Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

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As a web3 critic, my criticism is not that there can be only one, it is that all the proposed web3 stuff that I read about is just an existing thing with extra steps.

If I were to build a blog system I would not store the blog posts in a local merkle tree. Why not? Because a regular database has more benefits. Now why would I want to store the data on a decentralized public merkle tree (blockchain)? I don't want my blogs data to be public, I want *an adjustable view" into non-public, editable and deletable data, which is what we have now. This is one case where the status quo is not only totally fine as you phrased it, but it is superior (to me at least).

The issue I have with web3 is not that it is a new idea, it is that to me it sounds like yet another solution in search of a problem. People who have/are invested in crypto-tokens have a huge incentives to fool themselves into believing you actually can/should solve every problem using the technology of the blockchain.

If it is an problem that people can delete things use an append-only-log/merkle tree. If it is an problem that you want to have a centrally agreed upon public state, open a public API to that append-only-log. If it is a problem that people can neither trust you, nor each other to be a faithful keeper of logs, decentralize it wit consesus algorithms and end up with something like a block chain.

Now this chain of problems is something that fails at the first step for many things. There is not a lot of things that you want to be append-only, typically for very good reasons.

But let's say I want my blog append-only for some reason. One solution would be to just do it instead of forcing myself technically. But lets say I want to force others, then it would make sense.

Now it does not make a lot of sense to make that literal log public, but let's say I also offer an API to it and ignore all the real world problems it would bring (illegal content that needs to be deleted which I could do by rolling the merkle tree back to the latest non-illegal version.

Now I run that sote, why would I like to decentralize that data? So I can claim I don't need to delete anything?

The issue I have with web3 is that it's libertarian politics pretending to be a technological solution. "Decentralised" is being sold as "Out of reach of governments" - but that's clearly not true.

It's also ridiculously poor value-generated-per-Watt-used.

It's in the same conceptual class as "gun culture makes everyone safer" and "lowering taxes on rich people makes everyone richer" - both of which are trivially falsifiable, but repeated fervently by promoters and adherents, some of whom are acting in bad faith.

The root comment is correct - you can't enforce trust in a low-trust culture.

The real problem is the culture. And especially the fact that in a low-trust culture, successful scamming is considered a major status marker.

Decentralized doesn’t mean everything is unregulated and out of reach of governments. USDC is pretty heavily regulated despite operating on top of, and featuring composability with, a decentralized network.

The value per watt concern does not apply to all consensus mechanisms.

I wonder how many of the anti-crypto people will stop using this argument when Ethereum completes The Merge and we get rid of PoW. Specially the gamer crowd who will finally get access to cheap GPUs and will go on to collective "waste" orders of magnitude more energy playing games in comparison with the network of validators.

GPU mining is a lottery. No individual is likely to win the lottery, only pooled in aggregate is the likelihood of winning enough to offset the costs of participating. A GPU mining outfit is wasting shitloads of electricity every day trying to buy enough lottery tickets to pay the bills.

An individual buying a GPU is not wasting any electricity in the hope of winning a rendered frame of a game. Every watt used by the GPU is explicitly for the user's purpose. Applying some sort of moral judgement to an individual's use of their private property is ludicrous. It doesn't matter if a GPU is used to play a game, display a spreadsheet, or play back porn.

The "lottery" is just a method to have the aligned incentives and secure the network. Without the miners, there would be no Blockchain. Every user of the blockchain benefits from the work from the miners. So if you have a problem with miners, you have a problem with all those that depend on them. But if you want to complain about the consumption patterns of this group, you open yourself for criticism for your consumption patterns as well. As long as you are actually paying for the electricity and energy you are consuming, I am not going to be judging you if you prefer to use with gaming, or by driving an huge SUV or flying every weekend to Las Vegas.

Still, I am glad that we are moving away from it and adopting PoS. Not only the system is more efficient, it also removes from the perma-bears one more talking point.

> As long as you are actually paying for the electricity and energy you are consuming.

For starters the price of electricity is not at all capturing all the negative externalities of generating that electricity. A miner paying a utility bill is not paying the entire cost of the energy used for mining.

Second, the vast majority of "work" performed by Proof of Work schemes is literally thrown away. It has absolutely zero utility and so is in the most literal sense just wasted electricity. Not only do they require waste but by design require increasing amounts of waste as the networks scale. They're not designed to improve or get more efficient.

Unless you're just running a game idly in the background, idling an SUV in the driveway, or idling a jet on the tarmac they're not wasting the resources used to run. They're serving at least some utility. An SUV or jet to Vegas might not be the best use of fuel for the task but they're not just wasting it. Neither an SUV or jet burns coal so even their energy usage has fewer negative externalities than a majority of blockchain miners.

Proof of Stake has been coming Real Soon Now to Ethereum for a few years now. It's still not here. Even with PoS it doesn't help matters if a majority of coins are still PoW and continue burning an Argentina worth of power.

The migration to PoS is well under way. The whole path to ETH2.0 was full of setbacks and delays, but it was never vaporware as the critics would like to think.

Just this week the largest test network completed the migration successfully, despite the miners making efforts to destabilize it.

> majority of coins

You mean BTC. Well, the best way to get rid of BTC will not be by yelling at people about the energy "waste" (which again, it is not "wasted" if it fulfill its purpose securing the network, but you are free to disagree), it will be by supporting a better alternative compelling most people to migrate.

You fall into the same trap that the parent commenter points out. Rarely does a serious web3 project aim to put everything on a blockchain.

But something like a Kickstarter-ish crowdfund system could be using a blockchain contract to handle funding and escrow, while the rest of the website is hosted in a standard web2 way. Suddenly it’s a “web3 project” where users are able to interact with and even own records in the contract, outside the context of a single frontend website.

Not the parent's objection, rather my own, but how many times has this been tried already, only to hit predictable and easily avoidable issues, if only you'd been using fiat?

Like for example, the crypto kickstarter that tried to buy a copy of the constitution? Nevermind the fact that the geniuses in charge didn't realize this didn't give them merchandising rights, when the bid failed, returning the money was a legitimate problem. Hell, even collecting the money was hard, for the same reason - gas fees.

Sure, there are ways around gas fees using second layer chains or whatever, but it's STILL not any more useful than just using fiat currency and existing systems.

Just solutions in search of problems. Kickstarter-style platforms are NOT a problem that fiat currency doesn't solve. Adding blockchain, even just for payment, doesn't solve this problem that doesn't exist.

How many times do we have to keep trying to make cars happen, we have perfectly good horse-drawn carriages!

The constitution DAO was pretty successful application of the tech. Within a week, they went from idea to public fundraiser, raised more than they would have been allowed to on Kickstarter or GoFundMe, had immediate access to the funds, and paid 0% commission compared to what most corporate platforms would charge. When the bid failed, donors were able to seamlessly exchange their PEOPLE tokens for their initial deposit. The whole process was faster than Kickstarter’s 14 day settlement.

The fees could be mitigated by using a rollup.

They lost the auction because their maximum fixed bid was public knowledge, but another application of this tech could just activate the funds toward the goal such as putting it toward carbon removal.

Disclosure: I was one of the donors and I knew the risks and also the fees involved, and I was satisfied with the whole process. A low fee tech like this on a rollup would be great.

The criticism that I phrased was not that somehow it could be done, it was that I don't see a reason why it should.

It only works in places where the institutions are functional, which is something that you are taking from granted.

But forget kickstarter. We are talking about identity. Tell me how you could implement, e.g, a twitter-like application where no single entity can kick you out. Assume that the data does not need to live in a blockchain, and each user's data is portable between different servers. The only thing a (willing) server needs to have is a way to authenticate your identity. How would you do that without blockchain?

> It only works in places where the institutions are functional, which is something that you are taking from granted.

I want to stick with the Kickstarter example a bit longer, as "banking the unbanked" is to me one of the few claims of potential crypto applications that I care about.

Blockchain technology is at this point well over a decade old, yet we can still only talk about its benefits in hypotheticals. You claim that a decentralized, crypto-based alternative to Kickstarter would be valuable in those places where institutions are not functional. This seems like something that could be tested today, as opposed to in some nebulous future. So where are all these applications that financially emancipate the proverbial Somalian farmer? I haven't really seen any concrete, significant success stories, much less any that justify the fossil fuels we're burning to maintain these systems.

I suspect this has to do with the strong correlation between corruption in general (which would drive one to adopt crypto alternatives) and poor or nonexistant education (which is needed for the tech literacy to use crypto and not be scammed at every turn). I don't know how to solve that problem.

> But forget kickstarter[...]

I don't know how to solve that problem without blockchain; I also don't know how to solve it with blockchain.

> So where are all these applications that financially emancipate the proverbial Somalian farmer?

https://trustlines.network

> I also don't know how to solve it with blockchain.

https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/106825093961591719

> https://trustlines.network

I'm aware that there are several projects that aim to "bank the unbanked". The existence of projects that claim to solve an issue does not prove that the issue is solved or even addressed. I don't see any numbers or even anecdotes on how effective these projects are at achieving their goals.

How many formerly unbanked are now banked thanks to blockchain? And I don't mean that theoretically, as in, "any Somalian farmer could in theory access banking services through the blockchain right now", I mean "how many people who had no access to trustworthy financial institutions in the past, are now actively using blockchain-based alternatives for financial services?"

> "how many people who had no access to trustworthy financial institutions in the past, are now actively using blockchain-based alternatives for financial services?"

This is the falling for the same all-or-nothing trap that I pointed out in the very first comment. We are never going to go from "unbanked" to "banked exclusively thanks to the blockchain". What is going to happen (and is happening) is that these projects will bring "people who don't have access to service X" to "blockchain project that creates an alternative to service X".

Examples:

- People in countries with strong capital controls can now participate in a global economy through blockchain transactions.

- People living in countries with poor monetary policies and weak currencies can protect some of their wealth by buying stabletokens backed by stronger currency.

- Communities without access to money markets can now issue their own local currencies and create their own credit cooperatives.

- Sex workers and "sin businesses" who are denied access to payment processors (no matter if political or economic reasons) can use web3 to not only accept payments, but also as a way to distribute their content without intermediaries.

In all of the examples above, it might happen that the situation in the "traditional" system changes and the groups start getting access. But until they don't have it, it's nice to know that they have an alternative.

Your examples are all incomplete. They all need "until people with badges and guns shut them down" or "until they need to deal with off-chain assets that require trusted reliable oracles". It is ludicrous in the extreme to assume that some blockchain transaction can and will remain anonymous and outside the enforcement of laws.

A country with repressive or non-functional capital/monetary controls will just jail people using cryptocurrencies unless they turn over their wallets. They can also use an accusation of having a wallet as pretext for indefinite detainment or punishment. Such countries aren't likely to have functional governments or even free access to the Internet. Even TV and radio are tightly controlled in such places.

> outside the enforcement of laws

whose laws?

- Sex workers from countries where prostitution is absolutely legal are affected by, e.g, Mastercard pushing for blocking transactions and almost forcing OnlyFans to drop all their adult content. All because of extended overreach from American politicians.

- A lot of these countries with strong capital controls have a lot of loopholes in the legislation by design, so that the elites can find a way to move their capital while the middle-class is forced to carry all the burden. There is a saying from a Peruvian politician: "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law", which perfectly illustrates the situation.

Crypto is not illegal, it just democratizes these loopholes. If History can teach any lesson, whenever the middle-class finds a way to enjoy the same privileges as the elites, it does not end up in a repressive reaction from the government, but in the normalization and formalization of the "informal" behavior.

- Same thing for holding stabletokens. In Brazil there is no regulation against holding crypto. The problem is that Forex is not something for retail. Too many fees, taxes on fiat and the impossibility of making deposits in foreign currency make it difficult for "retail investors", but a lot of elites have access to external markets where they can hold USD/EUR/GBP to protect themselves.

I could go on... but the point I am trying to make is that in the places it doesn't take an extreme case of Authoritarianism or Poor Economic Development to face a situation where the institutions fail.

This is besides my point. Again, I'm not asking for what these projects can mean for people in theory. We've been doing blockchain for almost 15 years, we're pumping megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year to feed proof of work algorithms, by now we should have something concrete to show for it.

What do we have to show for it? I'm asking for concrete data, or even just some anecdotes. You list some projects and how these projects could, in principle, help people. How many people are helped by them (even indirectly by improving access to traditional services)? Is this number proportional to the cost of running these systems?

What do you want? For developers to go forcing others to adopt their solution? And do it against the interests of the current elites, and God forbid if VCs get involved because then obviously you are a greedy bastard who just want to exploit a fad?

Do me a favor: go check my project (https://hub20.io/about). If minimally supported, it could very well become THE system to "bank the unbanked". Afterwards go check the "Contribute" link. See how many people are supporting my work.

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