Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire
twitter.com
twitter.com
What do you mean? Record expiry can easily be incorporated into the smart contract protocol. ENS already does that. When you register an ENS domain, you can pre-pay for up to 10 years, after which you have to renew the domain. Same as web2 domain name registry.
> Like anything blockchain there is no real solution for how to handle records becoming stale over time without a central authority that manages disputes.
I don't understand this part. In pretty much every decentralized name system I've seen a user pays to own a name for a period of time, there's no stale records.
Any former meaning is now drowned out by that definition, whether you like it or not.
Random pronouncements on HN don't make it true. If you want to restrict your understanding of the term, by all means do so. But don't expect others to follow suit.
I hate it too but it feels too late to turn back the tide.
But what do I know? I'm still sore that "content creator" now means "social media person" rather than "someone who creates content".
This co-opting of term by blockchain-backed everything is for something actively dangerous as opposed to simply too little bang for too much buck.
I personally think it's very fitting that web3 is now hijacked by crypto, another utopia dream that tries to deny the benefits of government and human judgement in the rule of law
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...
Everyone focuses on the big scams, but there's lots of "small-scale" attempts to get funding from big players who don't want to "miss out" - some may not be scams, but they're all filled with "true believers".
So, there is a legitimate need for some new business model where you print money and keep most of it for yourself. Web3! I guarantee you someone will get rich from it. That means it worked.
(I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here. I get the actual idea for cryptocurrency and even NFTs if I squint a little bit, I just think that the hype is from people that think they're going to get rich without doing any actual work. It does happen, but at the end of the day, doing actual work is probably going to be more profitable on average. You're probably too late to the game if you start now intending to be a Web3 trillionaire, anyway. The hype is to get you to buy some of the money you're printing with money that can actually be used to buy mansions. So they can buy some mansions.)
- crypto - meme stocks - NFTs
There needs to be another innovation where hype can build around some narrative so people can get rich quick. Web3 has terrific product-market fit.
I clicked it curious to see what his reasoning was, but nope, the HN headline is all there is.
It would be maybe OK if that guy would @ him and said "look this is cool, what do you think of that" - but guy made specific question to Guido.
This is not some rant thrown into the net "just because" like Elon does.
I'm not sold at all on the Web3 dream, but I'd be open to being convinced if any true believer wishes to try.
A lot of these Web3 discussions just seem really boring.
If someone on the street comes out of the blue and wants something from me there is no obligation that I have to be nice.
Especially if that someone seems to be building his personal profile on calling out people on TT.
The manner in which it is stated may produce other feelings when reading it but the content is still there.
I can't remember when there's ever been such a Bigendian-scale dispute in technology before. Can you?
The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it.
Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs. In other words, they are perfectly ripened marks for the hucksters.
Also I would like to point out that the idea you can ever be fully anonymous on the internet is a lot of bunk. Regardless of what kind of cryptography you use or how many obfuscation layers you put things through you're still generating a great deal of identifying data just by accessing other servers. This is a problem I have with most of the marketing behind any privacy technology, it's not just these privacycoins that are making false promises.
This statement is false. Zcash's shielded transactions hide both the wallet ID and the transaction via zero knowledge proof.
If they in fact worked like Bitcoin, with balances & account-numbers transparent to everyone, I might believe as you do. But I know the tech obscures both amounts & recipients, so I don't.
Your 2nd paragraph, that people are spraying all sorts of privacy-destroying info with every interaction, is mostly true. But it's not essentially true, and with education, & software, & further technical advances, far more privacy than we have now is possible. Especially, far more privacy from criminals & abusive regimes that would persecute/imprison/kill people for dumb reasons.
>But it's not essentially true, and with education, & software, & further technical advances, far more privacy than we have now is possible
Yeah and that's a huge headache most people don't want to go through, very few even in the privacy community want to have their money tied up in that kind of system forever because it's so cumbersome to use correctly.
>Especially, far more privacy from criminals & abusive regimes that would persecute/imprison/kill people for dumb reasons.
I have seen no evidence that this kind of technology actually helps those people in any disproportionate way, the same technology can be used by criminals and abusive regimes to conceal their activities and in fact it is being used that way right now. Long-term I think it's unwise for them to use it for that purpose, for the same reason it's unwise for others to use it for the purposes of evading them. Remember that the human factor of people making stupid yet honest mistakes is the biggest vulnerability in any system of this kind.
I could give you my Zcash z-address right now, & there's no way known to cryptographic science for you to know its balance, when and how much ZEC it has received or sent, from or to whom, or even if it's ever been used at all.
None of the metadata thrown off gives any hints to that. Even godlike omniscience about my every interaction with the internet, or a man-in-the-middle attack against all my connections to other Zcash nodes always, would only indicate that I have interacted with the network, and likely sent transactions at cerain times. You'd still know nothing about my address's activities. (The case is somewhat weaker for Monero, though savvy Monero users can start to approach Zcash's privacy with some extra steps like 'churning'.)
If you keep spreading falsehoods, you're harming people who have a right to know what's technically possible, whether they like the implications or not.
And while I'm unlikely to convince you, any other lurkers who want to do their own research, and confirm my claims, should take note: I am providing truthful, reliable info here, under my real name, which you can use to discover many other facts against which to calibrate my credibility (including the fact that I'm a compensated advisor to Electric Coin Company, the original developers of the Zcash software). A anonymous account is spreading falsehoods that will mislead you. Proceed accordingly.
This is a general problem with zero knowledge proofs by the way, you can use them all you want but they ultimately mean nothing when some other party that actually has the knowledge leaks it. And since the blockchain is required to be public there's going to be so much publicly generated metadata available that it eventually makes no difference what you hide behind a ZKP, the information leaks are built into the system. The weirdest and most self-defeating part of your comment is this:
>would only indicate that I have interacted with the network, and likely sent transactions at cerain times
Sorry but this is identifying metadata. It gives away a lot about you depending on who you are. I don't know why you wrote this and then wrote the rest of your comment trying to claim that I'm promoting falsehoods, when you refuted yourself in your own comment! I hope you were honest and forthcoming about these problems in your advisory position.
Your insistence, wordiness, & goalpost-shifting can’t cover up that you’re trying to assertively bluff knowledge of things you don’t understand, like a child trying to pretend they’re an adult. The adults aren’t fooled!
If your impression, based on what you've seen, is that "crypto is generally dominated by marketers and pump and dumps", well I suppose you're the expert about what's in your junk info-diet.
But even if most email, by count, is spam or promotional, people with good filters see little of it, and it'd be a total misreading of the transformative social/economic value of email to say it "is dominated by marketers".
I have good filters against seeing, or spending any attention, on the carnival-barker & naive-speculator froth. (And, any truly momentous economic shift is often wrapped in a phalanx of such pretenders & hangers-on. I don't mistake the lampreys for the whale.)
And looking at tangible measures, like total market cap, real innovators with interesting tech & growing histories of stability are a comfortably majority of all value.
For 100+ years, the most fervently 'socialist' regimes have promised various utopias but actually delivered famines, prison camps, pathologically dishonest & oppressive police states, and even genocides on a larger scale than famous 'fascist' regimes.
I can see why you might get into bickering if you find those situations analogous!
Here:
Socialist governments have been a mix of successes & failures, among the very-privileged who can afford to take risks, for just the last ~100y. Everyone involved knows there's a lot of things left to solve, but sees reasons for hope.
For 13+ years, the most fervently 'crypto' fanboys have promised various utopias but actually delivered scams, fraud, pathologically dishonest companies, and even financial ruin on a larger scale than other technologies.
(please note I am not comparing genocide and financial ruin as being analogous)
Of course you can always do a MadLibs-style search and replace on rhetoric.
But are the resulting linguistic similarities relevant in the real world? Isn’t all the real impact on people - who aren’t mere language models - dependent on the relevant magnitudes, & other salient distinctions?
We real people suffer financial losses, or bleed, or starve, or die in revolutionary purges & prison camps. Of those 4 outcomes, only the 1st one can be blamed on some subsets of the 13yo cryptoeconomics movement. For the last three, you've got to wage a "socialist" war on other traditional economic arrangements over decades.
Crypto believers don't have "limitless patience". If after 100y, the fiercest crypto zealots have killed tens or hundreds of millions, they'll update their beliefs. (Probably, much sooner.)
But hey, thanks for at least describing Zcash's privacy-protecting-qualities accurately in a sibling thread.
ETA to make my point clear, it's an inverted "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
Many of us still have hope in crypto because in 13y, it's made amazing progress & hasn't yet done mass murder – and we're suspicious of those who rally under a banner of "socialism", without reservations, because there's now a long history of that having a large body count. If 100y from now, those patterns reverse, check with me then. YMMV.
It is not, because people are not angels. Everyone has their own goals and wants to have something only for themselves. Soviet Russia and Maos China are great examples of cool idea that has no possibility to work in reality. Because people are people, not because they "did it wrong".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
Granted, the crypto debate on HN is pretty well hashed & Guido's tweet doesn't add anything to the discussion besides making clear where he stands on the issue
This is a classic example of the Halo Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect).
I trust his intellect and judgment for Python, and that's it. I don't trust him for programming in general, for example, let alone a completely different arena.
I really don't know how to square that with basically everyone else in the space being clearly morons or hucksters.
The problem (like many others) is that Vitalik doesn't necessarily think practically about the situation. For example, how do you explain to my grandma that the fork of BTC is the newly reached consensus or the original one? Vitalik would have an answer for this, but it's not a practical one.
Lucrative opportunities attract frauds. The dot com boom attracted frauds, was the internet a big scam? Literally every technological development in history that was potentially very lucrative attracted swathes of con men. For every stock worth purchasing there are a dozen garbage ones. For every innovative product you can buy online there are dozens of cheap worthless pieces of junk. The fact that idiots and scumbags are attracted to crypto only means there's money to be made, it says nothing about the actual utility of the technology.
"Crypto is bad for the earth? Well fuck it, ima still get mine."
Even though I can't personally get behind it, it's easy understand the appeal of hopping on the wagon to make some easy money. Especially if one feels FOMO and has little empathy for others or concern about the long-term prospects for humanity surviving.
Eric Schmidt is president of ChainLink
Silvio Micali professor at MIT created Algorand
Emin Gün Sirer creator of Avalanche is a professor at Cornell
Nicholas Szabo holds a honorary professorship
etc. etc. etc
I guess you either don't know these people, or they don't count as intelligent to you.
On another note, Web3 technology will soon be everywhere. Individuals are building tools everyday, and so are governments. The latter because they have found a powerful tool to subvert your rights. Wake up, adapt, or die.
> The intelligent people I know want nothing to do with it.
"political tribes self-segregate to an impressive extent – a 1/10^45 extent, I will never tire of hammering in – based on their implicit tribal characteristics." - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
> Folks I've met IRL who are into it usually aren't all that bright. The traits they do have are affinity for risk taking, and being somewhat technical but not too much so, just enough to be dangerous. They certainly won't be opening any PRs to fix Ethereum bugs.
Replace "risk taking" with "compliance" for outgroup point of view. (Being "into it" then meaning heavy investment into being opposed to cryptocurrency.)
Most people, even web3 proponents, seem to agree that the current crop of web3 companies is largely scammy or without real value propositions beyond speculation. It's actually hard to argue otherwise when you look at what's out there.
You also have to look very closely at financial interests. There are a lot of "smart people" who invested heavily in web3 tokens and have a vested interest in hyping them to the moon.
Unless there is a reason to believe that somehow the scams will be outdone by legitimate use cases, the platform should be abandoned.
Established tech companies and their employees have a lot to lose if web3 and related tech would actually become successful.
P2P payment systems and P2P collateralized loans are already there more or less working with a clear path to scaling. If they gain adoption they directly obsolete existing fintech companies.
I'm not saying there's much concrete stuff there yet, but web3 has a clear MAGMA hostile discourse, so it's natural that reactionary feelings arise when web3 gets hype (deserved or not, that's not the point).
Even for fintech there's a lot of value in providing a streamlined user experienced on top of crypto so there's still room for intermediaries. See how many people primarily use CEXs.
> Web3 has a clear MAGMA hostile discourse
I really don't see it. There's nothing in web3 that threatens any of these companies.
See Facebook trying to make a cryptocurrency and then abandoning their plans.
After you sell your crap just in time, people will either forget your stance or you say "but nobody knew it was all crap back then!"
And that will attract folks who like puzzles for puzzle's sake.
The most similar dispute I can remember during my career were the early years of MongoDB. The gripe of people with it wasn't much about that there is no space for no-sql databases and that they don't have their uses cases (after all they existed long before mongo), but how it was marketed and pushed by some people.
If you missed it, you can either admit to yourself you missed probably the easiest way to get rich in your entire life, or rationalize to yourself it's all a scam and you didn't get in because you're morally virtuous.
Turns out both concerns were largely correct. The part I missed was that people would still buy it anyway. I don't really feel bad about the decision since the process that lead me to it will work out more often than not. I'm sure plenty of tech folks had a similar thought process.
() for any variation of "ends" people have come up with so far.
This is just the usual “twitter bait” thats going on now. People are promoting this and then other people feel “threatened” and feel the need to take a position. Same with the whole Metaverse discussion going on now.
Next year it will be something else, ad nauseam.
‘Jack Dorsey’s First Tweet’ NFT Went on Sale for $48M. It Ended With a Top Bid of Just $280.
I'm actually shocked someone would pay $280 for it.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/13/jack-dorseys-fi...
he could have gotten a reasonable price (though perhaps still a loss) if he tried to list with sotheby. curation matters.
2) There are irremovable privacy, scalability, and recentralization contradictions at the core of any and all permissionless blockchain solutions.
3) There are vast negative externalities that every blockchain-based investment inevitably entails.
But I think there is too little discussion about the transactions that go in and out the network. Those transactions are still about trust. So crypto doesn't solve any trust issues.
And since not a lot of people have the resources to host crypto it will become less decentralized over time. So in the end it also doesn't fix centralization.
To me it's just a gold rush. Some people will get very wealthy from it, most wont.
I can walk you through some of the useful stuff going on if you want to have a chat.
Offer valid for anyone else.
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Who exactly is this being positioned to? If I passed this along to the marketing team at my job they will probably just reply back with a bunch of question marks attempting to understand that language. Is that even the right audience?
One side signals their allegiance to centralization as a philosophy of government; the other side signals their allegiance to decentralization.
It’s similar to the recent dust-up over masking: one side craves centralized, top-down, totalizing governance by experts; the other side craves decentralized power, maximizing individual liberty. Both sides loudly advertise their allegiances.
Some VCs don't invest in things they think are net-negative even if there would be a big profit.
More money > money
In other sectors be it healthcare, construction, anything involving people or the 'world of atoms' as Thiel liked to put it things aren't going that great. Web3 seems increasingly the only thing to throw billions at.
Sorry, since you mentioned I have to ask: Why volunteer at a VC? Shouldn't they have plenty of capital to pay you with?
- Decentralized! No government control! 100% freedom of speech!
- What if someone posts a video of child rape, with no moderation or ways to take it down
- ...
I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO). Concretely, if I can jump onto a website and consume content without having to go through the hassle of signing up to a monthly subscription and entering my credit card details, that's a step change improvement in my enjoyment of the web. Want to read a particularly interesting paywalled news article? Sure, pay 25c via crypto wallet (2 clicks), read article, move on.
The other interesting application are the technological innovations brought on by smart contracts. Blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps. Instead of having to write a lambda on AWS, I can just submit a smart contract to the blockchain. Provided it's a read only use case, I pay once and can freely call the contract for as long as the network exists.
This might seem uninteresting but as the contract gives access to the current state of the blockchain, there are interesting applications that you can build on top of this [1], particularly if you combine it with oracles that give access to real world data.
Crypto as a financial revolution seems incredibly contrived but web3 as a tool has potential merit. Whether web3 is the best solution to such problems is a question worth exploring.
[1]. I use it to determine whether crypto tokens are honeypots or not by simulating a buy and sell.
1. Couldn't this be done with just a credit card if companies took micro payments? My browser will save my cc details, so if they accepted micro payments, I could just click one button to get it.
2. Why would companies, who do not accept micropayments now, suddenly accept them just because crypto?
3. Wouldn't I still have to enter information into the system (more than 2 clicks)? Or would everyone just have access to my information all the time?
I don't get why crypto needs to be involved here, or how it forces companies to accept micro-payments.
1. Fixed payment processing fees make it unfeasible. Minimum credit card fees are 10s of cents, so anything sub a dollar becomes unpractical.
2. Viability of micropayments is proportional to the fees charged by the payment processor. If the processor charges 1c, then 10c micropayments are feasible. If they charge 30c, it makes much more economic sense to charge larger amounts in bulk (as a business, a 40c microtransaction means I'm giving up 75% revenue to the payment processor). Sure, you could always charge in aggregate at the end of the month but the experience to me as a user is worse.
3. What information? If I'm reading an article on a news website, what more information do they need then my wallet address to identify me (if that)? If they require name, that can be linked my wallet address and I can decide whether I give access to that information (no different to SSO today or app store permissions).
Can it be done without crypto? Absolutely, but it requires a lot of change to make it feasible. It's one application that does seem ideally suited to crypto and web3.
VISA could waive those fees tomorrow. And then the rubber would meet the road: who will be more efficient at processing transactions on a global scale, hundreds or thousands of millions of transactions? VISA or a crypto coin?
I’d lay my bet on VISA.
Crypto does offer (on the surface) an end to end solution to the problem that's not going through multiple companies.
The other side is identity linking. Again, can have a global account with a payment processor like stripe or PayPal that solves that problem though linking to your wallet does seem like a lower impedance opportunity.
I'm not of the opinion that crypto is going to become the new incumbent, but as a technology it presents as a viable alternative to the existing system that could trigger real change.
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/E...
* cryptographically-anchored decentralized identities
* content-addressed publishing
* natively-software-accessible incentive systems engineered with the same rigor, & productivity-multiple upside, as our personal-computers/mobile-devices, world-wide-web, & ecommerce/industrial automation systems
'web3' may even give a new life to the semantic-web vision TbL had under the name "Web 3.0", which "died in a flaming ball of fire" via the dominance of the Web 2.0 platform monopolies.
Good for him.
Btw, web3 is an old term, back in the days the semantic web was seen as web3.0
Failed, just like the "new" web3.0 will...
Crypto/blockchain will still exists, web3 will have some use-fullness.. But no, it wont change the world. Centralised systems work quite well in a capitalist system.
Notice that this tweet is a reply.
Yes, it is a free market issue, and people will choose what they know, and will choose based on their fears.
We could just print money and all be rich? If you value money, and you think that compensation for work can be paid with money, then compensating the work that went into creating digital goods seems appropriate. Should compensation for digital goods be through donations?
I consume digital goods all the time, and I pay for them with money.
Money is an inflationary asset that I keep in order to pay people. It is not an investment, it's value (in my country, the US) is stable, and I get paid in money.
There is no cryptocurrency that shares these characteristics and there never will be as long as people try to pitch it as both deflationary (good investment) and spendable.
Do you have an example of one that's not digitally scarce or donation based? Or is donation the future?
Is that the same thing as saying: should this system be used to design a whole new "Web 3.0"? No, it isn't the same (and no, it shouldn't).
If we're trying to do accurate record-keeping on the scarcity of tangible artifacts using digital means... That's useful, but it's not the problem BTC or its ilk solves.
The NBA NFTs, for example. Why NFT? If the NBA is running the enforcement, you'd de facto have to trust them to be in the system, and if you trust them, then surely you'd trust their MySQL database just as much.
A group of foreign investors comes in. “It’s shocking how the market for bottled water is completely inexistant here. Don’t worry, we’re going to teach you how to make money selling imported water! First thing, we’ll dynamite those springs that disturb the market…”
Do you welcome these business gurus and their scarcity-introducing ideas with open arms?
This is factually wrong.
50+% of those miners could collude (or secretly be the same person) and change anything in the database. You would have no warning before this happened.
As for deleting, unless you want to enter a philosophical argument on the nature of deleting, and whether anything in the universe can truly be deleted [1], for all practical purposes a 51% attack does allow one to delete transactions off the blockchain but the older the transaction is the more expensive and impractical it would be to do so.
A 51% attack does not allow someone to create new bitcoins or spend coins they don't have the keys to, but they could double spend coins or delete existing transactions.
A 51% attack can't immediately change other people's history, but it can eventually[1][2]. You would not need to change transaction history very deeply to cause a lot of chaos.
1. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/101565/why-cant-...
-- Fixed it for you
Same people who also control the hash rate? :)
That's why it's important to the Bitcoin community that the average person can run a full node and that as many people as possible also do so.
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=beanstalk-farms-stablecoin-...
Who can afford to keep their money in a ledger that you can’t fix mistakes in? Not these people.
Sadly it won't. There is nothing about any kind of cryptocurrency that makes it incorruptible or immune to integrity problems. That's more myth-building that I hear quite often but it's not true. The hardest part in any data integrity problem is verifying that the data going into the system was correct in the first place, and blockchains cannot solve this. And actually they make it worse by making it prohibitively expensive to remove incorrect data from the database.
(Note that in general computers and automation cannot solve this because "correct" here refers to whatever the humans designing the system specified according to their human purposes)
Except if they're the central authority, in which case they can unilaterally rollback the blockchain, rewrite history and fork? Totally makes sense.
And how is this change supposed to work?
Sounds like bringing back aristocracy.
It's surprising to me that anyone taking blockchain technologies seriously for "standing up to power" fails to recognize some basic realities of how power works in practice.
Blockchain is an obstacle to no real power, since real power does not care if some external source disagrees with it. There is no dictator that is going to say "damn, got me with that blockchain stuff *sigh* you win", they'll just torture you until you agree that you don't see anything troublesome in the ledger either.
As we've seen from cryptocurrencies rampant use in scams and ransomware it is absolutely impotent in the face of real corruption and power.
Ironically for crypto to work at all for these idyllic cases it requires a remarkably stable civil society, in which case a piece of paper in the public square works as well.
This is a feature, not a bug.
I wouldn't want to have to tell a judge "I can't remove it" in a libel proceeding, either.
If the government decides that your crypto is a Munition or Child Porn, you're going to need a lot to convince them otherwise, and you're probably going to spend time in jail while waiting for your lawyers to deal with it.
By the way, do you know how I can view the image? The link doesn't work anymore.
Web3.js - the 7 year old library for communicating with any EVM has an actively maintained and fully featured python version.
Solana.py is available for the Solana ecosystem
These libraries typically make it very easy to connect to the nearest node, which you can treat as pay-once-read-forever compute instances. Where reading and and all bandwidth is free.
You can completely ignore the cringy ideology if you prefer to and just accept that people are willing to store your crap for free forever.
You can build lucrative businesses around the observation that long winded web 2.0 funnels have been shorted down to a single call to action that in itself is a payment, while again completely ignoring the ethos and ideology of the users and enthusiasts.
This kind of question doesn't need input or gracing from a web 1.0 developer that people respect. when people say decentralization they mean "no opinion of any individual or entity matters" (of course many conflate permissionless with decentralization, but the degree of permissionlessness is derived from the degree of decentralization.) Individuals are free to respect or assign more weight to the opinion of someone they like, when that opinion matches what they want to hear, its just not necessary for an outcome.
and when you mean latest scam ... how? all - or all major - blockchains have had this feature since day 1. reading is free, writing is not. now all the nodes in most networks can function as event-driven compute services, similar to aws lambda and other products, except reading and bandwidth is free.
Yes, there is a stack and heap limiting the amount of resources that a command can use. So what? Design your application with that limitation in mind. Focus on what you can control, its a one-step one-click funnel that is inherently a payment and insatiable demand right now from the users. A Web 2.0 dream, I've sat through so many useless OKRs and KPIs meetings trying to figure that out, and now its just here for any individual willing to look, apply the same concepts and use it.
What do you mean about the amount of reads can be played with? I don't see how it matters. You can read the state of a smart contract or any account for free. Not really sure how this is a point.
But, imagine a DDOS attack on the nodes serving the blockchain. I don’t see why “pay once read forever” works financially.
Okay.
> I don’t see why “pay once read forever” works financially.
A separate issue thats not really your problem. Its the node operators problem. When your use case expands to that being a viable problem for you, then you'll need to become a node operator or at least keep a copy of the state yourself. You can design applications around that. Or maybe you can't. Just rule those out or keep using AWS or some other company for those applications?
right now is the really, really big issue here. We're talking about pay once read forever, not pay once read right now, or pay once and read while there's still interest or demand in running nodes.
What use case are you trying to imagine?
I think its been very easy and very competitive to design applications around using these redundant blockchain nodes as event-driven compute nodes, when compared to AWS Lambda or even addons to a paid Vercel plan or hosting my own microservice somewhere. The uptime has been on-par and the system design gives some assurances of the ability to maintain the uptime where it could theoretically be a concern.
It is a scam to promise forever. AWS doesn't promise forever. It's free reads until one day.
in the meantime you won't be charged for how much you read or how often. which was my main point. before this conversation, did you know that?
just mentally replace "forever" with "unlimited" or just "free". reads are free. a lot of services meter that for developers. that's all.
just a weird assumption to skip straight to unbridled optimism about a system where thousands of nodes functioning as backups might be available for a while. I've seen torrents with less redundancy remain available for decades now.
Happens all the time. Nintendo announced they're shutting off their Wii U and 3DS eShops next March, for example. At that point players are on their own to hack their hardware so they can make backups.
Sidebar: I love sentences like this that go on and on but say literally nothing. Nothing in the preceding or following context gives it any clarity. It feels like people are still trying to pad their college essays long since graduating.
So you don't actually love sentences like that. That's interesting, I don't see it as one of those sentences. I don't know what insight you are missing such that you can't apply it here.
Where would you like to start?
Do you know what a funnel is? Do you know how convoluted they have become as businesses compete for the future illusion of revenue?
Do you use any "web3" services? Is that a farfetched thing to consider for you because you are first waiting to understand why anyone would bother, while ironically limiting your ability to understand what I consider to be a simple sentence?
Maybe something else?
For example, what is “future illusion of revenue”. Why is the word illusion there? Are you challenging the existence or classification of revenue? Of money? Of commerce? Or accounting? I can’t tell. Why is the word future there? Are you challenging old business models that will be replaced by web3? Highlighting the emergence of a post money economy?
I don’t know what you mean by including you those buzz words. So they feel like fluff to create apparent sophistication but in reality have no meaningful conceptual value. They don’t move the argument forward towards a conclusion.
Hope that helped you or someone.
> You can completely ignore the cringy ideology if you prefer to and just accept that people are willing to store your crap for free forever.
These are extremely strong and unusual claims. Computers and storage and bandwidth and power all cost money. Very very few things in life are free - even things that you might think of as such, such as libraries, which are funded or subsidized through other means. "people are willing to store your crap for free forever" is so hard to believe as to almost sound like satire.
Please provide justification for these claims.
What I described is actually a cynical description of blockchains, but blockchain nodes store everything written in perpetuity. a subset of that information is necessary to sustain the blockchain, there are reasons why some nodes store more than what is necessary. if you are willing to pay to store more information, there are a lot of free backups of it automatically, which are also free to recover from, as many times as you want. that competes directly with the SaaS model that charges or meters uploading the information, reading the information, downloading the information, storing the information, accessing the information or some combination thereof. those SaaS services also come with the questions of how long that information will remain available.
Was it like this during the first dotcom bubble?
I was a highschooler back then.
And if somebody didn't get it yet you could show them a webpage or something. You could pull up a news site - "see, it's like your regular newspaper, except on the computer... plus a zillion other online newspapers, and weather, and shopping" etc. Very few people would fail to get the general concept (even if they had no interest in it) after a few minutes of that.
Ordering things from a catalog over the phone (Sears, etc) had existed for a century already, and online shopping was a fairly obvious extension of that.
The internet was also an idea that all manner of media had primed us for. Since, what, the 1950s? 1960s? movies and television and World's Fairs had all been promising us that someday we'd be able to do actual useful shit through our TV screens and that computers were "the future."
So once that all arrived it all felt pretty obvious. Both to tech-savvy types, and the general populace.
But... Web3?
There's nothing simple you can show an Average Joe. Even most tech-savvy people I know fall somewhere between thinking it's utter garbage and having no clue what it is on any kind of practical level. That's something you absolutely did not hear from tech-savvy folks in the 90s.
The basic innovation of proof of work is that it sidesteps the need to solve hard economic problems of energy storage and transmission and lets you turn energy where you find it into fungible, valuable compute and transmit it back as information. Economically, this means if you can find power, you can refine and sell it in the form of mining compute, which means I can make money that enables a supply line to wherever I can harvest an energy source.
Once we figure out solar efficiency and more efficient processors, it's how we can fund colonies on the moon, develop remote regions, and decouple some of our economic activity from geography. It's the most fundamental and pure form of value added manufacturing. When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple.
Maybe I'm being dumb and web3 dies in a fire, but if it sucks that badly, maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet. Even though I like who web3 annoys and why, seeing them at less than their best is unsatisfying.
No, we can't. Becuse all energy is going towards bitcoin mining.
> maybe I just don't see how its critics are taking the other side of that bet.
There is no "other side".
Similarly, if Web3 wants to be taken seriously it has to provide more than access to private Discords. NFTs are basically a digital lanyard, they get you in and around some niche areas of the web's convention center but once the big show comes and goes what's left? Web3's value prop needs to be greater than "we can see your coins".
What? Just use an RDBMS, it'll "refine" that electricity to the same end product millions of times more efficiently. That's the argument most Web3 critics have.
An RDBMS depends on trust, where web3 uses consensus, and that consensus is a different product, which also has some useful anti-technocrat and anti-leviathan properties. Are all these kids writing crypto protocols for smart contracts just too dumb to spin up postgress? Doubtful. The ideology behind it is from a generation raised on narrative and they are inventing a way to relate based on something concrete that requires proofs and truth.
The problem I think web3 techs solve is the forfeit of trust that institutions and platforms have engaged in over the last decade. There's no point in even talking to anyone involved in them because there's no reason to believe they would argue in good faith. Consensus protocols and proofs provide stability and some of that trust the culture has lost.
The people who still believe in those institutions are just clinging to a precarious bourgeois and managerialist aspiration to become a part of them, where it's people from wealth (material and cultural), and working class people with less education and money who are the marks of those institutions who are typically the ones flocking to cryptocurrencies and now web3. They're also where growth comes from. In this sense, web3 is less ideological than just a polarized class strategy.
The question isn't why not use an RDBMS, it should be, can you reasonably expect that anyone involved in the EMV payments partners, banks, government, social platforms, google, media(hah), non-stem academia, etc, are willing or able to act or debate in good faith? Consensus protocols route around that problem.
I guess that's the case if your refinery is producing absolutely nothing of value.
That's the overall point of critics: web3 has huge costs for tiny (and disputable) benefits.
Even your comment lacks any benefits of web3. Making electricity more expensive isn't a benefit at all. It sure won't put a colony on the moon. And we were already able to turn electricity into "information" using an invention called a "computer."