My First Impressions of Web3

Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by mattwilsonn888 on Saturday January 08, 2022 @03:41AM (#29849851)

> But, how do they know that that record is really from NUU? How do they know that NUU really exists? How do they know what its signing keys were, and how long they remained under the university administration's control? How do they know whether it's a legitimate university? And, maybe most significantly, how do they know that you're the same Joeri who earned that degree back in the day, as opposed to some other Joeri? Are these records including some kind of digitally signed biometrics?

Asking blockchain to solve those problems is a bit ridiculous. Those are problems that need to be solved in any system, and are solved enough in many today. For starters, its not hard to archive your signing keys somewhere safe and public, especially on the blockchain - the group of Universities and employers who care about that validity will have some central organization in identifying that archive.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by grey-area on Saturday January 08, 2022 @04:14AM (#29849980)

So now remove the blockchain entirely and what value was lost?

This is what the article demonstrates. All the value is in the trusted authorities issuing things, not the transaction record on a blockchain.

Trust is important and trustless transactions with pseudo anonymous entities are not worth much.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by mattwilsonn888 on Saturday January 08, 2022 @06:20AM (#29850633)

The issue being discussed is putting college degrees on the blockchain such that viewers can be sure they are genuine and robustly hosted without tampering - no revocation.

The blockchain solves the last two, but if your conception of them is as a magical technology that can solve every issue by virtue of hosting data then you're going to be a dissapointed simpleton.

Your core issue is that colleges are a centralized institution which decide who gets rewarded - that's what it boils down to when you say "all the value" is in trusted authorities issuing things. For starters that's a ridiculous assumption that trust is still necessary for value, but more importantly stating that blockchains are useless because they cannot replace colleges is disingenuous.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by grey-area on Saturday January 08, 2022 @09:07AM (#29851792)

My problem with blockchains as the proposed solution here is that they solve none of the hard problems, introduce some new problems, (and no they are not an irrevocable record (as if that were even desirable), look up the DAO Hack or Bitcoin Cash fork and they certainly aren't proven to be permanent or reliable) and removing them would make the solution simpler and cheaper - the essential problem here is trust, not recording and sharing data.

You have not demonstrated any added value, and the straw-man insults sprinkled with spelling mistakes do not help persuade.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by mattwilsonn888 on Saturday January 08, 2022 @01:01PM (#29854265)

Yes I am straw-manning when you've built your original critique off a single niche use case (I believe the progenitor even used the phrase 'what if') and cite failing projects at least attempting to innovate as evidence of the uselessness of a technology which has achieved its original goal and continues on.

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by grey-area on Saturday January 08, 2022 @03:16PM (#29855705)

Bitcoin is a dismal currency.

It has thus failed at its original goal (a useful currency to rival state backed currencies).

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by tsimionescu on Saturday January 08, 2022 @03:52AM (#29849900)

If they can verify that, how much does the blockchain add then?

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Re:My First Impressions of Web3 by mattwilsonn888 on Saturday January 08, 2022 @06:22AM (#29850644)

Well the example clearly stated an issue of redundancy. Things which can be done off chain which as little trust should be done off chain - that doesn't mean a distributed file storage protocol which runs off some chain and uses economic and cryptographic incentives isn't the solution.

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