1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out
2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance
In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?
Every versioning of that idea is marketing speech.
Web2.0 might have had a silly name, but the idea of the web as something that the average user and company could contribute back to and use to communicate with in real time provided explicit value and convenience over existing alternatives (letter writing, door-to-door sales, in-person self-promotion, calling a pizza parlor, renting a physical video, long distance phone calls, physical plane tickets mailed to your house…)
I don’t see that with web3.0.
> I don’t see that with web3.0.
I do.
The strategic quoting was supposed to show that the only thing I disagreed with was that I find the name "Web 3.0" about as silly as its predecessor.
I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not speaking in support or against here.
PGP did that 31 years ago though, faster and more efficient and without all the downsides?
Except for the tons of CO2 that get pumped into the atmosphere in the process, or the blackouts its causes, or the fact that there are tons of more useful applications for that energy, like heating homes, running air conditioning, charging electric vehicles ...
Metafilter charges $5 to get an account. If you can't afford the $5, you can email the mods to join for free.
SomethingAwful charges $10 (and offers a platinum account, and a paid add-on to view old threads).
Both of these payments are done through PayPal, and both exist as a way to filter spammers and trolls.
I thought the whole point of decentralisation was that you couldn't be banned though.
The exclusive communities you mention only have value because of the hype and FOMO and high dollar amounts that people see being made on sales of "exclusive" NFTs or some such. Same as many of the many crypto pumps, same as the dotcom bubble, same as tulips. Same as it ever was.
Yeah, but this actually works.
Like it or not, people are already using their wallets as their username. And they're trading cryptographic assets. And everyone can see it because it's public.
This isn't theoretical.
I've been to PGP key-signing parties. I can assure you that this is not that.
Exchanging public keys worked for decades before blorkchains were even a word.
How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information.
So how exactly is that different from using my google account to login to some webservice?
Yes, and what maps that to your physical identity? How is that any different from showing someone a public key you just generated with GPG?
For what it’s worth, I recently read Moxie Marlinspike’s essay on web3, and I think he crystallised one of the most interesting insights I’ve ever heard on that topic:
> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust.
I think he’s correct, and the cryptocurrency of the future – the one which actually takes off as a medium of exchange – will do exactly what we’re arguing about here. It will use purely cryptography as its mechanism, instead of large groups of servers acting as the gatekeeper. You’ll be able to send money to someone with purely a public key, no servers required, just you and them as peer-to-peer. And, as a corollary, you’ll be able to prove your balance with only a key and the encrypted data of your past transactions. I’ve barely stopped thinking about my envisioned implementation for the past couple of weeks.
that's a very very liberal equivalence to make. decentralized authority in practice is just a collection of servers in aggregate that come to consensus according to a certain protocol.
I can't use blockchain to pay pretty much any vendor I buy things from without an intermediary - the intermediary requires me to log in to a website and unless I'm willing to go through a lot of trouble (more trouble than dealing with PGP) an intermediary will also be storing my wallet and have "physical" control of all my "coins." Blockchain works to the extent that you aren't really using blockchain but simply a trusted intermediary.
If you're actually personally managing your wallet keys it's worse than PGP. With PGP if you lose your key you just say so and people figure it out, you have to go to some key signing parties. With Bitcoin if you lose your key you have no money, end of story, no recourse.
I assume it would make the application much simpler because there would not need to be any or very little user-account management, no sending bills or charging credit-cards. Just gimme them bitcoins. The user-state could be stored on the client-machine, unless they especially want to pay for us backing it up on the cloud. Still it could be backed up anonymously, identified by the wallet.
No more hacking, if there were no user-accounts or passwords there would be nothing to hack.
Sure, you can publish your wallet address and tell them to send you money. How do you give them access to your content after they have sent their money? How is Bitcoin helping compared to you publishing your IBAN account number and asking for money to be sent directly there?
I wouldn't need to "send bills" because I wouldn't know who my users are. Except that when they login with their crypto-id my application will do work for them, because they have crypto-paid for it.
I wouldn't need to charge credit-cards since they transfer the bitcoins to my account. I only need to know their id and that they have paid me a specific amount of crypto, and that id has used a certain amount of my application.
There needs to be the infra-structure associated with crypto-currency, but not much else. That would make things simpler, I assume. That's my point. Crypto can presumably make payments and user-accounts management simpler. The less you know about your users, the less there is to manage.
The webshop exposes some way of receiving value tokens, be that USD, EUR or BTC, and has some way to tell which user transferred how many tokens.
So technically there is no difference.
The difference is, I can be pretty sure that EUR won't lose 20% of their value overnight.
If you want to accept bitcoin, you run a piece of software and write a few lines of code.
I am okay with that.
Want to accept lightning (bitcoin over a low cost and high speed payment network)? It’s an api call to generate an invoice and another api call to see if that invoice has been paid. Again you can run everything yourself or use a managed service. Bitcoin make programmatic payment processing SO MUCH EASIER than traditional payment rails.
I do that without any involvement of a blorkchain on a daily basis. Everytime I use my ssh key to connect to a server that knows my public key.
Can someone provide me with a clear example of this being implemented? AFAIK accessing blockchain from a traditional client(website/app) still requires going through a central node.
Did something change with 'Web3'? Pardon me for not being up-to-date but it's like one day I woke up and Web3 is all over the place it seems like well-coordinated, heavily funded campaign. How else can we explain this seemingly sudden trend of Web3?
This recent NYTimes piece takes that approach, though none of the examples are that impressive: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actual...
(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
I thought about why so many centralizsed systems failed, or failed to be built, for streamlining processes in the real world. I think that it's because typically such systems would be built on SQL databases and backend servers that are prone to hacks and downtimes, and the APIs built by different developers often cannot integrate with one another.
What if, instead of databases and custom APIs, a blockchain with smart contracts is used? What if we can also sign documents such as receipts with hashes that can be verified off-chain and off-line? We'd have a fault-tolerant, always-available systems, and also a "unified" protocol in which other systems can interface to.
Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to.
The PCR test system would be something along the line of: - Booking through a smart contract, paying the PCR test fee, and obtaining a receipt signed by the contract in the form of a hash - Upon arrival in the test center, they check the validity of this signature offline by using a public key to verify your payment. - An identification service can keep a hashed version of your personal data on-chain. You can provide your name, DOB, place of birth etc, and this can be checked against the identification service by decoding the hashed data with a one-time key you generated
There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd.
There are of course questions to be answered. But I see many use cases in my everyday life.
It's not pretend like it's not a solved problem. It's just that you're trying to eliminate the central provider in this case and you want to replace that with a blockchain which is excruciatingly slow
There are trade offs, but having data and core business logic in an open and transparent network would allow for better interoperability imo. Not saying there aren't fundamental issues to be solved with using blockchains, but it's a new path to be explored.
The speed of the blockchain doesn't necessarily have to be slow. It depends on how decentralised and safe it needs to be. It's possible to create a "private" blockchain for some use cases. I don't see web3 as open in the sense of open to the whole world, but open to whoever the stakeholders are.
That's a common refrain that seems to associate blockchains with standards and common APIs, it doesn't resist closer inspection. To take your example, I can easily design two PCR test systems completely incompatible with each other, and leaving no way for anyone else to implement a compatibility layer between these two, even if they both use the same blockchain.
There are various ERC20 tokens that should in theory implement the same interface, but turn out to be subtly incompatible with each other because of how imprecise the specification is. Standardization is hard, even when people try, and blockchain doesn't even enforce a modicum of effort in this direction.
Another way to see it: as a software development constraint, "the system has to live in a blockchain" is akin to "it has to be written in C" or "it has to use functional programming": maybe the end result will be more alike, maybe it'll be easier for a dev to understand one system based on the knowledge of the other, but that's pretty much it.
> There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd.
Smart contracts can be vulnerable (and ensuring they are not is very expensive, if possible at all), private keys get lost and some external system has to update the smart contract (you can never really get rid of all external systems, something lives outside the blockchain, if only the human operators), transaction fees are high enough that getting protection from a DDOS mitigation service would be cheaper than using a blockchain in the first place.
I am also not arguing that incompatible APIs will disappear with blockchain usage. But things like an EVM can be used as a template to build underlying blockchains to provide a common datastore and execution layer for multiple systems to work together. It is harder to achieve with traditional SQL databases, which shouldn't be publicly accessible.
Also an advantage I thought of is it would be harder in this case for corruption to take place in the PCR testing regime since all transactions are immutable, and transparency ensures that the public would be able to check against those if they so wish. A closed system would allow the government or participating platforms to manipulate data records for their benefit, with less chance of scrutiny.
I agree with your points about the vulnerability of smart contracts and private keys. These are challenges that I hope will continue to be addressed as we try to figure out how to make blockchains accessible for mass usage. I think that smart contracts auditing is still far from mature, but the immutable nature of contracts would allow audited contracts to remain secure, as opposed to some code running on some company's server.
In the end as with everything in life, there are trade offs. It's about picking the right tool for the right job, and to continue experimenting with potential improvements that new technologies can bring and to reduce their externalities.
Substitute EVM for JVM and you end up with a similar statement that looks just as correct, but it's still not clear what the EVM brings that the JVM doesn't.
> it would be harder in this case for corruption to take place in the PCR testing regime since all transactions are immutable
In your system, the blockchain would replace the database, not everything around it. That's also something I keep seeing in these discussions: blockchain provides some guarantees, so you assume the system you'll build on top of it will inherit from these guarantees, without questioning the composability further. But the interfaces of the blockchain component of these systems you're trying to conceive are precisely where the guarantees break down.
To take your example, you'd basically replace a database (and just a database) with a smart contract, which would ensure immutability and transparency. But:
1. you don't need a blockchain to get these guarantees (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency)[0]
2. using blockchains still imply that you're trusting the people holding the keys and interacting with the smart contract, so you haven't changed your trust model (the interface problem I mentioned above).
> the immutable nature of contracts would allow audited contracts to remain secure
The immutable nature of contracts is also what makes them unfit for evolving systems that have to be regularly updated to address new requirements.
[0]: to be clear, I'm talking about permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum
But there's a good reason things like k8 and react become overused for everything these days, because they provide a standard that works for a relatively large spectrum of cases.
The argument of "you don't need X to do Y" is not wrong, but it doesn't make X absolutely useless. Your points are not really invalid imo, but i think you're missing the point of the continuum between centralised and decentralised systems
I'm mostly missing the point in this continuum where I can start listing pros instead of just cons. There are fundamental reasons why we haven't reached this point and may never reach it, as I (and many others) highlighted before, and these haven't changed for the past 5 years.
Couldn't this be done with something like an enterprise service bus, without the blockchain?
> Booking through a smart contract [...] There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt
But you have moved the hacking problem to the smart contract instead, and last time I looked those seemed a lot harder to make secure.
Yes, but you're arguing that against someone -- someone whom you haven't shown is making "quick judgements and assumptions". You're just assuming that.
That is the problem GP was pointing out: Crypto-"currency" proponents always jump to that conclusion. Stop doing that.
I don't think telling someone to not jump to conclusions is itself jumping to conclusions. Otherwise we'd have infinite loops in every discussion
No, it's staying with the null hypothesis until disproven.
> we'd have infinite loops in every discussion
With you, we do.
A useful contribution would be to point out how exactly the GP is wrong.
I can imagine the current international banking system get upgraded with a blockchain like technology such that you don't need a central bank of central banks.
But the web3 guys simply want to compare detractors to luddites
my argument is for us to make our cases in an enlightened and civilised way instead of calling out names
Until somebody does, the null hypothesis remains that it is. (Use some cuter name if that makes you feel better, but it is what it is.)
I have my views on positive use cases for the blockchain and/or cryptocurrencies, and I got that by learning and building stuff with it. On whether the technology is a net good or bad to society, I don't know.
One can refuse to participate in anything without completely dismissing its merit. But that's the polarised world we live in :/
But, hey, you seem to be closer to 100-0 than to 99-1 in favour of "Utopia!".
You would be a lot more persuasive for that side if you didn't natter about meta shit like "fallacies" or "false dichotomies" but in stead presented some actual arguments.
I notice you didn't.
Between black and white there's gray.
You keep digging into that false dichotomy
I've learned enough at this point to know a scam when I see one, and I definitely don't need to go thru my history w/ software and tech bubbles and cryptocurrencies to explain why web 3.0 is full-on bullshit.
I get it, you don't like it.
So I agree with your last point: let's all please move on.
We don't do that here.
I like hashing things out but whenever there is a huge bandwagon effect, I am increasingly getting more skeptical. Happy to be wrong but we need skeptics that question mob mentality.
There are several recent examples of this: 1) Inflation 2) COVID origins (Lab leak) 3) Zero-COVID policies and lockdowns.
I always question these things - what if we are wrong?