It's an italian serial conman in a dark room somewhere, pressing "print" on software that generates ostensibly a dollar-equivalent crypto currency out of thin air, wrapped in a network of criminal enterprises that is currently using special 'insider only' versions of those tokens (tether-trons, vs tether-eths) to facilitate the theft of the life savings of a generation of middle class chinese, wrapped in a nesting doll of scams and pyramid schemes, wrapped in the greed, hubris, and legitimate desperation of a generation of 1st world hustlers, all wrapped in crypto-bros trying to take over the world.
If it was just crypto-bros, there wouldn't be anywhere near so much smoke to confuse/conflate with fire: the market manipulation being facilitated by the dirty (and clean, albeit grifted) money entering the system makes the whole thing seem financially bigger than it really is. But despite all the smoke making, it is still just a fart in a colander: the entire crypto market cap, as fanciful and hyperbolic as it is, is still less than the market cap of Apple.
The really astounding part is that so much of this activity is being recorded on publicly accessible server ledgers, in real-time.
Spot price times the number of tokens means nothing if the tokens have no intrinsic value.
Apple may be overvalued, but they have enormous assets and revenue backing their price. Their P/E ratio is a rational number.
Crypto could fall to zero at any time and all the hodlers are left holding nothing but the bag.
And of course a lot of the tokens are just locked away, keys are lost, etc.
I appreciated this inadvertently exactly technically correct definition of a rational number. But I assume you mean a rationally derived number ….
I'm not sure why you think there has to be a world-ending cataclysm for this to happen? If there were any major change in the way societies or economies were organized, Apple the entity could cease to exist entirely, or some/all of its assets could cease to belong to them. Like for patents, it certainly seems like the world is very far from deciding to abolish IP, but if society wills it, it is very simple to do.
By contrast the sudden demise of all crypto value could also happen, in the same sense that tomorrow might be cloudy.
...Whereas blockchain assets going to zero doesn't even register as a blip to the average citizen.
Devaluation of cryptocurrency assets, on the other hand, could come about from someone sneezing. Or other events which would have similarly little impact on any asset valuations outside the crypto bubble itself.
I just spent all day digging a hole in my backyard for no reason. Does it have intrinsic value?
Cryptocurrencies are a null term. There's no there there.
and as for them being a null term, you have no clue what you're talking about or you're intentionally trolling. please don't reply to me.
That is inherent worth, unless you intend to go full big-brain about the Fall of Society, and at that point nobody is going to care about your digital ledger unless it comes with lead-backed securities.
I’d have mentioned their real estate holdings (offices, etc). Office chairs don’t have a big resale value but real estate often does.
Check out ebay auctions for Herman Miller Aeron, they're still worth something !
Replace italian with <insert racial boogeyman here> and you would literally be describing the current financial system.
I used broad strokes, but I wasn't making a fanciful description of what drives the crypto market as much as a literal one.
Wow. I have been guilty of this very same blunder many times and I understand it's just a joke, but please realize that it is not pleasant to be on the wrong side of a joke for no reason.
I'll be more careful with my generalizations in the future. I am confident you will be, too.
Thanks.
Craig Wright (Claims to have invented Bitcoin but cant prove it lol)
Richard Heart (Behind the Hex fraud crypto)
(70% may be off. It was correct as of 6 months ago.)
(If he was a conman, this kind of misdirection would be really in style !)
[1] - https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/05/italy-has-a-regis...
There is zero evidence for the Tether conspiracy theories.. But I gotta give you marks for creative writing.
Tether has literally admitted to lying, which means at least one of the conspiracy theories is true by the admission of the major player. There is plenty of evidence that they are still lying, but the biggest evidence is that (unlike the rest of the financial system!) they claim to have $10s of billions of financial assets and refuse to identify which assets those are.
USDC can. BUSD can. oh but not USDT hrm.
That's exactly what it is. They don't want anything new or innovative, they just want to be able to levy a tax on what everyone does online.
Convincing others that there's imaginary future money on taxing online interactions is where the real present money is actually made. In a way, this turns their biggest weakness (they can't actually achieve their goal) into their biggest strength (their audience is people who aren't tech-literate enough to understand that they can't actually achieve their goal)
https://mybuild.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/dce02ee4-1c0d-4...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/register-today-for-aws...
And since Web2 has largely picked its main winners and losers an opportunity existed to reset the game and pick another set. Only this time they would be the ones to invest in the next Apple, Google etc.
Bitcoin achieves it for the narrow privilege of publishing small amounts of block data to it's chain. It's important for the security of Bitcoin that this is what the novice would say is "inefficient" - but the minutia online activity is far lower stakes and therefore naive proclamations that Web3 is all Web2 data hosted on blockchain is an embarrassing suggestion - there are extremely basic techniques like hashing data in Merkle Trees as a timestamp service that any cryptographer would reach for before adding arbitrary data to a blockchain.
Techniques like that and systems which allow one to own their identity independent of corporations or Public Key Authorities are the basis. Obviously it has a long way to go - but try not to mistake your obtuse guess for what is possible.
In the sense that the “web3” brand is mostly used to make proof-of-concept and crypto startups in the Ethereum ecosystem, which is just one ecosystem, and a highly centralised one at that, 100%.
Creating a decentralised web is extremely difficult. Most Ethereum web3 projects are more like concept art within a research project.
We’ve had it for years: tor’s .onion sites. And look how popular they are… when was the last time you visited one?
Technically, You could say Web2 sites are decentralized, by the way: most include JS, CSS, and images from different domains and servers.
Don't ask this kind of rhetorical question on HN - HN is exactly where you can find a lot of audience that can honestly answer this question with "today" or "yesterday". :-D
Pornhub's onion site is probably somewhere more regular than I'd like to admit.
Me too. I'm an outsider, but can anyone understand why they didn't do this? If you were designing NFT's, wouldn't this be an obvious thing to do?
tokenURI aims to be flexible and unopinionated. It can be an inline SVG string generated by the Solidity contract itself, an IPFS link to a JPG, some app's custom protocol URI scheme, or a mutable HTTPS CDN like a game developer using NFTs but wanting to retain control over their assets.
(My company, among other things, spiders + scrapes + archives NFT assets. I know what I'm talking about here.)
ETC721 should have been limited to exactly two use-cases:
1. embedded data: URNs
2. URNs for data on distributed content networks that make permanency a guarantee for posting (e.g. Arweave); where an oracle-check that the data is in the network at the time of creation from at least one client's perspective is required as collateral to successfully mint the asset.
As it is, I'd settle for even IPFS-without-guarantee-of-pinning, as long as you can guarantee that at least one node accessible to the public web has the data at the time of mint. That'd at least mean that someone who does care could come along, scrape the asset, and then pin it themselves to ensure the URN never goes bad from then on.
Even this, though, is far more thought than people put into earlier standards, e.g. the Solidity compiler's deployment metadata, which is always nominally an IPFS URN, but is never actually populated by the generated metadata. If they had just stood up a backend at ReMix.org that pinned these metadata files, and had solc push compiled metadata to said backend, then we wouldn't be where we are now with the (centralized) Etherscan "verified contract source code" being the only way to see/decode the storage layouts for (even some) contracts.
totally disagree with your assessment and would hate to be forced to rely on oracles to deploy a mintable ERC721. I like the broadness and simplicity of ERC721 and would attribute that to its success.
The chain is open and public, just publish your own ERC with oracles and see if it takes off?
My point is that "success" (in the sense of "a lot of people making NFTs" or "a lot of people investing in NFTs") is a bad measure for things that "Web3 society" should care about, because the whole thing happening with NFTs right now is a speculative market run by people who want to make money first, second, and N≤1000th; and to package art they would have made anyway for long-term secondary-market appreciation, roughly dead-last.
(And even if they did want that, they don't know how; the whole ecosystem is geared toward splitting technological competence out of the equation into fly-by-night professional-services firms and their productized "NFT as a Service" offerings, leaving the decision-making for choosing those firms in the hands of independent artists/musicians/etc — i.e. people who have no idea what considerations are at play for things like fault-tolerant distribution of digital media. Or in the hands of businesspeople who recruit and exploit such independent artists en-masse, with eyes only on short-term profitability of their NFT collection offerings, and no thought toward long-term asset valuation even ten years down the line.)
Insofar as the people building Web3 — and Ethereum specifically — can be said to share a set of ideals about decentralization, immutability, permanency, etc., the kind of people who have come in to create NFTs are operating explicitly against these ideals (see also: the fact that NFT asset URIs — and NFT metadata generally — is updatable; the artist/their publisher can come along and decide they want to replace your monkey with a "better-drawn" one after you've bought it!)
IMHO a non-fungible asset standard that was actually written and used to the same ideological purpose that Ethereum itself was created and operated, would look far different.
It's just that "the ideological purpose for which Ethereum itself was created"... isn't a very common thing for artists or business-people to care about; and so that kind of NFT wouldn't have any speculative market behind it. So nobody would even know it exists. Except maybe digital conservationists, and the rare kind of private collectors who want to engage explicitly with digital conservationists. The sorts of people who would consider purchasing something from the Smithsonian's private archives.
---
Also, re: oracles, I can see why "get an oracle to do X" is onerous; my own personal stance has always been that there should be functionality built into Ethereum-alike nodes enabling every node to be its own web2 + web3 oracle; in two primary senses:
- "declare your intent to request an arbitrary web2 URL; actually request it; and embed the request+result together into a tx, where your key then asserts provenance on the fetch" being a core RPC method you can expect to exist on any node for any Eth-like blockchain
- "fetch an asset by URN from a permanent storage network into memory" being an EVM opcode — the permanency means it's deterministic, so why not, eh? Though, such an opcode would actually be terminal — would interrupt current TX execution and instead queue a thunk into a state-trie scheduling queue, to be evaluated when the runtime finishes the blocking IO for the tx. (Like how Microsoft Orleans does blocking-yields on distributed actors. See also, the way Elrond's cross-shard transactions work: https://docs.elrond.com/technology/cross-shard-transactions/.)
Of course, none of this exists today, let alone did it exist in November of 2017 when the first ERC721 token was minted. :)
I'm just someone from the outside saying, from the actual current popular use cases of NFT, it seems really a mis-match between design and use-case not to have a digest fingerprint, right? What confuses me if that, from your comment it seems like the "community" does not agree... or perhaps thinks this is somehow an insoluble problem?
If it's totally arbitrary what the payload is, like it doesn't even have to be a URL, but URLs seem quite popular... okay, how about putting in eg `https://example.com/some/url#sha512=a1bd4ef`
Marketplaces could put a special tag on items that supplied digests, the marketplace could even check it and confirm it. No change to standard needed. (Since I know nothing about what I'm talking about, it's possible I have some details wrong, but surely something along these lines is possible? This does not seem like a sophisticated technological problem, to embed a digest in a recognizable way)
If it's not being done, it would seem like there isn't sufficient interest in it? That is what confuses me.
I just can't, hahahah
Congratulations, you understand exactly what web3 is.
The NFT/DAO and VC boom is the ideological nail in the coffin for me. I guess that's what people cal Web3... so perhaps you are right.
The good news is that it's hard to imagine how it could get any worse, the bad news is that perhaps I am just lacking imagination ?
(If you're wondering how this website appears on its own domain rather than you needing to directly visit the domain of the gateway node, that's because of https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/dnslink/).
In other words: if someone could figure out how to host ThePirateBay on IPFS, then governments wouldn't be able to take them down any more. They'd only be able to take down arbitrary IPFS gateway nodes; and if they did that enough to be a problem, anyone who cared could work around that by just running their own IPFS node. (Or using a browser like Brave which runs its own IPFS node internally.) Content will be fetched from by DNSLink-aware browsers in preference to hitting the gateway specified in the DNSLink record, so as soon as you used such a browser, all the taken-down domains would just magically work again for you.
Data can be lost.
I put a few files on IPFS some time ago. That files are no longer accessible because I stopped hosting them.
> Site will never go down
As long as there is a node hosting the data you're looking for. So it can go down.
IPFS's own docs do have these additional higher-level guarantees — so they specifically will never go down.
One way to think of this is that, in a centralized model, the owner of an asset has to choose a single centralized CDN partner to collaborate with to distribute that asset, where the website you visit is really a pointer to the single (fallible) CDN partner.
Whereas, in a decentralized model, the owner of an asset can pick zero or more CDN partners who will all then "back" the asset on the DHT with their own mirrored copies of it. And I say zero or more, because the asset-owner can also still back the DHT asset with their own mirror on some personal node, without this causing much of a problem for them. (Where doing this wouldn't help in the centralized-CDN case, for two reasons: if the central CDN goes down, clients don't automatically switch to fetching from the origin that populated the CDN; and even if they did, a personal origin server would likely fall over under the traffic load. Whereas in IPFS, those nodes fetching copies — gateways et al — become (temporary) mirrors of the data themselves; so an origin server only ever has to serve O(log N) copies of an asset, not O(N).)
Also, in a decentralized model, besides the owner, anyone else who is interested in the asset's continued availability, can also choose to increase the data's availability in the network by mirroring it themselves (or by paying some pinning service to mirror it.)
Compare/contrast: organizations like universities who seed torrents of important data like Linux distro ISOs. IPFS is the BitTorrent model of data survivability/availability, but applied to websites / web assets.
----
Which is all the way one would present this until a few years ago, since IPFS used to be the forerunner in this space... but now there are decentralized protocols that are similar to IPFS but are "permanent" at the network level, e.g. https://www.arweave.org/. With these networks, as long as you pay the (one-time) costs related to writing data to the network, your assets will then be available on the network as long as the network itself exists.
Any particular reason this hasn’t been figured out or why TPB hasn’t done it yet?
Also the whole rug-pulling game has been an impressive transfer of wealth from VCs -> influencers.
None of those things were happening.
Like self custody: the idea of owning a valuable and transferable asset by only holding a private key was not possible prior to Bitcoin. The closest comparison might be a domain name: people feel like they own those, but they are just renting them from a registrar who leases you the account and ability to edit your domain records.
This applies all over Ethereum, DeFi, ENS, NFTs. Look at Aave, that allows lending and borrowing without a custodial service provider.
Certainly web3 is used by lots of different people to mean lots of different things. And many of those people are there to scam.
Part of web3 are DAOs, corporate entities with both a legal presence as well as a presence on a public blockchain system of record. The DAO is an organization where people perform work in the context of workflows and incentives. The workflows and incentives are called a protocol.
The protocol is implemented in code, and the record of activities are on the blockchain. Governance of the protocol occurs in the non-blockchain legal organization.
There are many entities- many non-profits and public service entities, passive management entities like real estate management, many others- that in the future could be much more fairly, sustainably, and transparently operated as DAOs.
Much- very much- has to be done still, of course. But I am confident that in 10-20 years participation in DAOs will be common and a net benefit to society.
Cheers.
In fact, I can minimally edit your description to make it an accurate description of checking out using Braintree, for example.
«The drop-in UIs is an external wallet that can authorize card transactions securely because it is separate from the merchant's web page itself. When I use my credit card to buy something from a retailer, the PSP will ask my bank to do a SCA to confirm that it is me doing it. That's all that the merchant can do, they can ask the PSP to confirm the transaction is authenticated. Once it's confirmed, a one-time unique token for the transaction is created, and used to execute the transaction. This can work because the browser provides the secure separation between website and wallet. Otherwise, no one would trust an online shop with their credit card details to run transactions.»
I thought the app and wallet were the same thing. What's the difference here?
The "wallet" (Metamask) is a browser extension containing a set of pairs of (RPC gateway URI for a given blockchain, cryptographic private key for an account on said blockchain.) It can also proxy through to other such "wallets", e.g. "hardware wallets" (smart cards.)
"web3" is an API (like any DOM API) that the browser extension exposes to app, allowing the app to ask the wallet to do things (where the wallet then asks the user to confirm that they want to do those things); and, through the wallet's connection to blockchains, to watch for things to happen on a blockchain.
Together, these additional APIs allow web3 "DApps" to transact on blockchains, and to observe what happens in response to their transactions.
Example DApps:
- Gnosis Safe (https://gnosis-safe.io/) — an interface for deploying and managing multi-signature smart contracts (i.e. trusts whose assets are controlled by M-of-N voting)
- Sushiswap (https://www.sushi.com/swap) — an interface for creating and managing Automated Market Maker liquidity pools
- OpenSea (https://opensea.io/) — a marketplace for buying and selling NFTs
On all of these websites, you'll notice that instead of registering an account, there is a button that CTAs you to "Connect a Wallet." This is requesting permission to communicate with the web3 agent installed as an extension in your browser.
If a Pi solves your use case, for God's sake don't use the EVM.
If a Pi doesn't solve your use case, because {particular reason}, then consider the EVM as an option.
Cryptography is the basis of Web 3.0, so in a formal sense there is none.
But I think that you rather want an example that is a little farther away from finance markets. Consider, for example, the (in my observation mostly dead) Namecoin:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
which attempts/attempted to implement domain names via a blockchain and is sometimes considered a precursor to NFTs.
It's a potemkin village.
No, not necessarily. For one let's qualify that statement. Smart contracts on Ethereum are executed 100,000+ times by every node on the network, which is providing security and uptime for the network.
Some software transactions have external costs associated with them, such as financial transactions. Doing an international bank transfer may simply boil down to a credit in one SQL database and a debit in another SQL database but it still can cost dozens to thousands of dollars depending on the amount, and the situation. Even a VISA credit card transaction costs 1.5-3%. You as a consumer don't see that cost, the retailer is eating it though, and marking up their products and services to accommodate that fee.
But ETH transaction fees do not scale with the value of the transaction, it simply scales with the demand for the limited block space.
Ethereum community has been actively developing solutions for this problem, by developing optimistic rollups and zero knowledge rollups, which are effectively able to compress transactions and scale the network throughout by 100-1000x. Innovations like this will get Ethereum to Visa scale plus.
This technology is still early, but rapidly improving. Currently deployed rollups are in the 10-100x scale improvement range.
Some rollups currently in production:
https://arbitrum.io/ https://www.optimism.io/ https://starkware.co/
On Ethereum, you can execute a swap from one currency to another (0.3% fee) and have the transfer execute to anyone in the world in 15 seconds. Even in a highly congested time on the network, that will cost at most a few dozen dollars. Doesn't matter if you're sending $1K or $1B.
Crypto isn't ready for retail use cases yet, but it's within the next few years (less than 3) that it gets there. Retail transactions will occur on rollups. The retailers will pay transaction fees of a few pennies to a few dozen cents. It will not be percentage based on the transaction value as VISA, AMEX, etc currently get away with.
For example: CryptoKitties. The only things in the on-chain state of CryptoKitties' contracts, are the kitties' ownerships, and their "genes" (an entropy blob, a bit like Pokemon https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values.) Because these are the two things that, if they were entirely in the hands of CryptoKitties themselves, you'd be suspicious that they might "cheat" on, by e.g. making their friends special kitties with genes nobody else can have; or deciding one day that kitties that aren't "cared for" should be forcibly transferred back to an "adoption agency." If either of these things were found to be possible, the value of kitties would quickly drop to zero.
Meanwhile, what exactly a kitty's genes translate to in terms of actual kitty features, is dictated by some arbitrary centralized Javascript on the CryptoKitties website. Nobody distrusts CryptoKitties on this aspect, because it doesn't really impact the value of their investment relative to other people's. If the same gene makes kitties render with wings one day and vampire fangs the next, that might upset people, but it won't make them do a mass sell-off of their kitties. After all, CryptoKitties could always change it back, so why would you sell "early" rather than wait to see if they do?
Or, in short: you put data in a smart contract if a game-theoretic prerequisite of your system working out is for certain data to be only updated in an openly-audited, multilaterally-agreed-upon way. (Good non-crypto example: the dealer's shuffle between hands at a card game at a casino. Done right in front of all the players, because otherwise they wouldn't trust it.)
You understand it perfectly.
- eth: making transactions with smart contracts
- bzz: decentralised storage - save files
- whisper: peer-to-peer messaging, chat, etc.
More about the history of web3 in my Twitter thread here:
https://mobile.twitter.com/moo9000/status/148446388922402406...
However the usage of the term and it meaning has corrupted over the years, especially when marketing people took it over.
Perhaps the biggest issue is that if you lose your key you have no recourse to recover your identity. Another big issue is paying fees or waiting for transactions when I shouldn't have to, like updating some profile information or logging in to a service. I don't want to use any form of financial identifier or financial account to sign in to any non financial related web service for obvious reasons. There isn't really a decentralization imo if you're using metamask or kukai or other wallet service, it doesn't seem very secure, and it's a pain or flat out unsupported to use anything else.
And for all these & other related drawbacks, I just don't see any upside over tradition auth systems.
1. An ill-defined buzzword with some vague concepts to try and "fix" aspect of the current web. Nobody can really agree what it is or isn't.
2. The crypto-bros various attempt(s) to implement their special vision of this buzzword, mostly in an attempt create a reason for cryptocurrency to have some kind of intrinsic value.
> Why would anybody outside of the crypto scam sphere care about it if that were the case?
People generally don't, but that doesn't so crptobros continually trying to "gaslight" people into thinking it's going to be a thing. The technique worked quite well when used for bitcoin, why not try it again?
So you end up with a situation like OpenSea. Half of the information about the NFT is on the chain but then the other half is in its own private database e.g. ratings, reviews etc.
It is not prohibitively expensive to store data on a blockchain, however. Arweave and Filecoin are the largest storage-centric blockchains. They each have multiple exabytes of data stored on them. Currently, you can store on Filecoin for free: https://nft.storage/ as a promotional thing, but even for larger data stores (https://web3.storage/) it's $10 / month for 120GiB and 8 cents per GiB after that.
OpenSea itself is a marketplace with some centralized elements. That's fine. The core listing, selling and transfer logic is written as a series of smart contracts, however.
They also compete with other marketplaces, some which are fully decentralized. They do not control or own the important data, which is the NFT itself.
Some NFTs store all the metadata on chain, you can implement an NFT contract metadata as base64 encoded JSON (as you can see in a recent project https://etherscan.io/address/0x6f4388602c5dd6c593bf7c9cf3128..., plug in tokenId 2 into tokenURI to see). Some store them on IPFS with a hash based reference to the content. Some use centralized storage in a private database. All are valid use cases with varying applications. If you only want to own fully native-chain NFTs, feel free to filter based on that criteria.
But I come from the generation that knows information wants to be free.
Consider Facebook. Facebook is an advertising platform: advertisers pay money in exchange for users looking at ads; users look at ads. But the users don't receive the money! Facebook keeps the money. A Web 3.0 version could pass some fraction of the advertisers' money on to each user; the amount passed on could be based on various aspects of the user's activity, to incentivise them to do things which increase the value of the ads (looking at ads, attracting other users to the site, etc), and to not do things which decrease the value of the ads (driving other users away from the site, posting naughty content, etc).
The fundamental theorem of Web 3.0, as i understand it, is that this is both better for users (they get paid), and also better for site operators (users will be attracted by the prospect of getting paid).
There are problems with this, even on its own terms. Firstly, every site now has to be structured around some sort of transaction, where somebody is prepared to pay. You can't just have people hanging out aimlessly. Now, maybe that just means that Web 3.0 isn't universal, and there are sites where it doesn't make sense. But the best places on the net have always been places where people hang out aimlessly, so this seems like a substantial lacuna. Secondly, detailed, mechanically applied incentives often end up driving behaviour that isn't what the setter really wanted; you end up with everyone breeding cobras etc. Web 3.0 sites might end up not being better for users or operators. Thirdly, a Web 3.0 site will be less profitable for its operator than an equivalent Web 2.0 site, so it will (often) be less attractive as a thing for an entrepreneur to build. I suppose the theory predicts that Web 3.0 sites will outcompete Web 2.0 sites, so entrepreneurs won't have a choice.
Then there are problems where the theory interacts with reality. We already have transactions, without using cryptocurrencies, and as long as users are happy to batch up payments and withdrawals, transactions on sites themselves can be arbitrarily micro. We don't have smart contracts without blockchains, so users would have to trust operators to apply incentives fairly; but people already trust all sorts of companies to do that (credit card rewards, supermarket loyalty points, MMORPG XP, etc), so this isn't a real obstacle. If we wanted to build sites like this, we already could!
And then there are the general cryptocurrency / blockchain problems. For every one genuine and sensible attempt to build a site like this, there will be a hundred which are genuine but ill-conceived, and ten thousand which are scams. This is pretty much a market for lemons.
So i'm not sure there is any reason for anybody outside of the crypto scam sphere to care about it. It won't take off, and if it did, it would be crap.
> blockchain pyramid schemes
Sounds about right.