Copied from another reply I made a few days ago, here's some projects to check out:
- Lens Protocol [https://lens.xyz/ (one example implementation: https://lenster.xyz/)] is an early social network built on top of Polygon.
- Farcaster [https://farcaster.xyz/] is another one, that takes a more hybrid approach of using Ethereum for trustless identity, but stores social stuff in a "sufficiently decentralized" way.
- ENS [https://ens.domains/] is a universal username system.
- Unlock Protocol [https://unlock-protocol.com/] uses NFTs for tradeable subscriptions, event tickets, etc.
- Radicle [https://radicle.xyz/] is a decentralized Github basically, that (optionally) uses Ethereum to store the Git HEAD of a "project" essentially.
- Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.
2 issues spring to mind:
- What happens when someone puts illegal content on it? Eg child porn. It claims to be censorship-resistant (not censorship-proof), but I imagine any system that cannot expunge data like this won’t be around for long.
- Where are the details on the 1000 years of storage? Have they got financing arranged (and already in trust funds/isolated from the rest of the business) for this storage, the maintenance of the software throughout the next 1000 years etc? Or are they relying on people to contribute resources? If I pay money to store data here (say precious, irreplaceable family photos), then come back in 50 years, what’s the odds that I will still be able to access them?
RE the second point: highly recommend taking a look at the arweave white paper. They use an interesting pricing mechanism that tries to account for the cost of the next 200 years of storage (dunno where 1000 came from, the spec plans for 200).
That’s a weak claim then. I wouldn’t call that censorship resistant at all. That’s no better than China imo. Wouldn’t be surprised- if this got popular- for people to publish blacklists you can subscribe to.
Re the pricing mechanism, if the project fails/people abandon it (because the arweave economy crashes for whatever reason) what happens to the data? Paying out an endowment over time to fund the storage only works if you have people who put value in the tokens. Which could no longer exist.
The spec plans for 200, but that's a minimum I believe.
We'll stop asking the question when we finally get a good answer.
Just because you come from a place of great financial privilege and a liberal society does not mean others have no use for a censorship resistant form of money.
Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-dono...
Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-yout...
Nigeria: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut...
Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...
If they'd put it all into USDC they'd still have all their money. It's by no means a perfect solution but it's spiritually in the right direction. Time for Rohan Grey's e-cash or a CBDC. That's how this actually gets improved.
A global financial system could very likely be built on top of a system like this. A global identity/credentials system could also benefit from such kind of properties.
If you disagree it would then be interesting you explained where you put the cut-off, i.e. define how many sigmas should be enough for any use case and define who should we be willing to trust the operation.
No it can't.
Two major reasons (and this isn't an exhaustive list, just the first couple that spring to mind): 1) the lack of scalability both in transaction rate and data volumes, and 2) the lack of transaction reversibility.
Scalability is already being tackled, rollups are already scaling Ethereum today. In combination with data sharding they will allow scaling Ethereum to the order of 10 million TPS by the end of the decade. But much earlier than that we will see multiple orders of magnitude increased scalability.
Transaction reversibility is a non issue. Any trustworthy ledger is non-reversible. The way you implement a reverse transaction in a pen and paper ledger is by writing a new transaction that undoes the effect of a previous one. Not by erasing the previous one. Ethereum itself is non reversible but this exact logic can be implemented over Ethereum in your smart contract if so desired. And, in fact, there is smart contracts that operate like that. For example, USDC the stablecoin by Circle has this logic built in, it can freeze funds and take control of them at which point it can do whatever it needs, send it to law enforcement, reverse a transaction, etc... This is one of the lamest counterarguments people put forward.
USDC is over $50 billion - https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin - so clearly the market is seeing value in a stablecoin running on crypto rails.
But then the counterpoint is "BUT NO ONE NEEDS THIS HAVEN'T YOU HEARD OF VISA DURR DURR HURR" it's exhausting to try and argue.
We've had over 10 years of crypto. At some point it'd be nice if we moved past "projects with promise" to "projects that lived up to their promises".
So far? All we have is an ecosystem that enables gambling and a truly astonishing amount of fraud.
So I have to ask: How much longer should we wait? Five more years? Ten? Or do we just keep waiting because the faith is unshakeable?
Smells rather desperate in the crypto mines, doesn't it.
Bitcoin worth anything above $0 would have been an absurd thought 10 years ago, now it's a global asset class worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Unstoppable money not backed by any state is an amazing accomplishment. This alone is a mind blowing fact to me, but again, to the HN crypto hater it's meaningless, because the definition of "success" is constantly moving.
Blockchain and finance are deeply intertwined, so a lot of applications built on digital financial rails (blockchains) are naturally around capital formation, derivatives, trading, etc. but to the socialist / statist that should be outlawed (not just in crypto but likely Wall Street itself) so that isn't anything to you.
One counterpoint is the HN shibboleth of Stripe. Stripe is barely a tweak on PayPal, or at least it was at first, yet everyone on HN ejaculated in amazement at the ability to take a credit card with a javascript function. Of course I think Stripe is a great company, I just want to put into context how on HackerNews, Stripe = "Amazing incredible glorious $100 billion epic company" and cryptocurrency = "Wow a trillion dollar asset built on pure computer science and economic principles created by mysterious cypherpunk, who cares".
I'm not the one that picked that list of projects. You're the one who described them as having "promise", not me.
If there's some projects out there that have lived up to their promises and aren't just gambling enablement, please, list them!
I'll take a quick crack at a few:
Helium, which actually purported to use crypto to build a real-world impacting product? Fraud.
NFTs generally? Speculation, gambling, mostly fraud, rug manufacture (not in the textile sense).
Exchanges, derivatives, "yield" farming, etc. Mix of gambling, fraud, and simple wealth transfers.
Various DAO-style projects. My favourite is projects like Spice, buying real-world assets to leverage them in some way. All failures, some comically so.
Cheap money transfers? Nope. Gas fees, etc.
Store of value? Nope. Massively volatile.
Currency usable for real-world purchases/transactions? Nope. Too slow (also gas fees, etc).
And now I'm at the limit of what comes up off the top of my head.
The fact that billions of dollars have swept into a massively speculative market during a period of historically low yields isn't a surprise. The prospect of wealth transfers from the gullible to the rich will always draw in investors. But that isn't evidence of actual value or success, unless your measure of success is "how many people got rich on the backs of a lot of losers".
So what am I missing?
Someone asking me at the bar "but what's the value?" when they are an experienced technologist does not get my engagement. They haven't done enough homework to even propose a potential answer to the question they're nongenuinely asking
It has been interesting. The liberal technology community is so emboldened by "muh environment" FUD this cycle that they're actually more blind to the growing sector than ever before.
Ultimately, for the finance-minded developer, there is a gargantuan shortage of web3/crypto devs. I'm not talking about scammy VC web3. I'm referring to the people capable of building what's coming. Overnight, every company is gonna need devs and the shortage will be exaggerated.
As was the case with the Mozilla incident. Mozilla had been accepting crypto donations for many years. Until somehow this got back into the news and some influential "progressives" applied the very typical mob pressure, forcing Mozilla to stop.
And all is right again in the world. Except that people willing to give crypto (which is a form of money) now won't or can't. Less income for Mozilla whilst crypto in itself is in absolutely no way harmed. It's still there, same energy use, I guess it will now be spent elsewhere.
That's the new progressive. Obsessively cleaning your self-image, whilst outcomes are completely ignored or achieve the exact opposite.
Arguably the blockchain makes detecting and prosecuting money laundering easier than our opaque legacy financial system.
(plug warning)
Well.... I tried that, the HN comments seemed somewhat positive to me at least:
You can’t argue in good faith with people who don’t agree with the ideology behind crypto and decentralization. I'm a "crypto" person. I work for a "crypto" company. I do so for primarily ideological reasons. The tech is cool, but I'm here for the ideas and the possibility of a different world. Most people on HN are creating developer tools and SaaS software for corporations. Different ideology. They simply don't agree with the worldview that crypto is offering developers/users.
Some of the best engineers and researchers I've ever worked with were in the blockchain space. Companies that do this are shooting themselves in the foot. I work for a pretty cool startup in the defense sector that appreciated the experience I've had in distributed systems from my several years working on projects like Cardano.
Not companies that care about PR and want to distance themselves from crypto space. Those engineers and researchers unfortunately have been tricked into thinking that crypto would be here to stay as were the hundreds and thousands of investors that were duped into an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that serves no real purpose other than the monetary incentives of a closed few.
I suspect this won't change. See /r/buttcoin.
I am about as bearish on crypto as it gets but I have a very hard time believing this. It’s definitely not true at the major tech companies.
You do not want that to be the norm. It just so happens that, right now, they are discriminating towards something that you believe to be "wrong". What is "wrong" may change in the future or someone else's "wrong" may not align with your own. And considering we're talking about people's jobs and means to survive, it's not at all something to be taken lightly. At all.
The applicant might not even have an interest in what they worked for, or might even opposed to it. Maybe they worked there just to survive and the pay was good. Has that ever happened to you? I know for a fact that I could not give a single fuck about few of the sectors I worked for, some of them I actively believe to be cancerous to society. I do not have the right to discard people based exclusively on their past work experience, as I'd discard myself.
It just doesn't make sense from a moral standpoint, not to mention it also doesn't make sense from a competitive standpoint: I'd have a smaller pool of talent to choose from, and would discard brilliant minds simply by association to something I do not agree with (or simply don't understand) and ... for what, exactly? To make a point?
I get the overall point you are making, but it is just a rehash of the free speech absolutist position which, in my opinion (that you will not change), inevitably and continuously attempts to shield the worst abusers of society.
And if it turns out that I end up working on something horrible and don't get out immediately and scrub it off my resume? Then I deserve to take reputational damage
Do you believe that to be a reasonable position to have?
its also pretty common to form a resume for the job you want, omiting less helpful or unrelated things.
I went the whole decade never telling any web2 startup I worked for about crypto, who cares if its another bear market and people are yet again souring on it