Comment by birracerveza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by birracerveza | Hacker News Reader

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I like how this article went almost ~40 minutes with barely any vote and no comment and was immediately pushed to page 2, whereas any article speaking negatively about crypto, with the usual regurgitated tirades of how blockchains are going to destroy humanity, get front paged with hundreds of points and flaming comments repeating the same old "crypto is a scam" within 10 minutes.

But snark aside.

Hopefully in the long term PoW will eventually be abandoned altogether... aside from BTC and maybe some inconsequential stragglers. But this is a very big nuance that people refuse to address. All blockchains are evil, period. I've seen people outright dismiss the fact that eco-friendly blockchains exist, even when linked to Tezos' wiki's energy consumption explanation. [1] Their opinion is that no matter what, blockchains are a bloated solution because it's an append only database replicated across the globe. But what they fail to understand is just how much redundancy is hidden from the user in the traditional web. Just think that every website has a database, likely replicated and with multiple backups, with all the infrastructure to keep it up and serve its data, all of which is likely not optimized at all because hey, as long as it works. For each and every website!

On the other hand, blockchains are likely highly optimized for their use case (well, aside from Ethereum), with no need for backups, replicas and all that jazz as it's already built in the protocol. Consider also that traditional websites' servers have to run 24/7, even with no visitors.

Sadly, NFTs completely shut down any possibility of rational discussion, but in my opinion blockchains are breaking ground for new ways to develop websites by using decentralized, highly optimized, shared infrastructure. (Example: The Graph[2])

We'll see.

[1] https://wiki.tezosagora.org/learn/baking/tezos-energy-consum...

[2] https://thegraph.com/

Maybe I’ve missed something, but the eco-friendly blockchains you’re describing are virtually all using some variety of PoS (“PoH” for solana, so-called “Nakamoto” PoS for Tezos.) I’ve yet to encounter anything convincing me that PoS in its various incarnations, does suffer of centralization in a way that PoW doesn’t.

Maybe blockchains are useful somewhere outside of crypto speculation, but blockchains that are marketed as eco-friendly and secure and decentralized deserve extra scrutiny in my mind.

I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but I do try to keep up to date with the technology. POW sucks in terms of resources, but PoS sucks in terms of centralization, and, it follows, security (the core selling points of blockchains)

I'm still too much of a noob to comment on what the core selling points of blockchains are, but in my experience the core selling points vary a lot from person to person and decentralization is not always the most important concern.

(For example, one key selling point is that you can leverage all of the existing financialization tools that exist for that blockchain, even if your allocation of those tokens is centralized.)

Security is without doubt not a core selling point of crypto though?

The design introduces security problems that it then has to solve, and in doing so, reduces security in other places

I'd like to be indignant with you, but until a week or two ago, I was definitely in that camp. There's so much hype around crypto that it almost felt like there had to be nothing there, and if there was, it was hard to identify what it was. And yeah - there's definitely some cool stuff happening with NFTs, but at least for me, there's a lot more "what in the world is this money laundering" than there is "oh cool".

I personally love the whole decentralization aspect of crypto/blockchains, but absolutely hate NFTs for irreversably poisoning the well rather than just the fact that they're useless money laundering scams.

The problem stems from the fact that actual useful applications take time to develop, whereas just slapping an image on an NFT and investing in marketing takes no time at all. Same for cryptocurrencies. But IMO that doesn't invalidate the technology as a whole, it just speaks for humans' greed, nothing else.

This brings to mind one of the issues I have with the w3 model: It eliminates efficiencies of scale. All of the processing to render a website is delegated to customers (many of whom are on cell phones with terrible bandwidth). You can't do any sort of caching or any sort of optimizations to make a website run faster. You couldn't do it even if you needed to for your customers.

No caching. No QUIC. No parallel pipelines (you need the whole blockchain locally to begin rendering), no deletion of old content. No CDNs. No edge distribution of secured media (Netflix movies, et.al.).

Everybody must (to be secure) verify all the entries of the entire blockchain as a boot-up step. At least once per load, viewers must traverse the block chain to build the latest state for a specific web page.

It gets worse if you optimize for the above actions by creating and maintaining one block chain per individual or small groups of w3 sites. Frankly, I find this idea to be completely unrealistic. One can look at existing P2P and see how seeds vanish without traditional websites (and their trackers - hey, databases!) to back them up.

Just imagine what Reddit's blockchain (size, transaction time, parsing time, growth) would look like.

That's not how it works. The users' clients receive already verified data, the "verification" is done by the network nodes that provide it. The network can cryptographically ensure that the data is not tampered with, so that every node in the network returns verified, secure data, regardless of who you're retrieving it from.

The user does not have to download the blockchain. It would be the same as needing to download a database, it makes no sense. It all happens in the backend, all the client needs is a simple API call.

> Consider also that traditional websites' servers have to run 24/7, even with no visitors.

And somehow, no websites will need to be run or databases spun up, in the futuristic web3 universe?

That makes no sense, almost all crypto-apps use traditional web2 technology alongside blockchain & wallet web3 stuff.

In the long term I speculate that yes, no servers or databases will be needed, as websites (dapps) will just be dumb clients that interface themselves directly with decentralized services. Whether that will be true is to be seen, but it's certainly a possibility.

Last I heard, you wouldn't need a DB since you'd just use the blockchain as a stream of events your website is built from.

That said, I have more reservations about this concept than the Hilton.

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