All of the examples of having to trust the government in this article neglect the fact that trusting the government is not just trusting the government, and it’s not just the government storing a deed or giving you a Social Security Number that makes it real. It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively decided to run society by these rules. Your recourse when somebody runs afoul of these rules is the courts, which you may feel free to criticize, but pretending they don’t exist is just silly.
Democracy solves the Byzantine agreement problem just fine already. I like the aspects of decentralisation that help you preserve democracy, but beyond that it’s not necessary to replace every single aspect of a functioning democracy with a cryptographic commitment scheme. It would be worse if you did. That vision of society sounds terrible.
(I can’t comment on this without noting that of all the interpretations of the name web3 I’ve seen so far, “a cryptographic commitment scheme” is the least novel idea, and the least to do with “the web” or anything related to it that I have seen. There is simply no way that is what web3 means. The author is describing smart contracts, and if that’s what it is, it is intellectually dishonest to be promoting “web3” as a new idea when smart contracts have been around for years and have had very little impact on society due to fundamental limitations like “not being capable of adjudication by a court, which is actually desirable and basically non-negotiable for 99% of people and corporations alike”. Talk about whether attempting to put better UX in front of them (a much more plausible definition of web3) is capable of remedying the basic flaws. Otherwise talking about it like this is a dishonest attempt to skirt around the debate that’s largely been had already, much like Facebook rebranding itself just as the PR heat got too much.)
> Democracy solves the Byzantine agreement problem just fine already.
That’s nice when you and your counterparty are part of the same democracy, or potentially allied ones. But how do you enforce contracts when your government and their government are at war?
(The governments say “you shouldn’t; they’re the enemy.” Well, screw the governments, I want to make positive-sum trades in the hopes of increasing global GDP and ratcheting us up out of the need for wars over unevenly-distributed scarce resources in the first place.)
All the speculative value of cryptocurrencies is based on their utility in making and fulfilling the terms of contracts, when a government or governments don’t want to — or fundamentally aren’t able to — grant that contract any legal enforceability.
And much of the rest of the value derives from the ability of Proof-of-Work mining to be used to convert local export-controlled assets into exportable digital assets. (The whole reason PoW has stuck around as long as it has is that capital flight in China still needs it for a few years yet.)
In the thought experiment of a true anarchy, how do you ultimately enforce the off-chain part of a transaction? If BTC is traded for goods or services, how do you enforce that the goods and services have been sufficiently provided?
In OP article the interfacing with real world is solved by some group voting.
In the real world, when disagreements arise, we have voting + due process + a hierarchy of courts. It could be argued that due process is an essential part of finding justice.
Baking due process into a smart contract is, although extremely interesting, probably impossible.
Great, but take the example in the article. I roll in with my heavies and at gun point force enough of you to vote that the contract was complete even if it wasn't. You can't engineer people away and when you try you've undoubtedly missed something.
But if you were just going to rob them at gunpoint, why did you need the smart contact?
Smart contacts exists so that you don't need the heavies nor the guns, you can just exploit a "bug" in the contract and run off with the cash, preferably without anyone knowing who you even are.
This boils down to the basic problem of a ruleset.
It's nice when everyone abides by the same ruleset. But there will always be individuals that will behave outside of it.
Like, we can all play capitalism and try to outcompete each other, but eventually there's going to be someone that just abandons that ruleset and murders all competitors.
Smart contracts are just a better ruleset, still not enough.
If your argument is that decentralized ledger technologies cannot in their current state or perhaps ever entirely replace governments then I guess any reasonable person will just have to give that to you. And I doubt as many "crypto evangelicals" would actually argue with you on this.
Right; distributed smart contracts complement legal systems, like a road network complements a rail network.
Of course, that’s just the simple, “immutable logic” kind of smart contracts. The “updatable policy” kind of smart contracts are really just a way to encode and implement a legal system. (See: the regulation model in security tokens.)
I also think people complement smart contracts. The difficulty of building smart contracts makes me think people and human processes will be the glue that binds many of them together.
Presuming this is a fancy sci-fi kind of anarchy: multi-sig escrow wallet requiring a 2-of-3 quorum of oracle triggers from observation cubesats owned by both parties plus some disinterested third party.
(People are already doing the virtual equivalent for prediction markets: everyone who cares runs their own oracle agent to forward result data from web2 sources into web3. You “just” need computer vision + good optics to bring that paradigm into the physical world.)
Zero Knowledge Contingent Payments are one approach. Encoding everything that you might want to buy as an input to a ZKP system is a stretch, obviously. But at least, that's the spirit of this philosophy.
My thinking is that if the blockchain has sufficiently high fees and sufficiently high computational cost, then people have an incentive not to try to game it. That includes off-chain.
It leads to the question of what is the real purpose and utility of a distributed blockchain? If the blockchain can willy-nilly be gamed and won't be enforced, why have it?
If that’s what you want web3 for, I’m actually quite happy for you to record your treachery on a public ledger. There is a reason the government doesn’t want you to do it, and that’s that sanctions are one of the only reasonable deterrents to war that we have. I can’t believe you would advocate for interfering with that on a public forum, in 2021 when western democracies are already struggling to make economic sanctions hurt because the autocrats are all in cahoots. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/the-aut...
You’re assuming I’m talking about selling things to North Korea, or arms dealing, or something; but in the multilateral case, I’m actually talking about enabling trade in situations where arbitration of otherwise-legal contracts is impractical due to enforcement of contracts requiring ongoing positive relations (e.g. for mutual extradition) which have lapsed, or requiring the crossing of a DMZ — leaving parties on either side in a legal “state of nature”, free to screw one-another over with no consequences.
There were no economic sanctions imposed between East and West Germany; but making a contract with someone on the other side of the wall was still impractical, due to lack of diplomatic relations. Smart contracts solve that problem.
Other angles on this: the regular financial system in the Western world doesn’t let anyone transfer fiat currency to countries like Nigeria “for your protection”, even if you’re literally trying to run payroll for the registered employees of your Nigerian subsidiary company. (In other words, a de-facto trade embargo, but not a legal one, and not one to do with a any war.)
The only good way to do that payroll at this point is to send them crypto.
But your argument also justifies selling arms to North Korea. After all, it's a positive-sum transaction that increases global GDP?
The flaw is that a transaction isn't positive-sum just because you and your trade partner are both happy. Your transaction may well incur negative externalities that outweigh the total profit enjoyed by you and your partner. For example, the world is much worse off if you sell a button-that-destroys-America to North Korea, even though you and North Korea are both pleased at the arrangement.
I don't want to put activity out of the reach of governments. Governments are the organ by which we decide what is and isn't acceptable behavior. If our governments are behaving unreasonably, the solution is to fix them, not to pursue anarchy.
While I think the stated use case is bizarre and useless, I will note that economic sanctions are almost universally bad, used to hurt the populace of countries like Iran, North Korea, Cuba and others without doing anything to hurt the ruling elites. That said, the problem with such sanctions and trade embargoes is usually the flow of goods, which Bitcoin does less than nothing to solve of course.
I agree, but as we speak Russia has amassed 150k+ troops on the Ukrainian border and Putin is waiting to see whether the West can apply enough sanctions to make the whole effort a net loss before he gives the green light on an invasion.
I'm not sure economic sanctions are the solution here. More likely, a positive deal and various security promises for Russia (e.g. no more NATO exercises for a mock invasion of Russia, or simply more commerce) will probably do a lot more to ease tensions. As long as NATO and Russia continue to behave as enemies, Russia will continue to see Ukraine as a necessary buffer at its borders, and seek to make it a vassal state, to the detriment of everyone...
Edit to add: avoid phrases like "the West", it's very "Us and Them", it's much better to be explicit: is this about NATO? The US and its closest allies? The EU?
But why do I have to care about that? Due to the overreach of US policies even companies in countries which don't have sanctions against Russia have to worry about the efficiency and performance of payments going towards Russia. SEPA and ACH may be marginally performant but SWIFT is incredibly expensive, which is the only option you have for international transfers that doesn't depend on an American monopoly of power.
Do you just not care about anybody else in the world? We live in a society.
I am surprised at the political ideas on display in this thread. This isn’t even under the comment in which I described the influence of “techno-libertarian anarcho-capitalism” on the crypto community! If you are not part of a western democracy, of course you do not have to care, but if you are, then you should. (Moreover if you think war is bad, like that other commenter agreed before wondering how to erase the effect of sanction deterrents, you should also care.)
>Do you just not care about anybody else in the world
Sure I do, however I also get to choose who I care about, and it definitely doesn't include people who make policies which are extraterritorially enforced on me.
>If you are not part of a western democracy, of course you do not have to care
What do you do when a "Western" "democracy" enforces their laws on you and all remaining solutions point you to services that are beholden to a "Western" "democracy".
They’re not extraterritorially enforced unless you’re talking about a blockade, so unless you’re a Cuban or Puerto Rican, you can’t complain. Most sanctions are just one nation deciding it prefers to lose your business than to lose its security agreements with its allies. If you find yourself unable to make a cross border deal, it’s because your country was unable to negotiate it with another. I have no intrinsic right to do business with anyone in the world as I see fit. Neither do you. I’m just okay with that because there are bigger goals than my own.
> What do you do when a "Western" "democracy" enforces their laws on you and all remaining solutions point you to services that are beholden to a "Western" "democracy".
Correct the aberrant behavior that caused your nation to get kicked out of the global trade system, or move to a nation that hasn't gone rogue. That's what the sanctions are meant to encourage. Bypassing the sanctions with clever math is just going to get the clever math outlawed; exerting international pressure to keep countries in line is far more important than your coinbase account.
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances refers to three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary on 5 December 1994 to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
As a result, between 1994 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons. Until then, Ukraine had the world's third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile
If the US convinced Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons with the promise they would help fend off an invasion, and then proceeds to not help fend off an invasion, what do you think happens the next time the US asks a country to give up their nukes?
>The governments say “you shouldn’t; they’re the enemy.” Well, screw the governments, I want to make positive-sum trades in the hopes of increasing global GDP and ratcheting us up out of the need for wars over unevenly-distributed scarce resources in the first place.
That's a real nice justification for war profiteering ya got there. I don't think it'll convince too many people though...
You miss something, imagine a world where crypto is finally used to pay for services. How do you enforce that when you give an advance to your house builder so that he can start building and contracting out and paying his own people by the hours, that he wont build you something that eventually crumbles as soon as you open the door?
Who enforces THAT ? Who care about decentralising, we need to centralize violent enforcement or people will just scam each other. The problem in China is this one, not that they're not crypto-dumb dumb enough :s
In that case, you could enforce that some of the paid amount is locked and release over time so as to provide an incentive to build something not totally fucked up.
> Well, screw the governments, I want to make positive-sum trades
You and what army? And I’m not even being facetious, you’d probably need an army to go against your government and economically aid an enemy like this. And therein lies your answer for who will enforce these contracts: those with the most capability for force.
> That’s nice when you and your counterparty are part of the same democracy, or potentially allied ones. But how do you enforce contracts when your government and their government are at war?
You should look into actual historical examples here!
I'd also add that one of the big fallacies/deceits of blockchain is that it does not allow trustless transactions as the article author suggests, it simply shifts the trust. In the author's example of gathering funds to renovate a neighbourhood park, you'd still need to trust that the contract developers hadn't made a unfixable bug or deliberate backdoor, you'd still have to trust your neighbours to not screw up when interacting with the smart contract, you'd still need to trust the blockchain platform because if your funds are lost or stolen transactions are by design irreversable and you have no recourse to the law, etc. In pretty much every case, you would be better off without the additional complexity, risks and points of failure of a blockchain solution.
What this is really about is that the cryptocurrency enthusiasts distrust authority. They would rather put their trust in anonymous developers, shady mining cartels, exchanges which clearly engage in front running and wash trading, cryptocurrency scheme leaders who are convicted fraudsters, etc. If people genuinely want to put their trust in the less trustworthy, even if for no other reason than trying to get rich quickly, then we have a fundamental problem with our society.
Great example. I would add here a problem that blockchain solution does not solve and I might say it even makes it hard to fix (but I might be wrong as I don't work with blockchain so maybe I am missing something):
This Smart contract about fixing the park is a virtual thing. But if someones does this kind of job then in real life there is usually someone else who will accept and sign that the work was done accordingly with the requirements.
First, I don't understand how this works.
If everybody in the neighborhood needs to accept the work and sign it then I think it will be very difficult to be a contractor. Because you are suddently at the mercy of all residents to accept the work which is a nightmare as everybody could have a small things to change.
Let's say the residents there will delegate the acceptance to one single person. This case gets more interesting. What if the persone they delegate this acceptance is corrupted and will sign and accept the work but after 2 months the work will break. How do the residents recovery the loss? Will they go to the _centralised_ court? Will they go to the _centralised_ state to help them?
And here goes the problem: what if the crypto dream gets implemented globally so no central authority. What then?
This is another intractable problem with blockchain and cryptocurrencies, known as "the oracle problem" - in order to do something useful in the real world, it has to interact with the real world in some way. There are various schemes to try to offer solutions for automatable processes, but when human decision-making is involved data still has to come from humans who are "off-chain", i.e. have no direct link with the blockchain or cryptocurrency platform.
> What this is really about is that the cryptocurrency enthusiasts distrust authority.
I really think you hit the nail on the head with this statement. There are often so many hidden assumptions in anything that authorities by definition are bad. I believe the whole blockchain/crypto/web3 movement is more an idealogy than a solution to a problem.
But wouldn't you first look up that developers prior work history on the blockchain? I'd just ask what they've deployed in the past and could then easily verify if they are skilled or a bad actor. As for the funds being stolen I think we're just at the beginning of crypto custody services. It's like in the eighteen hundreds saying banks are a bad idea because they get robbed all the time.
“Just ask” and “easily verify” are carrying a lot of water in your comment. Ask who? Verify how? How would someone with no programming experience do it, how long would it take them, and would it be a good use of their time vs. the old-fashioned way?
There are countless cases of anonymous developers spending several years building positive reputations on Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub etc. before disappearing with >$10M USD of other people's cryptocurrency. Whether they set out to perform a long con, or whether the opportunity makes them thieves, is irrelevant - you simply can't trust anonymous people to look after your money.
True, but there's value in reducing the number of parties you must trust to get something done. It's easy to imagine that, at the margin, there are a subset of collective action problems that will get solved if you can reduce the number of parties that must be trusted. Worrying about the need to sue 3 people has to be better than worrying about the need to sue 6.
If that were the case, then decentralization would be the explicit opposite: instead of trusting a central party you've got N machines owned by M parties involved, most of whom you couldn't take to court if you wanted if a "smart contract" was misinvoked or a blockchain transaction was screwed up. Sure, most chains require attacks to be 51% or more collusion, but if a 51% attack happened, how many third parties did you trust that you probably can't sue? Millions of machines with thousands of owners? That is by far the opposite of "trust as few parties as possible".
Also, it's important to realize the core reason why people trust the government with these things. It's because the government has the ability to actually _enforce_ the contracts if required.
I mean, having a deed of owning some property on the blockchain is all cool and dandy. Provided that the polity where the property is located recognizes this. Otherwise you're still trespassing.
I think the sweet spot for some blockchain use cases is where contract enforcement doesn't work well. It's really hard to seek redress for diffuse, low-grade breach. A 10 million people with one dollar in damages are less likely to be made whole than 1 person with 10 million in damages. And contract enforcement often fails in insolvency. Try enforcing a how warranty against a builder that's gone bankrupt.
> Try enforcing a [home] warranty against a builder that's gone bankrupt.
As someone who has been through this exact thing, it sucks, but it is possible in the current court systems. Courts have complicated "Discovery" processes explicitly for this reason: to find out not just the immediate problem (a bankrupt builder or a builder who would be bankrupt by the end of the court case), but the supply lines (what other warranties apply?) and the creditors (where is the bankrupt company's money going?).
A human run court is allowed to state "this bankruptcy looks fishy for this reason, and these people are owed damages, and some of the money that moved on already to these creditors is by rights should be paid for damages to these people". It's definitely not fun to be involved in such court proceedings, and it is and likely always be an inefficient human process, but it is a process as a society we've built to be mostly very trustworthy. A jury of peers to decide if damages are warranted in the first place; a human judge with reasoning to say "this shell company is bankrupt, but these other companies can and should pay, maybe with the money they took from this shell company" or "this shell company is bankrupt but some of this still applies to the warranty insurance product they purchased and the insurance provider needs to pay up even though their client is bankrupt".
It doesn't always work right/decide in your favor, and it is slow and expensive, but "smart contracts" offer no better and often a lot worse processes. A "smart contract" can't route around a shell company/wallet. A "smart contract" likely can't discover that other warranties may have applied or other insurance products existed (and if it can it's in a programming class all its own and likely a one off you can't expect to exist in general or to work if you need to actually rely on it).
The example in the article had a way to enforce contract breaking - the person had to put up collateral until the work was done.
There’s problems with that particular mechanism, but in general if contracts can automatically decrease someone’s money, reputation, access etc, they can do enforcement.
So, let's say I pay you 200 ETH and get an NFT signifying ownership of a flat in downtown Kinshasa. I fly to Kinshasa, find the key as you have described, start living in the flat. A year later as I come home I find that the key has been changed and someone else has moved in. They present a purchase agreement, as well as a deed.
Exactly, the whole web3 blockchain movement seems to assume these contracts are legally binding in real world. For that to happen the same 'untrustworthy' government authority will have to trust the decentralized contracts on internet.
All these schemes always still might need some higher authority in the end e.g. who decides when the work is done? Putting up collateral only ensures that someone has the money, it does not ensure that one actually gets the money. Because defining when "the work" is done, can be really complicated in real life projects. Contracts in real life are complicated. Real life is messy etc.
I’d imagine they would, kind of like the levels of arbitrators and courts today.
The article said the neighbours first vote that work is done. Most of the time that could work. But it also mentions the neighbours could collude to steal the collateral. In that case courts could get involved and force money be returned etc.
I’m very far from a legal expert, but smart contracts seem like a potentially useful tool, within the current system. Not as a complete replacement.
Aave has $11 billion deposited on it right now and safety of those funds depend completely on getting accurate price data to trigger liquidations. So you can say that the oracle problem is solved, at least for price data.
Getting data in isn’t the big issue though, and we’ve had market data streams since forever. I’m talking about the example above, where a smart contract would need some way of knowing when to flip the “Bob has satisfactorily finished community refurbishment” flag. This would require an abundance of interoperable data sources for bizzare things. Where do I subscribe to the count(dogshit_pile_in_the_playground) stream, and who or what is publishing to it in a trust-less manner?
Getting all the data in the world into the blockchain and coding smart contracts to infer judgement from it would be too complex and expensive.
A more practical approach is to transfer the funds to Bob once he clicks on the checkbox and have some lock-up period, so that Alice has the opportunity to trigger a dispute if she needs to.
Then the dispute can be resolved by a private court (composed of humans) that both Alice and Bob agreed on beforehand. See: https://kleros.io
Ok, but this isn’t purely a smart contract anymore. You’re describing a typical escrow (running on a blockchain, because ______) with human judges, conceptually identical to what goes on behind the scenes at EBay. What necessitates a blockchain here?
No, it's running completely on smart contracts. You get the regular advantages of running on blockchain: permissionless and trustless access to finance.
You don't have to trust the escrow holder, you don't have to worry about getting banned from Ebay.
The human judges/arbitrators aren’t, and they’re what’s critical. The contract cannot be sensibly completed without their input.
So you have an escrow system where human judges need to supply critical information. I’m left having to trust the human judges, unsurprisingly. Running this basic escrow code on the blockchain means that I no longer have to trust the kind of basic escrow code that’s used in centralised escrows. My question now is whether the escrow code of centralised providers (if condition then funds.release()) is really so unreliable that I’ll get get tonnes of benefit using blockchain escrows. Whenever there’s controversy over escrows, it comes down to the arbitration, which as you admitted would still be performed by humans.
> Running this basic escrow code on the blockchain means that I no longer have to trust the kind of basic escrow code that’s used in centralised escrows
Yes, it means that you will 100% know that the escrow website is not gambling your money away, that it won't out of the blue ask you to supply more documents when it finally comes the time for you to get paid, it means that the escrow won't get hacked and your PII won't be sold on darknet.
Smart contracts are just a simpler and more transparent way to deal with finance.
> He can work for Alice or anyone else in the world
what's stopping him now?
> without having to deal with intermediaries and bureaucracy.
you mean laws?
edit: immagine this situation, Bob does the job, the other party never clicks on "done", Bob doesn't get the money, what Bob can do if there's no intermediary and/or bureaucracy protecting him?
Laws are not ideal and are often used to discriminate against certain groups.
> immagine this situation, Bob does the job, the other party never clicks on "done", Bob doesn't get the money, what Bob can do if there's no intermediary and/or bureaucracy protecting him?
As I said, there is a period of funds lock-up. In the worst case, Bob has to wait some time until the smart contract sends him his payment.
> Laws are not ideal and are often used to discriminate against certain groups
and your virtual ideology is better, how?
since nobody can enforce anything.
> As I said, there is a period of funds lock-up. In the worst case, Bob has to wait some time until the smart contract sends him his payment.
What if they payment is never sent and "some time" is forever?
You need laws after all (AKA a solution outside of the chain, or a deus ex machina if you want)
If I was Bob I would not see this thing you're talking about like a great advancement and would continue doing my job like I do it now.
I mean, I get you watched a lot of fiction and wanna feel like living as an outlaw, but even outlaws have laws and follow some of them.
You are trading mid to low trust in your local community for zero trust to some entity you'll never know, who'll never know you, couldn't care less about you and respecting the terms of some virtual contract and pretend we all should do the same.
Do you understand that this is the exact definition of "out of touch"?
how does this solve the issue of authoritarian governments?
> You have no idea how smart contracts work, do you?
I was writing smart contracts in solidity in 2015
at least it was something new back then...
but back on topic, what if they payment is never sent and "some time" is forever?
can you tell me what tools can the poor Bob use to claim what is legitimately his in your perrmissionless world?
how would you encode the "work completed" in a smart contract?
should nodes run by people in the Philipines vote on Bob's work, when Bob lives in Yowa and only wanted to be paid for keeping the gardens in his neighborhood clean (as per job description)?
I was talking about Kleros at the beginning of the discussion, but it's just one possible option.
>You can only hire someone for a job if you have the money.
No, you can only hire someone for a job using this specific method if you have the money beforehand. This means that Bob can be 100% sure that his employer is capable of paying him.
>In reality many people hire someone for a job and thanks to their help they'll have the money to repay them in the future.
There can be other smart contracts which allow this. The cool thing about them is that Bob is always fully aware whether his employer has the funds to pay him or it's just an IOU.
>But what if Alice disappeared because she's dead, and Bob id the one who killed her?
This is outside of our threat model. We're designing a smart contract for employing a freelancer, not high value SC where murder would be economically viable. If Bob murders Alice this is handled the same way as any other murder.
>You're avoiding the answer, and I understand you, it's hard to come with an answer when your design have bugs.
I'm not avoiding an answer, I gave you it clear and straight.
>If Alice dies Bob get his money.
Correct.
>There no way to stop it from happening.
>What if Bob is a minor or the employer is a minor?
>That would make the contract void in real life.
Depends on jurisdiction.
>Should people publish their personal info on the public blockchain so that the smart contract can exclude them from proposing or accepting a job?
They can do whatever they want.
>And how do you check that the informations are correct?
Idk. I wasn't proposing putting public info on the blockchain, it's your problem.
>What if Bob is an immigrant running from a regime and has no way to prove who he is, but needs the job to survive?
Bob would be delighted to know that he can interact with a permissionless network that does not require an ID and get paid for his work without revealing his identity.
>you'd need to basically recreate what government do today, without the enforcement of the law capability.
Nope.
>who would trust a system like that, except outlaws and scammers?
People who like efficiency and don't like intermediaries.
So I have to trust the other party they will report in good faith on my delivered work. How is that trust working for Amazon product reviews? Why would be that net of lies any different for smart contracts?
>but in general if contracts can automatically decrease someone’s money, reputation, access etc, they can do enforcement.
No, they cannot. They can reduce these values, but that by itself doesn't enforce anything in the real world. If the entitiy doesn't care about these values (for example because it was a fake account/identity/whatever) then the only enforcement can come from outside.
That's why the word "force" is in "enforcement". States work because, among other things, they ultimately have a monopoly on the application of force.
Do we really think everyone has money for collateral? Small businesses and individual people are already struggling with money, where will they get the collateral?
Reminds me of some of the newer blockchains e.g. I think Binance Smart Chain works like this.
They don't use PoW or PoS. Instead they run on centralized servers like traditional databases. Only, they run on 10 or 20 or 50 centralized servers run by different people and processing the same input and cross-checking each other. Anybody who has money on the chain can stake it to vote for one of the servers (so I guess it is PoS really). Although anyone can connect to the chain and process input, the N servers with the highest stake-votes are the ones that actually count. Also the server owner has to put up some crazy collateral (currently in the realm of $500,000 I think, this is determined by market mechanisms, it used to be lower) and if they are caught cheating they lose it, a process called "slashing". Even having your server go down can cause you to lose some collateral. Conversely you earn collateral while it is up (like in PoS).
So it's really a lot like a traditional database cluster with an enforcement mechanism, and that enforcement mechanism makes all the difference unless your attacker has millions of dollars to waste.
No they can't, how could they? How is actionable events in the real world going to be translated without trust to a smart contract except by assessment by a third party?
succinctly said. all these web3 / crypto folks forget complex laws exist to prevent and remedy situations that can't be simply solved by smart contracts. most of the laws are so complex, we've professionals who specialise in them.
I've come to the acceptance that lawyers are to the legal system as software engineers are to technical systems. You pay people who specialize in knowing the ins and outs of a complex system so you can get on with your life as a citizen, founder, etc.
And people who espouse that we don't need laws or lawyers to run our society are making about as coherent sense as saying we can ship a unicorn entirely on no-code and without engineers. It's in the realm of possibilities, maybe, but it will be a house of cards ready to implode unless this mantra is, at best, sheepishly abandoned half way through the endeavor.
The trouble is that the systems are broken. The level of gatekeeping and lack of informed consent have made the legal system a mess. The lawyers are the ones writing the laws... for the benefit of the lawyers and the people with the highest bids.
In a fair system, sure, but the American financial legal system is bonkers. There's a reason people are looking for alternatives.
Stated like this it comes across like a software rewrite, with all its inherent fallacies: underestimating the effort, misjudging the complexity of the original system and comparing known to unknown outcomes.
That's not to say it's inherently a bad idea, rewrites are sometimes useful but you need to acknowledge those factors.
And the biggest one: anyone that undertakes it should be an expert in the existing system. Otherwise you're just the junior dev coming in and suggesting a rewrite in the language you know best.
It also sounds a lot like lawyers arguing that cybersecurity is broken, so you should replace part of your dev team with a new type of contract and some lawyers to enforce it
(I'd say this does't actually happen because lawyers aren't that daft, but then I remember really long EULAs with really silly clauses...)
People need to stop using software analogies for everything.
It does not work for something like laws. You can't just go and change something the following month because you realized there's an edge case you forgot. All that constant churn will just erode the public's faith in the system.
The solution to a broken system is not to replace it with another equally broken system. It is to replace it with a better one. The argument from people who are skeptical of the entire premise of smart contracts is that it looks to them like a worse not better system.
I am a software engineer. I know full well what it takes to design a well functioning software system. I also know that software tends to ossify processes. Anyone who has ever tried to work against the software of another business knows how straight jacketed that can get. Putting these together my only reasonable conclusion is that smart contracts look like a terrible idea and I would never in a million years trust one.
I think your comment, and the one you responded to, are both correct. If our legal/governing system was able to adapt more quickly and keep up with the pace of modern technological advances, we would all be better off. The challenge is, how?
> There's a reason people are looking for alternatives
But is this true?
some people have always looked for alternatives throughout history, but very few of them have become popular, most of them were a failure and a bunch of them completely destroyed societies, sometimes for centuries.
I might be completely wrong, but in my eyes the crypto-optimism looks like reverse luddism.
The laws are mostly fine. The process of getting justice when someone has broken them is the bigger problem. Unfortunately solving the problem of access to cheap and efficient justice is just not that glamorous. There’s not enough money in it, so let’s start again from scratch right?
Not to mention techno-libertarian anarcho-capitalism is the ideological driving force behind many decentralisation efforts (hello Bitcoin), which is kinda at odds with improving justice. Many people in the space actively wish to be outside the law. Those are the people who started looking for alternatives, everyone else will parrot any old extreme ideology like “get rid of courts” for a sweet well-paying gig.
I think there's also a substantial subset of cases that are simple/common/clear enough to have managed through an automated contract, and being able to cut out the cost of depending on the legal system would be game-changing for many people/projects/etc.
So it seems like a good complement, not a replacement.
Fair point :) I was admittedly thinking of more DIY scenarios, but it isn't really fair to only consider how it impacts programmers.
OTOH—without knowing many concrete details myself—seems like there would be plenty of room for reuse of contracts? Maybe even something like a storefront where you can grab one that matches your scenario
As open source successes start to accumulate, the costs will go down. Reuse is incentivized as development on the cryptocurrency as opposed to a perpetually monetized rent extraction by regulators or "professionals."
As open source successes start to accumulate, the costs will go down.
That hasn't happened in any other area of open source. Linux is supported by billion dollar companies with hundreds-of-millions in revenue. Container software is supported by tech giants. Browsers are the same. Web frameworks are either from corporations or they're built by people who are sponsored to build them. Most successful open source projects have revenue streams from outside the project paying people to work on them. I'd even suggest that might be a requirement for a successful project. As the project grows and gains popularity the costs of running it go up massively.
In the case of all of those projects the usefulness and utility of the projects also goes up, so people are able to make money with them that pays for the developers, and that could happen for web3 tech. I'm not suggesting web3 won't go the same way, just that economies of scale don't rrally work for software development. The more popular a software project gets the more it costs to run, forever.
I don't think they are talking about the cost of running an open source project. They are talking about the cost of creating and deploying a robust application. In that sense the cost has absolutely gone down. It's trivial to create a web application today in a way that would have been incredibly costly 20 years ago.
You don't have to pull a Paul Graham and invent a the concept of a web application for the first time. You can piggyback on decades of development and open source software and frameworks and libraries. One developer and create and deploy an application in a weekend that would take a team of engineers months to build 2000.
Yes, this exactly. Billion dollar companies contribute to open source because the model is a net economic driver. I can tap into decades long and billions of dollars of man hours of effort to offer systems admin consultation and earn a living deploying and managing open source software for people, or incorporate that into almost any business, or participate in hackathons that riff on the bleeding edge of ai or security or art. The only barrier to entry is ability and willingness to learn, and things like moocs and YouTube and Khan Academy have expanded the "open source" ethos into almost every real world endeavor.
Crypto is a nascent space that similarly enables people to bypass all the gatekeeping and institutional cruft in finance. It just turns out that a lot of the gatekeeping in finance is structurally important and intentional, so it may be a couple decades before any particular cryptocurrency is comparably robust and secure as well trusted fiat currencies like the usd or euro. A trustless and mature financial system that doesn't have the pitfalls of credit bureaus and arbitrary government policy chaos, that opens up microloans and honest banking for literally anyone, that gives opportunity to invest and trade and participate even at low levels of wealth - those are socially good things, in my view.
Legacy code (aka the American legal system) is routinely despised by those new to the problem space. Most experienced programmers will know that the (new to them) code isn’t all flaws, despite its initial appearance - there are a myriad of embedded edge cases and branches that at first blush seem like cruft, but in reality are the result of learning from various failure modes.
As with any complex rewrite I suspect we are doomed to rediscover the rationale for the original design. Hopefully it will end up meaningfully better, and not a Digg 3.0.
Governments constantly break the contracts they sign.
Take a look at the Maastricht Treaty and what it says about government debt in the European union. The government broke this treaty that was the basis for the union in the first place.
You say "Your recourse when somebody runs afoul of these rules is the courts". For an individual this is not a practical approach. An individual has no way to get back financial stability and to undo the excessive government debt and inflation.
The individual who held Euros throughout this process now holds way less buying power than someone who kept their assets out of the reach of governments.
Never forgetting the gold standard, that was just scandalous, against their own folk and allies. Not even against enemies, opinion or whatever geopolitical thing... not much margin here for flexible moral. They just do with us whatever they want, and forcing inflation onto the population is just as closed as evil an economy can be against the general interest of the whole population.
This is an ideological position. In reality, economies need money printing, although it comes with its own problems, must be carefully controlled, and since 1971 we have not yet learned the correct way to control it.
All of the examples of having to trust the whole complex of laws and regulations and people that you mention neglect the fact that crypto doesn't rid you of them: the technology may be willing, but you're still a citizen bound by them, and your use of crypto can be regulated; just like how the technology of paper currency allows it to be transferred from anyone to anyone, but laws exist that make mugging someone else for their paper notes criminal.
>It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively decided to run society by these rules.
Don't forget the whole violent kidnapping thing your fellow citizens let governments do. The mythology of laws running society is cute but laws are made real by constant threats of violence and caging.
To someone with a hammer, every problem is a nail. Web3 seems like it's primarily a horde of crypto-maxis running around hitting every damn thing with a smart contract, and see what sticks.
This is, arguably, going to be better than violently caging people, in some circumstances.
I take the GF comment to be maybe virtue-signally, but mostly pointing out that our legacy law system has an awwwwwful lot of people in jail. Maybe that jail-shaped hammer is not as useful as you think it is?
What is the virtue that I am signaling? Is the ability to have objective opinions outside of the socio-cultural mythology a virtue?
To give another perspective on my "the current legal system exclusively works via the use of force" argument, look how effective the legal system is against banks, Google, Facebook, etc where use of forceful caging is not applied.
What virtue am I signalling? Are objective observations about how the world and society functions considered some kind of virtue now?
I was responding to the argument that "courts" and "fellow citizens" make the legal system work, when in fact courts are just proxies for use of force. Use of force makes the legal system work, everything else around it is just the cushy stories about law, order and justice we cooked up for ourselves to collectively agree with.
And this is in stark contrast to how a contract running on the Ethereum VM gets enforced.
I am certainly not suggesting we should implement laws against violence like the murderers you mention on a blockchain. I am talking about laws governing financial transactions, companies, and other economic related activities between nonviolent but nonetheless potentially fraudulent actors.
what other enforcement mechanism do you suggest? The smart contract method call where Alice murders Bob should not validate unless signed by Bob's private key?
Are you argumenting in good faith that somehow I said that violent crimes should be solved by mathematics?
I said that the legal system works not because of it's complexities or how authoritative the costumes of law enforcement or judges look, but exclusively by the threat of having your liberty taken away from you.
Violent offenders should still be dealt with violence.
But voting? Public policy? Public spending tracking? Economic activity between two private entities? There is no longer need for the threat of a central authority with a monopoly on violence to ensure the proper functioning of those things. Satoshi showed we can have decentralized proof of trust.
Law is like a border after a war: a description of where it was that conflicting forces could not advance without retreating somewhere else that mattered more. It is history, not code: it describes where the last conflict ended.
Actually, you or your parents took action to apply for a SSN. No requirement to be American and have the mark. Once you take the mark, it is nearly impossible to undo it.
Right, but the government is not just some unaccountable third party that sits between you and the rest of society. It is meant to embody the society, and, in a democracy, represent its interests effectively.
Yes in theory. In practice, justice is expensive to procure even when you're in the right, and sometimes even then you can lose just by being out-monied.
This leads to a more nuanced view of web3 and smart contracts: a way to acquire law-like order in business dealings at a vastly lower cost. Or put yet another way, if lawyers and the government got their act together and used technology to reduce the cost of their services (and actually passed on those savings) then smart contracts would never have been a thing.
So like, if you don't deliver those shipping containers of hot sauce, I just click the "I was scammed" checkbox on my smart contract dashboard?
Where exactly does the leverage of smart contracts come into play?
The biggest reason libertarianism is a nonstarter is that it outright rejects the state monopoly on violence. Without a lone arbiter, societies fragment due to intragroup competition and violence. As a society fragments, the size of the monolithic projects it can engage in become smaller and smaller.
International trade is already so fragile that a stuck tanker threatens swaths of the entire thing. Now picture how infinitely improbable a system like that is if there's no physical enforcement mechanisms backing contracts up.
Your comment gave me a neat idea that maybe smart contracts could be used for calculating blame and penalties in long supply chains. Vendor A promises to deliver the widget to Shipping Company B on a certain date who promises to deliver it on another date - but only if Vendor A receives the parts from Vendor X - but only if Vendor X receives the raw materials from Vendor Y - etc. That kind of transparency could be really interesting
I think you hit the nail on the head. In my experience, if both parties are happy payment isn't really a problem anyway. Trouble always comes up when there is disagreement e.g. buyer claims that the hot sauce is not spicy enough and the seller says it's exactly as spicy as ordered. Now what?
You take the issue to a crypto court which controls the escrowed funds.
If the crypto court makes an unfair ruling, you tell everyone to never trust their judgement. Now they’ve lost credibility and nobody will want to escrow funds with them in the future.
Whichever court provides the most consistent fair rulings attains the best reputation and becomes the most utilized.
By contrast, if government courts make an unfair ruling, they’re still going to be in business tomorrow and there’s nobody that can stop their monopoly on broken justice.
Some people might argue that their western country has a fair justice system and that everyone should be glad to be subject to that system.
That argument would be overly generous to even the most fair countries, and completely falls flat in the many countries where corruption is rampant.
This sounds awfully naive. I have a very small company that sometimes deals with large corporations. Large corporations already want to push a jurisdiction onto you in their contracts. Usually the jurisdiction of where they are headquartered, which makes sense because they have lawyers that are allowed to work at those courts and know how to deal with that specific jurisdiction. So now you want them to be able to choose some big-corp-friendly-private-crypto-court? Sorry, no thank you. In a world where everyone has exactly the same power this scheme might work, but I would hate to have to negotiate with big clients which crypto court to choose.
It's hard to imagine any system that would solve 100% of disputes accurately, but at least having a free market of reputation-based dispute resolution providers gives you more options and attempts to weed out corrupt justice.
The thing I don't understand about all of the cryptocurrency negativity on HN is nobody's forcing anyone to use decentralized products, but the naysayers seem to insist that everyone needs to continue use existing centralized solutions even if they're not happy with them. What's so bad about letting the nerds LARP amongst themselves even if you don't want to participate?
Imagine a court that consistently rules in favour of a richer party. Imagine that the richer party is not THAT interested in doing business with you, so they can tell you to take it or leave it. How do you think it will work?
Next steps would be that they create another decentralized smart legal judiciary system to enforce and handle breach of smart contracts. And a supreme chain with Elon & Chamath on the bench.
To clarify, from my understanding, in a libertarian society, individuals and groups would be able to hire armed mercenary groups a la private security forces, but with presumably less regulation. That's what I mean by "monopoly on violence", eg only the ruling government has the right to use violence to enforce contracts.
It represents the lowest common denominator of what everyone can agree on. Democracies have problems when that denominator gets really low, but are relatively great when it is high
Yeah. I’m not saying it’s perfect, there may actually be some limited use for blockchain technology, but casting it as an alternative to the modern liberal state beggars belief.
I don't think many people are suggesting that the blockchain can replace all of the functions of the nation-state. I think the most common sentiment among blockchain advocates is actually closer to your views, of it having utiltiy in specific use-cases.
The government, and all of its institutions, are indeed a third party.
The government is not some representative of the collective will. Thomas Sowell provides his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 as a poignant demonstration of the fallacy of that notion: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38
Another example would be the latest $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It was 1,500 pages long and no legislator read even an appreciable fraction of it. There were provisions in it that the public was discovering a week before it was voted on, like one threatening to classify cryptocurrency nodes as brokers with KYC requirements for any transaction they processed.
The difficulty of parsing a 1500 page infrastructure bill isn't exactly reduceed by expressing each of its provisions and exceptions in a Turing complete programming language though...
1500 pages to govern 330 million people. Was there ever a time in history when an individual understood all the laws of a country?
The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system. The fourth and fifth estates need to play precisely this role, of parsing and communicating the actions of government and business.
Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice. Every segment of society decouples from accountability to any other: individuals hide from governments, governments hide from the press, business hides from government...
What exactly is the argument that you think would make that a worthwhile future to pursue?
One government should not be governing at such a micro-level for 330 million people. It's absurd and in practice becomes totally corrupt and undemocratic.
>>The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system
Being discovered a week before the vote meant that there was no time for all those affected to study its effects, let alone to negotiate an amendment for it, and furthermore, that it came within a hair's breadth of NOT being discovered.
Other very worrying provisions were only discovered after the law's passing.
>>Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice.
Crypto systems are opt in. The government mandates are violently enforced on those who would prefer to opt out. This sophomoric socialist argument that private enterprise is fascist is totally shallow.
I think this is kind of a misconception about how unitary the unitary state really is. Which is especially weird coming from America with its zillion decentralized police forces. The government is not necessarily a single entity that behaves with one purpose, that's what allows concepts like an independent judiciary to exist.
People keep saying 'trustless', without realizing the upsetting and very real truth that no mechanism is trustless. Even if you can, if well informed, verify the cryptographic integrity of any communication or data, you are also relying on and trusting the device, UI, and OS that you're using (+myriad stacks, libs, protocols). You are relying on every single medium between you and whatever it is that's verifiable. Let's not kid ourselves. There is no 'trustless'. We just end up assigning the burden of trust to other things. Unless you've built every element from transister upwards, then you're assigning trust. If we implemented, e.g., blockchain based democracy you can bet your bottom dollar that vulnerabilities will be found and utilized.
I guess when people say `trustless`, it means that they don't have to trust every single elements of the chain between you and your target: if any steps of the chain acting untruthfully, it would be detected by other steps thanks to the protocol they're using.
Of course, with enough failures in the link, anything can be compromised.
But how do you know who is holding the phone/keyboard? If my phone is stolen and someone then sells my house and drains my bank accounts, how can I prove it was not me?
The whole thing is built on sand.
Suggesting that it is all verifiable etc is fine and dandy, but that is risky as the onus of proof falls to the victim. It is a bit like when Chip+Pin first came in for the UK way back when - there was this suggestion by the banks that fraud was now impossible, and the only possible way for the card to be used was by you the account holder as you are the only person that knows your pin is 1234.
Obviously that was bullshit and they have softened their line since, but I worry that we'd just go through this all over again "You are the only person who has your private key! It must have been you that sold your house to someone in Nigeria for $1! It is in the blockchain now - it is irreversible there is nothing we can do. Case closed!" ... ignoring all of the possible ways we can imagine in just 30 seconds for how someone could access your computer/phone without your permission.
Hasty conclusion, but I am glad you put a traditional banking system to the same standard.
Beneath all incumbent banking processes and redundancies, money and value is a bearer instrument. If someone takes it, it is their's (with some extra steps for reintegration back into the economy necessary, sometimes). Redundancies have been built on top of it to improve that user experience.
Crypto assets have accomplished the bearer level. The commodity raw resource that people then built value transfer on top of, and then credit-velocity based money, and then banking systems compatible with that. In the crypto-asset sector, additional private businesses and sector wide redundancies will be built to improve that user experience. They have been built and many compete directly with each other, if you find them laughably inadequate then congratulations, you've identified a market need. Obviously the conclusion that it is fundamentally and irreconcilably flawed and 'built on sand' won't necessarily motivate you to fulfill the market need, but others are motivated by it.
Just wondering: is it objectively better to rely on a complex technical cryptographic chain rather than a person or entity with representatives someone who you can drag over a counter if necessary?
Maybe it's a bit of a marketing sleight-of-hand, but the difference is the nature of what you trust. Authority, tradition, laws, that kind of everyday thing, or math, cryptography, algorithms?
I won't get into the weeds of whether you can actually trust math, just pointing out that this is what crypto proponents seem to mean when they say trustless.
Isn't the first question we should answer more whether math, cryptography and algorithms can actually replace authority, tradition and laws? I personally have my doubts.
In order to answer that we need to know what math, cryptography and algorithms can do and the cryptocurrency movement is doing a great job of exploring that space.
Also, since we're in the weeds, you can ask yourself why you believe in math. Did someone tell you that Public Key cryptography works, or did you verify it yourself? I've read through a lot of crypto code, and in the end I can't say I really understand the details. I can point at the readings, but really, do I actually get what a pairing group is? Chances are I'm relying on authority.
> what if the neighbors collude and vote that you failed to improve the park despite having done what was specified. The contract could further specify that some neutral third party acts as an arbiter in that case.
If there's anything that shows that Web3.0, smart contracts and so on are a bad solution in search of a non-existent problem, it's this.
The ``problem'' is apparently that we don't trust each other and our institutions. The ``solution'' is to create a protocol for trust-less commitments. The bug is that the protocol ultimately relies on the fact that we trust each other and our institutions.
Can Web. 3.0 remove some friction from the system? Maybe. Enough to revolutionize it? Highly doubt it.
I think the bigger problem (which the example conveniently sidesteps) is that smart contracts don’t involve people. They involve _wallets_. I can have as many wallets as I want. Unless there is some external (centralized, trusted) unique identity mechanism, there’s no way to ensure the vote isn’t rigged. It also means that I could make a smart contract where I’m on all sides of the contract (e.g. say I’m trying to pump the market value of park-improvement projects…).
Outside of “a few neighbors who all know/trust each other and the public key for each other’s wallets” example, this all falls apart.
I've been to some HOA meetings. I think it's more likely that there's no consensus than that people agree that the park was improved. Even if the organizer did their best and spent a thousand bucks on supplies. There's no way to "make everyone whole again". Or maybe a majority of neighbors just aren't good people and realize they can get a nice park and their money back just by voting "no" as a bloc. All the fancy number theory hasn't really achieved anything.
The solution of course is to use a collection of oracles that report the state of the park to the blockchain. You would need to use enough oracles to be sure they aren't just your neighbors running them or being manipulated by your neighbors.
I'm only half joking. This example is a bad use case and web3 isn't going to replace literally every aspect of society.
It also assumes that neutral third party (should we call them judges, or jurors?) would act in good faith. What's stopping them from rolling with the majority? And how exactly is the problem of trust solved by trusting a third party? It would be laughable if it wasn't a straight faced affirmation. The "radically new" proposal is basically to recreate the old structures, just with new web3 labels. Is there a reason this would work better, only because it's proposed by software folk instead of politician folk? Or is it better only because it's proposed by "my gang"?
I think you're right that Web3 won't come close to displacing existing last-resort dispute handlers (courts, laws, etc). But it's dangerous to overlook the revolution lurking in "remove some friction from the system."
Uber removes some friction from hailing a taxi.
AirBnB removes some friction from finding a room to rent.
The internet removes some friction from sending messages.
Web3 (blockchain or not... the important feature is decentralisation) enables choice of governance - you can pick the "neutral third party". This destroys the governance monopoly and creates a marketplace.
But government laws and regulations still have precedence over smart contracts or blockchain transactions. “But it’s written in the smart contract” is not a valid excuse for breaking the law of the country you reside in, and will be thrown out in any court. So instead of replacing one governance system with another, you’ve create a second, subservient system that is overruled by the first, have you not?
That’s the part I’ve never understood. Sure, you could use a blockchain that is anonymous to try and avoid scrutiny and legal trouble, but at that point you’re basically just a criminal.
Yep yep. Your points are all valid and true, as far as I can see.
I think it would be interesting of governments started using this tech (Blockchain, smart contracts, etc) to improve existing systems. To me, I can see this tech being used to improve infrastructure in a lot of public services (library cards, driver license registry, etc)
Estonia has been doing that. I bet there is something that other countries can learn about what works and what doesn't
But is there any case where you'd actually trust a pile of blockchains more than an existing trust mechanism (whether that's neighbourliness, contract law, or something else)? If you're not a programmer, getting a programmer to review your smart contract probably costs more than getting a lawyer to review your regular contract. If you are a programmer, you probably know better than to rely on some code being bug-free.
Even if you trust the programmer, and even if he is competent he might still miss a very complex edge case ... and since there is no court / jury to take a human decision, you can be totally screwed.
Even worse (better?) no sane programmer is going to sign a real-world contract guaranteeing the code is bug-free, and if you trust the wrong programmer to work on your complex blockchain program they might put in a sufficiently complex exploitable code path, and be first in line to (anonymously) exploit it.
With millions of dollars being stolen from various smart contracts every other week... No, I don't trust those programmers.
Designing hash/crypto functions is a very different story than implementing contracts. You would need to know basically 0 of the math that would be needed to implement a hash function.
You don't have to trust a single developer if you pay multiple independent reviewers though. If you paid a bonus for finding problems you could even incentivize their honesty.
It feels like The United States unofficial 0th amendment is the enshrined concept of getting off on a technicality. It comes with the territory with a written constitution.
OJ, sexual relations with that woman, Capone’s unpaid parking tickets, hanging chads… or anything heard by the Supreme Circus.
A huge part of the legal system, or at least the part that goes to trial, is exploiting the equivalent of bugs in the legal code.
Respectfully disagree -- these examples are mostly how the system is supposed to work to protect the rights of the individual.
OJ was found not guilty by a jury of his peers who felt there was reasonable doubt to his guilt. Sure, to the vast majority of us, he obviously did it and skated, but I'd guess there are 100 or 1000 non-publicized cases of an innocent person getting railroaded for every OJ.
Clinton paid a massive political price for his weasel language and related evasions, and some people think that price included Gore's loss of the Presidency in 2000.
Capone was brought down for unpaid taxes, not parking tickets, and that was as a result of a federal task force brought about following years of incredible gangland violence in Chicago.
Have you ever heard of a better use case for clamped down functional languages? The only issue with crypto right now is how infantile it is - that's what most critiques boil down to (especially on this site). Any long term speculator is happy to see it, so long as they see the same problems the forever skeptics see but with a dash of optimism rather than arrogance.
Ah, the solution to all of mankind's problems is so simple, really. (Where have we heard that one before?) Technology can solve all problems in human society, just be optimistic! Also, you'll get rich quick.
You can't ever be 100% certain - even if you analysed the smart contract completely correctly, there's always the possibility of an ethereum-style hard fork to change what your contract means. So you have to ask how confident you can actually be in whichever style of contract in practice.
I'm tired of circular web3 discussions. All I see is people arguing for "but, maybe you shouldn't trust the government, maybe you should trust some math that works like a government in this limited scope".
All I see is markets which sidestep all the rules enforced by governments to keep them fair (which prevent things like trading with yourself to create fake transactions), and none of the "park renovation" or "enabling trade for people in oppressed regimes" hypothetical examples. Whatever crypto claimed as values they are not actually being used in practice. The only things it visibly succeeded at were enabling ponzi schemes, enabling dark web trade, making lives easier for ransomware, and using a ton of electricity.
I can't buy that web3 will deliver on any value it claims based on the monumental screw-up that industry did with cryptocoins. Especially when all values are hypothetical, and deal with abstract things like "trust".
More than 2 billions of people live in authoritarian regimes where the government rules exist only to oppress the population and make it more easily controlled. Bitcoin gives them the option to maintain their property rights, avoid financial surveillance and money controls. Saying that crypto is only used for ponzi schemes is simply false and disingenuous.
I think ToR is the worst example you can use. Good in theory? Yes. In practice it is pedophile and drug honeypot with exit nodes run my the government with limited legitimate actual people using it.
> Once submitted, that “contract” will be carried out exactly as specified. It is observable to everyone, debuggable, and non-falsifiable.
But a centralized database can also achieve this, right? The premise of the general public trusting a blockchain more than an established, centralized 3rd party (e.g. government) seems so feeble.
Exactly. Case in point: GitHub. We trust it to provide consensus on the latest hashes that branches point to, and if you use signed commits, then you don't even have to trust it to ensure integrity. The identity used to sign is completely controlled by you, and you can easily move to a self-hosted solution if GitHub loses your trust. Distributed consensus mechanisms are not worth it if you just design your system to (a) be auditable and independently verifiable (b) support identities controlled by the users.
If I understood Web3 correctly, it would be exactly like traditional web, except that:
* The source code of all websites would be open-source, and accessible to anyone. It could still be changed, but it could not be done secretly.
* All the actions of the users of the websites would be public.
If we take social forums, for example Hacker News, it would mean that:
* The algorithm behind the front page of social forums would be known. Administrators would have no way of secretly skewing it.
* When a moderator would delete a message, they would merely mark them as deleted in the blockchain, and they would merely be hidden in the UI that you use to see the blockchain. The message would still be accessible on the blockchain.
The biggest downside, though, is that there would be a fee to any action done on the website (posting, moderation actions, changing your profile, ...).
The other biggest downside is that anyone else can just copy your website and profit off it.
I already have a pretty hard time with SEO spammers rephrasing the content I live from and passing it as their own. I can't imagine people lifting the entire website and making a permanent copy of it, profiting from 4 years of my work.
That's for a 100% free website with no "secret sauce" besides hard work. I can imagine any other website might want to hold their cards even closer.
Then there's also the site owners being held responsible for hosting illegal content, and being powerless to delete it.
Even if they aren't powerless to delete it, they'd still have to pay to delete it. I wouldn't be surprised if someone finds a way to blackmail site owners with that, forcing them to pay out the nose to remove content they didn't even create.
I think a platform like this is as impractical as you are thinking. However, there are potential other things you can do by mixing centralized services with decentralized ones. You could create a forum like hackernews that utilizes traditional infra but restricts access to users that hold NFTs or something similar. Think of something like a Patreon type deal where access to the service is tokenized. I've been kinda thinking of stuff I could do with a NFT project I've been working on and it's a thought I've been bouncing around.
There's no way I'd want to create something that is similar to what you're thinking, because it's pointless as you are thinking. Nobody would pay for this. Also messages such as these have no reason to be on an immutable blockchain. But you can certainly create specialized services for people that support your projects using ideas like this quite seemlessly.
I’d also put the moderators and administrators having no way of skewing things as a negative. They do lots of good things for the community like removing flags on topics, merging topics and reupping topics that are interesting for a second chance. It’s a good demonstration that pure algorithmic feeds still need gardening.
And the fee thing is why none of this will work in practice so it’s a really big negative. Who on Earth wants to be nickel and dimed across the Internet for really over expensive compute and storage?
All those moderator actions you described would still be possible in web3. Moderators would still be able to up a topic, merge a topic, delete topics, ...
But:
* The fact that the moderators have access to these mechanisms would be known by all users
* The use of these mechanisms by moderators would be public. If a topic is upped by a moderator, it would be logged in the blockchain. No moderator would be able to do it secretly.
Regarding the fee, it's true that it's a big downside. To get a feasible use case, the devs would need to find a blockchain that reduces them.
Or they could just publish a log of actions, this isn’t such priceless information that we couldn’t just rely on trust like we already do in the current situation that seems to work well.
You're providing a solution that doesn't fit the initial requirement of a system being trust-less. So, indeed, your solution works, but as you described, it requires trust in the administrators of the website. The idea of web3 is that you wouldn't. "Trust but verify", if you want.
This could be used for Facebook or Reddit (given that they solve or attenuate the issue of fees), where people might have less trust in the administrators.
I'm just saying that HN has no need to be trustless. I don't see the value of that as a user.
For stuff at the scale of Facebook and Reddit you'd also probably end up needing caching as the chains would be too slow so you end up needing a layer of trust anyway.
A blockchain is essentially an Event Sourced system. And Right To Be Forgotton is a common issue in all event sourced systems.
Several technical and one non technical solution are common:
Encrypt events with per actor keys. Delete the key when user wants to be forgotton. Or encrypt just certain attributes in the same way.
Keep actual data outside of events but only include a link to the data and checksum of the data.
Avoid storing PII in the first place. Does your ___domain model really require an IPaddress or First Name?
All have tradeoffs, none are silver bullets. But it is a solved problem in Event Sourcing, so it is a solved problem with blockchains (if only new programmers new this and reused patters instead of continually reinventing them)
> Or, wait, you're going to centrally store these keys?
No necessarily. Three alternatives are common:
Data is encrypted with a key only the actor owns. Works for cases where that actor is the only one who should access it (I Reveal My Attributes type of schemes)
Data is encrypted with a sum (combination) of the key from an actor plus some other actors have: only you and the recipient can decrypt. Works for cases like messaging or p2p data exchange.
Data is encrypted with a OR of the key from an actor plus one by a trusted proxy: proxy and actor have ability to decrypt. This is closest the "centrally" storing. With the difference that "proxy" allows for a little more flexibity -in theory-.
The blockchain is decentralised though so you can't do things like per actor encryption that can be deleted AFAIK. It requires a separate, mutable source of data.
Similarly storing all the data off the blockchain just means you didn’t need a blockchain.
A lot of government databases are publicly accessible.
For example, in Austria we have the "Grundbuch", a register of land ownership. Everyone can inspect the Grundbuch database. Authenticity is guaranteed by requiring a public notary or a court to confirm any changes in the database, and there is a paper trail for every change to a record.
It's boring old tech, but it works, and doesn't have all the gotchas of blockchains.
The system is optimized for security, preventing fraud is more important than throughput in this case. Registering something in the Grundbuch is fast enough for property transactions.
Transaction fees are high by design. They are a form of tax on property transactions that discourages short term investments.
The system works very well and I just don't think it needs fixing.
> The system works very well and I just don't think it needs fixing.
For the few use-cases that match it, yes.
The name Grundbuch itself puts a limit on its use, but we can imagine that there are many situations that call for the same amount of protection and trust, but which require a far higher throughput.
Back when Grundbuch was set up, ground and estate was probably the most valuable asset peopel can own. Today we have stocks, bonds, contracts, savings, companies, art, private-keys, hell; even cars, that are worth a multiple of a typical meadow in the Austrian hills.
Many of these classes cannot use the a system like Grundbuch because its fees are too high or its throughput too low. No-one wants to pay upwards of €600 just to sell some AAPL stock. No insurance company wants to drive to a notary for each contract they sign and then pay €600 upwards.
I'm not trying to say that blockchain is a solution for all these cases (It isn't). I'm saying that the system is limiting, problematic and unfit for many cases. That therefore, this system is unfit for the majority of cases that would need them 2021 (but for one specific case it works).
Well not exactly. The blockchain is distributed and you effectively can’t modify it (let’s not get into 51% attacks etc)
A centralised database is controlled and modifiable by the owner - government, private company or whoever. They will act on their best interest not yours.
I don’t personally have a problem with government having my dat although they’re usually useless at implementing technology, but a decentralised blockchain would be way more trustworthy than private companies..
Blockchain is not necessarily "distributed", in the sense that multiple competing parties have a copy of it. As an example, hyperledger fabric is commonly used as a "private" blockchain.
Also, it is trivial to implement the same verification mechanisms in traditional databases, without the performance penalties of "blockchain", and transforming them in immutable, append-only storage systems that can't be tampered transparently. A good example of this is google trillian, the backend used by Certificate Transparency implementations.
A centralized database is not observable by default. It’s usually not directly connected to the internet accessible by anyone.
Databases as they’re usually designed today are updated in-place so they have no provenance of the data.
Blockchain data one written will exist in the history and cannot be changed. Unless specifically designed this way centralized db doesn’t work this way.
This is hardly true. It's easy to keep a history of query logs, which is enough to figure out 90% of data lineage. The rest 10% probably correspond to operations not even runnable on a blockchain.
I can mock a web3 application by opening a database to the entire internet. All edits logs will be visible, although edits will be access controlled. Now I'll claim this is observable. Some people would probably complain. But how in the world is the general public going to complain?
I still think it could be potentially useful to, with a centralized database, use a similar kind of authentication scheme, in a way that allows for succinct demonstrations of any kinds of rule violations (compared to the rules that were set), as well as efficient to check proofs that state changes are in accordance with the rules which were set.
(I wonder if a network of such centralized DBs run by different parties might be enough to produce incentives among the different DB owners to behave in accordance to rules which they initially publish for themselves, etc. )
Feeble in what sense? Even absent blockchains, I only trust the people running the government in so far our incentives are aligned, and they aren't all that aligned at the moment.
Perhaps alternative structures of implementing governments should be explored.
A centralized database can't achieve being public without putting trust in a third party (and no Web3 developer seem to eminently trust the government) to verify the double spend problem, otherwise blockchain is just a database. Non-falsiability can be verified through cryptography, yet we have no centralized but non-falsiable database system ready to use.
Well, you mention double-spend problem, that is a very narrow scope of applicability for a centralized database.
There is a huge public, cryptographically secure, append-only, verifiable centralized database (in fact, they are several), used by Certificate Transparency. Spoiler alert: Its a sparse merkle tree in MySQL.
"Seems feeble?" You can go on about implementation details, UX flaws, problems with the state of crypto today - but what's been mathematically obvious since Bitcoin's inception is that the right ledger is both permanent and open enough to disregard issues of trust (you could say it has infinite trust, which is an exaggeration, but in a practical sense this is how its used without blemish), and that governments and central parties are easily corruptible and capable of cheating in ways so as to never get caught or noticed.
You either know very little about cryptography and game theory or very little about government to be asserting such doubt. Crypto-currencies have many problems, but finding ones where trust can be taken for granted is trivial.
Nice read.
What I don't get about all the crypto haters, who will probably make up the majority of replies here, are they really just happy with the status quo? Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying? That usernames and passwords given to each of a million different companies are so great, why would people want to manage their own information?
I get it, it's hard to see past the memes and bubbles and bullshit and buzzwords in the crypto industry. But there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea of self-sovereignty at the core to all this stuff. You dictate the terms of your data and your money and your stuff to an ultimate degree.
As a crypto skeptic, which I think is not fairly categorized as "hater," I think you're painting this in far too black and white terms.[1] "The current financial system is not great" and "cryptocurrency is not great" are not mutually exclusive propositions, right?
> ...there is a very real, very powerful, politically agnostic idea...
There's very little about the way cryptocurrency and NFTs and even blockchains as a concept are presented that seems politically agnostic; "you shouldn't have to trust anything or anyone in order to complete a transaction" is not a conventionally partisan position, but when you're applying it to government institutions, surely it's political.
[1]: I would say this happens a lot with crypto-adjacent technologies -- sometimes it seems like the only two acceptable opinions are "this will revolutionize literally everything, how can you not see it" and "this will destroy the entire world, how can you not see it" -- but I think it happens a lot with everything right now. That's a different rant, though.
I think the problem is that blockchain tech has moved far away from the original Bitcoin white paper at this point. The original was a cypherpunk wet dream which was indeed a system for financial transactions resistant to government manipulation/interference. The current strain of NFTs and other junk coins have pushed the tech into a scammy world that has developed an increasingly worse reputation and adds little value.
I think it's very easy for people to categorize you as "hater" because it makes their argument much easier, no need to argue with "haters" and just easily build a strawman to fight.
> As a crypto skeptic, which I think is not fairly categorized as "hater," I think you're painting this in far too black and white terms.[1] "The current financial system is not great" and "cryptocurrency is not great" are not mutually exclusive propositions, right?
They are not mutually exclusive. However often retorts to Web3 or DeFi are along the line of "I can receive my salary for free" or "I can send a bank transfer for low fees and it settles in 24 hours" - the implication being, why do we need anything else this is fine. My question to those who roughly hold this position (whether they be haters, skeptics, curious, critical) would be, if we can agree that generically technology is improving many elements of our modern life, isn't it sensible that we should also be trying out new technologies for finance and banking? Banking and credit cards have largely stayed the same for decades, shouldn't we be innovating here? Regardless of whether you consider Web3 to be innovative or not, isn't it better that people are trying other ways to improve?
> There's very little about the way cryptocurrency and NFTs and even blockchains as a concept are presented that seems politically agnostic; "you shouldn't have to trust anything or anyone in order to complete a transaction" is not a conventionally partisan position, but when you're applying it to government institutions, surely it's political.
There's a line of argument that basically everything is political. But that's often kind of a pointless statement. I would say that Web3 is non-political in the sense that, if you have a credibly neutral trustless global operating system, secured by validators around the world and used by users around the world, this environment is apolitical. It's not Western, Chinese, Russian, no one is gate kept from interacting with it. It is open for all, transparent and unable to be censored. Having you're Paypal account locked because you're from Iran feels intuitively political in a way that the system I described above does not.
You are pretending things like Revolut, Venmo, Zelle etc. do not exist.
They are centralized but solve most things an avg. person dislikes about their bank services.
So, one bank and 2 transfer services with patchy compatibility? I disagree.
My bitcoin wallet isn't looking to trap me in a cycle of debt[1] if I run low on money; most banks are. My bitcoin wallet is auditable down to first mathematical principles, and will never steal my identity[2], create accounts in my name without my knowledge[3], etc. Nobody can cancel my access to my wallet because I said something politically incorrect[4] or because I tripped some opaque anti-fraud system.[5]
Banks are, as institutions normal people are expected to deal with at least, inherently exploitative and lack accountability.
I’m not sure about patchy. I transferred money about 10 times this year and all the recipients wanted Zelle.
All of your other criticisms are valid, but also exist in a system where you trust your wallet with a third party service. the majority of Americans would use a bank like service that manages their key instead of managing it themselves.
You also ignore the other risks that crypto introduces. Like losing your key, password, your exchange gets seized, your exchange just straight up steals your money, or having a 1 character bug in a smartcontract.
All of those failure cases you mention have mitigations. Dealing with banks? Not so much.
And I'd go so far as to call what the majority of Americans prefer wrt. key management a result of inertia due to a few centuries of having always done it that way. That's not necessarily surprising, a lot of this is new and doesn't have a good "real world" analogue to tie back to.
I’m not satisfied by the standard quo and want something better. But the current state of trustless web3 is not it.
My bank account is great. If I die there are clear procedures for getting my assets to my spouse. Even if I forget my account number or my password, my lifetime of earnings does not simply disappear. This can’t happen in crypto unless I trust a third party, in which case just using a bank in US dollars is much safer as there are actual laws and insurance covering it.
There are middle grounds here. Sovereignty, like security, is not binary, it's a spectrum.
You could use a scheme where two of three signatures allow transactions : you, your 'bank' and a notary. Or have such schemes for anything above a value. Or allow transactions by and to a list of whitelisted addresses after a certain date or event (such as a missed canary).
> You could use a scheme where two of three signatures allow transactions
So now social engineering hits and someone convinces my ‘bank’ and notary to allow the transaction to a third party. Now my life savings are gone forever.
In my real bank (no quotes) you have regulation. Banks are liable for fraud. Blockchains aren’t.
Now you could have pre assigned addresses that the notary and bank are allowed to transfer to, but now you have to think about edge cases. Every time i update my will I have to hire a blockchain engineer to update my smart contract and then hire another firm to audit it for errors so a bug doesn’t drain my account. Huge headache and much more expensive compared to the status quo.
> Or allow transactions by and to a list of whitelisted addresses after a certain date or event (such as a missed canary).
whats triggering the canary? How can I trust that it will be accurate?
Also, my spouse can change or die. If my spouse and I died at the same time and my parent’s should get the money if they are still alive. now what happens? You have to map out hundreds of edge cases, like every permutation of my relatives wallets. Then I have to trust that the blockchain can tell these people are alive.
Current California State law takes all of that into account. It handles the edge cases in a way that code does not. Probate court is expensive but its better than everything going to zero.
You are dismissing the examples for being too simple. They are simple because they are examples.
My point is not that these three examples "solve all issues we have with Authority/Govt/BigFinance". Nor to prove that "Bitcoin Fixes this".
My point is to show that crypto-currencies, by design, are programmable, and this allows a lot of use cases to move from Authority/Govt/BigFinance to DIY.
Not all cases, not everywhere, not for everyone. But in a spectrum.
To clarify with your refutations:
> Now my life savings are gone forever.
Which is why you probably want "your life savings" in a secure, goverened, trusted environment. For many people Blockchain or DIY is out of the question for "my life savings". But that leaves a giant spectrum of other use-cases. From checking accounts to saving-for-a-friends-present. Use your imagination.
> Then I have to trust that the blockchain can tell these people are alive
You are dismissing a giant set of use-cases on one that will, indeed, probably never work.
I never mentioned that this the ultimate and only replacement for Deed. I deliberately did not, because I think this is a bad use-case for Blockchain for the reasons you mention and much more.
But this could be a "here's some money for when you turn 18" or "bonuses for managers which can only get extracted after a year", a "tip jar that pays out every month" etc.
My point was that trust is a spectrum, and not binary. Yet you take the most extreme outliers thinkable, refute those and then conclude that none of the cases in the broad spectrum can ever work. They can. And Blockchain is one of the tools. As are trust-funds, banks, payment-APIs, courts, notaries and so on.
If you notice the phrasing, all the crypto arguments are in the realm "it could be...". The major difference is that all the legislation, be it good or bad, "is". Which makes crypto very convenient to paint imaginative rosy futures, and actual legislation very convenient to point out actual flaws and dark patterns.
Not being happy with the status quo and not liking cryptocurrencies are not mutually exclusive. You can "hate" both.
My problem with "crypto" is that the industry is so focused on getting rich, is all about money. That's not changing the status quo, that's wanting to be a part of it.
If you TRULY want to change the status quo your focus can't be on how you can get rich quicker. There's been centuries of thought on self-sovereignty, of dictating your own terms, anarchism, freedom, etc. There's been literal wars about this all over the world and I just don't see how some dudes with bitcoins are really adding anything new to the table.
I’ve proposed to a crypto company that they explicitly prevent themselves from getting rich off the ICO. They were decidedly completely uninterested. We all know the actual motivation of crypto bros, they want money. They don’t really care about improving the world, it’s all marketing bullshit.
I agree but there is one thing -- if enough of the crypto-rich convert enough of their crypto-money to "fiat" then eventually, we may have a class of billionaires even more disconnected from the traditions of society than the Silicon Valley crop has been.[0][1]
And these people may found universities, buy politicians, sit on the boards of art museums.
So, while I personally don't think it'd be a good thing, I think there's a decent possibility the "crypto people" will someday use the spoils of their business to dabble in large-scale social engineering, and in a roundabout way that's how the dudes with the bitcoins will leave their mark.
Idk. I get my direct deposit into my account from my employer for free. I can transfer funds to pay bills for free. And I can go anywhere in the world and withdraw money for less than a 5$ fee in less than a minute.
You must live in a developed nation. I'm from one of the tier-2 cities in India.
I cannot hold stable, diversified collection of global currencies in my bank account and cannot invest in global markets without going to a branch in a bigger town and without significant paperwork. I cannot legally accept money from around the world for my software development skills without being a part of the existing banking system. My relatives in my native village just 100 KMs away don't even have a bank they can walk into (they have mobile phones with data though).
Do we just have to wait for regulated, for-profit entities to calculate when it will be profitable for them to provide us with services? What benefit did maintaining the status quo provide for people in countries where inflation wiped out savings overnight? If we have the skills and the opportunity to participate in an alternative, mostly open system, how long should we need to wait for permission?
India Post offers savings accounts services through its post offices. Non-profit public enterprise and a post office is available in every PIN code. There is probably one within walking distance of your relatives in your native village.
Cross border transactions are heavily regulated precisely because they cross jurisdictional boundaries - without regulation it becomes trivially easy to commit fraud and make the money effectively disappear. Does the current regulation come in the way of the average person trying to accept Paypal money? Sure. But that is not a technological problem - its a regulation problem, which is ultimately a social problem.
I know options exist, but better, more inclusive options can be possible.
Take for example messaging – Jeff Bezos uses (used?) WhatsApp, I use it, you probably use it and my relatives use it as well. No matter what the geography or your social/financial standing, you probably have access to a world-class messaging product easily.
The same is true for a lot of things: Wikipedia, Linux, Bicycles.
Why should the same not be true for wealth protection and growth? If it is possible to come up with a such a system, shouldn't we at least give it a shot?
You can invest in mutual funds which invest in foreign companies. Creating online accounts for direct mutual funds investments is fully digital using Video KYC.
Yes, I'm aware of that. However, I need to go through a mutual fund and rely on their stock picking strategy and fees (we've had mutual funds default very recently). I want to enter into a position in a specific stock according to my strategy at a price I'm comfortable at.
This again leads to the same point: why are we so _comfortable_ with the status quo?
I want to think about what could be possible, not what sub-par alternative is available today.
I understand your context 100% as I am an African currently living in Europe. It is almost impossible for anyone who has grown all their lives in the western economic system to fully grasp what is wrong with the status quo and the need to engage in a plausible alternative. Heck even I get so comfortable sometimes here and forget the context I grew in and question the need for change.
Just for the sake of argument, the same can be said about dark web: it offers freedom to do whatever business one pleases, with minor government interference. Is that a great alternative? For some, yes. Could it sell also cancer treatments for people unable to obtain them otherwise? Yes it could, but that doesn't make the dark web a good thing. My point is that what "could be" is very different from what "is". And from what I can see nowadays with crypto we find the positives only in the "could be". I beg the crypto advocates to make those possibilities reality, then I guarantee everybody will jump ship, or at least I definitely will.
The dark web is a good thing – it's a good utility. Whether someone uses it for a good thing or a bad thing, it's up to the individual, but I'm glad that an investment was made to come up with a more secure, privacy-focused protocols was made (and continuing work is being done to improve it).
I'm also glad other protocols exist and the market will ultimately determine adoption based on utility. We mostly used HTTP until FireSheep happened and now use HTTPS very widely and someday, if governments and organisations continue to pry on online activity, we might move to the protocols powering the dark web.
It's the same with crypto. I, too, feel a lot of the use cases being talked about right now are just words – but at the same time, I'm glad that people with the skills and the resources are making investments into coming up with these experiments and the experiments that will offer the most utility might get widely adopted in the future.
>I beg the crypto advocates to make those possibilities reality
It's up to people to start utilizing the technology. But some need it more than others, for you it might not be necessary but millions of people are already using cryptocurrencies in countries where government caused hyperinflation of their currencies.
I don't think that the convenience of moving money around has much to do with what the article's talking about. It's more about flexibility when there're more than just one party involved--the kind of stuff that with fiat you'd have to hire lawyers for.
"I can get my favorite articles delivered to my door, I can watch my sports games live, I can talk to my parent's across country instantly and cheaply over the phone. Try doing any of that with 'the internet.'"
Sometimes you're just early, bud.
Scale comparison: Cryptocurrency-based technology has been publicly available for at least 12 years now. If I place initial public availability of the web at about 1992, we're currently in the equivalent of 2004, when two of the three described usecases were already widely available in developed nations. Amazon was maybe not a household name yet, but e-commerce was already an accepted purchasing model for several product categories, and Skype gave the world very cheap international phone calls. Only the video usecase was still terrible because of the available bandwidth.
DEXs(uniswap), Auction Houses(zora), Community Voting Systems(snapshot), Reputation and trust networks(circles), public goods funding(clr.fund), self publishing and fundraising(mirror, and now kickstarter), e2ee messaging and chat rooms(status/whisper), ubi and sybil resistance(proofofhumanity). These are all things I and lots of others are interacting with pretty much daily, it doesnt get so much coverage because its not all speculation and imo what people are actually angry about with crypto is more exposure to abusive capitalism games, money is a painful trauma so more of it in new forms is hard to imagine as positive. But there is plenty of useful stuff being built and I think it is progressing pretty well. 5 years ago the ideas of rights management combined with open distribution (rather than DRM that locks down distribution) was a strange idea we didnt know how to make work, now NFTs are mainstream.
In 2004 i was downloading textures and skins for the sims and xplane, and joining forums to chat and share music. Then there was a while imo where the internet felt dominated by facebook/google/youtube, but the past couple of years ive sunk into smaller communities making things in crypto/web3 and its fun and exciting. I spend most of my online time in that space. It feels more like being in a WoW guild than using twitter. There is profit/loss and speculation that excites/angers the masses, but theres also the best online communities ive ever been a part of, doing things like making games and custom skins and sharing music. Some things change and some things stay the same. Im pretty positive on the idea that making new tools, providing permissionless access, and building it with free open source software, people can do neat and surprising things. Till then people will see what they want to see, because its all there. Sturgeons law etc
Early work on the internet was in the 1960s. Much of that stuff you're talking about didn't happen until 40-50 years later. So what you're saying is I'll likely be dead before I see any tangible benefit from all this hubub?
This is not a convincing argument. Just because I think something should be improved, doesn‘t mean I should applaud any and all attempts to improve it.
If my city has a hideous, impractical train station and you just take a wrecking ball to it overnight, I‘m not going to thank you, because I won‘t be able to ride a train for months.
Also consumer banking (in Europe) is great, I don‘t know what people are so mad about. If it‘s just "consumer banking sucks in the US" you have a much more straightforward improvement plan in "make it like Europe".
You can agree with most or all of that and still think the the tokenisation of everything with over expensive compute and storage and infinite middlemen isn’t the win their advocates think it is.
You can own your own data, log in using a cryptographic secure identity and do many other awesome decentralised things through that without needing a blockchain. The latter I think does have value if you want to transfer funds without the government stopping you at the time (retrospectively though they might). That’s not very useful for normal people though.
The problem is that there is little thought outside of crypto for this digital self-sovereignty when the digital world is effectively post-scarcity. Which makes me think that most care more about the money to be made than the ideals they claim to hold.
> Do they really think the current financial system is great and their online bank account is perfect and nothing radical is worth trying?
Try, absolutely! New tech is fun tech!
The problem is it's not about the tech is it? Lets be honest. It's just people trying to milk it for cash right now. Once they've all got theirs it'll evolve into something useful or just sorta be there now like Bitcoin
Web3 tech, from my perspective, is people promoting profile pictures of bored apes, pirates, robots and (new to me) snowflakes with varying accessories on Twitter. It's like a ridiculously expensive version of Pokemon except you can't even fight them against each other. It's a bit of a joke currently, I hope someone finds a decent use case
In any case whether I'm right or wrong, NFTs and web3s are something I'm too poor to understand right now. It's like watching an orgy of millionaires taking money from each other and patting themselves on the back if you're on the outside haha. It's so weird to come across an "open" tech you can't afford to learn
Yes, we're absolutely happy with the current system.
I have absolutely no problem with the banking system. Everything has worked, I can transfer money to everyone I know basically for free, and the few weird issues I've had in my life (messed up account credentials) have been easily solved by talking to an authorized person at a bank, and having them hand-edit my data in the system. My bank can be robbed, blown up, or go out of business, and all of my money is safe.
I don't want to manage my "financial infrastructure" for the same reason I don't want to host my own website. I want to pay other people with vastly better equipment, training, and around-the-clock availability to do a better job than me.
Replacing this with crypto — even a refined endgame version from half a century in the future, is a pure negative. And that's before we consider the people pushing it as a bad-faith ponzi scheme.
My skepticism comes from a belief based on observation that messy human collaboration is the name of the game, and our job is to merely move the needle in the right direction. Removing the messiness is not possible, may not even desirable, and so grand theories aimed at fixing the entire problem of politic, financial, and legal work are likely fool's errands.
My theory is that the people who shitpost about blockchain on HN every day do it for the same reasons as crypto people post positive things: We all want more money at the end of the day.
Take this with a grain of salt, but I think all of this is about incentives. And so that stephendiehl.com fellow must have the same kind of stake in some technology as a crypto maximalist, but maybe directed elsewhere.
There are enough people in this world that are living a happy life without blockchains and for them, it looks like a threat so they belittle it and try to argue it away.
It‘s a nice theory, but… what would that be? I can‘t really think of much. Sure a lot of us make money as web2 developers but we could switch to web3 without much issue. It wouldn‘t have a serious financial impact.
The people who are heavily invested in these technologies, like VCs, Banks, Social Networks, they all seem to love crypto.
The Semantic Web was coming into prominence at the peak of Bittorrent and P2P. It allowed people to publish data in schemas without centralized databases. Protocols in markup. You could declare and share schemas for things, build on top of other people's schemas, and remix endlessly. It was powerful.
You could define your contact details in FOAF and a client could ingest that and make contacts.
You could consume articles as RSS or Atom and use any client you wanted. Clients that were faster and more performant than HTML-based websites. We could have shed HTML and Javascript for many schema-aware applications.
If we'd built Reddit back then, it'd have been topics and comments that were digitally signed and exchanged p2p, with signed voting, interest graphs, and curated peer groups.
Unfortunately, this was just as the VC and ad-money fueled Google and Facebook were coming into prominence. They built centralized systems that were easy to use faster than the Semantic Web community could move. (Semantic Web was much broader - some were interested in predicate logic distributed databases, which were a bit much.)
Web 3.0 was the Semantic Web. Do not forget. We can still use the lessons today. This is what the web could have become if the advertising gravity well hadn't sucked it in.
Exactly. In my view the crypto community have hijacked the name coined by timbl because calling it web4 would have highlighted that web3.0 (the semantic web) failed, at least outside academia.
Wikipedia has two articles, it’s all about the “.0” apparently, see the page on Web3.0 [0] vs the page on Web3 [1]
I’ve seen plenty of crypto community content [2] claiming that blockchain is a key part of the original timbl vision [3], perhaps the missing piece of the puzzle.
I think it’s clear timbl’s “decentralisation” point meant “not Google”. It definitely didn’t mean “not http, use blockchain”.
You’re right that there was an opportunity where we could have delivered on the original vision of the semantic web but that time has long passed and Google have stepped into that void, to become the gatekeeper of the web.
The vision of the semantic web was supposed to make every organisation, person, place and thing machine readable. Twenty years later and we basically just use it to share pretty links on Facebook.
Plug: I’m working on a DNS-based protocol to fix this, making it easy for organisations to provide machine-readable data direct to users. We launched it in the UK last month and have machine readable data for 5m businesses. US roll out next year. I wrote up the launch in a blog post [3].
> You could consume articles as RSS or Atom and use any client you wanted. Clients that were faster and more performant than HTML-based websites. We could have shed HTML and Javascript for many schema-aware applications.
I still can do that today, granted on the sites that keep publishing feeds.
I feel like web3 continues the trend (in a good way) of the financialization of everything.
The primitives of web3 effectively enable the fine grained economic measurement and distribution of every element of value-exchange, and gives folks the ability to participate in these cashflows where they were previously not able to.
Now that there's standards for representations of value / governance / etc (ERC-20) now any protocol that supports ERC-20 tokens can be applied to any ERC-20 token. Ditto for NFTs.
As an example, if you want to split cashflows from any source based on some pro-rata ownership of tokens: there's a off-the-shelf battle tested contract for that. This composability and remixability of economic value flows has never existed before. Mix that with governance concepts in DAOs and you effectively have a parallel system of capital allocation and investment decision making.
p.s. Charles Stross was amazingly prophetic in Accelerando where the Superintelligent AIs create a system of economics called Economics 2.0, which is indecipherable to humans. Reminds me of smart contracts interacting :)
Like a company can literally spin off a division and make it public in a similar way. Or you can securitize cash flows into an ABS. The investment bank's fees will be a lot lower than the gas fees.
Economics 2.0 starts at "Welcome to decade eight, third millennium"
A bit further down:
> Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences – the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they're poor.
The examples he gives don't work very well in practice:
>How do you prove you own a house?
The crypto idea of having a private key to a token goes wrong when you lose the key or get hacked, and then say to the court the house is still yours which it is in law
>you want to fix up your local neighborhood’s park. You have the time, but doing so will take a few thousand dollars in supplies. You could go to your neighbors ...
You might just get your neighbours to go on some fixmypark.com site and contribute normal dollars. Getting them all to buy crypto and transfer to smart contracts is not going to happen in the near future.
The whole interaction between crypto and the physical world is very clunky. It seems to work better for flipping virtual assets like jpegs and imaginary coins.
If web3 is a thing it'll probably be more stuff like funding websites by selling NFTs to have ape avatars by your account rather than interacting with parks and houses. But selling imaginary stuff and images and the like can be powerful. I mean US$ are largely imaginary things represented by 0s and 1s in some databases and they do a lot of stuff.
End users don't care about government trust or privacy as much as we would want them too. Had it been the case Signal would have already replaced Whatsapp. Unless Blockchain based product solves a real problem it would be hard to see larger adoption.
What makes it worse is most of the web3 products are always centered around coins, why do I need a coin to use a decentralized social network? It makes users feel like it's a financial scheme and early adopters have incentives to sell it.
Yes this point about needing to "pay" for what so far has been free will be a blocker for 99% of people I expect.
It will be a hard enough ask to ask the average non-tech user to dump whatsapp or tiktok for something else because of the network effect, then if you tell them "oh and you need to pay with this weird thing you've never heard of too" it will be impossible IMO.
People can go on about paying vs "users are the product" etc, but the truth of the matter is the average person doesn't seem to care that Google et al sells ads.
Authors point about trustless commitments, ignoring the semantic arguments posed in the comments, is important.
Not mentioned but I would argue as equally or of greater importance is interoperability. If you lose trust in the commitment you've made, you can move your capital/identity/etc. To the new thing relatively seamlessly. This is the DeFi experience already built that's so amazing to interact with relative to traditional banking and capital markets. If you apply that same functionality to other markets, such as social media or healthcare (using zero knowledge rollups to protect private data), I think that's inevitably an a-ha moment.
It's like the Amazon API mandate - https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes... - if you build with interoperability at the core, the knock-on effects can be exponential. It's a game changer. The consumer is no longer captive to walled gardens.
Drop play money into a low fee blockchain, stick to a stablecoin, and mess around with some of the DeFi apps. I think it's easy to become a believer if you do that and compare to your normal banking experience.
The important part is the network itself. Bank of America is free to build on top of the network but by doing so it enters into competition with the rest of the network.
You don't need them for a bank account so if you don't like their services then you can take your funds elsewhere. In my opinion this is a critical piece of what is missing in our current society. These corporations and government agencies have become too entrenched and too big to fail. We need to inject competition back into the system.
Escrow services do exist, and usually one of the parties has more power over the transaction than the other. Either the buyer or the seller can cheat the other one out of their money or goods. How do you prove that the package didn’t just contain a heavy brick instead of the promised tablet? I‘m not convinced this can be solved by any kind of contract.
That's a big problem with "smart contract" systems. The "trustless" part only works if you stay within the smart contract system. About all you can do with that is speculate in various crypto items. The ties to the real world are weak. Yes, there are "oracles" for widely available non-controversial info, such as the DJIA. But how do you get an oracle for "house is complete as specified and is ready for occupancy"? Or "package was delivered and contained contents as ordered"?
In systems where transactions are reversable, such as credit cards, problems can be fixed up later. But with instant irreversible transactions, you don't have that feature.
Only in the sense that it's a buzzword used to inflate crypto-things, really. If you mean "is it a thing that people use, in any significant numbers", then, no, of course not.
Crypto people will, of course, attempt to excuse this with "it's like the Internet in the 90s", but it is important to bear in mind here that (a) hundreds of millions of people used the internet in the 90s and (b) they have been saying this about _Bitcoin_, and other assorted blockchain-y things, for at least a decade, and no-one really uses those for anything as yet.
Kinda? It’s under ridicule here because it’s quite contrived of a name and it adopts an ethos that is not put into practice by its developers and proponents.
There is a popular library called web3.js as well, which is used to find and communicate with nearby nodes of distributed ledgers. It’s pretty clever and convenient.
Since those kind of nodes store variables forever for free, developers dont need any other server side infrastructure and are able to make services extremely quickly, cheaply, and have a quick goto market strategy and it is extremely lucrative, and the users absorb all the costs of writing data. This is where things are 10x better than existing alternatives: revenue paths, overhead costs, speed.
not the user experience or the performance of the underlying technology.
HN is one of the last places where people are skeptical and reasonable about this whole charade, and now it feels like some people are trying to bruteforce "crypto is good" on us, just for the lulz.
I neither see tv ads nor billboards, but I also don’t mean crypto in general. Specifically, all the Web3 posts feel like people arguing against something that’s actually just a minor blip no-one (outside of crypto) cares about at all. Essentially all the outrage being the only thing giving it publicity.
I think it's one of those things that many don't realize that they need until they have it.
We're so used to financially being controlled by authorities so it's deemed normal. Governments can tax you however they want and that is "normal".
Coming from an extremely corrupted country/government I know how taking control of your assets is important, which web3 aims. To which extent it can succeed is another question though.
The issue is trust.
Smart contracts as a solution are a sad attempt at solving that issue.
There's always edge cases you can't code in.
E.g. in the example of the neighbour buying goods;
What if the other neighbours don't really like this guy, and conspire against him?
The solution to trust, isn't codifying every possible variable and putting in on some silly unmodifiable chain. That solution just shifts the trust. Instead of trusting humans, we're now trusting some poorly written code...
The solution to the trust issue is good ethics, mindfulness and good upbringing.
If someone violates your trust, it's probably due to some stress factor in that person's life. We need to create a better world for everyone and actually help the people that our violating our trust, and show them the way.
I have yet to see a good example of what “web3” is useful for… honestly this just smells like it’s going to be the next major hype train of 2022.
Just like VR/AR and ML/AI of yesteryear. Note that both of these examples are wonderful pieces of tech but they were blown wildly out of proportion by everyone.
Agreed. It's like when people starting throwing around "blockchain" as the solution for every problem. The same lot has adopted web3 as the thing they are shouting from their soap-boxes, without really understanding the difference between concept, technology and implementation.
We'll need to crowdsource some Big Data for some push content. Luckily it's all Object Oriented so we can run some AR social media code on it. I'll get an IM when it's finished on my 5G.
I do think that the best critique of "web3" is that it's shifting the trust into a different and less well understood space. There are advantages and disadvantages to using computers instead of analog processes to resolve conflicts, but biology is kind of unavoidably analog. In the long term I'm bull(ish) on blockchains - I think they have some uses, but most of the excitement I'm seeing now feels like it's scammy or mistaken.
I'm very skeptical about any claims about the correctness or the health of the blockchain ecosystem because, if you're interested in using flaws to take money, it's obviously much easier to scam people than to go after the fundamentals. Imagine you're a Superhacker who Only Cares About Money and you have found a flaw in crypto. You could make some money breaking the whole system, but you can probably make a lot more money taking crypto from poorly setup exchanges or individuals and maintaining the value of the things you took.
We are well aware of the problems of using legal and social systems to adjudicate disagreements. People feel excited because we have found math that helps us adjudicate disagreements in a new way and I also think it's exciting - but it all feels too early.
I like crypto, it’s interesting, from a technical perspective.
And if you e ever had to send money to a foreign currency and pay exchange rates then sending a bit of crypto is like “huh, so that’s how that should feel”.
However, the argument that you need it to be free from government and society troubles me because it all runs on electricity and other infrastructure. Maybe solar panels and satellites will help in the short term, but we’d need a bit more of a robust internet solution.
I really like cardano’s approach. Trial in places that aren’t developed countries. That will teach you a lot.
Everyday on hacker news there is a new shit-on-web3 post on the fp. To me this would be a strong signal to buy some.
Implicit assumptions always seem to be that trust authorities are a bad thing, something that exists for the lack of a better alternative. It is kept implicit that if we can go around trust authorities, we definitely should. But should we? I truly wonder if that is actually the case. I can imagine there to be also quite some benefits to trust authorities. This whole web3 thing seems very similar to centralized/decentralized movements that always end up being a sine curve. For me any analysis like this always ends up with the same question in my mind: what problem are we trying to solve here?
To me its just the open deployment and one time payment. Other development and cloud environments do not compete, from a founder or developer perspective. Users pay to use with no convincing necessary.
I think Web3 is interesting for authorities and notaries. Authorities can still perform identity checks and detect money laundering schemes. But still use web3 underneath, which still has benefits for interoperability with other countries and other companies as well. For example you could potentially have a decentralized global real estate ETFs, where the cost of joining many markets would be (potentially) lower. I do personally believe for consumers it is better to have services helping with security and advice.
> The government issues you a deed declaring that some parcel of land and whatever is on it is yours.
Small nitpick but this is not how deeds work, at least not in the US. In the US the seller provides you with a deed. The government simply records it, and the title company insures it based on their research of the chain of title. The government doesn't issue deeds unless they are the seller or grantor of the land.
> But I think it’s a mistake to see the current mechanisms and lose sight of the actual capability they’re attempting to provide.
This is magnitudes wiser than the typical sentiment of crypto here or in other skeptical communities. When the potential is first recognized, the criticisms then build toward that potential rather than simply having the purpose of tearing something down. Thanks for the piece, Chris.
It's supposed to mean anything, so your imagination, excitement and greed can inpaint the rest.
"Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.
When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all."
> Most of the descriptions I’ve seen focus on mechanisms - block chains, smart contracts, tokens, etc - but I would argue those are implementation details ... The real question is what fundamental capability are people pointing to when they talk about web3?
That's exactly the change in focus needed in order for discussions of this topic to be more rational/sober/productive, imo.
1. many of the people doing originating work with the tech had deep understanding of the ___domain it applies to (and most software engineers to do not)
2. that gets diluted by people incentivized to shill for various reasons
3. so now we're not "in search of a problem" it's just been lost amid diverse noisy communication—and it's also defined in a ___domain unfamiliar to most programmers, so describing it is non-trivial
4. a good starting point for communicating this to programmers might be in terms of technical capability, then working toward more specific social/economic applications from there
I wish what people call web 3 would be called web 4.
For me, Web 3 was the (mostly failed) semantic web. That said, ideas and tech behind the semantic web are alive and well in knowledge graphs. Life is good.
I would welcome more opportunities for decentralization and privacy in Web 4, I hope it works out!
> This is ostensibly what the legal system provides, but anyone who’s actually tried to go through small claims court knows that the reality of that route is… painful. And it often ends unsatisfactorily
And it is in fact a key feature of the contemporary modern world: the people don't have a realistic access to court anymore, and this deeply undermines the legitimacy of the State.
This immediately reminded this article[1] which explained how the Taliban have rebuilt their power in Afghanistan in recent years, especially outside of their original ethnic group (Pashtuns): by appointing judges in every provinces, available for free, with no delay and hassle.
A quick DeepL translation of the most relevant part of the article:
> From a material point of view, these courts are rudimentary. The judges, dressed without distinctive signs, sit in village mosques, in private houses or under the cover of trees. “The Taliban courts operate in a very simple way, said one of them. The Taliban judge sits with a cup of green tea in front of him, he receives the requests in person. Then he calls a member of the movement and tells him to go and ask the people against whom a complaint has been filed to come the next day” The judges interview witnesses, examine the documents brought by the disputing parties, and render their verdict, often after a few days - at most a few months for the most sensitive cases. Most disputes concerned land or matrimonial matters, but judges also punished theft, murder and adultery, sometimes with very severe penalties (executions, amputations, stoning). […]
> The same motivation was found in a relative of Mr. Faizal Akbar, governor of Kounar province between 2002 and 2005. Despite his political opposition to the Taliban, he was forced to turn to them for a theft of cattle because, since the regime's judges were "corrupt," the costs of filing a complaint with the police and of an official trial would have far exceeded the value of the stolen cattle.
> this isn’t about removing trust, it’s about increasing what you can do at a given level of it
I think this is at the center of a lot of arguments. The proponents come from circles where trust is a dirty word, so they don't want to say too loudly that they need it. The critics see this as an unnecessarily extreme position, which isn't the kind of thing you back down from, so they end up arguing that new tech is unnecessary/incapable when applied to this task.
Blockchain solves the "how do we keep track of everything?" problem.
We already had databases for that, but OK, blockchain is decentralized.
The much harder problem of "how do we bridge data & reality?" is mostly unsolved, and sometimes especially unsolved when blockchain is involved. (eg. paying via Apple/Google Pay will generally go OK in many stores, but paying via a blockchain-based cryptocurrency not so much...)
With the neighbors example, don’t you need to trust your neighbors to actually confirm you did the work?
What happens if you put in begonias and they wanted daisies? Or they just don’t want to pay you $200 and see they can back out and have you holding the bag.
More generally, I still don’t understand how the “third party oracle” issue (ie how do you make real world add to blockchain) doesn’t undermine the trust less idea.
I don’t know anything about blockchain, but setting up beforehand some kind of auto trigger to buy daisies with the funds would seem to solve that problem.
Whether the work actually happens after that point, yes I agree, I don’t see a way for that to happen without human trust.
A much more interesting news in the space, not being discussed on HN: polygon just acquired Mir for 400 million $. They are slowly acquiring every zero-knolwedge teams in the space.
Could you please review the site guidelines and stick to them in the future? Comments like this manage to break several of them, such as:
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Dang, I appreciate that moderation is used sparingly and your resources are always stretched, my appologies.
These articles slagging off web3 / crypto are appearing front page every 2-3 days at the moment and the comments section always becomes a shitshow. In a recent comment section for ~140 comments there were over 30 mentions of "ponzi"
WRT to my comment, yes agreed it breaks the rules and probably could have gone unspoken. But it is born of frustraition in seeing AWS being touted by people that haven't either bothered to understand the technology but want to fling mud.
This constant echo chamber HN is engaging in is making it less of a place for discussing intellectual ideas and more about pushing viewpoints.
I know the internet (including HN) supplies endless frustration, but just because of that, we all need to cultivate the skill of not responding from a triggered place. Comments like the GP and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29525651 definitely just make things worse.
Some large actors dominating the market and with that come regulations (AML/KYC), laws and borders and in the end it's like the traditional financial system with a VM and JavaScript instead of COBOL.
Whether that has any practical benefits to regular people remains to be seen. Perhaps, Perhaps not.
> trust-less commitments seem to be at the heart of what web3 really is and that feels much harder to dismiss than owning JPEGs or speculating on currencies
This is indeed the core feature of this whole genre but arguably makes it easier to dismiss in its entirety as concept and philosophy.
Technology should enable building trust. Simply enabling a trust-less society to limb along in a transactional way reveals the libertarian bitcoin roots of web3 that actually believes "there is no such a thing as society".
Designing institutions that are authoritative while democratically accountable is a continuous struggle against power grabbing insiders but it is not impossible.
All of these systems are pay-to-play systems, and just like pay-to-play games favor whales and their large wallets. Proof-of-work just means more bots hard at work. Voting systems will botted. Swarm investments will seem like democracy to the average user, but all orchestrated from a single source.
What’s missing from this discussion is that you are trusting a blockchain. So if someone goes around and raises money from a bunch of people they are exchanging currency for some crypto asset. How do they know that crypto asset is actually genuine Etherium and not Etheriumm?
It's Ethereum, and this is really not an issue, AMM's that allow swapping between permissionless pools have token lists you can use. The person raising the money can also provide an ID used to identify the pool where the users can do the swap.
Of all the scams in Web3 (and there's quit a few) this is not one.
Debit cards, credit cards and ATMs came with new best practices to be aware of. And no, not all gaffs result in reimbursals from the bank.
Here, we are acknowledging thats there are humans that commit malicious actions and they shouldn’t do that, and also acknowledge that there are programs that exist in perpetuity to do this which means there is no malicious human to educate, and requires (not just advises) the potential and actual victims to have agency themselves and their victim status is prevented by actually following the best practices that all predate the malicious actors to begin with.
But where do all those best practises and recourses and advice and learning come from? It's trust and laws and government and society. Crypto enthusiasts claim that these can be solved independently of any governing framework, but my point is that you can only solve it for a given blockchain, and anyone can create a blockchain, so what's the process by which any blockchain becomes the de-facto standard? And if your answer is "Everyone just settles on that one" then what you have just described is government.
Unlike many crypto enthusiasts, I’ve never been allergic to the word governance or governing framework and have aimed to inspire on the forms it can take, even within national representative democracies.
Blockchains, distributed ledgers, allow for us to reevaluate what governance is and entails. It is expected that some processes of existing governments because redundant, and that there is some kind of governance occurring to coordinate behavior.
So here we are actually agreeing, except on where the best practices come from, which would be cypherpunk mailing lists, old bitcoin wikis, and protocol specification drafts and ratifications.
What's happened is that a bunch of people who have zero understanding about what crypto is or how it works have been able to buy an asset because a bunch of people using pre-existing technological and legal frameworks created platforms for them to do so.
The "accelerated saturation" you are referring to relies on the very types of trust and authority that the article claims to obviate the need for.
my only point is that PGP had the same opportunity and failed for nearly three decades, in comparison
in both there are opportunities for people with zero understanding to use a platform created by someone else. crypto asset sector has been more successful.
Ultimately you do have an issue with who controls the browser. You would think that web3 people would invest in Firefox so that you do not have a duopoly owning the browser space between apple and google.
There is certainly some hope: for example Decentraland joining Blender as a sponsor equal to Aws, Facebook, or Nvidia. It's all about who controls the money
Every disastrous technology/standard has been when people have shoehorned different agendas into one thing. The shorter the keyword and catchier the better.
Web 3 is shaping up to be excellent for this! Prepare your resume. Start early, add Web 3 in there.
To marketers, it means better targeted advertising (more is just a side effect they love). To hackers, it means decentralization and going back to 1.0... IRC, but better, Usenet, but better, Blogs, but better... To Megacorps, it means more control, more moneeeeey. To governments, more control, more transparency. To humanists, absolutely nothing. This is shaping to advance humanity in absolutely no way better than 1.0 did.
So get the popcorn ready, update your resumes and join the penthouse of the jaded.
> Unfortunately with trust in low supply these days...
This is at the core of the issue: no technology, but especially not web3, is just a tool. Tech is inherently political because of both these kinds of underlying assumptions about the world, and how it shapes habits and beliefs of people using it.
Creating tech which accepts "trust is in low demand" and proceeds to fix it by making trusting people unnecessary, is a very effective way to promote right-libertarian policies.
So I understand why right-libertarian people support "web3". What I don't understand is why so many people with very different political values do.
IMO we need tech that promotes trusting each other, not tech where we can make do with a war of all against all.
You might be interested in CirclesUBI, which is pretty leftist as crypto's go. I think it's in the minority only only because bitcoin gave the right leaning folk a head start. The cryptocommunists will be along any minute now.
Crypto, in its current form, is a brainstorm of half-thought-out, half-spec'd and soon-to-be-replaced-with-something-better implementations that has stumbled upon the web in its never ending task of enticing more converts to invest in its hype train, thereby justifying the previous investors' investments. We've seem to be inundated with articles talking about web3's vacuous nature, as if crypto's blackhole has enveloped the idea of web3 and now, in its place, leaving nothing but a vacuum.
I am starting a campaign for web4. Optionally decentralised internet with no trust. It is simple, you can browse anything anywhere anytime and you can never trust any of it.
It can be static forever or dynamic so it always changes. It can use blockchain as a way to verify history or as anonymous messages as you can make them. No obligations, no commitments. Free or not. Just do it!
Users flagged this submission. I didn't see it until now.
Please don't post this sort of rhetoric to HN. It's boring and almost always based on false assumptions (as in this case).
Edit: and could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN generally? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we ban that sort of account—it's not what the site is for.
Ethereum has twice hard forked the blockchain to revert the results of "code is law", clearly saying that code is only law when a quorum of powerful individuals accept the outcome. Code isn't law, "code is law" is a slogan with as much veracity as slogans usually have.
This is a very good point. It was pointed out quite a while ago that talk about 'decentralised' systems can hide the technical features of those systems and the mode of governance like a 'veil'. 'Decentralisation', aside from being a technical word for certain aspects of a technology, can also hide centralised structures, whether maintained by a small number stakeholders controlling a majority of nodes, or governance driven by major organisations people depend on for that decentralisation.
Miners choose where it's profitable to mine, which will always be the more active blockchain. It's called voting with your feet, and clearly Ethereum miners followed the quorum of powerful individuals. What matters your massive holdings of ETC when there's no buyers?
Disclosure: I'm a very very large miner and I've been doing it across many protocols over the last 7 years.
You're right that miners choose profitability, but we also choose technology. I don't mine BTC any more, I mine with GPUs (and thus ETH). There are a dozen chains I could mine with these GPUs, but I'd like to see the success of ETH over others.
I can tell you with certainty, no quorum of powerful individuals influenced that decision.
I understand. What did influence that decision? I expect it would be your overall appraisal of the viability of a particular blockchain and future expectations of activity. Is that accurate?
ETH is where the mindshare and developer resources went. ETC became too fringe. BETA vs. VHS. It really had very little to do with some quorum of powerful people.
Many people don't understand that GPUs don't have the same hardware race war as bitcoin ASICs. Older GPUs actually have better ROI because the ethash algo is constrained by memory controller speed, not as much by nm scale or clock rate. The GPUs we use today were new old stock from many years ago. This is why we don't see a large influx of ASICs for ethash... it just isn't profitable.
We can sell (or use) the GPUs at a later date for other purposes than just mining. In fact, as we race towards "the merge" and PoS, it astounds me that someone isn't working on something all these miners can switch their compute resources to mine profitably.
It is crazy to think that ETC could actually become a viable chain again (but they have some plans to switch a more friendly ASIC algo, which I don't think will work out well for them). Note that ETC is a mess right now, exchanges have 6+ day holds on transfers because nobody trusts the chain.
I'll be transparent and admit that there are some other significant non-technical factors as well, but can't discuss them here.
Thanks for the detail. BTW, "quorum of powerful individuals" (QOPI) means the core ETH people who decided to execute the hard forks. I think you're demonstrating my point for me. It's not that QOPI led you all by the nose or that you acceded to a vote; it's that the core ETH people decided to hard fork and you made a pretty rational business decision to stick with ETH and not ETC in part because, as you put it, "nobody trusts the chain".
It's about trust because "code is law" is pretty obviously marketing rather than foundational principle.
Thanks for asking. My business model has always been larger than just mining ETH. I'm focused on building data centers for providing decentralized compute to all these web3 applications being built today. Mining (aka: being paid to validate anonymous transactions) is just one use case. You see all these articles about how a dApp went down because AWS was down? I'd like to help solve that issue. It isn't just about renting out servers or virtual machines. It is about providing compute in a way that nobody realizes where it is even hosted. True "cloud" in my eyes.
Thanks for the answer it’s very interesting to see how the infrastructure spin off of mining could lead to more conventionally useful hosting. So in some sense you intend to be multi-region without the eye watering data transfer costs?
That's not totally crazy, it's just the decentralization is at a different layer. Like Solid pods provide decentralized ownership over personal data but it's probably easier for people to use a provider for them than host their own server.
For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before.
Code isn’t law, code is better than law. I wondered what I would have done 300 years agi before computers, and realized I’d probably be an architect or one of those lawmaker guys who wrote the Constitution. I mean think about it … you’re setting initial conditions, trying to think of edge cases, putting in Byzantine Consensus (checks and balances between branches of government, mutually distrusting parties checking election results etc.), but making it an Upgradeable smart contracts (process to do amendments etc.)
Now CODE can do a lot more. In our applications for instance, you can:
1) Know the average amount spent on food or clothing by a citizen of a city
2) Vote on how much of food, clothing etc to simply subsidize by issuing more currency and airdropping it to the people (universal basic income)
3) Take a dot product between 1 and 2, and issue the universal basic income or stipend etc. and redistribute the wealth in the community according to the
And best of all — it is entirely voluntary, thanks to smart contracts. No one has to accept your currency by fiat. But if they do, they’re helping to end food insecurity in your community. Just like that. No representative democracy and out of touch elites. Just the community taking care of its business and its vulnerable. Via a smart contract and decision making.
And that is just ONE of the many applications that are possible. Intercoin has produced 10-15 applications that can all work together like LEGOs. Now we will be giving them to communities. Here are some more possibilities:
All of 1/2/3 could be or gamed or hacked if not EXTREME measures are taken. As proven repeatedly by the hundreds millions in dollars in smart contract hacks and losses that have happened and continue to happen.
People can’t trust the code to do what they want, because when you read it you might mistake a 0 or a O. You trust someone else or machine to audit the code tell you the code will do what you want.
US court systems take into account the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. Its a feature not a bug.
You're right, you can do all that--until vested interests revert your blockchain because the current blockchain status quo isn't to their liking, at which point your belief that code is better than law is a lie, because it still comes down to powerful individuals deciding what benefits them instead of letting "deterministic" outcomes stand.
It's not that people are laughing at it now; it's that it's already been proven to be a fraud, where the promise of an immutable blockchain is a grift to part suckers from their money.
"gas fees" are an abberation, the "world computer" is a glorified mainframe where you rent time.
Smart contract can be done in completely different ways, with no bottlenecks. If you notice point 2 of https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf .. I can send you the details if you're interested. I spent years speaking with the best teams around the world working on things beyond blockchain.
Can we actually restate this as a 51% attack on Ethereum. But by the community itself, with powerful (yet not code-level enforcing) influence of Ethereum Foundation and rich people who has invested in The DAO (and lost money on the hack)?
So what? Ethereum classic has two+ orders of magnitude less activity. The hard forks are where Ethereum is today. It's not just the maintainers deciding what's law, instead of code; the coin community actually wants it that way.
> YOU CAN WRITE A PROGRAM THAT EVERYONE CAN TRUST TO DO WHAT THE CODE SAYS
Ah yes. Because everyone is an expert in verifying programs written in esoteric programming languages. Oh. It's written by you? Well, of course I can trust what you've written
> It does to financial institutions and many others, what Web1 did to publishing.
That's not how it works. But I'm sure you'd be defending paper ballots for voting forever as well. You're used to whatever works now, and I'd say that's like Luddites (except the Luddites were actually reacting to the economics of industrialization, meaning the machines were actually replacing the human labor).
Look around you, in the last 100 years we got the ability to print and copy our own documents, to send emails and to write on forums, to use VOIP encrypted end to end, all without the permission of the government. It's based on open protocols that route around friction. Is it so far fetched that autonomous networks technology can also help obviate the need to trust intermediaries like we trusted the Post Office, the Newspaper Printers, Ma Bell and so forth? Really?
This is the guy who ditched light table. Personally, I can't think of someone I despise more. I thought light table was the most innovative and slick products I'd ever seen on a computer.
