And so will everyone else that isn't blinded by fanaticism.
If it fails to, then it is probably a bug that they will have to fix. If the API were immutable, then the bug would not be possible to fix.
The immutability is the exact opposite of a feature.
IE things end up immutable and incompatible, immutable and broken, etc. Or even worse "immutable and vulnerable". (IE can interact enough to still kinda work, but often do things it should not).
If you truly want to jump down the rabbit hole, it's true that immutability of this kind can provide great integrity. But you can get pretty darn good without it.
But even if developers implemented their contract with the possibility of updating, the most important detail here is that only those developers can do that.
Not AWS, not Apple, not Google, etc.
... anonymity isn't a killer feature for me personally, but it is for some.
Anyway, the parent post's point is just that it's not clear what the 'killer feature' that web3 is offering is.
Without that, it's just expensive and pathetically underpowered compared to other platforms.
You can use it to do crypto. hm... ok. I don't have crypto, and I don't have piles I money lying around I want to throw away gambling or turning into crypto.
That doesn't seem to leave any 'Killer features' for me to care about.
> Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to.
> Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract.
> Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users.
> Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.
And when it comes to "That doesn't seem to leave any 'Killer features' for me to care about", I'll also say what I said to somebody else:
Good for you. These are not killer features you'd care about. They are, however, killer features that some others care out. Why is it a bad thing that an option exists for those that do care about these features?
Also I hope you can understand that leading the conversation with these "fight the government" sentiments really sours the debate on crypto, to me that only cements the idea that this stuff only appeals to other nation-state actors, activists, journalists, and scammers/criminals. Which I suppose is fine, except for the criminals, but at that point it's the same niche that Tor fits into.
Yes, that would cut off most of the fiat on/off ramps, but your assets there are still untouched. You could still, if you wanted, go to another country that hasn't banned crypto and exchange it for other assets in those countries. That's far different from the US freezing your US bank account, in which case it doesn't matter which country you go to, your assets are still locked in the US bank.
And even in the US, I'm sure there will still be people on the street willing to exchange cash for crypto, albeit obviously at a markup. Like I said elsewhere, we've been unable to stop the billion dollar drug trade. What makes you think we will be able to completely stop a trillion dollar crypto market from within our borders?
> There's no need to take down every node; I can't see how any of those translate to killer features for this reason.
Because you need to take down every node (or prevent anyone in your country from accessing any node) before the smart contracts stop executing. So long as that's the case, it's a killer feature for anyone who is concerned about traditional financial services shutting them off. You can't see how any of these are killer features because that is presumably not you.
> For PGP, I don't understand why the user isn't encrypting them on their own machine. That seems like an incredible waste to implement encryption in a smart contract.
I didn't mean that PGP would be implemented on the smart contracts, I meant that functionality wouldn't change from under you like they did with the darknet markets. The functionality you see in a smart contract is the functionality you get, and it'll stay that way forever unless you built your smart contract to allow for such change in the future.
> As far as sanctions go, the fact that criminals and ransomware and other fraudsters can't be stopped or sanctioned is an anti-feature if you ask me.
That's fine. It's a feature for others. In other words, it creates value for people who are not you.
> but at that point it's the same niche that Tor fits into.
Well yes, I do strongly believe this is the case. Which is why I make repeated references to Tor. Do you also think that Tor's strong anonymity guarantees protecting pedophiles is an anti-feature too?
>I meant that functionality wouldn't change from under you like they did with the darknet markets
I still don't get why it did, it sounds like they were not using secure tools? Crypto isn't necessary there, just an ordinary E2E encryption scheme.
>In other words, it creates value for people who are not you.
Yes, criminals, who actively decrease value for me when people I know get hit by ransomware attacks, people I know get addicted to drugs purchased online, companies I work with get taken offline with ransomware attacks, government services I need to use get taken down by ransomware attacks, etc. All of this has already happened to me, by the way; I'm not an investor so the only real effect crypto has had on me is loss of money and well being.
>Do you also think that Tor's strong anonymity guarantees protecting pedophiles is an anti-feature too?
Well just like a lot of promises about crypto being faulty, I think this one is also faulty; I've heard a lot of stories of deep web child sex abuse rings being busted up. Tor is not a panacea. But if we say for a moment that it was, I don't think I would be ok with it. Would you be okay with finding sex abuse content on Tor that included your children? What would you do?
- Aave allows you to lend and borrow different crypto assets. If you wish to short a crypto, or if you wish to borrow against your portfolio so that you're spending fiat rather than your portfolio (a feature offered by traditional assets as well), this lets you do both of those.
- Tornado cash allows you to anonymize your Ethereum, because unfortunately Ethereum just doesn't have strong built-in privacy guarantees like Monero
- All the gambling websites. If gambling is illegal in your jurisdiction, but you'd like to gamble anyway, it's hard to stop you from doing so. Depending on your political sensibilities, this could be a good or bad thing. Personally, I say let adults do what they want, including making dumb decisions for themselves. (Of course, if you want to hide your tracks well, you'd probably want to use the aforementioned Tornado Cash.)
- Trade blockchain tokens for other blockchain tokens. Or trade blockchain tokens for tokens that claim (with dubious, temporary and totally non-cryptographic evidence) to be backed by something else.
- Lend and borrow blockchain tokens.
- Try to launder your blockchain tokens. They have to be really dirty for it to be worth it, since obscuring how you got hold of something valuable is already a crime in itself.
- Give your blockchain tokens to blockchain casino owners.
The Perth Mint is "dubious" and "temporary" to you?
If you dislike examples of assets backed by centralized entities, then look at decentralized algorithmic stablecoins.
> - Lend and borrow blockchain tokens.
Yes, including tokens that track "real world" assets. Lending and borrowing is afater all an integral part of the modern economy. This bulletpoint stands by itself.
> - Try to launder your blockchain tokens. They have to be really dirty for it to be worth it, since obscuring how you got hold of something valuable is already a crime in itself.
Just because you don't see any value in money laundering doesn't mean others don't. It's a billion dollar industry.
> - Give your blockchain tokens to blockchain casino owners.
If you want to, yes, you should absolutely have the freedom to do that. Alas, some jurisdictions in real life prevent their people from doing just that.
And yes, it is actually a surprisingly dubious organization (that corporations fully owned by a state and performing some minor official service for it, can still be extremely dodgy, should not come as a surprise).
They seem to be profiting off the assumption that from the name, they would be as tightly controlled as a central bank. But it's very clear from dodgy stuff they've already been involved in, that they're absolutely not.
But of course, I wasn't first and foremost talking about them, I was talking about the 800 dollar gorilla, Tether. They're now where Mt Gox was ca. mid-2013, with "everyone" knowing they're extremely dodgy and likely to collapse, but hoping to make money off those who haven't realized it yet.
As to "tracking" real world assets, that mechanism of tracking is a weak point, rendering all the other "guarantees" moot.
> Just because you don't see any value in money laundering doesn't mean others don't. It's a billion dollar industry.
So is other fraud. Doesn't mean it isn't money out the window. For that matter, you don't know how much of the economic activity is real. Saying "this laundromat must be really good, see how much money is going through it" is a lot like saying "this service for purchasing fake reviews must be great, look how many 6 star reviews it has".
Alright, then don't trade in their token. Or short it, if you think it's going to collapse in value anytime soon.
> But of course, I wasn't first and foremost talking about them, I was talking about the 800 dollar gorilla, Tether. They're now where Mt Gox was ca. mid-2013, with "everyone" knowing they're extremely dodgy and likely to collapse, but hoping to make money off those who haven't realized it yet.
Well yes, the whole point of a decentralized ecosystem is that it gives people the freedom to do things without government stepping in and telling them no, for better or for worse. Tether is free to print as much Tether as they want, and everyone else is free to hold or not hold USDT if they want. Caveat emptor.
> As to "tracking" real world assets, that mechanism of tracking is a weak point, rendering all the other "guarantees" moot.
Sure, that is still a centralized point of failure. But the other decentralized benefits still hold. No government sanctions can prevent you from buying this gold-backed crypto, if you so wish. Or if you have it already, from selling it for something else. Nobody to enforce pattern day trading rules on you. For better or for worse, it still gives you all the benefits that decentralization entails.
> So is other fraud. Doesn't mean it isn't money out the window.
It's money circulating through a different part of the economy than it would've otherwise. It's valuable to the people participating in it. Not to you, obviously. To other people.
> For that matter, you don't know how much of the economic activity is real.
Of course, that's the whole point. But you can still make educated guessing. Looking at the size of various illicit businesses, money laundering is obviously a billion dollar global industry. Why? Because a lot of people find it valuable. Not you, obviously. Other people.
Where's the "Youtube" of the dark web? The famed red rooms don't even exist.
What's the "killer app" of the dark web? Doesn't even exist, unless maybe you count the drug markets. I'd hazard a guess that they're by far the most popular.
> Everything you've listed is just different ways to throw away cryptocurrency.
I literally gave as an example how you could use fiat-backed crypto to buy gold-backed crypto. These assets literally track their real-world equivalents. Or do you have an issue with modern banking and the stock market too, because it's "just different ways to throw away" fake fiat money?
> The average Joe is going to look at that list, chuckle, and go back to browsing Twitter on their iPhone.
Good. The average Joe has no business using Tor. Hell, the average Joe doesn't even care enough about privacy to stop using Facebook. The average Joe doesn't need a lot of things. Who cares what the average Joe wants or doesn't want, unless you're trying specifically to market a product to the average Joe?
Crypto exists for those who actually find a use for it. You seem either unable or unwilling to acknowledge this fact. Which is it?
If the only people using Tor are people who actually need it, then 'using Tor' becomes a very dangerous marker.
There's actually something truly new and tangible that crypto has spurred - the ability to drive consensus in a trustless manner automatically and the ability to execute computer programs that are deterministic, immutable, and will run forever. With those new tools in the global toolbox I suspect that some iteration of them will be in use somewhere in our future, but no-one exactly where. Are NFT game assets the ultimate expression of crypto? No, but Friendster and HotOrNot weren't the ultimate expression of the internet either.
The ability to network 2 computers together was also new and tangible thing that the internet as a concept brought, but it wasn't before a huge amount of foundational work in the form of IETF protocols, router hardware design & production, software network stacks, and wireless communications before it really took off. Mass adoption was one of the last phases, and I still remember a day when people would call you crazy for putting your credit card anywhere near the internet.
IMO that's the phase we're at, so for most people it's just not ready yet, but it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people out there trying new and novel things with these tools ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Let's try to think quite ahead, going sci-fi even:
Maybe the only use case for such programs is valid if they are powerful AIs, or uploaded human minds. But for the blockchain to be able to run that? The compute and memory needed is astronomical. It also means that blockchain will be relevant technology only in the 22nd century and now we are just playing with it for no actual value whatsoever.
Because, how else would I ensure that my uploaded mind from year 2060 henceforth runs forever in the cloud? I can't, the 22nd century equivalent AWS may be shutdown. Solution - blockchain...
Quantum computing is going through this too right now where we have the ability to compute with a handful of qbits, but the implications on a years time horizon are profound.
You do bring up a valid point in that it’s unclear exactly how the “legacy software” story fits in here. Migrations to new blockchains and the blockchains themselves upgrading without contention (Tezos comes to mind with this as a core feature) seem like the natural response to this problem. Not unlike anything else though it’ll be hard to predict until it slaps us in the face lol.
Yeah, and that's why we have Ethereum Classic, a remnant of its own shameful history. Dapps are still man-made, so can be faulty, but Ethereum doesn't have any recovery scenario for faulty dapps other than forking out. No one can save you from your own deadly mistakes. This simply can't scale.
> No one can save you from your own deadly mistakes.
Alternatively, "You really really have to give a shit about your own security". Imagine if banks had some skin in the game in terms of their security story. Why was I able to have 2 factor on my world of warcraft account many years before my bank account?
You're right in that crypto is a cold world of immutability, but in the same way that exposing servers and data to the internet (along with all the hacks, identity theft, etc that came with it) ultimately led to better security protections like ASLR, DEP, Yubikeys, etc, I posit we'll see rise of new technologies to help combat these issues as well to help offset the risks as much as possible. Hardware wallets, multi-sig contracts, and now multi-party computation are promising new tools to help make the blockchain space more operationally safe, which enables the whole thing to scale.
It’s telling that you don’t know how wrong this is, but feel qualified to redesign a mature industry anyway. Banks are highly regulated and spend billions on security — that’s why the major breaches which are routine in the cryptocurrency world don’t have an analog in the real financial system.
They know that there would be significant penalties if they lose customer resources or grant access to your account improperly, but they don’t spend it on the same things. For example, MFA doesn’t solve every problem — if I phish you or compromise your device, your cryptocurrency life savings are gone but trying to send a wire transfer from your bank for an amount that large will require out of band confirmation, especially if it’s to a random third party or out of the country.
That irrecoverable failure mode is one of the core design flaws of cryptocurrency which makes it unappealing to most people. Most people do not want the risk or constant maintenance work of being their own bank, and mitigating that by reinventing the banking sector except more expensive is a tough sell.
You're either ignorant or joking.
Just because FDIC has taken care of the blunders that couldn't be sorted out internally between the banks does not mean there haven't been huge privacy and security hacks on these systems since the 90s.
Yes, that's the point: banks have not lost that much money because they have layers of process built around preventing large amounts from moving quickly without lots of layers of approval, things like the SWIFT hacks (which were smaller than the cryptocurrency losses even before you consider how many orders of magnitude larger the banking system is), and as a customer your risk of a permanent loss is extremely low. This is a stark contrast to what happens when cryptocurrency attacks are successful and the community says “you should have been more careful, nothing we can do”.
No reason it has to stay that way in all cases. There are many solutions such as layered approaches, semi-custodial services, community forgiveness.
Token governance is the next step from forking that isn't so arduous. With proper governance, the community around a token can come to a consensus that a mistake led to irrecoverable funds (for example) for one user and if the amount is worth the time issue a proposal and vote on minting replacement tokens for that user. Token holders are the share holders of their protocol, no reason all the normal operations that make a business safer for users can't be implemented in token contracts.
Try not to confuse the current state with what's possible.
I don’t want to get into some pissing match about my qualifications but I’ve seen the insides of a number of large financial institutions and their security first hand while working in the security industry. Your argument is that they’re regulated and have a large security spend which is sufficient, my counter argument is that they’re bloated and that large spend is largely security theater.
Doing things like spending money and installing Carbon Black on a server in some closet to check the “endpoint protection” box to auditors is not the same as a competent team sitting down and building an infrastructure with effective defense in depth principals.
Crypto is immutable which can be dangerous but that edge of it is also spurring novel research into things like hardware wallets, multi sig smart contracts, and multi party computation which are real tangible ways to alleviate some of these problems (and other, non-crypto space problems as well). You call it a bug, I call it a feature.
Ultimately crypto’s immutability is a form of global free market Darwinism playing out where protocols that are well designed (and again, really really give a shit about their security) are the ones that continue to exist. Shitty protocols built by incompetent people get hacked and die. Darwinism is not a “design flaw”, it’s what allowed us to transcend living in caves and build society. Has it all been smooth and easy? Of course not, but evolution rarely is. E-commerce had its own rocky start too.
> They know that there would be significant penalties if they lose customer resources or grant access to your account improperly, but they don’t spend it on the same things.
Just because banks have reduced the tail end consequences of their ineptitude and crappy behavior doesn’t mean that it’s scalable globally and forever with no cost for those that use it or prop it up (U.S. banks largely rely on U.S. govt for this compensating control, as well as bailouts when they’re too big to fail), and I will point out that major financial institutions/networks have been getting hacked for decades at this point, but especially in the early days. There are tons of cases of theft, fraud, and abuse in the traditional banking sector (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–2016_SWIFT_banking_hack). Fin firms tend to hire “crisis management” firms to spin media coverage and offset the negative PR when it happens though, which makes it ok in the public eye.
I’m not sure what banks you’re referring to here but every major bank has been doing anti consumer and illegal stuff for a long time, whether it’s Wells Fargo (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/02/24/wells-farg...) or JPMC (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...).
Just because they’ve offset the risks from this shitty behavior doesn’t suddenly make this behavior palatable or something we should accept IMO. The Equifax breach comes to mind as well, but don’t worry because they’re still around, and they were so nice as to offer everyone a year of identity protection (…offered through equifax) as compensation for their gross negligence. They definitely learned their lesson though right?
Well yes, that's kind of the point. Freedom to choose what you want to do with your money -- including the freedom to make your own mistakes and shoot yourself in the foot.
Maybe it will be someday, but it definitely isn't today, nor does it seem to be happening particularly soon!
Until developers feel like that day is coming, this neither makes sense, nor will it go anywhere.
(as an aside, the non-payment one seems kind of silly, since the blockchain apps don't work without payment either - network fees, etc. Sometimes they are covered, sometimes not)
You can't define away comparisons with how things are done now by saying it can only be compared with things that offer the same assurances. That makes no sense - all software architectures are tradeoffs of these sorts. Privacy vs Security vs Ease of Use vs Cost vs Performance vs ...
People are quite literally going to ask themselves whether it is worth getting those features for the current cost. They aren't going to say "well, we can't compare the cost because the current system doesn't do that". They are going to say "is it worth <cost> to get these things".
There's a subtle difference here though: So long as I use AWS, I'm responsible for funding the account, and my non-payment means the app goes down. I have to continue to pay for the app to run, even if no one uses it.
On a blockchain, once I've deployed my app, I can walk away and never think about the app again. I only have to pay for the initial deployment of the contract without any further ongoing cost. The app will always be there ready to be used by an end user who's willing to pay to interact with it.
I pointed out it appears to not solve any problem that currently exists, yes. But I also qualified it by saying it doesn't solve a problem that people seem likely to have anytime soon, ie the future, either.
So the latter statement you try to prop up doesn't change anything - it does not have obvious value compared to today's standard, but it also doesn't have obvious value in the future, either.
So no, the latter statement is not a thinker in comparison. In fact, as i said elsewhere, there appears to have been zero diligence on product/market fit. This appears to be something that was done because they could, not because anyone actually seems to want it.
Good luck on turning that vision that solves nobody's problem into a thing anyone cares about!
Likewise, there always exists the possibility that your server can be compromised and the code can be altered. The immutability of the blockchain guarantees that your code cannot be changed, with or without your knowledge.
> The immutability of the blockchain guarantees that your code cannot be changed, with or without your knowledge.
There's been a lot of examples lately why this is not a desirable feature at all for most purposes.
It's possible that bugs in the blockchain software can cause blocks to no longer be produced, essentially halting the network until the problem is resolved. So-called 51% attacks are also a failure possibility.
How will miners be paid to host apps? Given that app usage concentrates into winner take all groupings wouldn't we except the web 3 winners to be paying for the vast majority of any web 3 mining?
Bitcoin doesn't technically solve this either, its just that its data growth rate is small enough to be trivial in comparison to storage costs. Ethereum and other classical distributed ledger systems cannot fulfill the true vision of Web3 (it can and will continue to do a fraction of that vision) because they have no affectual economic functions for data rent or data handling in general. Mining/staking is paid for and everything else is an economic after-thought. Ethereum's Infura Problem is a quick way to see the consequences of these poorly suited economic incentives.
Bitcoin is about stability, but Web3 is about data, so I believe its fair to say that a distributed ledger technology built for "Web3" (which is quickly becoming a dirty word) will have its economic components focused on data. This is different from keeping the traditional Nakamoto Consensus (which judges value based on somewhat arbitrary measures) but deriving tricks to push more data - this means maintaining or exceeding the security guarantees of Nakamoto Consensus while incentivizing data routing-work and storage rather than number crunching.
What? Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to.
Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract.
Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users.
Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.
Phrased another way, “bug immortality guarantees.” What is the use case for completely immutable software? Even Ethereum smart contracts do not actually guarantee the compiled byte code matches the supposed source of the contract, so while it might be immutable, it is not free. I think the bigger concern is not that the code will update - updates are good, especially ones for bug fixes like the log4j vulnerability recently - but that the code they say is running, is not actually running.
And let’s assume that we need to update our code. You need to pay to deploy an entirely new contract and then have some sort of “pointer”/gateway that redirects all your users to the new patched contract, and then we’re right back where we started where this gateway can be forced by law to not direct people to your contract much like Google can be DMCA’d to not show copyright violations.
What? You don't have to publish your smart contract code for the public to verify, but you absolutely can. And once you do, the public can absolutely verify that the smart contract code you provided does in fact compile to the byte code deployed to the blockchain.
> and then we’re right back where we started where this gateway can be forced by law to not direct people to your contract much like Google can be DMCA’d to not show copyright violations.
You don't have to include that upgrade functionality in your smart contracts. Or if you do include upgrade functionality, you can limit what sort of functionality can be upgraded. Otherwise, yes, it's no different than just running your own server and changing the code all of a sudden with the users being none the wiser.
Question is, if you don't limit your upgrade functionality, are your users going to trust you not to rugpull?
The point is simply to be able to make certain immutability guarantees, if you do want them. The utility is very evident in that something like a Uniswap pool a) works and b) cannot be stopped, so people who do find a Uniswap pool useful, are able to rely on the guarantees made by the smart contract, including of course any potential bugs.
For Uniswap pools, you’re referring to smart contracts that allow people to take out or provide funding for loans, right? So the immutability of the contract may be appealing in terms of interest rates or loan duration/terms/etc. But this option already exists outside of DeFi (fixed rate loans). It is cool that we can offer these in a decentralized manner, but the possibility of a bug affecting my mortgage or another sizable loan is a huge, huge deterrent and I am also sure that, if DeFi “takes off,” there will be solutions implemented that completely remove all immutability guarantees.
You can do all that, but then who but the most gullible will use your smart contracts?
I literally explained a few comments ago how that's not the case. Did you forget what you read already? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588550
In a trustless environment like defi, why would anyone other than the most gullible put their money in any smart contract that doesn't have open sourced code?
> When a company open sources some code, we assume and trust they are not keeping a separate, evil branch running in production unbeknownst to us.
We assume and trust because we have to. With crypto, you can trust and verify, as the Russians say.
So... this is a thing for techies only? The rest of the world that can't read the code will have to trust the techies that say "this is good".
As a not-JavaScript-devleoper, open sourced optimal written JavaScript is only slightly less inscrutable than minified or compiled JavaScript.
So, would I be gullible to put my money into a smart contract written in JavaScript?
Most of the world can't verify the code and will need to trust someone. I hope that isn't the password verification commission that calls grandmothers offering to help check out their bank account security.
I haven't scrutinized the code for major flagship apps like Uniswap either. But plenty of others have, including paid auditors.
With open-sourced code, you can actually do this. You can actually get semi-reliable signals that others have scrutinized the code and found it to be fine. Not completely reliable, because sometimes auditors also miss subtle exploits. But you know, everyone's risk tolerance is different. Decide for yourself what degree of trust you're comfortable with, and put or don't put your money in accordingly.
This isn't specific to crypto, this is true for open source in general.
> So... this is a thing for techies only? The rest of the world that can't read the code will have to trust the techies that say "this is good".
But yes, as of now pretty much. The average Joe who cannot remember their own passwords should not be using crypto, IMO. With freedom comes the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot, and unless you understand basic digital safety procedures, you are best off not shooting yourself in the foot.
They won't have to. It's like putting absurd security on your door yet leaving the windows as open as always.
If you ever want to move value out of your virtual economy and into the real, they can and will be there waiting for you, with all their unreasonable demands.
I’m just waiting for the day when governments decide that all this crypto is hurting the environment more than necessary for no real gain and forces ISPs to block this traffic. Similar to how many ISPs block serving DNS or SMTP from residential IPs.
Also, just use a friggin VPN.
How would you propose to ban all cryptos? We haven't even been able to ban torrents.
ISPs could simply run honeypots that in real time sniff out who is running a blockchain node and block traffic to those IPs. These nodes must broadcast publicly to other nodes to even function, so they can't hide the fact that they are a blockchain node: they are forced to peer with whoever else is... peering in the same direction, pun intended.
I'd love to know what gaps in my knowledge invalidate the above thesis, though.
I'm my only user, that's why I'm discussing self-hosted apps here...
I mean, yes, but if your use case is only yourself as the sole user, that's quite different from the majority of businesses out there who need to service many users. This is truly like comparing apples and oranges.
I know "there is nothing new that blockchain does" has become a meme among sceptics, but with respect, I am getting a bit tired of it.
It's just not accurate. You can argue that what the way blockchain allows for shared state is useless all they long, or that the financial use cases are undesirable, and that's all fine. But you simple cannot run the kind of apps that are running on Ethereum right now, enabling financial transactions, with the same guarantees of décentralisation and permissionless access, w/o a blockchain.
It may be useless and/or criminal, but it is certainly new and it works.
Not with realtime action games, nope. The server hopefully verifies, but not even that is a given... Just look at New Worlds immortality bug from a few weeks back for a pretty large budget game that forgot to do that to a sufficient degree.
Ever heard of dns or IP addresses?
What about bittorrent, tor, i2p, ipfs?
Blockchain products are write once, read free, persist forever for free.
Your users pay to interact. Every SaaS funnel person knows that of you get users to pay at all then you have filtered the funnel to larger payments already. Blockchakn projects are that funnel in warp speed.
> Yes, blockchains are slower and more expensive. This is the current cost of enabling the two facets above. If we're not comparing blockchain dapps to other systems that offer the same assurances, then we're comparing apples and oranges.
Could you please respond more meaningfully to the conversation?
You can't wave away the serious issues by saying "there's no point in comparing them"
Lots of things offer different functionality and tradeoffs. If you want to play in the space of "web app", you can and should be compared to things that are solutions for producing "web apps". We compare codeless web apps to code ones, etc.
The same way people compare gas and electric vehicles. Or minivans and suvs and trucks. Or, well, everything in a solution space.
Any solution for a given use case can and should get compared with other solutions for that use case.
I'm really sorry that it doesn't seem (judging by this thread) to compare particularly well for most developers, but that doesn't invalidate the comparison.
And the current use cases are sufficiently different that it's like comparing apples and oranges.
> I'm really sorry that it doesn't seem (judging by this thread) to compare particularly well for most developers, but that doesn't invalidate the comparison.
Again, do you think the same of Tor? It doesn't compare particularly well by most mainstream metrics. High latency, low bandwidth. And yet it serves a lot of value to a lot of people.
But then some smartass goes and says "It's completely useless tech, I can host a simple static website on clearnet for much less hassle." Yeah, duh, but that's not the point of Tor. Go use the clearnet if that's what you're looking to do.
Uh, what? This whole thread and post is about the argument that replacing existing apps with dapps will be better (or worse).
They specifically said that it has advantages over current apps, and compared what happens with your current apps when you don't pay your AWS bill.
They then later, after lots of comments pointing out that nobody cares, said "well you can't really compare it to any of those things".
You seem more sane in the sense of what you think this stuff will do.
Immutability and resistance to shutdown are not features that the vast majority of apps, present and in the future, will ever need. My main dispute with the original article is that the author argues every single use case of a Web3 app can be done with a traditional app, and I argue that's simply not true. The case where that breaks down is precisely when your app requires immutability and resistance to shutdown.
To use an analogy: Most people will never need to own or use an armored car, and if you evaluated an armored car based on its viability as a consumer vehicle, you would say that its fuel requirements and maintenance costs are impractical, because you don't need the assurance of having a bulletproof vehicle in your everyday life. It would be overkill.
Similarly, these Web3 technologies are not being designed to replace YouTube or Facebook. If you're building a service like that, you don't need the armored car. On the other hand, if you're designing an app that performs financial transactions, then the armored car may be something you can use. Or not! But the option is there.
99% of developers will never need to build an app this way. But there are use cases outside of ponzi schemes and fraud that seem to be overlooked and which I think are worth drawing attention to.
Imagine if a single red apple costed about $100M, yet it had rather unique qualities such as indisputable, provable lack of contamination. That's the kind of cost difference we're talking about here.
Vacuum tubes gave way to the silicon transistor, which immediately moved the idea of "personal computing" from a complete impossibility to something that was a pipedream that was technically possible to do. From there things like the Apple II made paths to make personal computing actually usable and affordable. The iteration cycle continues, drives demand for new things to do, which drives demand for the internet. Eventually we arrive at the iPhone where I can now have a low-latency, high definition, video call for (basically) free with anyone in the world. Try explaining that vision to someone in the 90's who has a pager, pays for long distance, and buys stamps and they'll tell you it's impossible or a pipedream.
The crypto/web3 industry is just finding its feet with some new tools in the proverbial toolbox (distributed consensus and smart contracts). There's a lot of people building on it and iterating every day, but in the same way that the IETF were unsung heros of bringing everyone Youtube, there are a lot of folks hard at work at making things usable and practical for mass adoption. Mass adoption just comes last.
But some people are willing to pay 10^9 the cost for certain guarantees. Good for them too, that such options now exist. Why the irrational hate?
> This is great, but I don't need it at 10^9 times the cost.
Like I said, good for you. You don't need it at 10^9 the cost. Some others do. Why hate that a solution exists for those who do?
Because from where I am it looks more like it exists for charlatans and scammers to draw more people in and exploit them. Also, why do cryptocurrency fanatics so frequently accuse anyone critical of them as being hateful?
Yes, "charlatans and scammers" are definitely part of the demographic that would benefit from crypto. But you're really going to ignore every other use case I've mentioned?
From where some people stand, it looks more like Tor exists for pedophiles to draw other pedophiles in. They're not wrong, but they're also not acknowledging the full picture of what Tor and privacy in general enables.
> Also, why do cryptocurrency fanatics so frequently accuse anyone critical of them as being hateful?
Because the critics, as you can see over and over again in this very thread, are being completely dismissive to the actual use cases and benefits that crypto brings. Never acknowledging the minority of people for whom it actually brings real value to (granted, they've become a minority now that there's a lot of speculative dumb money in the market), never acknowledging the points that are being made, and also calling crypto advocates MLM schemers who just want to draw more people in to make money off of them.
It's one thing if the critics take a look at it and say "Oh that's not really for me" or "Oh I don't know if censorship resistance is an attractive enough incentive for people to keep running Ethereum nodes long-term." Then we could really have a conversation. But they don't say it like that. They say everything with disdain and a sneer. So I respond in kind.
What would you call that other than "hate"? If you kept criticizing something your friend likes despite them telling you all the reasons they like it, and you only ever saying how much it sucks and how nobody should like it, doesn't it make sense for them to ask you "Dude, why do you hate it so much? What do you have against it?"
>Why the irrational hate?
you’re coming off as too mean and I think you’d do well to avoid that tone.
This is imo the best case scenario with web3. Which would mean that most of the current "value" is a bubble.
So IPFS does allow DMCA and the like to exist and function but as long as a certain margin refuse to comply, the network continues to function as expected ignoring the actions of centralised organisations.
> but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing
There's no way for the blockchain to do that. The only way this is possible on ethereum is if the smart contract includes a self-destruct function, and the owner of the smart contract decides to call it (either because their private keys were compromised, or because they were coerced into doing so IRL). Otherwise, it's technically impossible to do without taking down the entire network or breaking encryption.
I'm less familiar with IPFS so can't really speak much to that -- but from what little I understand, censorship-resistance is also a major selling point there.
> So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS?
There is the ENS, but even then, nobody can take an ENS domain down except for the owner of that domain. Not even the creator of the ENS smart contract, unless they specifically included upgrade functionality into the contract, because smart contracts are immutable.
> Sure, the item at the address is immutable, but you might not be able to get it.
As long as you have access to a single Ethereum node, or access to a service that has access to an Ethereum node, you will be able to get at it. It's hard to imagine you not getting at any Ethereum nodes unless a Great Firewall of China situation exists, and even China doesn't care to ban most proxies.
Like I've said elsewhere, this is "for better or for worse," depending on your political sensibilities. Again, I think Tor is a good example here. Lots of CP on Tor, or so I hear. But also persecuted journalists and whistleblowers, and safer drugs than you'd find on the streets. You can't realistically say "I want X to be outside the reach of tyrannical governments, but not Y." It's an all-or-nothing deal. By its very nature, these sorts of libertarian technologies will attract all the illegal parts of society -- for better or for worse.
Having used both defi and traditional financial infrastructure, defi definitely feels a lot, lot more frictionless to me, at least while acting within the Ethereum ecosystem. Time will tell, but I find it hard to believe such frictionlessness won't eventually force its way into the world.
Individuals running IPFS gateways or nodes may be directly targeted and asked to take down data, but there's no mechanism for "the network as a whole" to remove data. It's exactly the same as bittorrent. So long as one individual in some hard-to-reach jurisdiction continues hosting the data, nothing can be done.
why the blockchain? There are other peer to peer tech that do not involve the blockchain, if your goal is avoiding being shutdown or censored.
Is this a big worry for a lot of people or is just one of the possible things that can go wrong incidental to doing business, like a traffic ticket is to driving?
It's also a worry for people who are traditionally blocked from doing business -- for example, anyone who's got some sanctions placed on them. Again, could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your political opinions. But some people find it valuable, that's for sure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/world/asia/north-korea-kp...
Again, not saying this way is the right way. Just saying, there's a lot of value in such tech -- for better or for worse.
The gatekeepers are important and play a role. There are real arguments to be made about how we can make the gatekeepers more efficient, but not that they aren’t necessary.
I have tried my best to read up on how all this is supposed to work but have come up blank. Is there a simple explanation - using zero buzzwords - of how I can run a site in the way you describe in the Web3 world?
The second is a web frontend typically deployed to a decentralized service like IPFS to provide interactions with the backend contract, however this isn't the only way a web3 site can be made. You can also have the front end as something the user runs locally, or you can eschew the front end entirely, as it's also possible to programmatically interact with smart contracts directly (analogous to the command line in a way).
An example of such a site would be the decentralized trading exchange Uniswap located at https://app.uniswap.org/. Rather than calling a centralized API endpoint to populate the front end, all the data is being pulled through interactions with contracts on the blockchain. Smart contracts can provide read-only data fee free, and you only have to pay to interact with the site when you're doing something that would change state.
- The hostname is resolved from Cloudflare's authoritative DNS nameservers
- It has a TLS cert issued by Cloudflare
- The backend IP resolves to Cloudflare's server range
- It is a pretty standard React front end served entirely from https://app.uniswap.org
- I can't say about the compute, but it's pretty obvious that the site isn't running on 1/5,000 the power of a Raspberry Pi for $250 a second (aka Smart Contract).
So, what part of it is distributed and resilient to takedowns?
Put another way – is there a use case for Web3 which doesn't involve touting Web3? What is the "killer app" for the average user who isn't obsessed with crypto/blockchain?
Then just do that. You're neither the kind of user nor the kind of developer who would want to use web3.
> What is the "killer app" for the average user who isn't obsessed with crypto/blockchain?
What's the "killer app" of Tor for the average user who isn't obsessed with privacy? Nothing. The whole point is privacy. If you're okay with clearnet tracking, then just use the clearnet.
What I don't understand is this refusal to understand that there's actual value in blockchain technology for some people. I get that you don't need or want it. Why is it so hard for you to understand that others do need or want it?
If you're actually curious, and not just looking to status signal, I listed the apps that I've found to be most groundbreaking here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588151 .
I've explained again and again in other comments. As did the parent comment of this whole thread. It's really not that hard to understand, but there's nothing I can do if you don't want to understand.
> Well its TOR - its pretty clear proposition even to mainstream users it will be instantly obvious - the privacy is the feature.
Really? Have you ever met a non-technical user who said they wanted to use Tor for anything?
Regardless, that's entirely besides the point. So what if a mainstream user doesn't understand why version control would be useful for their Excel sheets? The rest of us carry on using version control just fine.
Look, we all know how MLMs work. Just say that you’re finding reasons for other people to pay money for your tokens rather than accusing people of not understanding. None of your comments have included a compelling sales pitch and it’s not the reader’s obligation to help you improve it.
You're looking for something that just isn't there, so you can sneer at it and show your snide superiority. Go somewhere else for that sort of validation, because you're not getting it from me.
> When you're backed into a corner you can't resort to "it's not for you"
I think your bias is showing. I'm hardly backed into a corner. From my perspective, I've only ever stated hard facts. They're the ones backed into a corner by these facts, and all they can ever muster up is "Oh but I don't find that useful. My use case is an app that literally only myself uses."
It's like wading into a conversation about Spark and saying it's overkill when you just want to process a hundred line CSV file. No duh, that's not what it's meant for. It gets real old when commenter after commenter -- and often even the same commenter -- misses the same point again and again.
And I'll say, that includes you. You're backed into a corner and unable to name any alternatives here [1], so you resort to criticizing my tone instead.
> It frankly makes your case look paper-thin and further reinforces the idea that cryptocurrency is a chump's game.
I wasn't looking to convince anyone in particular, and that includes you. It seems you're more swayed by tone than by facts. So be it.
Web3 is marketing itself as something it is not. You're using a combination of expectation management and goalpost shifting to refute that, and people have called you on it. I can imagine that you don't see yourself as "losing" these arguments, since you haven't even responded to them in the first place.
The supply of ledger space is limited. When demand for that space not only goes up, but keeps going up, what does economics tell us happens to the price? I keep giving example after example of what people use this ledger space for, but all anyone every says is "Oh, but it's just moving tokens around." I have yet to see anyone say how that's any different from the stock market just moving fiat around. Deflection, deflection, deflection. Who's refusing to engage with the conversation now?
> and purely serves to benefit people who invested first (like MLM)
That is simply not true, and I've given example after example of the use cases that benefit the people using the chain. But after every explanation, you still resort to "Oh but I don't use it, so it must be an MLM." You haven't engaged at all with any of my points, you just keep repeating your own. Who's reframing the conversation now?
> When confronted about the possibility of all of it being a scam, your only response was "caveat emptor".
When confronted about the possibility of any single smart contract being a scam, my only response is "caveat emptor," yes. Because that's the whole point. You can't have censorship resistance without having this phenomenon.
But when it comes to the possibility of the whole thing being a scam, that's clearly ridiculous and as I've said, I've refuted it many times over. The next few sentences of your comment are just more of the same, so I'm not going to bother refuting every individual sentence.
> When people say that's stupid, you resort to "well that's fine, I didn't want your money anyways".
Yes, all people ever do is to call it "stupid" without backing their argument up. You said it yourself.
> This is a textbook scam
And by implication, I'm one of the scammers then, aren't I? And you expect me to respond to such accusations politely and demurely?
> your rhetoric will perpetually be at odds with the rest of the discussion unless you engage them on their own terms.
"On their own terms" meaning that we accept the premise that it's a scam? So you don't want a discussion, you just want me to affirm your pre-existing beliefs.
> I can imagine that you don't see yourself as "losing" these arguments, since you haven't even responded to them in the first place.
I notice you still haven't named any alternative technologies in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29588753 . You say "decentralization doesn't need the blockchain," implying that the blockchain doesn't really do much for decentralization. I respond asking for any other alternative that does what crypto does, and gave an example of a major decentralized platform that was only possible because of crypto. Once again, you're backed into a corner, and all you do is refuse to respond, and then deflect and project your own loss onto me. I rest my case.
It's just not useful for you. Which I understand. Not everything is for everyone. But you seem incapable of understanding that it's useful for many who are not you.
Then why can't you provide examples which are useful for things other than moving cryptocurrency tokens around? When the web started, sure some of the pages were talking about the web and how to build new things with it, but most of the things people were putting online were using the web to make were related to their hobbies, professional interests, politics, etc. and simply using it as a communications medium.
More crassly, why do I not hear anyone saying it's useful unless they have a personal financial stake in me buying their tokens? The closest past event I remember seeing was during the dotcom era when day-traders would talk up stocks without being able to say what a company did or why they were a good bet.
I provided, among other things, examples of trading tokens that track real world assets. Or what, you think the stock market isn't actually useful because it doesn't do anything useful other than moving money around?
Do you know why Ethereum gas fees are so high? Because lots of people are using Ethereum. Obviously because they find it useful for -- yes -- moving tokens around and whatnot.
Again, you're obviously not someone who would find it useful or even interesting. But seriously, how is it so hard for you to understand that the world isn't just you?
> More crassly, why do I not hear anyone saying it's useful unless they have a personal financial stake in me buying their tokens?
Maybe because you're not interested in the tech, so the only people who you ever get to talk to about crypto are the shills? Because that has obviously not been my experience, which has been a lot more technical.
IMO these projects are aiming at a new form of sovereignty on the internet that doesn't/can't exist currently - the ability to have your data be permanently stored and accessible on the web. Google can decide to kill Google Photos, and every email provider on the planet can delete everyone's old emails if they so choose. It's unlikely, yes, but the ability to put something on the internet permanently surely has some novel value to it, even if just as an open building block to something bigger than the sum of its parts.
A massive part of what's going on right now in the crypto space is people experimenting with these new protocols and tools like smart contracts and DAOs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...) and attempting to figure out new and novel things to do with them. Web3 is a moniker du-jour to try to encompass these experiments in finance, governance, art, and collaboration.
When the internet was early, people were doing the same, and it gave rise to new forms of art, online gaming, radically different access to banking, ecommerce, and low latency, (basically) free, video calling anywhere in the world. Imagine trying to explain Twitch.tv or Facebook to someone in the early 90s when people were paying for long distance calls and stamps. The groundwork for these things was being created as people were inventing DNS, HTTP, etc etc, but in the same way that NeoPets was not the ultimate expression of online gaming (but had influence on it nonetheless), the things we're seeing today are not the ultimate expression of what "web3" will eventually be but instead a bunch of passionate people trying to figure out what revolutionary things can be built with these new unique tools.
Similarly, there’s a lot of mythology about content not being censorable which falls apart as soon as you think about it. People still have to follow the law in their country: if you upload a Disney movie to IPFS, their lawyers will send takedowns to everyone hosting it. Just as with other P2P services, anyone using it will be deterred by the risk of your ISPs cutting your service if you don’t comply with legal requirements but unlike its more efficient and private alternatives these services are both public (making it easier to track users) and the blockchain services handily provide a signed statement for prosecutors, which seems unlikely to be a popular feature for anyone who actually needs it.
That’s the key difference between the early internet and “web3”: those early efforts were building things people outside of that community clearly wanted but the latter is what happened when people spent a decade pumping money into cryptocurrencies in the hopes of one day becoming rich and are now desperately searching around for reasons why everyone else should pay a premium for their random numbers. It never goes well when the conversation starts with what you’d like to sell someone rather than what they need.
Have you heard of the uncensorable library project? https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en it aims to make some data permanent and available even in the face of Chinese censorship. Is it a panacea that’s going to scale for all data forever? Of course not, but it’s a novel approach and an interesting experiment (and look ma, no blockchain!).
How much does this cost to do?
How much does this cost to update?
What does it take to remove it if you decide that no, you really don't want to have that material online anymore?
I can think of very few systems I'd want to use where nothing can be deleted.
I don't understand why this is seemingly considered a feature for all use cases.
Who says it's a feature for all use cases? It's a feature for some use cases. For those use cases, it's a major feature.
Then one suddenly finds oneself with a pretty much mutable world.
It appears it has been shown many times [1] that such attack is quite possible.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/cryptocurrency/...
is that good? seems flaws then are perpetual?
This is the only great use case I can think of.
> On a blockchain, once I've deployed my app, I can walk away and never think about the app again. I only have to pay for the initial deployment of the contract without any further ongoing cost. The app will always be there ready to be used by an end user who's willing to pay to interact with it.
Only the compiled contract itself.
Right?
Or patched for that matter
Immutability is important because it's guaranteed that no matter how many times you interact with a contract address, you can be assured that at no point has the code in that contract ever changed. This is not an assurance you can typically get, as backend code for traditional endpoints can change at any time.
Even more important IMO is the difficulty in shutting down a contract that's deployed to the blockchain. In the case of this article, the reliance on external services such as AWS opens up possibilities for your app to be shut down, whether it's through non-payment to your AWS account, AWS decides you've violated their terms of service, or legal action compels AWS to shut down your app.
In the case of dapps deployed to the blockchain (combined optionally with frontends deployed to a service like IPFS, but this isn't a requirement, as one can always interact directly with contracts), the ability to shutdown these apps would rely on somehow breaking the blockchain itself.
Whether or not you see these aspects as bugs or features is a matter of opinion. Yes, blockchains are slower and more expensive. This is the current cost of enabling the two facets above. If we're not comparing blockchain dapps to other systems that offer the same assurances, then we're comparing apples and oranges.