still don't get why it did, it sounds like they were not using secure tools? Crypto isn't necessary there, just an ordinary E2E encryption scheme.
>In other words, it creates value for people who are not you.
Yes, criminals, who actively decrease value for me when people I know get hit by ransomware attacks, people I know get addicted to drugs purchased online, companies I work with get taken offline with ransomware attacks, government services I need to use get taken down by ransomware attacks, etc. All of this has already happened to me, by the way; I'm not an investor so the only real effect crypto has had on me is loss of money and well being.
>Do you also think that Tor's strong anonymity guarantees protecting pedophiles is an anti-feature too?
Well just like a lot of promises about crypto being faulty, I think this one is also faulty; I've heard a lot of stories of deep web child sex abuse rings being busted up. Tor is not a panacea. But if we say for a moment that it was, I don't think I would be ok with it. Would you be okay with finding sex abuse content on Tor that included your children? What would you do?
If it fails to, then it is probably a bug that they will have to fix. If the API were immutable, then the bug would not be possible to fix.
The immutability is the exact opposite of a feature.
IE things end up immutable and incompatible, immutable and broken, etc. Or even worse "immutable and vulnerable". (IE can interact enough to still kinda work, but often do things it should not).
If you truly want to jump down the rabbit hole, it's true that immutability of this kind can provide great integrity. But you can get pretty darn good without it.
There's actually something truly new and tangible that crypto has spurred - the ability to drive consensus in a trustless manner automatically and the ability to execute computer programs that are deterministic, immutable, and will run forever. With those new tools in the global toolbox I suspect that some iteration of them will be in use somewhere in our future, but no-one exactly where. Are NFT game assets the ultimate expression of crypto? No, but Friendster and HotOrNot weren't the ultimate expression of the internet either.
The ability to network 2 computers together was also new and tangible thing that the internet as a concept brought, but it wasn't before a huge amount of foundational work in the form of IETF protocols, router hardware design & production, software network stacks, and wireless communications before it really took off. Mass adoption was one of the last phases, and I still remember a day when people would call you crazy for putting your credit card anywhere near the internet.
IMO that's the phase we're at, so for most people it's just not ready yet, but it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people out there trying new and novel things with these tools ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Let's try to think quite ahead, going sci-fi even:
Maybe the only use case for such programs is valid if they are powerful AIs, or uploaded human minds. But for the blockchain to be able to run that? The compute and memory needed is astronomical. It also means that blockchain will be relevant technology only in the 22nd century and now we are just playing with it for no actual value whatsoever.
Because, how else would I ensure that my uploaded mind from year 2060 henceforth runs forever in the cloud? I can't, the 22nd century equivalent AWS may be shutdown. Solution - blockchain...
Quantum computing is going through this too right now where we have the ability to compute with a handful of qbits, but the implications on a years time horizon are profound.
You do bring up a valid point in that it’s unclear exactly how the “legacy software” story fits in here. Migrations to new blockchains and the blockchains themselves upgrading without contention (Tezos comes to mind with this as a core feature) seem like the natural response to this problem. Not unlike anything else though it’ll be hard to predict until it slaps us in the face lol.
But even if developers implemented their contract with the possibility of updating, the most important detail here is that only those developers can do that.
Not AWS, not Apple, not Google, etc.
why the blockchain? There are other peer to peer tech that do not involve the blockchain, if your goal is avoiding being shutdown or censored.
Yeah, and that's why we have Ethereum Classic, a remnant of its own shameful history. Dapps are still man-made, so can be faulty, but Ethereum doesn't have any recovery scenario for faulty dapps other than forking out. No one can save you from your own deadly mistakes. This simply can't scale.
Well yes, that's kind of the point. Freedom to choose what you want to do with your money -- including the freedom to make your own mistakes and shoot yourself in the foot.
> No one can save you from your own deadly mistakes.
Alternatively, "You really really have to give a shit about your own security". Imagine if banks had some skin in the game in terms of their security story. Why was I able to have 2 factor on my world of warcraft account many years before my bank account?
You're right in that crypto is a cold world of immutability, but in the same way that exposing servers and data to the internet (along with all the hacks, identity theft, etc that came with it) ultimately led to better security protections like ASLR, DEP, Yubikeys, etc, I posit we'll see rise of new technologies to help combat these issues as well to help offset the risks as much as possible. Hardware wallets, multi-sig contracts, and now multi-party computation are promising new tools to help make the blockchain space more operationally safe, which enables the whole thing to scale.
It’s telling that you don’t know how wrong this is, but feel qualified to redesign a mature industry anyway. Banks are highly regulated and spend billions on security — that’s why the major breaches which are routine in the cryptocurrency world don’t have an analog in the real financial system.
They know that there would be significant penalties if they lose customer resources or grant access to your account improperly, but they don’t spend it on the same things. For example, MFA doesn’t solve every problem — if I phish you or compromise your device, your cryptocurrency life savings are gone but trying to send a wire transfer from your bank for an amount that large will require out of band confirmation, especially if it’s to a random third party or out of the country.
That irrecoverable failure mode is one of the core design flaws of cryptocurrency which makes it unappealing to most people. Most people do not want the risk or constant maintenance work of being their own bank, and mitigating that by reinventing the banking sector except more expensive is a tough sell.
No reason it has to stay that way in all cases. There are many solutions such as layered approaches, semi-custodial services, community forgiveness.
Token governance is the next step from forking that isn't so arduous. With proper governance, the community around a token can come to a consensus that a mistake led to irrecoverable funds (for example) for one user and if the amount is worth the time issue a proposal and vote on minting replacement tokens for that user. Token holders are the share holders of their protocol, no reason all the normal operations that make a business safer for users can't be implemented in token contracts.
Try not to confuse the current state with what's possible.
You're either ignorant or joking.
Just because FDIC has taken care of the blunders that couldn't be sorted out internally between the banks does not mean there haven't been huge privacy and security hacks on these systems since the 90s.
Yes, that's the point: banks have not lost that much money because they have layers of process built around preventing large amounts from moving quickly without lots of layers of approval, things like the SWIFT hacks (which were smaller than the cryptocurrency losses even before you consider how many orders of magnitude larger the banking system is), and as a customer your risk of a permanent loss is extremely low. This is a stark contrast to what happens when cryptocurrency attacks are successful and the community says “you should have been more careful, nothing we can do”.
I don’t want to get into some pissing match about my qualifications but I’ve seen the insides of a number of large financial institutions and their security first hand while working in the security industry. Your argument is that they’re regulated and have a large security spend which is sufficient, my counter argument is that they’re bloated and that large spend is largely security theater.
Doing things like spending money and installing Carbon Black on a server in some closet to check the “endpoint protection” box to auditors is not the same as a competent team sitting down and building an infrastructure with effective defense in depth principals.
Crypto is immutable which can be dangerous but that edge of it is also spurring novel research into things like hardware wallets, multi sig smart contracts, and multi party computation which are real tangible ways to alleviate some of these problems (and other, non-crypto space problems as well). You call it a bug, I call it a feature.
Ultimately crypto’s immutability is a form of global free market Darwinism playing out where protocols that are well designed (and again, really really give a shit about their security) are the ones that continue to exist. Shitty protocols built by incompetent people get hacked and die. Darwinism is not a “design flaw”, it’s what allowed us to transcend living in caves and build society. Has it all been smooth and easy? Of course not, but evolution rarely is. E-commerce had its own rocky start too.
> They know that there would be significant penalties if they lose customer resources or grant access to your account improperly, but they don’t spend it on the same things.
Just because banks have reduced the tail end consequences of their ineptitude and crappy behavior doesn’t mean that it’s scalable globally and forever with no cost for those that use it or prop it up (U.S. banks largely rely on U.S. govt for this compensating control, as well as bailouts when they’re too big to fail), and I will point out that major financial institutions/networks have been getting hacked for decades at this point, but especially in the early days. There are tons of cases of theft, fraud, and abuse in the traditional banking sector (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–2016_SWIFT_banking_hack). Fin firms tend to hire “crisis management” firms to spin media coverage and offset the negative PR when it happens though, which makes it ok in the public eye.
I’m not sure what banks you’re referring to here but every major bank has been doing anti consumer and illegal stuff for a long time, whether it’s Wells Fargo (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/02/24/wells-farg...) or JPMC (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...).
Just because they’ve offset the risks from this shitty behavior doesn’t suddenly make this behavior palatable or something we should accept IMO. The Equifax breach comes to mind as well, but don’t worry because they’re still around, and they were so nice as to offer everyone a year of identity protection (…offered through equifax) as compensation for their gross negligence. They definitely learned their lesson though right?
I can think of very few systems I'd want to use where nothing can be deleted.
I don't understand why this is seemingly considered a feature for all use cases.
Who says it's a feature for all use cases? It's a feature for some use cases. For those use cases, it's a major feature.
I have tried my best to read up on how all this is supposed to work but have come up blank. Is there a simple explanation - using zero buzzwords - of how I can run a site in the way you describe in the Web3 world?
The second is a web frontend typically deployed to a decentralized service like IPFS to provide interactions with the backend contract, however this isn't the only way a web3 site can be made. You can also have the front end as something the user runs locally, or you can eschew the front end entirely, as it's also possible to programmatically interact with smart contracts directly (analogous to the command line in a way).
An example of such a site would be the decentralized trading exchange Uniswap located at https://app.uniswap.org/. Rather than calling a centralized API endpoint to populate the front end, all the data is being pulled through interactions with contracts on the blockchain. Smart contracts can provide read-only data fee free, and you only have to pay to interact with the site when you're doing something that would change state.
- The hostname is resolved from Cloudflare's authoritative DNS nameservers
- It has a TLS cert issued by Cloudflare
- The backend IP resolves to Cloudflare's server range
- It is a pretty standard React front end served entirely from https://app.uniswap.org
- I can't say about the compute, but it's pretty obvious that the site isn't running on 1/5,000 the power of a Raspberry Pi for $250 a second (aka Smart Contract).
So, what part of it is distributed and resilient to takedowns?
Put another way – is there a use case for Web3 which doesn't involve touting Web3? What is the "killer app" for the average user who isn't obsessed with crypto/blockchain?
Then just do that. You're neither the kind of user nor the kind of developer who would want to use web3.
> What is the "killer app" for the average user who isn't obsessed with crypto/blockchain?
What's the "killer app" of Tor for the average user who isn't obsessed with privacy? Nothing. The whole point is privacy. If you're okay with clearnet tracking, then just use the clearnet.
What I don't understand is this refusal to understand that there's actual value in blockchain technology for some people. I get that you don't need or want it. Why is it so hard for you to understand that others do need or want it?
If you're actually curious, and not just looking to status signal, I listed the apps that I've found to be most groundbreaking here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588151 .
I've explained again and again in other comments. As did the parent comment of this whole thread. It's really not that hard to understand, but there's nothing I can do if you don't want to understand.
> Well its TOR - its pretty clear proposition even to mainstream users it will be instantly obvious - the privacy is the feature.
Really? Have you ever met a non-technical user who said they wanted to use Tor for anything?
Regardless, that's entirely besides the point. So what if a mainstream user doesn't understand why version control would be useful for their Excel sheets? The rest of us carry on using version control just fine.
Look, we all know how MLMs work. Just say that you’re finding reasons for other people to pay money for your tokens rather than accusing people of not understanding. None of your comments have included a compelling sales pitch and it’s not the reader’s obligation to help you improve it.
You're looking for something that just isn't there, so you can sneer at it and show your snide superiority. Go somewhere else for that sort of validation, because you're not getting it from me.
It's just not useful for you. Which I understand. Not everything is for everyone. But you seem incapable of understanding that it's useful for many who are not you.
Then why can't you provide examples which are useful for things other than moving cryptocurrency tokens around? When the web started, sure some of the pages were talking about the web and how to build new things with it, but most of the things people were putting online were using the web to make were related to their hobbies, professional interests, politics, etc. and simply using it as a communications medium.
More crassly, why do I not hear anyone saying it's useful unless they have a personal financial stake in me buying their tokens? The closest past event I remember seeing was during the dotcom era when day-traders would talk up stocks without being able to say what a company did or why they were a good bet.
I provided, among other things, examples of trading tokens that track real world assets. Or what, you think the stock market isn't actually useful because it doesn't do anything useful other than moving money around?
Do you know why Ethereum gas fees are so high? Because lots of people are using Ethereum. Obviously because they find it useful for -- yes -- moving tokens around and whatnot.
Again, you're obviously not someone who would find it useful or even interesting. But seriously, how is it so hard for you to understand that the world isn't just you?
> More crassly, why do I not hear anyone saying it's useful unless they have a personal financial stake in me buying their tokens?
Maybe because you're not interested in the tech, so the only people who you ever get to talk to about crypto are the shills? Because that has obviously not been my experience, which has been a lot more technical.
> When you're backed into a corner you can't resort to "it's not for you"
I think your bias is showing. I'm hardly backed into a corner. From my perspective, I've only ever stated hard facts. They're the ones backed into a corner by these facts, and all they can ever muster up is "Oh but I don't find that useful. My use case is an app that literally only myself uses."
It's like wading into a conversation about Spark and saying it's overkill when you just want to process a hundred line CSV file. No duh, that's not what it's meant for. It gets real old when commenter after commenter -- and often even the same commenter -- misses the same point again and again.
And I'll say, that includes you. You're backed into a corner and unable to name any alternatives here [1], so you resort to criticizing my tone instead.
> It frankly makes your case look paper-thin and further reinforces the idea that cryptocurrency is a chump's game.
I wasn't looking to convince anyone in particular, and that includes you. It seems you're more swayed by tone than by facts. So be it.
Web3 is marketing itself as something it is not. You're using a combination of expectation management and goalpost shifting to refute that, and people have called you on it. I can imagine that you don't see yourself as "losing" these arguments, since you haven't even responded to them in the first place.
The supply of ledger space is limited. When demand for that space not only goes up, but keeps going up, what does economics tell us happens to the price? I keep giving example after example of what people use this ledger space for, but all anyone every says is "Oh, but it's just moving tokens around." I have yet to see anyone say how that's any different from the stock market just moving fiat around. Deflection, deflection, deflection. Who's refusing to engage with the conversation now?
> and purely serves to benefit people who invested first (like MLM)
That is simply not true, and I've given example after example of the use cases that benefit the people using the chain. But after every explanation, you still resort to "Oh but I don't use it, so it must be an MLM." You haven't engaged at all with any of my points, you just keep repeating your own. Who's reframing the conversation now?
> When confronted about the possibility of all of it being a scam, your only response was "caveat emptor".
When confronted about the possibility of any single smart contract being a scam, my only response is "caveat emptor," yes. Because that's the whole point. You can't have censorship resistance without having this phenomenon.
But when it comes to the possibility of the whole thing being a scam, that's clearly ridiculous and as I've said, I've refuted it many times over. The next few sentences of your comment are just more of the same, so I'm not going to bother refuting every individual sentence.
> When people say that's stupid, you resort to "well that's fine, I didn't want your money anyways".
Yes, all people ever do is to call it "stupid" without backing their argument up. You said it yourself.
> This is a textbook scam
And by implication, I'm one of the scammers then, aren't I? And you expect me to respond to such accusations politely and demurely?
> your rhetoric will perpetually be at odds with the rest of the discussion unless you engage them on their own terms.
"On their own terms" meaning that we accept the premise that it's a scam? So you don't want a discussion, you just want me to affirm your pre-existing beliefs.
> I can imagine that you don't see yourself as "losing" these arguments, since you haven't even responded to them in the first place.
I notice you still haven't named any alternative technologies in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588753 . You say "decentralization doesn't need the blockchain," implying that the blockchain doesn't really do much for decentralization. I respond asking for any other alternative that does what crypto does, and gave an example of a major decentralized platform that was only possible because of crypto. Once again, you're backed into a corner, and all you do is refuse to respond, and then deflect and project your own loss onto me. I rest my case.
How much does this cost to do?
How much does this cost to update?
What does it take to remove it if you decide that no, you really don't want to have that material online anymore?
IMO these projects are aiming at a new form of sovereignty on the internet that doesn't/can't exist currently - the ability to have your data be permanently stored and accessible on the web. Google can decide to kill Google Photos, and every email provider on the planet can delete everyone's old emails if they so choose. It's unlikely, yes, but the ability to put something on the internet permanently surely has some novel value to it, even if just as an open building block to something bigger than the sum of its parts.
A massive part of what's going on right now in the crypto space is people experimenting with these new protocols and tools like smart contracts and DAOs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...) and attempting to figure out new and novel things to do with them. Web3 is a moniker du-jour to try to encompass these experiments in finance, governance, art, and collaboration.
When the internet was early, people were doing the same, and it gave rise to new forms of art, online gaming, radically different access to banking, ecommerce, and low latency, (basically) free, video calling anywhere in the world. Imagine trying to explain Twitch.tv or Facebook to someone in the early 90s when people were paying for long distance calls and stamps. The groundwork for these things was being created as people were inventing DNS, HTTP, etc etc, but in the same way that NeoPets was not the ultimate expression of online gaming (but had influence on it nonetheless), the things we're seeing today are not the ultimate expression of what "web3" will eventually be but instead a bunch of passionate people trying to figure out what revolutionary things can be built with these new unique tools.
Similarly, there’s a lot of mythology about content not being censorable which falls apart as soon as you think about it. People still have to follow the law in their country: if you upload a Disney movie to IPFS, their lawyers will send takedowns to everyone hosting it. Just as with other P2P services, anyone using it will be deterred by the risk of your ISPs cutting your service if you don’t comply with legal requirements but unlike its more efficient and private alternatives these services are both public (making it easier to track users) and the blockchain services handily provide a signed statement for prosecutors, which seems unlikely to be a popular feature for anyone who actually needs it.
That’s the key difference between the early internet and “web3”: those early efforts were building things people outside of that community clearly wanted but the latter is what happened when people spent a decade pumping money into cryptocurrencies in the hopes of one day becoming rich and are now desperately searching around for reasons why everyone else should pay a premium for their random numbers. It never goes well when the conversation starts with what you’d like to sell someone rather than what they need.
Have you heard of the uncensorable library project? https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en it aims to make some data permanent and available even in the face of Chinese censorship. Is it a panacea that’s going to scale for all data forever? Of course not, but it’s a novel approach and an interesting experiment (and look ma, no blockchain!).
is that good? seems flaws then are perpetual?
Individuals running IPFS gateways or nodes may be directly targeted and asked to take down data, but there's no mechanism for "the network as a whole" to remove data. It's exactly the same as bittorrent. So long as one individual in some hard-to-reach jurisdiction continues hosting the data, nothing can be done.
So IPFS does allow DMCA and the like to exist and function but as long as a certain margin refuse to comply, the network continues to function as expected ignoring the actions of centralised organisations.
> but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing
There's no way for the blockchain to do that. The only way this is possible on ethereum is if the smart contract includes a self-destruct function, and the owner of the smart contract decides to call it (either because their private keys were compromised, or because they were coerced into doing so IRL). Otherwise, it's technically impossible to do without taking down the entire network or breaking encryption.
I'm less familiar with IPFS so can't really speak much to that -- but from what little I understand, censorship-resistance is also a major selling point there.
> So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS?
There is the ENS, but even then, nobody can take an ENS domain down except for the owner of that domain. Not even the creator of the ENS smart contract, unless they specifically included upgrade functionality into the contract, because smart contracts are immutable.
> Sure, the item at the address is immutable, but you might not be able to get it.
As long as you have access to a single Ethereum node, or access to a service that has access to an Ethereum node, you will be able to get at it. It's hard to imagine you not getting at any Ethereum nodes unless a Great Firewall of China situation exists, and even China doesn't care to ban most proxies.
Like I've said elsewhere, this is "for better or for worse," depending on your political sensibilities. Again, I think Tor is a good example here. Lots of CP on Tor, or so I hear. But also persecuted journalists and whistleblowers, and safer drugs than you'd find on the streets. You can't realistically say "I want X to be outside the reach of tyrannical governments, but not Y." It's an all-or-nothing deal. By its very nature, these sorts of libertarian technologies will attract all the illegal parts of society -- for better or for worse.
Having used both defi and traditional financial infrastructure, defi definitely feels a lot, lot more frictionless to me, at least while acting within the Ethereum ecosystem. Time will tell, but I find it hard to believe such frictionlessness won't eventually force its way into the world.
The gatekeepers are important and play a role. There are real arguments to be made about how we can make the gatekeepers more efficient, but not that they aren’t necessary.
This is the only great use case I can think of.
> On a blockchain, once I've deployed my app, I can walk away and never think about the app again. I only have to pay for the initial deployment of the contract without any further ongoing cost. The app will always be there ready to be used by an end user who's willing to pay to interact with it.
Only the compiled contract itself.
Right?
Or patched for that matter
Then one suddenly finds oneself with a pretty much mutable world.
It appears it has been shown many times [1] that such attack is quite possible.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/cryptocurrency/...
I'd looked at using NFTs for cross-grid ownership transfers of objects in Open Simulator. That's a set of virtual worlds run by several hundred different people and organizations, but using the same software, a rewrite of Second Life in C#. There's no moderately-secure way to pass 3D models around in that system without them being copied for free, which is why most of the good stuff stays in Second Life, which is centrally managed.
Such object instances have prices in the US$0.25 to US$20 range. When you go through a portal from one grid to another, and take some objects with you, a database transaction is required to transfer ownership from avatar A, grid X, to avatar A, grid Y. Otherwise, you could buy one copy and have a free copy in every grid.
The assets have to be hosted somewhere. Somewhere with reliable access times in the < 1s range for a few megabytes.
The blockchain systems just don't have the bandwidth and costs for that. As databases, they're far too slow, and transactions are too expensive. As storage, I've seen $5 for a gigabyte, forever. It's supposed to be funded by investing the $5 in a speculation that storage cost will decline. But the fine print says basically "until they get tired of doing this".
As for NFTs generally, the art is unimpressive, to put it mildly.
The NFT world is reportedly about half Axie Infinity and a quarter OpenSea, with all the little guys in the remaining quarter. (That may be bogus; there are no reliable stats on this stuff.) Axie Infinity is a Ponzi in the final stages of collapse.[1] OpenSea is becoming a stalled market. Pick some category, like "Bored Ape", which was getting news coverage a few weeks back. Look at the asking prices. Then look at "recently sold" prices. The "recently sold" prices seem to have a lot of zeros after the decimal point.
[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
This sounds like opinion written as fact. NFTs have use cases that don’t just encompass illegal activities and work well. I personally own NFTs that are used for governance in terms of a budding project’s direction and NFTs that are even used as subscription keys to certain alpha products.
Also it’s a little disingenuous to encourage looking at a contextless single data point indicating a collapse of a product without understanding other factors like there being a bear market in place for the overall cryptocurrency landscape
Which is it? Is it a single data point, or is crypto in a bear market?
NFTs are 100% a scam, and the use-cases you've described sounds like financial cosplay.
NFT data is not comprehensive and doesn't include all subsets of that market, most of it is collectors markets.
The Play 2 Earn space has nothing to do with collectors markets. This is analogous to saying Fortnite players grinding for characters skins are providing a forecast into the baseball trading card market.
The verified Bored Ape Yacht Club is the only Bored Ape collection to care about. This seems like the worst example for you to pick, since that collection is still under high demand? Asking prices being met, recently sold prices being the same price?
https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub?search[sortA...
Also your post is lacking an example of illegality and its relation to prevalence in the sector
https://opensea.io/assets/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18...
A few small bids, then a bid 10%-20% below the reserve price to pump up the listed price but not actually buy. That pattern reappears:
https://opensea.io/assets/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18...
Someone needs to run a test for wash sales on OpenSea data.
Biggest NFT sale ever was a wash sale.[1]
Yes there are crap uses at the moment. NFTs are a bubble, tokens are overpriced. But the idea of taking ownership of your financial wallet, allowing atomic transactions of digital items, allowing fast cross-border transactions, are all cool ideas. The issue is people only see the cryptobro memes and videos about what coin will 100x, or being asked if they own ethereum by their hairdresser, or seeing news articles about NFTs being sold for 500k.
Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of "Crypto is awesome, let's make a ton of money" or "Crypto is stupid, proof of work is bad for the environment, txs are slow" take the time to actually look at some of the underlying tech. I feel most people are just parroting issues they've heard rather than actually taking a look under the hood.
Edit: I found this a particularly well-reasoned explanation of the tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSTNhBlfV_s
One I particularly like is gig tickets. Represent them as NFTs, prove ownership of the ticket as it is in your wallet, trade them for USD with anyone around the world in a single atomic transaction, use third party tools to verify a ticket is authentic (either manually copying an NFT address onto a bands website or programatically). Suddenly I can sell you a ticket to a band we both like from a link in this message and you can guarantee if you pay you get the ticket and if I send the ticket I get the payment, and you can guarantee the ticket is authentic by checking it was one of the originally minted tickets. Boring, bad UX, but solves a multi-million dollar issue in the ticket reselling market. These are the peer-to-peer systems I wish people focused on. Sadly a couple million just isn't that cool in the web3 space.
Isn't this a temporary state of affairs? As a chain gets more popular, the fees will necessarily go up. A Dapp that must continually migrate to newer chains to provide a similar value proposition is vulnerable to being shut down, is it not?
For technologies that have gatekeepers, popularity eventually drives down costs. The tradeoff for these gatekeeper-less platforms is that popularity must drive costs up for them to work.
While it is possible to imagine use cases whose value equals or exceeds the cost at any point in time, it is difficult to imagine a use-case that scales in value at a rate equal to or exceeding the rate at which the costs do. Blockchains must continually find new higher value use cases or collapse in value. This isn't exactly the greater fool dynamic, but instead a 'greater foolishness'.
> And proof-of-stake so it's not destroying the planet (I know Eth is going that way soon too).
Proof-of-stake substitutes assets under management for transaction costs, but there is still an adverse selection problem that only gets worse over time.
And herein lies the problem. At some point cyrpto tokens have to come back into the real world. If you can’t get $centralized_authority onboard you’re screwed. And if it’s not “decentralized” just make a freaking web app.
Not really, adding a payment infrastructure that allows peer to peer payments is non-trivial. Also with smart contracts you could collect royalties on the reselling of tickets while keeping the data open enough for anyone to capitalize on creating a front end marketplace along with the original minter (which could encourage more innovation in usability). The minters also would have financial incentive to not shut down these 3rd party front end marketplaces because they can make it so that they’ll collect royalties regardless
In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user
Is there a difference between buying a "comment on HN" and the text of that comment?
NFTs require at least one of two centralized services to remain functional - the original URL and the Opensea cached URL. So proof of ownership is decentralized, but the actual image is not.
People can then choose to value that ledger entry, or not.
Everything else, such as the ability of n app to figure out an image URL for the NFT, is just sugar on top.
NFT people will value a Bored Ape token whether the URL is valid or not - and they are entirely right to do so. The Cryptopunks don't even have a URL!
It’s not about “open finance” versus “centralized finance”, it’s about “our finance” vs “their finance”, our ledgers versus their databases. This is no different than Silicon Valley starting as David and turning into West Coast Goliath, wrestling with the East Coast Hegemony for status and power.
I get the sentiment, but code doesn’t fix people problems. I am not without curiosity, but web3 still has much work to do to show both novel and meaningful use cases.
As technologists, we ought to be better than this. Think about this like we do with on-prem vs cloud. It is decentralization vs. centralization, but far more muted and less political. We should approach this with a mature contemplation, not cheap tribalism.
As technologists, we ought to recognize the difference and see the forests for the trees. As a technologist, I cannot unsee the patterns nor look away.
I’m sure you’d find similar musings in 2600 or Phrack decades ago.
> Do you refuse to acknowledge the value-add to decentralization that the first group brings?
Decentralization needs the blockchain less than the blockchain needs decentralization.
Short of a worldwide communist revolution, that's just going to continue to be the case for any up and coming technologies that make money. Who benefitted most from the enormous gains in tech stocks over the last 25 years? I'll wager it isn't the minimum wage employees.
> Decentralization needs the blockchain less than the blockchain needs decentralization.
Name for me any other way of transferring money to a stranger over the internet in a decentralized fashion. Name for me any other way of executing Turing complete code in a censorship-resistant fashion. These are two big parts of decentralization that crypto solves. Do you refuse to acknowledge that?
There's a reason the Silk Road only appeared after Bitcoin came on the scene. Tor's been around a long time, PGP's been around a long time, but Bitcoin was the missing puzzle piece. I'm not saying drugs are good, I'm just saying decentralization tech didn't reach the level required to implement Silk Road before crypto came on the scene.
These decentralised systems are a natural abstraction for so many different types of problems and systems. If you leverage them you can still get high performance systems in a centralised manner but the hard work making those systems resilient, localised, and highly available has already been solved. If you design your systems on top of this technical layer you can leverage the benefits without the costs of centralisation for the most part.
The other academic argument to be made is that this is basically the only industry that is meaningfully pushing cryptography forwards (IMHO). Concepts like Functional Encryption, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Secure Multi-Party Computation, and Zero Knowledge Proof Systems have been primarily funded by cryptocurrency research and towards the application in decentralised zero trust systems (which are basically the "ideal" environment for exploring cryptography and game theoretic technologies).
Code doesn't fix people problems but it can augment existing systems and letting those systems evolve to their logical conclusions is a worthwhile endeavour.
If not for AML, KYC and basically the fact you just can't really use cash any more in significant sums for anything we wouldn't have had to bother.
I have 200,000 bitcoin, or maybe I have 0.2, no-one knows other than me. Good.
The same is far from being true via other means such as the legacy banking system or cash. I mean, you can try and send a briefcase full of notes in the post cross-border, it might work, I wouldn't know or care to try.
Obviously the Government can attempt to, or pass laws, to censor anything at any time for any reason. In my country it was illegal for me to visit family for about 6 months this/last year, there's nothing special about Bitcoin, power will attempt to fuck with you simply because they can.
Well, they did. They pretty much all failed or were made to fail (DigiCash[0], Flooz, e-gold, etc.) or were subsumed into the existing system (eg. PayPal).
As far as I can tell, the big picture hope this time around is that the existing system will be subsumed into one or more successful cryptocurrencies, rather than the other way around (which defeats the decentralization).
[0] DigiCash was an anonymous, nominally distributed, system, which is a different set of properties than current cryptocurrencies.
I tend to think its not worth the trade off (and the "decentralization" is questionable in practise), but this line of criticism is basically begging the question.
Becoming a trusted entity is hard. Crypto allows for the creation of systems that don't require trusted entites. That's a huge win for the little guy and catalyst for innovation.
The real questions to ask with blockchain stuff:
- at what cost does this lack of trusted entitids come at? I don't just mean in terms of money but also engineering complexity
- what are the hidden trust relationships? Plenty of blockchain stuff still involved trusted entities, its just hidden through layers of indirection. The only thing worse than a trusted entity you dont trust is a trusted entity you don't even know exists.
For many use cases, BitTorrent is a superior file distribution mechanism compared to centralized alternatives.
Torrents?
Twitter won't allow you to say what the CDC says on viral transmission. They won't allow you to say that men aren't women. They hide posts as "sensitive content" that show crime in the cities that people of the same mindset run. Their CEO doesn't believe in freedom of speech.
Blockchain is currently a set of underwhelming technologies, but in a world of 0 or 1 existentials, it's a driving force to allow the open expression 90s tech people said they wanted but lied about.
Usenet.
Usenet itself was more centralised in most regards than Reddit is today. And even then it proved nonviable.
So that means HN really loved the .org takeover [0], and the price increases for .io [1] and now the holder of all our beloved trendy top level domains are going into the hands of the great Ethos Capital (again) who are going to do all of the above again. [2] /s
Nothing terrible to see here folks, its for your own good! /s
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/ethos-capital-grabbing...
[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/domain-name-registry-donuts-ac...
Sorry to be sarcastic.
I am still skeptical of most web3 use cases touted on twitter, but have personally experienced a few that have made me pause and be a bit more open minded.
Personal experiences: - Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!! - Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks - ResearchDao's like ResearchHub
You’re paying fees to transfer crypto.
That said, it’s free and instant with services like Zelle.
This is a problem that can be solved sans web3.
I think it's a wrong example. Email provides light-speed delivery, dirt-cheap cost, and brain-dead convenience on top of also being able to mail. So email actually never competed with mail.
Web3 is yet to strike any decisive blow against today's web (or it may never). It's more like another part of the web.
> Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!! - Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks - ResearchDao's like ResearchHub
For a smaller amount of money (<$100k), banks already can transfer money within seconds. I've seen people sending $1Ms only using their phones, but, IIRC, you need a good record to do that.
The US is very slow to move money, I still dread any time I have to use my old US bank accounts to get things done.
These advantages are obvious now. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk . My point being that blockchain does offer some new capabilities that were hard to build before. We maybe oblivious in what applications that may unlock.
Regarding money transfer, I know the technology exists, but all providers don't built it. That is native technology in blockchain.
We assume everyone in the world has access to non-rug-pulling companies like, say, BofA or TD Ameritrade but that's really not the case. These institutions have become trustworthy through decades of lawsuits and regulations.
Anecdote: My parents immigrated to the US from Albania, a few months before our planned move my dad's bank just decided to stop existing and the owners fled the country with all the (paper) money. My parents came to a new country with no money to their name because the FDIC is an American invention that a bunch of other countries still haven't copied.
So, I can see how it would work in that context, but I would agree here in the US where our tech overlords are generally benevolent it doesn't seem much more useful over web2.
I think we can analogize to open source and closed source software: "I don’t understand what problem [web3] can solve that [a trusted entity] cannot."
"I don’t understand what problem [open source software] can solve that [close source software maintained by a well funded and benevolant company] cannot."
A point of open source software isn't that it can create software that would be impossible given the correct closed-source company, the point is to not be beholden to them in the first place. You want to make a change to the software, make it. It's your right.
The same idea for web3. Want to make an application to do something and accept payments for it? Release it as a dapp and charge for each interaction. Nobody can stop you from doing that.
As for the second part, "the things built will inherently be centralized". I'm not sure what you mean. The dapp gets published, you can now interact with it and it doesn't run on any one specific machine. The interaction consists of you and the dapp (and the miners who adds your transaction to the chain). What part is centralized?
> I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot.
The lack of trustworthy entities.
> And let’s keep in mind your reply to this comment will be using a trusted entity.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...
> In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized.
Strong objections to most Web3 concepts can actually be derived from the idea that “there is no algorithm for truth.”
We can imagine an NFT that claims to be a deed for a house. We can also imagine:
* Someone with a fleet of tanks forcing me to leave the house, and then keeping me and my heirs from moving back in. Regardless of what the NFT says, by no means do I own the house.
* I might guess someone’s password and give their NFT to myself, and if it was government binding, convince the rest of society to go along with this. Maybe this counts as owning the house, but it definitely shouldn’t.
Political tools can live or die by being realistic, or by being just and fair. Etherium has managed the astonishing feat of being popular without achieving either.
So, how do we actually ensure that the database reflects the underlying social reality? That’s the part where all these supposedly “decentralized” applications punt, either by explicitly relying on a centralized entity, hoping the government goes along with it, or not having the database really reflect anything outside itself (a very small niche).
> The lack of trustworthy entities.
Note that trusted != trustworthy.
In security parlance a trusted entity is one you must trust, that can fuck you over (eg. 'Control' in popular culture, handlers in actual HUMINT, a bank that has your deposited money, etc.).
In that same parlance, trustworthy isn't really a thing. You can raise the cost of violating that trust in various ways (assets held by a theoretically disinterested third party with different incentives, reputational costs that foreclose future participation in the system, credible threats of legal action, etc.), but there isn't anything that you can do if the trusted entity is willing to pay that cost (or is unwilling to pay the cost of not violating that trust) to prevent the trust violation.
Trust cannot solve the problem of giving too much power to trustee. The fact that IT giants are collecting people's data to manipulate people's mind is one good example. We should be able to control the level of trust we can provide to other parties.
What's crypto been good for in its 10+ year span? Financing terrorism and ransomware, selling meaningless jpeg certificates of ownership, ICO scams, totally empty and greedy "number go up" speculation consuming the money and attention of potentially creative and productive fellow human beings, and Cryptokitties.
Meanwhile it's already irrevocably wasted, and continues wasting daily, tragic amounts of our world's resources and electricity.
Crypto is a cancer - it thrives because the earlier Ponzi participants are working overtime to hype it to the later ones, with mainly emotional and ideological appeals, plus plenty of technical handwaving. If you get deep enough down the rabbit hole technically and structurally, you discover basically what this article is saying.
People ask this over and over, and rather than "you could do x, y, and z" what I always seem to hear are vague emotional appeals - "the possibilities are limitless", "we didn't understand the future of the internet / the smartphone / Facebook / The Beatles / Jesus when they started either", "it's not for everyone but if you're selling cocaine in Venezuela it's indispensible", "well currency/tech X is horrible too" etc.
Even given the comments here about what this stuff is supposed to provide, it's really unclear anyone did even basic diligence. Something as simple as "we went around to different focus groups of developers and said "what are your biggest problems and pain points".
Things like "immutability" and "not being shut down" would not be the top 2 for most groups of developers, and i'd bet not in the top 10, either.
As a result, every time i hear about "web3" i can't stop hearing the simpsons clip where Stephen Hawking says "i wanted to see your utopia, but now i see it is more of a fruitopia"
Don't get me wrong, there are certainly types of apps, etc out there where they are going to say "being shut down" is their biggest problem, but that seems like a really small portion of the total addressable market.
What Ethereum marketing likes to call a “global supercomputer” is slower than a 1950s computer built out of vacuum tubes, and running programs is more expensive than it was in 1955. (Programming ergonomics are also nearly punch card level.)
There are very few applications you’d actually want to execute on a platform like that. And every attempt to improve the design (including the long-promised PoS transition) is going to turn it into a centralized plutocracy.
It’s a fascinating science experiment that doesn’t have much purpose as an application environment. But because people are stubborn and the marketing was successful enough, “blockchain” is to this decade what “object-oriented” was in 1990s: a token gesture towards it will make managers and journalists happy.
They did in the 90s.
OO is now one of several styles, and we no longer have the drive for OO purity we did back then - modern languages and modern versions of languages tend to mix up paradigms and make pragmatic choices, rather than insist on OO everything being the only way.
If instead of focusing on the flaws and then writing off blockchains, you searched for solutions or for the people more intelligent than yourself working on those solutions, you may have stumbled across ingenious proposals like the TrueBit protocol which can perform efficient computation trustlessy, or its competitors like the very well known Internet Computer, which surely deserves some criticism but doesn't waiver to your simplistic, narrow, and misplaced argument.
Exhibit A, (Dec 9, 2021):
Vitalik Buterin, C. Jentzsch: Creating the World Computer - The Past, Present and Future of Ethereum - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE8mV8N6cfw
Exhibit B, (Jul 30, 2015):
Ethereum: the World Computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j23HnORQXvs
You also don’t have to worry about getting your account shut down or funds frozen. I once worked for a YC company, LendUp, and we started off using Stripe for accepting payment but had to stop because the policies of their partner bank at the time disallowed servicing of our types of transactions. We spent a large chunk of time integrating with many different payments processors on and off, it was rough.
In summary, web3 has the potential to be and already is, cheaper, faster, and permissionless.
As an 18 year old tinkerer and hacker in 2008, I had no problem signing up to take payments via PayPal and running a little side thing selling home-assembled widgets out of my bedroom.
And as horrible as PayPal is, cryptocurrencies have even more friction and risk.
This comparison with PayPal is perfect. The way I see it, ACH and wire transfers are to PayPal what cryptocurrencies are to startups and tech that is being built right now. The reasons why cryptos have more friction at this point of time is because the PayPals of crypto are being built and distributed. I see a future where creating a wallet and accepting crypto payment will be faster, easier and cheaper than signing up for Venmo or Square Cash.
Any day now, just you wait, once we have PoS or Zkp or Cardano launches X or people adopt Solana, etc... crypto is going to do something amazing and unforseen, indescribable and worldchanging besides trading it for more crypto.
Nobody has ever claimed that you can run normal computer programs on the Ethereum blockchain. It isn't meant to run fucking Doom. Smart-contracts are more like financial protocols.
Blockchains are a form of database but they are not meant to store large amounts of data. That's more a job for IPFS.
Ethereum is migrating to a layered architecture and users are meant to stay on Layer 2's which provide substantially cheaper transactions.
I'm a fan of cryptocurrencies because I think there should be a spectrum of centralization <-> decentralization. If someone wants to stay centralized then fine but I should be able to handle my own money without a bank. I also believe that cryptocurrencies reduce financial friction and overhead. Taking donations is as simple as posting your public address. Taking payments means just integrating a library in your application instead of signing up with a service.
I'm a fan of NFTs because I think people should have ownership of digital items. I think if I pay money for Hearthstone cards then I should be able to sell them on my own terms just like Pokemon cards in real life.
Imagine that I assign value to my monopoly money (as in the game), and it is traded in a stock exchange. Yes, it could reach 60K, but it is still monopoly money.
Cryptocurrencies lack sovereignty and don’t have an alternative source of baseline demand, which is why they’re volatile on a level normally associated with collapsing states — especially if they’re like Bitcoin where the deflationary model encourages everyone not to spend. When anyone can easily set up a functional equivalent, there isn’t much to anchor the valuation. This is why people created things like NFTs to give others a reason to buy their tokens rather than someone else’s but that’s not especially stable until those NFTs are accompanied by legal contracts conveying tangible value.
I personally feel that we are still in the very early stages of this tech and I think it will continue to grow.
Just because it can be used for scams doesn’t mean the tech is a scam.
Considering the source, I don't find this likely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/;login:
(the colon needs to be the last character in the URL above, which this site's markdown parser truncates)
The problem is commerce (Amazon et al), search (Google), social (Facebook), etc. or, in general, the information layer built on top. David Clark said (in 1992!)
"The network as an Information Mesh. An old goal, not yet achieved."
The information theoretic and algorithmic ideas have matured (in no small part due to cryptocurrencies, yes, among other things).It's time to build that information mesh. I want a social identity that's not tied to a particular product/company. I want to shop online using a distributed protocol where reputation is independent of the platform. I want a search engine that can validate the identity and verify the integrity of the content it indexes. We can build such a thing now.
To some degree, the author is not wrong. Some of these so-called 'defi' apps were still sitting on AWS, GCP, and Azure and were affected by the outage underlying the decentralization illusion they created. The same thing with NFTs stored on OpenSea and not even being tied to the blockchain itself.
Right now, the only reason that Ethereum is hyped for this is because the defi hype squad has their investments in the cryptocurrency; even when it is not the best cryptocurrency to use for this. Not even I can use it to pay for my groceries without over paying for the fees just for it to go faster.
This all proves that web3 is not ready. (yet)
Everyone building bullshit on Shopify’s platform is the exact audience that would be better off building on an open finance platform (the shopify apps that are sold to merchants). That crowd just wants to launch a product, have users, and make money passively. Thats what defi builders are doing on web3 platforms waaaaay more effectively. If you actually thought anybody cared about the consensus then haha yeah you’re the one that fell for it, not them.
You need both your vendors and your customers to be able to easily transfer money in and out, and as things stand, that's an absolutely massive pain in the ass compared to using USD, and approximately nobody does it. But that is only the start of the problems, not factoring in things like wild exchange value swings, and huge gas/processing fees.
- possible the transaction won't happen immediately or happen at all
- extremely expensive
- stupid (if you expect your particular cryptocurrency to increase in value over time)
- missing all the protections and benefits of a credit card
Either way, it completely defeats the purpose of decentralization, consensus, etc. Coinbase, in that case, is exactly like a traditional bank except that you're trading non-money instead of money.
I just noticed I read that wrong. I missed the same provider as your vendor part.
So I guess the solution for using cryptocurrency to buy things at Amazon is “if you already bought cryptocurrency at Amazon…”.
But I’m trying to buy something. So how does the intermediatory step help at all?
This post may sound somewhat hostile. I TRUELY don’t understand how cryptocurrency helps any of this. It only seems to help cryptocurrency people.
The author nailed my feelings 100%.
Sell physical assets for crypto, then cash out at a Crypto ATM in your currency of choice, if you absolutely need to. A big part of the problem is Crypto ATMs aren't prolific enough. Restrictions on money-handling businesses come into play there, which is argued as anti-terrorism/organized crime measures but is really just gatekeeping/rent-seeking by the established players.
All defi products help people already in the defi ecosystem do something easier.
Why are you comparing DeFi platforms to Shopify? Who are the developers choosing between these options, and what are they trying to sell? How does a DeFi platform (or any blockchain) help me to sell physical products?
Also, it seems like you're arguing that blockchain platforms are better developer experiences, which seems untrue. There are a lot of extra hurdles, costs, and scaling issues on blockchains, but enthusiasts say it's worth it for the consensus. Now you're saying the consensus is unimportant.
So what is the benefit of building on a platform (please let me know a specific one you've used and liked) and why it can't be done elsewhere?
I have seen so many HN posts like yours, but no one will give me specifics. Who are all these builders launching apps that aren't just speculation frenzies (e.g. Axie Infinity)?
"Crypto is going to revolutionize ____."
"OK, what is a use case where it provides some value that wasn't possible without it?"
...
Quote from his article: "So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only “utility” for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers."
The gentlemen that invented and host this forum don't believe that. Disclaimer: I've founded a few cryptocurrencies.
This is not a convincing argument to me. It tells me that the real utility is just speculation.
Shiba Inu has a market cap of 10B. But you’re an idiot if you think Elon musk dog money is valuable to society. If I make a 1000000% return selling magic beans, does that mean the beans have actual utility?
A platform for things I don't like, but others love, customer rewards programs, collectibles, proof of ownership, timestamping. Removing the government money printing press from free war funding, and perhaps requiring a war tax, would reduce military globally. An impossible to fake record of the past, if you pay to write to the db.
You can get loans 24 hours a day with no signup that allow you to pay less tax by not selling the asset and paying capital gains, and just living off the borrowed money (like the wealthy have been doing for decades.) Shall I continue, or will you be ignoring all these features and benefits anyway?
Bitcoin does not remove counter-party risk. The counter-party is there, and it's risky:
* miners (can ditch Bitcoin; can censor your transactions)
* Bitcoin software (wallets; miners) (can have bugs which get your coins stolen)
* Bitcoin protocol (can have bugs which get your coins stolen)
* internet infrastructure (can censor Bitcoin)
1. You can mine your own transaction, and the chance that some miner somewhere is happy to do so is extremely high (Which is why no transaction has ever been censored to the best of my knowledge.) 2. You running the code of your own choice is not a counterparty risk. It's your own problem. It's the same problem you have when with physically securing your seed words. There's no reason to break the word counterparty. 3. The protocol never had that kind of bug, some mobile wallets did with bad RNG though. 4. Yes and? The network routes around that, see China banning mining, etc.
I will help you trash talk bitcoin though. It's fun. Uncensorable? Ask Ross Ulbricht how the Federal Marshalls auctioned off his bitcoin to Tim Draper. Inflation bugs twice where anyone could mine as many coins as they like, one executed, and one responsablity disclosed about 2 years ago. Have a list of vulnerabilities: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu... Have a list of weaknesses: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses Summary: The vast majority of users have no hacks at all, and far less problems than their banks give them, in my experience. P.S. Using your definition, is counterparty risk reduction even possible at all, and if so what would that look like? If you take the time to answer that, I think you'll see you're just trying to break a quite useful word.
Of course, it openly claims everyone promoting web3 technologies are scam artists, that it is a ponzi scheme, and that nobody in the space has considered "DNS and AWS are cheap, the EVM is way slow and expensive."
I guess we'll just have to wait and see which it is: the above claim, or that the authors writing these pieces are missing something. I'll admit I do respect the bravery to post something like this, lacking all humility, and fairly falsifiable, that will result in embarrassment if left up and disproven.
One thing that is interesting about these critiques is they mirror identically the early critiques of Bitcoin. And now, ironically, they take it as a given that cryptocurrencies are here to stay and are no longer going to eventually crash to zero, which was the claim made in these kinds of posts 5-10 years ago.
Imagine a whole new continent is discovered, and all the people back home are criticizing those who go there because it's not particularly safe at the moment, and look how warm and cozy they could be back in civilization.
No one's asking you to go to web3, stay here if you like. Hell, I found out today there's still people using gopher. There's room for all of us.
Imagine a whole new black hole is discovered, and all the people back home are like "but it just absorbs everything that crosses the event horizon" and "it will destroy everything you put near it" and "it's the end of everything you care about" and saying you shouldn't try to spend any more time getting close to it.
Someone is going out of that scenario (or not) looking (or not) a little the worse for wear. So the question is: do you feel lucky?
I don't know of anything in crypto which actually works (read: does something better/cheaper than pre-existing technologies). The single value of it is speculation.
Creatively showing how expensive and slow Ethereum is is entertaining but not entirely relevant. It's like comparing a passenger airplane and a tank, claiming transportation is their sole purpose and since airplanes are both faster and cheaper than tanks, tanks are fraudulent.
Ethereum is architected to be a decentralized, permissionless computing platform. Performance is one of the trade offs.
It's much more productive, and more challenging in my opinion, to discuss whether or not the trade offs being made are worthwhile.
Horses for courses.
ps. Does he think Web3 is about storing data on the blockchain network? It's not. Ex. https://ceramic.network/
by the way, shameless plug for /r/Web3Skepticism, where we take a long hard look at this "ecosystem", question its benefits and examine its failings.
Another thing that gets bandied about, emphasis mine.
I understand Web3 isn't there yet, but this comparison is egregious.
Ethereum Name Service (ENS) https://forkast.news/what-is-ens-ethereum-name-service-how-d...
> After all, a programmer doing the most basic test of a web3 prototype is going to need to get the cryptocurrency, spend the cryptocurrency, and any application will require all users to get the cryptocurrency as well. If this gets abandoned quickly due to the inevitable technical failure “web3” still accomplished its goal of getting more suckers in and extracting their money.
Hard to take serious the rest of the blog when he doesn't seem to be aware of development testnets that exist for exactly the above reason. Or familiar with scaling efforts, or some of the long term ethos of the crypto developer community.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Do you mean "the code is the contract unless the contract would cause a substantial number of wealthy stakeholders to lose money, in which case the code is no longer the contract" (a stance, I might add, that is _formalized_ by PoS systems, if anyone ever manages to get one online)?
See how much of the web you can access on an old IE6 installation.
I don’t think anything behind a LetsEncrypt certificate will, for example.