Do developers think Web3 will build a better internet?
stackoverflow.blog
stackoverflow.blog
I'm sorry, but until "Web3" manages to solve a real problem, people who actually believe that it will build a better internet with no evidence are misguided.
For the optimists, I really want you to think about this when you go to sleep tonight: if larger smart contracts cost more than smaller smart contracts, it's a forgone conclusion that developers will skip type and boundary checks. Do you really want to bet on a future where developers are perversely incentivized to write code that is easier to exploit?
Smart 'contracts' are not really 'contracts' - they're kind of bits of code. They're going to effectively be governed more broadly by 'real' contracts in in the regular sense whereupon the Blockchain contracts are merely terms of a specific exchange i.e. something like placing a 'buy/sell' order on an exchange.
Maybe something will establish itself as kind of a de facto standard long before that which may in and of itself be the 'legal precedent'.
https://polynya.medium.com/addressing-common-rollup-misconce...
https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...
if you can come up with a set of proofs for a particular action/solution that you can boot strap a network without the need for a company, that’s huge if actually true.
Creating opportunities for people to gamble - new casinos, scratch-off tickets, those sad machines you see in bars - all of these are cash generation vehicles that historically have highly negative outcomes for members of the communities they are dropped into. Especially for groups that are already disadvantaged. This isn't academic speculation.
As for gambling on every day outcomes - otherwise known as living your life - it's reasonable to say that one of the fundamental measures of progress as a species and a society is our distance from accidentally eating poisoned food, dangerous driving, a lack of opportunity and self-determination, and being forced to accept bad partners.
In other words, the more we remove gambling, the better our lives become.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about truly free markets, for sure.
However, the modern stock market is neither fair nor random. It's not accessible to you or I in the same way that it is to financial institutions. Front-running and dark pools are accepted as normal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP74RBTE8kI
I would also suggest that Warren Buffett does not see the stock market as random or gambling. When he buys a company, it comes after huge amounts of research. A good stock trader obsessively researches the companies that they invest in. While it might not be anything like a guarantee of success, I sure hope you have better than Vegas odds when investing in a company that you've learned everything you can learn about without becoming an employee.
Add crime too I guess.
They are (probably) governed by some kind of broader contract, and can probably be 'undone' or come under regulator scrutiny.
'Smart contracts' are a neat way for parties to 'agree' on something in a distributed way - but there's just no way that they will live up to being 'regular contracts'.
Maybe for some things like currency exchange - maybe.
But for anything else that happens in this world, contracts are complicated and require nuance. And there's always lawyers and a Judge and regulators that might want to have a say.
And while the application you've described is 'neat' - it doesn't really accomplish much. It's a novelty.
I see zero use for blockchain thus far - other than the eventual appearance of a possibly useful kind of crypto asset that doesn't exist yet because BTC and Etherium are full of flaws.
By smart contract, in this regard, I mean an Ethereum Solidity contract connected to an Oracle that has an Escrow component.
The way I see it is there are many companies at the moment that sit in the middle and mediate things by offering escrow services and trust that if you send X you'll receive Y. Crypto lets you start moving those things into a P2P setting by its nature of atomic transactions, programatic contracts/money, etc... Which I find pretty cool and I think a lot of people who spend some time in the space find cool too. FWIW I was skeptical when I first found a bitcoin ATM at Google Campus in 2014 and only really 'got it' in 2020 after years of saying WTF is the point? And for me that was when I was trying to organise an esports tournament with some strangers online and couldn't decide on how payments would work, while the services that managed this (read some API results and paid out after 7 working days) took a 15% fee.
So for the first part - this isn’t as simple as you suggest. First off, you need to be in the same country as most require KYC for your specific location (SSN or NI numbers). Second, few let you make your own peer-to-peer bets! Third, they tend to have significant fees or minimum deposits etc… regarding your second point layer 2 chains solve that issue and have done for the last year or more, fees are far far lower and sometimes even non-existent.
Also we probably don’t get to pick our own oracles! I don’t know of any site anywhere that does.
In comparison this is a fairly simple DApp to build.
Doesn't really sound that appealing since I don't think gambling is an useful application of anything, blockchain or not.
Come on man, don't strawman discussions or why would I bother continuing to talk to you? If you have decided that you dislike a tech for whatever reason fine, but do something more productive with your time than just chatting crap on the internet.
This is probably because social gambling is still illegal in some places and any legitimate company will not want to participate in your illegal activity. But using crypto tech for facilitating illegal things tracks..
You may not personally find it useful but it's much harder to solve on the "Web2 stack" than the "Web3 stack" if such descriptions exist.
Are you really asking this question as though this isn't a thing that's already happening, right now, today, without the need for crypto snake oil?
For anyone not familiar, this style of betting (used in horse racing) pays out based on the relative amounts waged on the winners. The house takes a cut of the entire pool and (in theory) isn't interested in the outcome.
So we can easily dismiss all of the claims you made because all these things can be done more easily via non blockchain solutions.
There is a rich history of developers saying something is the future and being wrong. Generally speaking, when a dev says something is Important or The Future of Tech, it means they think they can make a few bucks out of it or they enjoy working with it. We have no special insight into what's going to happen in 10 years time. Guessing is fun and there's no reason to stop, but there's no reason to believe anyone is right either, and that applies even more to groups.
I've been using the web for 20 of those years. The browsing experience is, structurally, mostly the same. We did online payments back then, there was chat, there was multimedia consumption, from back when it was a buzzword.
You're making a substantial confusion between new modes of consumption and uses cases versus the individual technologies that support them. Flash, VRML, Applets and other technologies we just the mediums there were back then, but fundamentally they're all just a method to consume rich content and to bypass feature limitations of browsers, many of which have been lifted by now.
Crypto can have a limitless number of various underlying technological substrates, but the fundamental idea is still about a decentralized financial instrument.
Regardless of the implementation details of said technology, it will always face the same issues the current financial system faces: regulatory controls, KYC, requirements for taxation, legal limitations in its uses for money laundering and hiding crimes, and a long list of etceteras. That has little to do with technology, and a lot to do with international legal frameworks, politics, lobbying, and a long list of etceteras where the dynamics are not really different from that of other industries.
None of those issue will, generally speaking, be solved by technology, because they are related to the way that human institutions work. And the products built upon that technological substrate are still limited by our known principles in how people consume digital tools.
The things about web3 is that none of the supporters fundamentally address the latter areas. I don't see compelling products where the technological substrate really "changes everything". I don't see the proponents address the very real institutional and social issues around it.
For the most part, I see the same misguided idealism I saw in the web of the past, where various proponents of libertarian ideological strains waxed poetic about how the freedoms brought by new technology will dramatically alter social dynamics. How we believed that immediate access to the world's knowledge would makes us wiser and help us progress towards peace and unity.
If anything, a deep study of the exponential advance of technological developments of the last century should shows that human nature is pretty impervious to change.
I think an unflinching belief in crypto in the face of so many scams is the consequence of having a good percentage of your wealth tied up in it. Even if the person himself was scammed, it would be in his interest to not admit it in the hopes that he can pass the bag on to some other greater fool.
For the same reason people get emotional whenever they see something they like being captured by hucksters. If you like woodworking would you not be mad if the workshop next door gets replaced by a Pachinko parlor?
"Maybe there's a middle ground" is the same kind of statement as "NFTs are awful, but the blockchain itself is brilliant!". Yet the crazy financial schemes keep proliferating and you still don't see blockchains anywhere else.
if there was a way to do so, outlook would do it too. but google won’t let them.
to me —- blockchains fundamentally open up two things - an open api (think lambdas) and an open database (think kv pair). you pay per use for compute and you pay per byte to store. and the payment comes in dollars, just that you need to push it through a translation layer (“tokens”).
the rest of the crypto ponzi schemes are just that. it’ll take some time for that noise to clear before this usecase becomes more well known.
Right now I'm using crypto pairs for automated trading (https://tradecast.one), which is a good a purpose as automated trading of stocks or any other asset.
It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Web3.
Does this use smart contracts? Otherwise what’s Web3 about it? Or is cryptocurrency just being rebranded as Web3 now?
Edit: Someone listed two examples inc Geocities but deleted their comment as examples of Web2 options. These work (although now defunct) by sticking ads down people’s throats. Tokens let you work out other ways to incentivize people to host them than the normal ad revenue model.
With newer, faster changing software of course the risk is much higher, so I'm not comfortable using them, but many people take that risk.
https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-w...