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_"The Ethereum virtual machine has the equivalent computational power of an Atari 2600 from the 1970s except it runs on casino chips that cost $500 a pop and every few minutes we have to reload it like a slot machine to buy a few more cycles. That anyone could consider this to be the computational backbone to the new global internet is beyond laughable. We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where the cost of compute time per person was nearly at post-scarcity levels, to the reverse of trying to enforce artificial scarcity on the most abundant resource humanity has ever created. This is regression, not progress."_
One of the best, most concise things I've read in a while. People are trying to move from a world in which compute resources are efficient and almost limitless to a world of scarcity because they want to build an economic system where you can trade your fortnite skins for online currency. Creating economic ownership schemes of things that nobody needs to own because they're not scarce in the first place.
Is this what the struggles of the transition from scarcity to post scarcity looks like? Building systems that simulate scarcity to generate the illusion of value and to front run that value?
Yes, because it’s the only way to generate “wealth” in a world full of plenty. Humans, like most creatures, have a biological imperative to try to outdo one another in order to reproduce.
The Tyranny of the Hierarchy.
Perhaps! Because people are trying to create opportunity from the lack of scarcity maybe?
Show me the Atari 2600 that people are happy to store billions of $ on.
> Show me the Atari 2600 that people are happy to store billions of $ on.
Uh, they just did.
To me this is rhetoric that conveniently ignores the sole advantages of blockchain and distributed computing.
Blockchains don't exist to be fast, efficient, or scalable. They exist to be decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant.
> People are trying to move from a world in which compute resources are efficient and almost limitless to a world of scarcity because they want to build an economic system where you can trade your fortnite skins for online currency
Actually, no one's doing this. You've created a strawman argument. Netflix and Youtube aren't moving their hosting to the blockchain. Google's not storing database shards on IPFS. What people are trying to use blockchains for is the creation and persistence of digital property. Blockchains are expressly better at provenance because records cannot easily be altered, compared to a centralized service.
> Creating economic ownership schemes of things that nobody needs to own because they're not scarce in the first place.
Congratulations, you just defined western capitalism.
Yeah most of these posts start with a straw man and try to work their way backwards from there.
What I think it really boils down to is that web3 represents a shift away from the centralized dystopian organizations that employ most of the people in this community.
Away from centralization and straight into energy inefficient pyramidal schemes.
The author seems to have no knowledge of Eth 2 sharding, zero-knowledge proofs, or ZK rollups. Or even basic encryption.
“Who’s servers will have custody of your private family photos and who get’s to determine those access controls?” - I can send them to you using your public key. Or store then encrypted and selectively give out the decoding key. Or selectively choose one server to trust (or self host) with my unencrypted photos and let them handle it for me.
The author is still picturing web2
The author has a huge conflict of interest whenever he writes about cryptocurrency, seeing as he's the founder of Adjoint, Inc, a company which digitizes cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates.
The site in question:
this was originally brought up by robot_no_419 in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27121532
all props go to him.
I don’t understand the use of “conflict of interest” here, the author is expressing an opinion, plainly explaining which “side” they are on, no other context required.
It’s not as if the author is trying to pass legislation or close a business deal without disclosing how they’ll benefit. Like my sibling says, that the author puts their money where their mouth is by placing bets against crypto only makes their opinion more credible.
Wouldn't a media interview or someone debating Diehl be even more credible?
The public can make their minds up when presented with both sides of the argument rather than one side on Twitter.
This is an opinion piece. Write a rebuttal and post it.
What rebuttal? I agree with the post?
I just want the common man to see crypto for what it really is with a balanced debate or interview, not just a blog post that only 'nerds' reads as Diehl states.
> It’s almost only nerds who read my blog...
After all, it would be more credible coming from him than me.
> I just want the common man to see crypto for what it really is with a balanced debate or interview, not just a blog post that only 'nerds' reads as Diehl states.
I've been following this space for a while and honestly I don't see how a counterpart would actually look like. We had blockchains/crypto for almost 13 years and the only thing that came out of it is a speculative semi-unregulated asset market. Still Forbes, NYT etc... always write articles like "Cryptocurrencies are volatile asset that is doomed to crash, but the underlying blockchain technology is here to say". Without offering any kind of proof for the second part of the statement.
Show me one blockchain application that has nothing to do with virtual assets that not only turns a profit but is provably more efficient than a database based solution.
Whenever I bring this up, the response is usually: "We're just at the beginning, this will take a while". For a space that is claiming the disruption of everything it's moving pretty slow.
I dont know that convincing the public was the intention of the blog, the author seems resigned that they are preaching to their choir. Not everything has to be about winning people over, I enjoyed the piece as a rant that resonates with me, puts my vague impressions into prose.
This makes him more qualified in my eyes to write about crypto currency. He's bearish on it. I'd be a fool not to listen to all sides of the argument.
I wish that people writing articles talking about how horrible web3 is tried something other than Ethereum lol. I'm fairly certain that if people's first web3 experience is something that actually works and doesn't cost hundreds of dollars for minor transactions they won't be as put off.
I get downvoted everytime here I bring it up but seriously if people tried something like Solana today compared to Ethereum I'm fairly certain they'd have a much better experience. Yeah, it's currently more centralized, but that really is minor compared to actually being able to use the ecosystem and explore what kinds of applications and products are possible on web3 without the unacceptably high costs and low tx throughputs that Ethereum as an L1 offers. It's no wonder that people are upset with web3 when their first experience is on ETH.
A fundamentally simple approach of using private keys (wallets) as identification for auth purposes is huge, and we're still really early imo as we explore the possibilities with Web3.
It's not really minor to worry about funds being inaccessible for who knows how long when Solana is down.
I'd rather go with Polygon or Arbitrum for now since it's fast, and wait until zkEVM like zkSync is out. Same with StarkNet. The quick and cheap transactions of Solana with Ethereum's decentralization is what I'm looking for, and that'll only be possible with zk rollups.
Polygon's a pretty good chain, but I have had issues with it before with essentially a traffic jam where my tx got locked up in a queue and took 30 minutes to process. But it's nice to be able to use the chain and it is quite cheap.
Arbitrum is pretty expensive per tx still though right? I haven't used the chain too much because the native bridge takes about a week to get funds over IIRC.
And Solana's only been down for a day like once I believe.
Genuine question: what has private key authentication to do with blockchain? I've been using this for my ssh connections for almost 15 years now.
And the second question: what happens if you use your private key? Every website that uses password has a mechanism to reset your password. Take that feature away you'll lock out millions of users.
Yeah PKI has been around of course for a long time and is a core facet to how the web functions today. The private key authentication I'm referring to is because wallet extensions allow for users to connect their wallet to applications, as a method of authentication. You don't even have to have funds in your wallet to perform this authentication, you just need a wallet.
If you lose your private key, you're probably out of luck, but there may be some wallets / platforms that have strategies to mitigate risk, but idk to be honest. So yes, for sensitive applications it is a risk vector, however for users that are already familiar with crypto, it's not really a new risk. If you ever lose your private key or it's compromised you can lose whatever money is in that wallet.
The thing that I like about the infra personally as a solo dev is that using this for authentication for small scale applications on whatever chain I chose is really easy to set up and is a great user experience, and I'm not worried about this as an app developer as my target audience already should be vaguely familiar with how this works.
The value provided by the crypto assets is financial. Decentralized exchanges, flash loans, and other real innovations are in service of money games. In the same way many financial firms participate in money games for profit (algorithmic trading, complex derivatives bets, etc.) a huge ecosystem is growing of games designed around blockchains. I don’t think these ideas of “one world currency”, “new internet”, or “my house on a blockchain” are relevant anymore. People are still attacking these ideas but the ecosystem isn’t going that way.
I think many people’s postive Web3 experience has been signing a transaction with Metamask as a proof of identity, at least that’s the most obvious magic I’ve seen, the notion that I can interact with a website without registering an account with email and 2FA etc etc feels futuristic and a good step toward whatever the metaverse is, allowing me to have a consistent identity across platforms.
But can’t this be accomplished with older crypto primatives? Is there any implementation of posting my ssh public key and being able to prove my identity by signing a transaction? I ask because I agree with the author, the work that a blockchain peforms is pitiful given the extraordibary cputime and bandwidth committed to the effort, and I appreciate their psychoanalysis that so many of us willing to follow a messiah if they promise to lead us out of the desert.
> But can’t this be accomplished with older crypto primatives?
What, like PGP? The only thing missing is integration with a common interchange... back in the day everybody on the net had a server and you could look up their PGP key. Of course, that was before https was common and it was all vulnerable to MITM (and PGP was deeply broken but the _concept_ was there)
You can do passwordless login already with WebAuthn. It's just a matter of sites integrating it.
Good, someone finally put it into words.
It’s only crypto-bros who are trying to push “web3” as even a “thing”. Kind of like Zuckerberg and the metaverse. Their delusions of grandeur are so great as to warrant an increment in the web’s metaphorical major version number, but nobody else gives a shit.
It's like when years ago it was speculated that web 3.0 might be a semantic web or some IoT web. I guess both technologies have some strong niches now but what drives everything is still web 2.0 and native apps that wrap any extra features. But I'm sure the crypto-everything hype will still be there for some time.
On a compute basis, blockchain networks don’t scale except by becoming the very same plutocratic and centralized systems they allegedly were designed to replace.
That sentence right there is when I stopped reading and realized the author doesn't understand the technology they are criticizing.
The word "plutocratic" is linked to the Wikipedia definition for Proof of Stake. PoS is _not_ meant to increase scalability, its meant to increase efficiency and network decentralization and reduce the cost of running a validator. Switching to PoS on its own doesn't increase the ability of the network to handle more transactions or speed them up.
> the author doesn't understand the technology they are criticizing
I've been following Stephen Diehl and he seems to have a greater understanding than most, even if he is consistently bearish on the technology and I'm not always in agreement.
I don't see the issue you are having:
adjective: plutocratic
relating to or characterized by government by the wealthy.
Proof of stake (PoS) protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency.
>> On a compute basis, blockchain networks don’t scale except by becoming the very same plutocratic [...]
> The word "plutocratic" is linked to the Wikipedia definition for Proof of Stake.
> PoS is not meant to increase scalability
carlosdp isn't saying "because PoS isn't plutocratic, the claim 'can only scale by becoming plutocratic by using PoS' doesn't hold",
Rather, carlosdp is saying that "because PoS isn't the thing being proposed for scaling, but is instead for different things, the claim 'can only scale by becoming plutocratic by using PoS' doesn't hold".
…how is efficiency different from scale? Right now Eth cannot accomodate the transactional demands of the world because it is extremely inefficient and costly (gas fees)
I don’t claim to be an eth or PoS expert, but is it not the case that the transition to PoS is to lower transaction fees and prepare the network for sharding? Maybe sharding for scale is a totally separate issue, but I don’t understand why they would prioritize PoS if it wasn’t necessary for the next step of becoming a “world computer”
I don’t want to come across as too flippant, I would like to understand the optimistic viewpoint.
my understanding is that much of the motivation for PoS is to avoid the electricity usage, and in some but not other ways of measuring it possibly has some better security properties, not really increasing the throughput or gas fees?
if Web2 became a dystopic Zuckerbergia and Web3 is a disguised Cryptobrosia is there maybe a chance for a _Web 2.5_ that doesn't suck? Like something that isn't fake techno-solutionism on steroids?
What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix? but more importantly what would be the _governance_ and _incentives_ that would prevent it from rapidly degenerating as with all other versions
Make it slow and size constrained. People will only use it when it matters then.
>What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix? but more importantly what would be the governance and incentives that would prevent it from rapidly degenerating as with all other versions.
Everything you listed is Web3 in my opinion. I don't think the idea is to put everything on Ethereum. It's to provide niche but critical services like DNS, identity/auth, and some connecting governance logic to other federated/distributed systems.
>if Web2 became a dystopic Zuckerbergia and Web3 is a disguised Cryptobrosia is there maybe a chance for a Web 2.5 that doesn't suck?
Nobody is forcing people to use Facebook or any of Facebook's family of apps. I personally don't use FB or any of its apps for the last 10 years and I'm totally fine.
>What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix?
IP, TCP and HTTP are not going away anytime soon. Nobody really knows how would next stage of WWW look like therefore you can't even think about candidate protocols and standards.
> IP, TCP and HTTP are not going away anytime soon. Nobody really knows how would next stage of WWW look like therefore you can't even think about candidate protocols and standards.
IPFS is supposed to also be able to replace HTTP in the stack. Whether that'll succeed or not is a different discussion, but turns out people are thinking about candidate protocols and standards.
> What would be its building blocks? IFPS, Activitypub, XMPP, Matrix?
Wrong way of looking at it. What are people going to do differently and then what technology gets us there.
Whatever your stance on Web3 is, major kudos for the _Dune_ deep dive analytical allusion, and Tim O’Reilly’s masterful book on the novel (which contrasts it with Asimov’s _Foundation_).
I think Web3 will be all about AI not crypto. Cryptography is already in the veins of modern World Wide Web through the use of PKI.
No, that's 5th generation computing...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer
I never heard of this project but it is really interesting. Something like proto AI.
That's gonna age great
Honestly this community is just an echo chamber of bad takes when it comes to web3.
Kind of hard to recognize a problem when your salary is dependent on propagating it.
What are the best resources for learning about the current state of web3 projects? Most of what I encounter with respect to it seems like marketing copy, without good summaries of the pros and cons that come with the different technologies and their roadmap.
There's clearly a lot going on in the space. But for someone who's at best adjacent to it, it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaffe.
The status blog has some good posts covering daos+communities/wallets/zkproofs/clients =>
https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal
has lots of recordings of talks from their hackathons, their playlists split into different topics
https://www.radicalxchange.org/#
is full of interesting discussions, organises meetups, more big picture discussions of the stuff web3/crypto is playing with
I enjoyed this conversation with Stuart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalogue) from a few years ago, it lays the ground of what then became NFTs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLGZdLpHl1w
https://ethereum-magicians.org/
is a more technical forum to discuss eips
is a good podcast from some musicians interviewing people in the space.
Dom (creator of Vine) is constantly pushing novel toys on chain, i enjoy his playful approach to making stuff less serious.
really though its a "get involved to understand" scene/subculture. if you can ignore the noise of markets/speculation/capitalism its a fun crowd poking around. Theres all sorts from content/identity/scaling/money stuff/games. it feels like playing an mmorpg. at some point it'll hit its eternal september moment but its been really great the past few years.
For a pretty great introduction on how to structure the FE of a web3 app I would take a look at PancakeSwaps GitHub, they have open sourced almost all of their code and it is pretty well written.
Many projects start as clones of that repo.
As far as use cases are concerned the best source of information has been and always will be the community itself.
All reputable projects produce white papers and they are usually more than happy to discuss questions and concerns in their community discords / telegram.
This reads like a poor DHH impression.