It all makes sense now! It's yet another attempt at making Web 3.0 happen.
Sigh...
There is did:peer: and did:git: don't know what issues some people here have with blockchain scams again.
Why are Bitcoin maxis and HN Web 2.0 people so intent on keeping everyone from advancing to the next phases of the Web?
Do you like centralized VC-funded “cloud”-hosted startups incubated in Silicon Valley that get gobbled up by big tech or dumped on the public? You like the extreme power inequality between those who run these systems and the public? You think the best our systems can do is extract rents at the behest of Wall Street? People who bought the shares at $100 dont want them to drop to $50 so Uber will take 50% of all drivers’ paychecks, while a decentralized autonomous network wouldn’t. Selling tokens is a one-time deal that makes the founders rich and then the network belongs to the participants.
What happened to the open source, hacker ethos? You know, counterculture, hacking on something, or at the very least not buying into the corporate morass? What happened to cypherpunks and people who wrote M$ and worked on Free Software alternatives to Big Tech?
Once upon a time America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy were today’s Google, Facebook etc. People left for the open, decentralized protocols like HTTP, as soon as good enough clients (browsers) appeared. Web 2.0 companies like FB or Google could have never even gotten started if they needed permission of AOL or MSN … the permissionless nature Web 1.0 made it possible.
Once upon a time, long distance calls cost $3 a minute. Then the decentralized file sharing network Kazaa guys made Skype, and it became so widespread that VOIP dropped the cost to zero. We can all videoconference now and the telcos are reduced to providing dumb pipes.
So why if Web 1.0 broke barriers and allowed anyone to write some HTML and serve via HTTP a website to the whole world … why is it sooooo terrible that in Web 3.0 people can write a smart contract and deploy it on some EVM compatible blockchain making the rules or payments instantly accessible to people around the world who control their own keys? Do you really think this won’t have any real applications?
And I’m not even talking about the outright scamming and the fact that most crypto’s primary use case is criminal. Or the environmental issues of spending energy we can’t spare on something we could solve so many other ways.
It's very unfortunate that the grifters have given the technology such a bad name when, like any technology, it has applications it excels in and others it doesn't. We're still definitely in the phase of working out what, if anything, blockchain is better (than centralised implementations) for. And it sucks that that search is being negatively impacted by all the grifters.
In the future I wouldn't be surprised if we saw 99.99% of blockchain stuff dead, but the small percentage that survive could disrupt some industries (I'm not convinced finance is one of those industries though lol).
Name five.
Like I said, we're still working out what it's good for. I've seen promising applications but nothing I'd say is obviously better than traditional technology. To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion.
So. No applications it excels at.
> To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion.
It's been 13 years. When will dismissing it become mature? In another 13 years?
Or maybe the tech is just bad.
2. Smart contracts
3. Append-only logs synchronised between mutually distrusting parties
4. Decentralised identities
5. Microtransactions for online games and to replace web advertising
>5. Microtransactions for online games and to replace web advertising
how money transfer and microtransactions are different?
1. Some people want to be able to send large amounts of money internationally to their family in a country which has currency controls and "official" exchange rates. Others want to be able to send funds to organisations that have been banned by traditional money transmitters, such as Wikileaks, or protest groups, or adult content, or cannabis.
5. Separate groups of people don't have a problem with their government's fiscal or censorship policies, but simply want to be able to buy an emote or a skin in an online game, or to listen to a piece of music or read an article without being tracked around the web or needing to wire 50 cents from their bank in Mongolia to the service provider's bank in Cyprus.
5. So you're still being tracked, because there isn't a company around that isn't monetizing viewership data. Also, if you're fine with fiscal policies, why are you hesitant to wire? Sounds to me like you're dissatisfied with your host country's fiscal controls, or service provider's offerings.
Look, control over financial networks is one of the most powerful soft control mechanisms on the planet. You will not work around that. Government is slow to catch up, but I assure you, these folks aren't stupid anywhere close to 100% of the time. The fact regulation is crystalizing around crypto as fast as it is without taking the multi-century learning experience trad-fi did is evidence enough of that.
If it comes down to "a bunch of nerds created an unregulable financial system" I can pretty much guarantee it'll get gobbled by trad-fi snd re-centralized.
In fact, anyone could roll their own financial networks without using banks/Visa/you name it. No one has because we've made laws that specifically increase the barrier to entry because finance is the spine that provides support for all manner of economic activity, which includes the illegal stuff, and Government is putatively in the business of making sure that the illegal stuff doesn't see the light of day.
I just do not see the compelling argument that'll carry weight to switch someone from "financial system that makes crime hard" to "financial system that makes crime easy" and feel alright about it. You have to already accept that crime is just an endemic human phenomena, and this is just a rebalancing of the spectrum.
Given you've got much more efficient implementations of your other use cases available, this is the sticking point for me. No people I've spoken to and laid out what Web3 really is, even with the most charitable framing gets passed that.
If I can't convince people it's a good idea with full disclosure in effect, I'm not sure it's something worth pushing forward.
2. Now, what's a valid use-case for a smart contract, and please explain how it functions if there's a bug in the contract?
3. Maybe. You'll need to provide a more concrete use-case. Also, you have the outside-world problem (you know the data hasn't been altered, but you don't necessarily know where it comes from).
4. All you need for decentralized identities is a public key. (Though if you want your identity to be long-lived, you'll have to also have a system of secure key rotation, and the most straightforward system is blockchain-ish in that it involves a signed append-only log. But it doesn't need a global trustless ledger.
5. See 1, except worse, because the transaction cost dwarf the actual payment.
2. A smart contract allows decentralised organisations to function, with democratic voting and transparency. (That's not appropriate or necessary for every organisation, but it can be an improvement on one person hosting a server and saying "Trust me"). If there's a bug in the contract, you have to vote to change the contract. Traditional contracts, businesses, and even countries fail all the time, but we haven't give up on them as concepts.
3. For a concrete use-case, I offer the example of blockchain technology being used to make the fishing industry supply chain more transparent.[3] It's true that someone could enter fake information onto the blockchain, but they could also fake signatures on paperwork, so a system can still be useful even if it doesn't prevent all possible attacks.
4. If the ledger isn't trustless, then someone is controlling it, so your identities aren't really decentralised.
5. There are better currencies than BTC if transaction costs are the main concern. The equivalent number for BCH is half a cent.[5]
[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
[3] https://www.reutersevents.com/sustainability/using-blockchai...
[5] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin%20cash-transact...
A smart contract is neither smart, nor a contract. It's a program, written in an esoteric language, and running in the world's most inefficient VM.
It's so bad and overcomplicated that "smart contract" authors themselves routinely make mistakes in code equivalent to the most basic of actual contracts. And since there's no avenue of recourse, these mistakes are irreversible.
"Smart contracts" also require the user to pay for any meaningful action.
As for "transparency", there's no transparency when something is enforced by code very few can read and understand (compared to actual contracts that can be read by humans).
As for "democracy", there's nothing democratic about "who has the most money has the most votes".
> Traditional contracts, businesses, and even countries fail all the time, but we haven't give up on them as concepts
Because we have thousands of years of history teaching us how to deal with those, and guess what, we've come up with multiple things like:
- regulations
- contract clauses dealing with failure
- avenues of recourse
- various methods of enforcement
Crypto bros pretend that these things are unnecessary, but then immediately turn to courts to sue scammers, or cry in cryptoforums when a "smart contract" bug wipes their wallets out.
Email became useful and replaced the post office
Web 1.0 became useful and replaced TV, radio, magazines
Web 2.0 became useful and allowed people to communicate but still hasn’t been truly decentralized
What makes you think that Web3 replacing trusted gatekeepers is not useful? You think “just trust me” is the best system we can possibly have for writing code that does some business logic?
For me it’s simple: if there is something that’s very valuable (some NFT, some role, some election, some large balance of USDT) then I prefer that my customers custody their own keys and deal with that themselves. Less liability for me. Rather than having a guy with keys to the database log in and potentially change the result of an election, and having to track down logs and deal with lawsuits etc. I just want smart contracts to deal with it, and each participant can only take the actions they are allowed to take - no exceptions. No central point of failure for security. No need for audits OF TRANSACTIONSby auditors who can also be corrupted.
How do we make sure that smart contracts are correct? Audits, battle testing and with Cardano we even have provable correctness. UniSwap likely has no exploitable bugs, for instance, or they would have been found. Every instance of UniSwap AMMs comes out of the same factory. THE END RESULT is far more reliable than any code that runs on only one machine by a “trust me” corp.
Sorry buddy, you can shill your centralized “trust me” all you want but you sound like Peter Schiff and his gold. You just don’t get it.
1. No liability for transactions, only for code
2. Open source infrastructure
3. No central entities who can corrupt the system in unlimited ways
4. People can only do what is allowed, no matter what
5. Code operates regardless of whether the central entity is around in 20-30 years
6. Different incentives (selling tokens is far more user-friendly than selling shares to a parasitic investor class that will cause you to extract rents forever and introduce dark patterns and lockin at the expense of the public).
7. Interoperability — on-chain data can be used for other smart contracts and any websites can read the data.
8. Global interoperability, no need to rely on a patchwork of currencies and money transmission legs and banks that Stripe takes care of for you. USDC is an ERC20 token and you write code, not connecting to a billion little APIs. Similarly to HTTP letting you go worldwide vs what Twilio had to do for you, or negotiating syndication by radio stations.
Of course I think blockchain is a first-gen technology but it enables this and a lot more !
Nobody here is shilling for centralized services, most of us are veterans of decentralized tech giving you warnings. Many projects have encountered these same issues, and have died because they have no purpose. Blockchains are little more than nerd porn, the average banker isn't going to look a trustless infrastructure and all of the sudden "get it". That's one of many insurmountable problems that cryptocurrency faces, and it has been successfully blocking adoption of it in the real world for more than 10 years. You can't simply shrug off decades of decentralized failure without applying the lessons you learned from watching them fall. Unfortunately, every cryptocurrency I've found is tone-deaf to these concerns, and prefers to replace genuine conversation with marketing crap.
What way do you propose out of regulatory capture?
You seem to assume the existence of a competent and non-corrupt metaregulator (some form of supervisory body that would "regulate the regulators" and somehow prevent "revolving door" scenarios).
- If it exists, why was long-term regulatory capture possible in the first place?
- If it doesn't, how would we go about instituting one?
We're on Hacker News. Exit wishful thinking, enter systems thinking.
- Feedback between regulatory agency and regulated industry: continuous.
- Feedback between regulatory agency and supervisory body: continuous.
- Feedback between supervisory body and sovereign (=the general public getting shafted by the regulatory capture): discrete, and of appalingly low resolution.
I'm told that in the world's dominant democracy, where most of the ideas that we're discussing originate, the sovereign is throttled to expressing its interest in the form of a binary decision once every ~35000 hours.
So, the boffins at the revolving door email each other and call each other on the phone all the time, but the public can only talk to the legislature at the grand rate of 1 bit per 4 years? In that case, I'm prone to applying the concept of "regulatory capture" to any and all regulation that nominally serve the public interest. They simply don't have the bandwidth to establish what the public interest is.
Even at Bitcoin's "low" speed of 7 transactions per second, on-chain voting would still support a much faster democratic process. That's why people are opposed to it. For now, people use cryptos to vote mostly on inconsequential things. That's while the quirks are being ironed out. Some crypto bros who got in for teh gainz got shafted. So what. Maybe in a fairer economic system a fool and his money would be parted even more easily.
Currently, crypto does not work... except as a public "exit"/"no confidence" vote towards the methods through which industry is organized and regulation is instituted. For one to devote time and effort to this emergent form of economic organization, no matter how uncertain its realities might be, is simply to refuse to take part in maintaining a status quo that one has had no part in establishing - and to look for alternatives, no matter how tenuous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
Zuck correctly described the situation early on: “I don’t know. They ‘trust me’. Dumb f#%ks”. And it’s still true today and you want to bury any alternative to that system.
- Scams - Risky financial structures that we regulated out of existence because they were risky and unregulated - Money laundering
If there are real applications of the technology, they would’ve popped up by now.
Just look at the whole space of cryptocurrency lending. Regulations exist for good reason, we have stress tests https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/large-bank-capit..., consumer protections, all kinds of safeguard so when you put money in a bank account you don’t have to worry that somebody’s gonna run with it.
Web 3.0 is a buzzword-filled collective hallucination. People keep shouting the buzzwords, but still nobody knows what it’s supposed to mean in any concrete way. NFTs are scams and still haven’t found a real use case that’s not a ponzi, crypto lending is 2008 capital structures but turned up to 11, DAOs are useless because courts and corporate governance are things that exists, I can go on and on.
If you have a concrete proposal of how this magical Web 3.0 future is supposed to be better I’m all ears, but where I’m standing it’s all ponzi, scams, shaky capital structuring, and criminal enterprises.
You are losing 10-15% a year from inflation. Nobody has to literally steal it when they can dilute it
You have no idea how serious the problems Bitcoin is trying to solve are.
One day you will be forced to understand it though. Hopefully it doesn't result in you losing all your savings, like it has happened to billions of people through history....
So where are they? The consensus is denying it on principle but rather wondering what it's actually useful for. It's strange to see all the claims of opportunities and problems to solve, yet nothing seems to be produced.
Is that not good enough for now? What more would you like?
Regardless of the follies of Wall Street, blockchains and smart contracts do not fix them. There is no particular reason why a DAO would not also cut worker wages to benefit the tokenholder class - it's the exact same structure as a corporation, just without the pesky regulation getting in the way. There is nothing about decentralized finance that guarantees that the employees are also tokenholders anymore than regular ol' brick-and-mortar capitalism guarantees that employees are also shareholders. If you want a worker's cooperative, you can start one right now without needing to buy Ethereum and develop a fragile smart contract.
DeFi isn't destroying power structures, nor is it making them less rigid. It's just a changing of the guard, from corporations and investors to anonymous "whales" and DAOs. This isn't actually decentralizing anything, it's just obfuscating how much the system has been corrupted.
As for open source and Free Software, well... their political opinions outside of hacker ethos are all over the map. The space is vaguely libertarian and vaguely leftist, which means there's plenty of people in the space who don't want more unregulated capitalism.
Your example about long distance calls is also wrong. Or, at least, missing some context. Skype was actually kind of late to the "cheap long-distance" party; the government had already done the hard work of breaking up the phone monopoly and ensuring that companies could place and terminate calls on other people's networks. This is because "permissionless" is not a capability, it is a policy. Even ostensibly permissionless blockchains could effectively become permissioned if miners and exchanges colluded in a way that made economic sense. I know this can happen because it's exactly the same thing that happened in Web 2.0.