Even if we pretend for a moment that there was some merit to the “web3 smart contract”, by now it should be painfully clear to anyone involved that this is a technological dead end.
There are a many more realistic ideas to explore and research instead of wasting time on crypto unicorns.
The value of decentralized platforms is that it gets rid of the tech bros and financial scams. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can make transactions independently, without having to blindly trust that the funds are actually there.
If people transacted using DeFI, there would be no FTX, no Coinbase, no VC trying to leech off the masses.
Ah yes. No scams or tech bros. Except the implicit blind trust in programs written in esoteric programming languages on esoteric VMs that are rife with financial scams.
> If people transacted using DeFI, there would be no FTX, no Coinbase, no VC trying to leech off the masses.
Except that Uniswap is currently almost 100% automated bots "swapping" fictional tokens. And for anything useful you depend on centralized oracles. And for anything related to actual real world you must go through centralized entities.
chainlink etc
Which are entirely dependent on centralised oracles etc.
Hint: if there are only 2/5/10 centralised oracles providing you with data, no amount of fluffy "decentralised tamper-proof inputs" statements make them such.
Even if that was true (which it is not) it is still valuable for the people that use it and for the liquidity providers who can employ their capital in a reasonably safe manner without relying on banks.
All I need is to have a market of people willing to trade. If you don't see the value of it, fine. But just go find someone who got their PayPal account frozen with no recourse and ask them how much they would value the ability to trade in a permissionless network.
I didn't say "absolute vast majority of tokens". I said "absolute vast majority of things happening on uniswap".
> All I need is to have a market of people willing to trade.
There's absolutely a market for people willing to trade. If there wasn't, Amazon, eBay, AliExpress etc. wouldn't have been multi-trillion behemoths they are.
Uniswap isn't a "market for people willing to trade". It's a market for people willing to engage in currency speculation and flash loans using fantasy tokens. Even you are saying this. Quote: "make use of Uniswap to exchange, e.g, Storj/BAT/ETH for DAI/USDC/EURS". There's nothing new or revolutionary in this.
Speculation in markets are always going to exist. We have people making a living by speculating on the price of commodities, forex, company stock and event insurance policies. You calling them fantasy does not change the fact that there are people willing to trade them and does not change the fact that there is value in being able to do this without a central authority.
I gave the example of Storj/BAT precisely because these are business who are paying actual money for a service (Storj is paid for those hosting data, BAT distributed by Brave as a reward for those willing to receive privacy-protecting ads).
You could argue that the tokens themselves are not needed and that we could do it with cash, but that would be missing the point: such systems could not work on a worldwide scale as easily as they work now, and the speculation is a desired property of the system. Most people are getting into the network not because of the $5/month they get from seeing ads, but because of the possibility of the received tokens going up in value. At the same time, the people who do want to sell their tokens and get cash can do so.
I am not. I am describing the absolute vast majority of cases on Uniswap.
> Speculation in markets are always going to exist. We have people making a living by speculating on the price of commodities, forex, company stock and event insurance policies.
Yes, but you're effusing that currency speculation and flash loans (majority of Uniswap) is this some new grand thing that never existed before. Reality disagrees.
> such systems could not work on a worldwide scale as easily as they work now
Forex was (and probably still is) a huge global market. I know because my friends spent a lot of time on it in early 2000s. Global market works easily, and at scale. For much longer and at much larger scale than anything crypto maximalists can even dream of.
> Most people are getting into the network not because of the $5/month they get from seeing ads, but because of the possibility of the received tokens going up in value.
Yup. Pure speculation. You're pretending it's something new, novel, and hasn't ever existed before.
At no point I said that what makes Uniswap (or crypto in general) valuable is the speculation in itself. The value of crypto is in the ability of doing things permissionlessly.
The value of Uniswap is not to that it is "better" than Forex. The value of Uniswap is that it lets people exchange value permissionlessly.
The value of ENS is not that it is "better" than the ICANN. The value of ENS is that it lets people control a stable, unique, global identity permissionlessly.
The value of crypto payment networks is not that it is "better" than Visa. The value of crypto payment networks is that it lets people make transactions around the world permissionlessly.
The value of Storj
> my friends spent a lot of time on (Forex) in early 2000s.
After jumping through all the required hoops, putting together minimum deposit requirements, passing KYC to show their legal standing with who-knows how many financial authorities... but what about those people who wanted to do Forex, but failed to pass any type of requirement? What about, e.g, people in Argentina who are forced to buy and sell dollars at the totally artificial rate imposed by the government?
> Global market works easily, and at scale.
If it works for you, great! Plenty of people who don't have the same luck.
> For much longer and at much larger scale than anything crypto maximalists can even dream of.
Nice strawman you got here. Where in this conversation was there any type of "maximalist" proclamation?
Tokens are also fully programmable, and that enables a number of primitives that are not possible with stock certificates or grain contracts. For one, they can easily be held within a multisig smart contract wallet, governed by configurable rules for spending (in an M-of-N scheme). This makes it frictionless to set up a small group or organization on the internet even if the participants are in 7 different countries. This helps to coordinate human and financial capital, because rules can be programmed in the DAO or multisig to prevent one person from stealing all the funds. Since everything is on-chain, everything is above the board. Very difficult to arrange this with traditional corporate checking accounts, and even then, one executive ultimately controls the account.
Those two alone would be huge and worth it for humanity, but I listed more on that list and I'm running out of time for a reply. But I invite you to analyze the products yourself. Try them on testnets for free if you like.
"Rules can be programmed (in esoteric programming languages using new made up terms for everything)" and frictionless in one sentence. Smh.
With a multisig smart contract wallet (https://gnosis-safe.io/), it's frictionless to setup a simple smart contract for holding the treasury and for enacting M-of-N rules on any expenditures from that multisig. This may be a 3 of 5 signature requirement or even a 5 of 5 signature requirement. It's fully programmable. So when starting a Web3 project, it's possible to jump into a partnership with a group and be productive without having to worry as much about establishing trust, navigating five different jurisdictions for employment agreements, or centralizing control in a single person.
In addition, far more elaborate org structures are possible, and there exist plenty of tooling for making those happen without even needing to know how to code (https://juicebox.money/, https://daohaus.club/).
Solidity is not all that esoteric. It's similar in syntax to JavaScript, but it's statically typed. There are also widely recognized and audited open source code bases to build off of (https://www.openzeppelin.com/contracts). And tons of developer tooling (https://docs.ethers.io/v5/, https://wagmi.sh/), along with countless resources on the web.
This is sufficiently rare that "traditional" finance hasn't come up with a product for that. Or maybe it has, but it's just as obscure as Gnosis.
> It's fully programmable.
You keep saying this as if this was a desirable quality.
> Solidity is not all that esoteric. It's similar in syntax to JavaScript
It doesn't make it not esoteric. It doesn't make it Javascript.
It's its own language with its own idiosyncrasies, its own lingo, its own terminology (so much of the terminology in the crypto space is just absolutely random bullshit people came up on the spot for things that already exist in the language).
There are no tools, no way to debug, no way to revert a deployment, no way to upgrade a "contract" etc.
And it's so bad that repeated audits and bug hunts routinely fail to find issues in the code of even the simplest contracts.
Traditional finance doesn't have an answer for this. It's not rare at all. I personally work with people from Argentina, Denmark, Canada, Serbia, Croatia, Australia and Hong Kong. It's very common to work in a fully distributed online manner, using chat products to communicate. It's very easy to meet people in online hackathons, on Discord servers, on gaming platforms, etc these days, from all over the world.
Yes, programmability is always superior to non-programmability, as it is a superset of non-programmability. After all, you could always encode whatever non-configurable properties you wanted as part of the ruleset for the contract or asset.
> It doesn't make it not esoteric. There are no tools, no way to debug, no way to revert a deployment, no way to upgrade a "contract" etc.
At this point Solidity is 7 years old. There are more than 200K developers that have learned it (50K from ETHGlobal hackathons alone: https://ethglobal.com/), 20K stars on Github, 44 million smart contracts have been deployed to ETH mainnet, 60K people watched Devcon Colombia vids a couple weeks ago (6K attended in person), 20K attended ETHDenver earlier this year, etc.
There's tons of tools: Hardhat (https://hardhat.org/) - for JS based task running, deployment, testing, debugging, etc. Even deploys a local chain or allows you to fork a copy of mainnet locally to test against.
Foundry (https://getfoundry.sh/) - if you want to run your build/test/debug tool-chain in Solidity
WAGMI (https://wagmi.sh/) - Robust React hooks for client-side interactions with smart contracts
Ethers.js (https://docs.ethers.io/v5/) - Client side lib for interacting with Solidity primitives like 256 bit numbers
Block Explorers like https://etherscan.io/ or https://beaconcha.in/
In the pareto distribution of smart contracts, the most consequential contracts get the most eyeballs, and after they've been deployed for years without hacks, in spite of holding billions in user funds, you can be reasonably assured of their security. If not, I invite you to use your superior powers of analysis to find a bug in:
Uniswap V3: https://github.com/Uniswap/v3-core (Currently open $2.2M bug bounty plus additional $3M reward for the Universal Router and Permit2 contracts https://uniswap.org/bug-bounty)
Or Aave V3: https://docs.aave.com/developers/deployed-contracts/security..., which has been audited by ABDK, OpenZeppelin, Trail of Bits, Peckshield, and SigmaPrime (up to $250K for critical bugs: https://github.com/aave/bug-bounty).
Also, see: https://docs.openzeppelin.com/learn/upgrading-smart-contract... about upgrading smart contracts. Not always desirable, but of course, entirely possible, thanks to the proxy pattern. There's also the alternative of doing "migrations" by wrapping an asset in another contract.
As every good old pyramid scheme, the crypto ecosystem needs you to believe that investing time and money has merits. That's how the few at the top benefit from the whole scheme.
Because I love financial products that help me retain my earned money, and am avid about getting the best deals. Right now I have 0$ transactions, 3.75% actual guaranteed returns on cash (not a 50% chance of being worth $0 by next year a la FTX, genesis, blockfi, etc.), 3% cash back on transactions that cost a business 2.5%, and would love a cheaper HELOC than traditional banks. However, none of anything you mentioned actually does any of this better, the things that 99.8% people actually want, rather than speculative "investments" they're hoping to sell for more later.
What's that YC slogan again? "Make something people want."
What does this reference?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Ethereum offers a way to step outside of it and is creating a decentralized, deflationary money.
Deflationary money means "whoever got in early and got the most money is going to be ultra-rich forever, unlike the poor sods who get in years/generations from now"
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
If you think about it when you turn on a money printer, those closest to it (elites, the well connected) are going to catch most of it.
Which graphs? I wasn't talking about 1971 or the largely US-specific chart of not compensating people.
I'm talking about deflationary currency. With a deflationary currency people who got in early and got the larger part of the pie will for ever be ultra rich, and get richer.
Because the money you get now will only increase in value over time. So you got in early and got a single coin X for something. Congrats, you're nearly infinitely richer than, say, your grand kids who'll be getting fractions of a percent of that coin for that same something.
ETH is also inflationary… Both of your provided charts show large currency issuance and only very slight recent drawdowns.
As I expected; a whole bunch of buzz words and given the chance to produce a single real example, no actual use case for the 99.8% consumer.
Heartbleed, Shellshock, Log4Shell, Spectre... there are plenty of examples of serious flaws found in software far more mature than these smart contracts. Audits and testing only confirm the presence of bugs, not their absence.
"cash-like" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
Only Monero and Grin have any real expectation of privacy. Chain analysis is pretty mature, and the records exist forever.
and consumers cant get enough of them and will shoulder costs of interacting with them
the most irrelevant part of this equation is debating why consumers are spending money on developer’s internet vending machines
its a market with demand, the market is telling you what to do for half a decade and yet
Every cloud platform has a free tier that can probably handle the entirety of crypto, and then some.
A Raspberry Pi is a more efficient platform that realistically competes with "web3"
nobody cares about the technical feasibility of running a blockchain, development routinely requires local deployments
Yup. In a response to "Even if we pretend for a moment that there was some merit to the 'web3 smart contract', by now it should be painfully clear to anyone involved that this is a technological dead end."
Of course there's no better platform than "web3" for developers who do the "web3" stuff. "Windows is the best platform to develop apps for Windows".
However. As a platform web3 is a failure. And for developers literally everything outside crypto is a better platform. For users, too.
Recognizing that makes you way better of a developer and entrepreneur than the 10x coder hunting for exploits and bug bounties, where making money is the goal
Cheaper than what?
That's the beauty of vague unverifiable statements like "for developers, there is no platform that realistically competes with 'web3 smart contract'." For any counter example you can always say "that's not what I meant"
> Recognizing that makes you way better of a developer and entrepreneur than the 10x coder hunting for exploits and bug bounties, where making money is the goal
Was this sentence written by ChatGPT?
the closest I can think of is Firebase or AWS Lambda (or similar compute instance) with some kind of rudimentary database or shoehorned in variable storage. these all charge by number of executions, bandwidth and storage, even geographic location
smart contract deployments would be cheaper than that, via a one time cost for the developer, and have unlimited use. it is also convenient and valuable that the smart contract cannot be deplatformed
I don't really see Firebase or AWS or other compute instances competing on any of these fronts, but if you know of a counterpoint I would love to check out their pricing and usage page
smart contracts are read for free and are read just as much as any api or application, whereas reading from my API that's doing nothing would still start charging me, the developer, and not be as cheap and using bare metal I have hosted somewhere or locally would have high maintenance or performance problems just reading and sending responses at the level necessary
writing is paid for by the consumers, but again here I agree that this level of activity would fit in the free tiers of cloud services