What these hucksters call Web3 is the digital equivalent of essential oils. Blockchain apps have no real productive use beyond selling them to each other. Calling the whole thing Web3 was a fairly transparent grasp at trying to legitimize the whole charade.
Also, does that mean that you going to finally stop using Signal for not only having mobile wallet [3] for payments, but also facilitating in using cryptocurrencies for donations? [4]
[3] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
Re: Skiff, it looks like a very cool product but I'm skeptical they can make enough money. The primary path to monetization for a product like this would be enterprise SaaS licensing but I simply don't see how you can sell to enterprises without centralizing the product. Auditability, compliance, SSO, etc. would all seem to be difficult if not impossible with the product as specced.
ens.domains is a privately owned and managed DNS provider. It's litterally the exact opposite of what web3 claims to be. Having a "constitution" is just re-wording "Terms of Service". I love how it sells hard covers versions of it's Terms of Service for fiat at Blurb.com. And no, Blurb does not accept cryptocurrency payments even, lol.
Signal.org existed well before they added crypto, and quite frankly, yes I did just about completely stop using it - and so did many others. The introduction of cryptocurrency in that app litterally chased away users rather than improve adoption.
Gawd, could go on forever here.
ENS is already super useful if you care about owning your identities without worrying about intermediaries.
I don't think this is even true.
For one, the service has a public governance process, and it is almost certainly the case that a proposal could be passed through that process which seized ownership of a "domain".
Second, any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction of has the ultimate veto power -- they can order it to take action under the threat of legal charges against their company's principals, or the seizure of their infrastructure. You may see this as a problem, but it isn't a problem which can be solved by software.
No, this is not how it works. To be able to do that, they would have to rewrite the smart contract with the specific rules to revoke ownership, "upgrade" the contract (which I am not even sure if it is something supported by ENS current protocol) and then they would have to convince everyone else (or the significant majority of users) to migrate to the new contract as well.
> any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction
What is the jurisdiction of "the internet"? There isn't one. There isn't a company behind this, there is no ZIP code, and so on. You can not stop tens of thousands of people running ethereum nodes all around the world. You might try to stop the current developers from doing further work, but the contract that is already deployed on the blockchain can not simply be removed. It is physically impossible to do it. That is the meaning of "censorship-resistant".
It’s the US, except for when it’s China or Russia.
You may feel you aren’t under their jurisdiction. It turns out it doesn’t matter what you think though, much like if an elephant is charging at you, your opinion of the situation doesn’t really have an effect.
You can’t get away by just not being interesting right now. Transactions are public and forever on most blockchains, so anyone can find you at any time in the future.
These people tried but they barely got to spend their winnings due to how hard it really is to launder money.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspira...
The question was "how the US government can stop people from making a transaction on the blockchain?" More specifically: what government who would have the capacity to stop people from using a dapp?
Can the US government stop people from getting their (completely KYC'd) crypto and exchanging on Uniswap? Can it stop them from making a Tornado Cash transfer? Can it stop them from buying a domain name on ENS?
The answer, of course, is no, they can not. Your talk about government reach is just unrelated bullshit.
Assuming you expect to still be alive in the next few years, it’s not a good idea to pretend like you don’t have to care about this. You can end up in front of a judge if you do something illegal, and they aren’t impressed with “you can’t stop me” as an argument. They can find someone who can do something and they can order them to do that.
> if they’re legal now it’s because they’re complying with laws, and if they stop complying with laws they won’t be legal.
Laws from what country?
OP's comment was trying to argue that "the country of jurisdiction has veto power". My question was "which country has jurisdiction over a distributed application running in thousands of independent computers spread around the world?"
It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped. A government could try to stop its citizens from using the service but even if they were successful (good luck with that...) the service itself would still be around.
Contrast that with, e.g, The Pirate Bay. To stop the service, Governments could and did manage to go after the individuals, or the hosting providers and even the DNS registrars. These were all the choke points that the governments tried to use, because these are points where they can have some jurisdiction. But no government can order an ENS domain to be suspended. No court can stop an IPFS hash to being a representation of a file, and while one could get an order for a specific server to be disconnected, there is no way to issue an order to delete all files of a given hash from the network. There is no one who can remove a contract that is deployed on a blockchain, so there is no way that a judge "can find someone to do something about it..."
And no, this is not a "theoretical argument". It is a very real one. The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature. If dapps were not censorship-resistant, then of course developers would just stick with what is more efficient, cheaper and well-established.
The US.
> OP's comment was trying to argue that "the country of jurisdiction has veto power". My question was "which country has jurisdiction over a distributed application running in thousands of independent computers spread around the world?"
The US. No, it doesn't matter where you live, it's the US. As Bandit Keith says, every country in this world belongs to America. (Except for a few like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.)
> It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped.
It can continue, but this is a Pyrrhic victory, ie there's no way this could work out in the real world that anyone would be happy about.
Imagine if someone puts child porn in your immutable distributed database. Is anyone getting away with it merely because it can't be deleted? No, now the service is illegal for everyone, forever.
More mild real example is crypto exchanges banning coins that were transferred out of a coin mixer in the last few transactions. Which is something they have done, and will do more of:
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0768
> There is no one who can remove a contract that is deployed on a blockchain, so there is no way that a judge "can find someone to do something about it..."
But they can! Judges are more powerful than you and more powerful than computers. The mere fact that you can't technically fulfill the order makes everything /worse/. Whoever they find is in contempt until they find some way out of doing something impossible; better to have had admin capabilities in the first place.
Tornado Cash seems to have the ability to do something though: https://www.cryptonewsz.com/lazarus-gets-banned-by-tornado-c...
> The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature.
Well, or because a16z is giving them money to do it. I don't agree that not getting prosecuted is proof it's fine; you need to get prosecuted and be found not guilty, get an SEC no-action letter, etc.
We could extend that "logic" to the Internet itself. Let's then just declare that because there are illegal things done in the Internet, all of it is illegal. Also, the only reason we are not suffering any repercussion is because Uncle Sam doesn't care about us (yet).
This is nothing but a cheap rhetorical trick. Hasn't anyone called you on your bullshit before?
The difference is that the various law enforcement agencies across the globe frequently succeed in taking sites offering child porn down and prosecute those involved. The point being made was that once it's on your immutable blockchain you can't do that.
And? it's not because something is on a blockchain that you have to host it, much less interact with it.
You certainly need to have people validating incoming blocks, and currently you need to have at least some nodes archiving all the data if you want to be able to reconstruct the whole history. But there is a lot of research going on in regards to state pruning, which would let nodes discard parts of the chain that are not interesting.
But currently all blockchain users have to download the entire thing unless they're just accessing it through a web API, which would be "centralized" and makes them not really blockchain users.
Web 2.0 gave us legitimate added productivity and functionality of being able to do stuff online for the first time. Web 3.0 does nothing but give us a trustless system that nobody asked for. Zero new functionality in any of those apps.
If you trust banks and FAANG companies, as most people do, Web 3.0 has exactly zero value.
I am not even asking you to do anything. I am just asking you to think of an alternative.
The web?
FAANG is not the web, it's just some companies putting apps on the web
Go ahead and try to live on the internet without being forced to interact with any of FAANG services. It's impossible even for me, who tries to keep as strict of a "digital hygiene" as possible and use open source and open standards as much as possible.
If you think that we can not improve on the web that we have today, either your standards are way too low or you already got so used to be manipulated by Big Tech that you can't even imagine how much better and freer life could be without it.
Good God, can we please stop with the cheap rhetoric and at least try to discuss things in a productive way?
Do I actually have to answer this?
.
> Good God, can we please stop with the cheap rhetoric and at least try to discuss things in a productive way?
I didn't engage in any rhetoric.
The question I asked you remains unanswered, and I was in fact being productive.
Sorry you got stuck. Better luck next time I guess
how exactly web3 is supposed to fix that?
> or you already got so used to be manipulated by Big Tech
assuming without knowing is the worst form of arrogance.
but even if that was true, I don't believe that the guy in the small village here in Italy that makes olive oil and sell it on Amazon to markets he could never even imagine existed is going to go decentralized and trustless just because Amazon is virtually a monopoly.
FAANG provided opportunities that have much more value for people than idealism (that doesn't even work!)
By providing a set of tools that allow (but not require) disintermediation.
> FAANG provided opportunities
Sure. It also blocked them. It also has created massive costs to people. It has also created Surveillance Capitalism. It employs thousands of people whose sole job is dedicated to keep its users addicted. It is creating a society of people who can "connect" with anyone on the other side of the world, but who get anxiety attacks if they have to talk with their own neighbor next door. It is destroying all chance of civil discourse, making groups increasingly polarized and isolated.
> that have much more value for people than idealism
To some people. Good for them. When it works, it is great. The question is: what about those people who don't get to enjoy these benefits? And can we get to provide this value without having all this collateral damage?
> (that doesn't even work!)
It works for some cases, and it works for some people. There is no technology in human history that was "born" perfectly ready for mass-usage. And there shouldn't be.
I'm not advocating here that we should all be dropping the systems and institutions that work, just to adopt something for the sake of "new tech". What I am saying is that there are whole lots of groups who are not being served by the current systems and institutions, and that we can do more than collectively shrug our shoulders and/or attack those who are attempting to create a solution.
How exactly is it gonna make people do the switch from Google search, Google maps, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, iPhones/MacBooks etc.?
> The question is: what about those people who don't get to enjoy these benefits? And can we get to provide this value without having all this collateral damage?
Make your own website, communicate via e-mail, host your own mail server, etc.
FAANG is not "the web" and "the web" is not the Internet.
> It works for some cases, and it works for some people
I don't think it actually works, or to put it in other words, it works like casinos in Las Vegas work.
But that they improve society it's highly questionable IMO.
I don't think we are talking about the same thing. The issue is not in getting people to consume the services that are "freely" available. The issue is in enabling people to participate both as consumers as well as producers in the larger economy without depending on intermediaries.
Instead of "get people out of Google Search", think "allow people to buy and sell things online without depending on Paypal" or "how can we have an alternative for the small olive oil producer in Amazon if for some reason Amazon decides to enter the market and abuses its power?"
larger than what exactly?
How web3 is gonna make it possible?
I can already send my tomato sauce produced by my family to Japan by simply putting up a website.
what could web3 make for my family?
> allow people to buy and sell things online without depending on Paypal
it's been possible for at last 20 years.
I pay using my credit card, not Paypal.
In Europe I can use SEPA transfers (usually free), SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (they cost me about 90 cents, money is transferred in seconds), the new PSD2 directive allow merchants to withdraw money directly from customers' accounts after being authorized and I believe GNU Taler is a much better option than any wallet solution web3 is proposing.
People can pay using any channel already available, they can also send me cash in an envelope if they want to, I'll gladly accept it.
And any of those systems (except cash in an envelope) are protected from fraud, insured, and refundable in full.
What about Web3?
Technically depending on Paypal is a choice.
Of course if you are talking about the possibility that your shady or illegal business will be banned from using one of those payment systems, well, that's a feature, not a bug.
You sound just like David Letterman when interviewing Bill Gates in 1995 ("why would I need a computer?", "oh, you mean I can listen the baseball game. Does radio ring a bell?") https://youtu.be/fs-YpQj88ew?t=155
> Of course if you are talking about the possibility that your shady or illegal business
This, right here, is the problem. The problem is that because you have all the privileges (SEPA, access to international transfers and open markets, etc, etc, etc) you think that only "shady" and "illegal" business will want to do these things.
Try being someone living in Argentina or Venezuela, who simply wants to work as a web designer with someone else from another continent. See how much Paypal (and by PayPal, I mean any money transmitting service) will eat in fees. See what exchange rate will be made available by the government.
So you're comparing Web3 with the computer and the internet revolution, but are not even able to tell me what's the advantage over current technologies, that are still evolving?
> The problem is that because you have all the privileges
You mean we have found a solution to a problem?
> Try being someone living in Argentina or Venezuela
My uncle is from Argentina.
He's not looking for web3, he's looking for political stability and blames US for installing a totalitarian regime that destroyed his country that killed 30 thousand people, created 30,000 desaparecidos and imprisoned 400,000 [1]
You've never spoken to someone from poorer countries, did you?
Anyway, if someone from Argentina build a website, I can send them money directly to their bank account from my European bank account.
No intermediary necessary, except good old banks.
My instinct tells me that the only thing people in web3 "space" (it's more like a cult) are interested in is avoiding taxes and keeping their money hidden.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
EDIT: anyway, web3 is still web based.
If governments can control banks, they can also control the web.
See: China or North Korea.
You won't free North Koreans with web3 nonsense.
And, fiy, I was born and raised in Brazil.
> My instinct tells me
Your instinct is wrong. I can not do anything about that.
the fact that a couple of your friends are using it, doesn't make it "Letterman interviewing Gates" material.
(btw, Letterman was being facetious, as per usual Letterman)
> And, fiy, I was born and raised in Brazil.
which is 10th economy by GDP in the World, just below Italy, my country, in front of many of what you called "privileged" European countries, such as Spain or the Netherlands...
More importantly: sending money to Brazil from Europe costs me a fixed Euro 0.5-0.6, plus maximum 1% of the sum (if sending up to Euro 115, less if sending more).
Very cheap, if you ask me.
> Your instinct is wrong. I can not do anything about that.
You could tell us why you are not able to explain what's the advantage for the average internet user, except avoiding taxes and hiding money...
Look at the numbers per capita, and look at the economic inequality indicators.
> sending money to Brazil from Europe
How much of these 100€ are going to get to the hands of the recipient, if sent by the "traditional" route? How fast can this money be made available to the recipient? What exchange rate is going to be used, the one offered to big international traders or the shitty one that banks offer to tourists? How much will be taken in fees by the banks? (not taxes, fees...).
I'll tell you: there is a good chance that middlemen are going to eat 7-12% of those 100€, just because they can and no competitor can challenge them.
And this is only for the first movement. What if the recipient in Brazil wants to have the money to buy something back in any other part of the world?
> You could tell us why you are not able to explain what's the advantage for the average internet user
Much like Bill Gates could not really explain the advantage of the internet to a privileged person in 1990's America?
Honestly?! I am tired. I might be throwing tens of different possible use-cases, and to all of them your reaction will be "I can do that already, all I need is <insert middleman service provider>". There isn't much to say, is there? If you are satisfied with the status quo and you don't see a need for decentralized technology meant for disintermediation, good for you.
Are you trolling or what?
If I send 100 euros to Brazil it will cost me 101.6 euros.
I pay the fee.
The recipient gets the 100.
If the recipient pays the fee, they get the 98.4% of it.
If I send 1,000 euros, it will cost 9.5 euros to send. The recipient get > 99%
how much does it cost to move money over web3 wallets?
because it is not free..
they can be free if you move them from a coinbase wallet to another coinbase wallet (for example)
If I have to chose, I prefer centralized banks over centralized coinbase.
> Much like Bill Gates could not really explain the advantage of the internet to a privileged person in 1990's America?
Bill Gates in the 90s wanted to sell MSN not internet.
You got your facts completely wrong.
And you can't still explain the advantages.
Except "it's hidden from governments, it cuts the middle man, I don't pay taxes over it"
like if maintaining the network was free.
Go hide your money and avoid your taxes if you like, but people don't want that.
They want safe tools, not useless, mob oriented, expensive scams.
If you really believe that people would prefer an insecure web3 wallet that has no safety and offer no guarantees, over a system like SEPA, you're delusional or a criminal.
> What if the recipient in Brazil wants to have the money to buy something back in any other part of the world?
Drug cartels do it all the time and they pay up to 40% in fees.
If that's your business, understand that it's a costly one.
If your only argument is "international, probably illegal, traffic of goods is gonna be easier" well, it's a very poor argument.
Imagine now that we are sanctioning Russia for invading Ukraine what would happen if everybody could freely make business with Russia unpunished.
Do you really think it would be a better World?
You continue to argue from a vantage point of someone who does not understand how the other side works and who only see the abstractions.
That is perfectly fine, and I am glad that you are fortunate enough to not need to learn that. But don't pretend that you understand all the costs involved, or how the sausage is made, or even that your solutions are applicable to everyone else.
I'm done here.
So far, you haven't named a single thing we couldn't already do vastly better
There was a post recently on hackernews about forcing client support of SNI being problematic according to some people.
So the effect of FAANG is far more fundamental; beyond ads and content that is.
basically the whole thing
.
> I am just asking you to think of an alternative.
uh thanks, alternatives predate them by decades
The "whole thing" is a mess of Surveillance Capitalism that serves no one but the elites, who is shaped to keep us in a constant state of anxiety and fear to try anything different and with enough energy to be able to do nothing but consume the crap they want us to consume.
Surely we can do better than that. We have to.
The important question is: "can society at large use the web without being forced to use products that exploit their data and/or locks them into rent-seeking vendors?"
With NFTs, there would be a huge boost in productivity in terms of licensing content (song for a movie).
I haven’t seen this mentioned in other threads nor is there a good current system, from my understanding.
(P.S. I know nothing about NFTs — just sharing a perspective.)
But... instead of that, it was just pure speculation, with nobody really wanting any of the art. And none of it ever came with that contract to give original artists money anyway. So even the smidge of a good idea in there never got done.
He’s in PE so he’s probably looking at this from a particular lease, which isn’t the wide adoption folks are hoping for.
There are songs that may have 10+ different owners of specific rights (author, composer, singer, recording, distribution, exclusive vs non-exclusive, regional vs national vs international).
With a smart contracts, you can abstract a ton of the lawyer-y stuff. Smart contracts are also good for indie, in terms of licensing samples.
[edit]: here’s a link with more info.
https://blog.reverbnation.com/2018/05/09/music-law-101-owns-...
Like I write a song that has 10 different owners - is the idea then that I purchase rights via purchase of an NFT? Because that will need a lawyer-y real world contract attached to it anyway, so I’m not sure what it’s replacing. And how does that NFT determine the cost of rights, which will be different if I am using it as the theme song for my movie compared to a tiny sample in a song?
I understand the complexities from that post, I just don’t understand how NFTs and smart contracts are the solution to the complexity.
The DB would allow current, and previous, copywriter holders to opt-in to the system. Ownership stake would be written into the smart contract with trenches of rights. Once you have a "movie" contract, that attributes X percent to Y people, based on rights, the contract can be easily reused for another project.
In most cases, music royalties are a fixed income business and the profits are easy to model. This was the foundation of the WB/Pershing Sq deal. Their prospectus is quite interesting.
Using the WB case for simplicity, the idea would be to take the current licenses and create trenches of rights, which would be sold/minted (not sure of right work) with all the legal/operational stuff baked in. For a real world example:
- WB owns the rights to song X
- DMX (hospitality) licenses music from WB to play on their connected devices, which service the hospitality sector, primarily (restaurants/bars)
- DMX renews their license on annual basis.
- Copy write owners would receive royalties per non-exclusive, commercial, non-reproducible trench when their song is played.
With NFTs, the initial licensing and renewal could be performed from a user interface similar to Amazon vs the current paper process.
This is applicable to chains like Starbucks too, as they license songs, burn them on CDs that have specific DRM and play on a (what I would guess) is a specialized CD player. Those CDs cannot be played outside the store, from my understanding.
TL;DR - you encode different licenses in smart contracts and once you have a framework, it’s easy to grant similar rights without the overhead. Specialized licenses can be created quicker. This would be applicable to large copywrite holders and flow down to indie, with time.
Edit: spelling and formatting.
Seems there would be lots of issues on the artist side of things with NFTs - like what if one of the 10 artists that are part of a song doesn’t want to sign up or get paid in crypto? Do you still get the NFT and handle the 1 person manually and sit half in NFT world and half outside? Or do you need 100% adoption before it is at all useful?
What if the music company wanted to vet who they licenced music to? Or particular songs can only be licenced for particular use cases by particular companies?
I’m not sure NFTs actually solve the complexities here.
The idea is to encapsulate the current contracts into smart contracts to downsize legal overhead.
Also, not sure why it HAS to be decentralized.
Look at IBMs implementation of HomeDepot’s inventory tracking. There is no decentralization (in a general sense), no tokens. They created a system that was easy to onboard vendors, vendors can process orders, and Home Depot can verify them with a lot less paper work and a trail.
Smart Contracts will not look how the space looks now and the ethos of crypto won’t survive most real-world use cases but some technologies will be adapted, if they fit well.
Real world example: - I worked for a hospitality chain and we have an order management system for our locations.
- we had many different vendors, different SKUs, and vendors went in/out based on annual contracts.
- when a vendor was switched, someone had to update the entire database and propagate it to stores.
- all vendors, stores, etc. had different databases and there were times were wrong items are sent, items never sent, or damaged/bad items. It takes an hour, on average, to check in an order.
With Smart Contracts, this process would be simplified: order management would require less data entry, loading orders on truck would have higher accuracy (removing errors when entering new item into the system), and there are general savings since order management protocol that all the big players use is proprietary and a pain to use.
They aren't a small percentage of the population and told me they had demand for decentralized technology.
to which i reply: "shaka, when the moon lambo fell"
If there's a productive use, it escapes me.
> Gitcoin grants quadratic funding is not just for funds allocation, it's also a great signaling tool!
Gitcoin is a platform where you get paid to work on open source software in Python, Rust, Ruby, JavaScript, Solidity, HTML, CSS, Design, and more.
But why was it hidden all the way down in the footer? Why was the rest of the page vacuous marketing copy that made my brain turn off?
And why does any of that need cryptocurrency? Grants for open source work have been around before cryptocurrency even existed.
The key word there is seems, you’ll probably find a lot of jurisdictions require you to report receiving payment through crypto.
Apparently "the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community". Mathematics sure have increased in scope since I left uni.
Hope that helps.
There are far too many web sites like that. Not just crypto-related ones. The ones with a flashy design, a blank for your email address, and far too little useful information. I refer to this as "the giant sucking sound of the onboarding funnel".
You can make this argument for any technology at this point. If people like crypto it will exist. It's the same with a lot of other things I think shouldn't exist like gold.
That was a perfectly reasonable position to hold until, like, Google Maps. Meanwhile we're 10 years and counting into the crypto hype and still zero legitimate use cases where it adds value.
I’ll have to poke around later and see if I can quit my day job while getting paid to solve real problems.
Start here: https://www.amazon.com/Trick-Treatment-Undeniable-Alternativ...