It's cheaper and freer so I think it's likely. Services like ipns://stealthhealth.crypto (access via Brave local IPFS node) have no server costs, no domain registration maintenance costs, no banking costs and no obvious vulnerabilities for shut down or data leakage.
Maybe not this iteration, but could something similar in general take off several iterations from now? Maybe
Edit: Someone listed two examples inc Geocities but deleted their comment as examples of Web2 options. These work (although now defunct) by sticking ads down people’s throats. Tokens let you work out other ways to incentivize people to host them than the normal ad revenue model.
Cheaper? It runs on regular computers, just inefficiently. If that somehow turns out to be cheaper, perhaps it can be used to power a perpetual motion device.
Depends on who’s making money, how much money, etc… could be that if you don’t require having Yahoo build this but a small open source protocol with people tipping to cover electrical costs it’s far cheaper :)
I simultaneously think polling analysis is a good pivot for stack overflow and that having Nate Silver takes of the analysis is basically value destruction. Pontificating about the least involved or educated margin is not good polling. It’s editorial detritus.
By web3, do they mean crypto get-rich-quick ponzi schemes? I’ve never seen so many scams in my entire life as over the last five years reading about this stuff. There is nothing to this but speculation, trying to ride a wave before it crests
If you think every project out there is some scam, and the entire space is speculation, then you’re in a similar polar opposite bubble to those trading jpegs. There’s loads of cool things going on in the space that allow you to build products that currently requires third parties, huge frameworks, and trust.
Helium has actually re stimulated my interest in the space.
if you can come up with a set of proofs for a particular action/solution that you can boot strap a network without the need for a company, that’s huge if actually true.
I quite like oracle based betting. Lots of sports/gaming/news apps have public APIs to see the results of something - aggregate them, plug them into a smart contract, and bet a total stranger on the outcome of an event with internet money held in an escrow account paid to the winner. Getting pretty simple to set up nowadays with drag and drop oracle creation a with some cool results, such as betting $10 on a 1v1 CoD game.
It could be argued that gambling is central to human activity. Its ultimate form is the stock market. In essence, everyone gambles every day on many kinds of outcomes, from choosing foods that won't kill us to driving safely, investing in one career and hobby over another, or picking a mating partner.
It'd be very hard for me to disagree with the spirit of your reply more than I do.
Creating opportunities for people to gamble - new casinos, scratch-off tickets, those sad machines you see in bars - all of these are cash generation vehicles that historically have highly negative outcomes for members of the communities they are dropped into. Especially for groups that are already disadvantaged. This isn't academic speculation.
As for gambling on every day outcomes - otherwise known as living your life - it's reasonable to say that one of the fundamental measures of progress as a species and a society is our distance from accidentally eating poisoned food, dangerous driving, a lack of opportunity and self-determination, and being forced to accept bad partners.
In other words, the more we remove gambling, the better our lives become.
I agree that casinos and crypto are predatory businesses. But I noticed you skipped the stock market -- which was my first and most important example. It would be difficult to argue in the modern world that the stock market is "bad" and we shouldn't have one. Yet it is undeniably a form of gambling -- the most advanced and expensive one, reserved for only the wealthiest gamblers.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about truly free markets, for sure.
However, the modern stock market is neither fair nor random. It's not accessible to you or I in the same way that it is to financial institutions. Front-running and dark pools are accepted as normal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP74RBTE8kI
I would also suggest that Warren Buffett does not see the stock market as random or gambling. When he buys a company, it comes after huge amounts of research. A good stock trader obsessively researches the companies that they invest in. While it might not be anything like a guarantee of success, I sure hope you have better than Vegas odds when investing in a company that you've learned everything you can learn about without becoming an employee.
Those are not 'smart contracts' in the sense you think they are.
They are (probably) governed by some kind of broader contract, and can probably be 'undone' or come under regulator scrutiny.
'Smart contracts' are a neat way for parties to 'agree' on something in a distributed way - but there's just no way that they will live up to being 'regular contracts'.
Maybe for some things like currency exchange - maybe.
But for anything else that happens in this world, contracts are complicated and require nuance. And there's always lawyers and a Judge and regulators that might want to have a say.
And while the application you've described is 'neat' - it doesn't really accomplish much. It's a novelty.
I see zero use for blockchain thus far - other than the eventual appearance of a possibly useful kind of crypto asset that doesn't exist yet because BTC and Etherium are full of flaws.
> Those are not 'smart contracts' in the sense you think they are.
> They are (probably) governed by some kind of broader contract, and can probably be 'undone' or come under regulator scrutiny.
By smart contract, in this regard, I mean an Ethereum Solidity contract connected to an Oracle that has an Escrow component.
The way I see it is there are many companies at the moment that sit in the middle and mediate things by offering escrow services and trust that if you send X you'll receive Y. Crypto lets you start moving those things into a P2P setting by its nature of atomic transactions, programatic contracts/money, etc... Which I find pretty cool and I think a lot of people who spend some time in the space find cool too. FWIW I was skeptical when I first found a bitcoin ATM at Google Campus in 2014 and only really 'got it' in 2020 after years of saying WTF is the point? And for me that was when I was trying to organise an esports tournament with some strangers online and couldn't decide on how payments would work, while the services that managed this (read some API results and paid out after 7 working days) took a 15% fee.
Those are good thoughts - the issue with 'escrow' however remains complicated - it generally implies some kind of authoritative clearing of a contract by some kind of 3rd party. If 2 people are arbitrarily entering into a contract, then I'm not sure how much 'true escrow' can really be had.
So it isn’t just gambling on crypto prices that web3 is good for; what people don’t realize is that it’s also really great for ordinary gambling? (Half joking)
Assume you were replying to my comment so will reply!
So for the first part - this isn’t as simple as you suggest. First off, you need to be in the same country as most require KYC for your specific location (SSN or NI numbers). Second, few let you make your own peer-to-peer bets! Third, they tend to have significant fees or minimum deposits etc… regarding your second point layer 2 chains solve that issue and have done for the last year or more, fees are far far lower and sometimes even non-existent.
Also we probably don’t get to pick our own oracles! I don’t know of any site anywhere that does.
In comparison this is a fairly simple DApp to build.
As far as I can tell, the only useful application for the blockchain seems to be gambling with sanctioned Russian oligarchs without the annoying trip to Russia that you'd need to do without the blockchain.
Doesn't really sound that appealing since I don't think gambling is an useful application of anything, blockchain or not.
> As far as I can tell, the only useful application for the blockchain seems to be gambling with sanctioned Russian oligarchs without the annoying trip to Russia that you'd need to do without the blockchain.
Come on man, don't strawman discussions or why would I bother continuing to talk to you? If you have decided that you dislike a tech for whatever reason fine, but do something more productive with your time than just chatting crap on the internet.
> First off, you need to be in the same country as most require KYC for your specific location (SSN or NI numbers).
This is probably because social gambling is still illegal in some places and any legitimate company will not want to participate in your illegal activity. But using crypto tech for facilitating illegal things tracks..
We don’t know each other - how would we trade or bet or do something that requires trusting each other? For example what would be your current solution to have a $10 bet on the outcome of a sports game tomorrow, between me and you?
You've never said "Hey, I know you're wrong, let's bet on it!" on the internet but never been able to go much further? I know I have! Plus I've definitely wanted to play 1v1 games for a bit of money (video games that is). And many others have, as people solving this issue are raising millions and have thousands of users already :)
You may not personally find it useful but it's much harder to solve on the "Web2 stack" than the "Web3 stack" if such descriptions exist.
Silk road, an illegal enterprise, basically ran on trust and reputation (and USPS) and that part of it actually had nothing to do with crypto or blockchains.
I'd send you $10 by paypal if I win, and expect you to do the same if you lose. If you don't, I'd call you out on these forums. If you wanted to bet more money, I'd use an escrow service. But also, why would I want to bet on sports against a random stranger?
It's a use case I happen to like, doesn't mean it's for everyone. Another way to view it - how large a project would it be to program this? It's basically given to you for free when money is programatic such as in crypto!
Sure but now we need a company to maintain this stuff! And that means staff, fees, etc... It could very easily be an open source contract with a list of oracles that are voted for/against adding.
Either neither party can trust the other, and you need an intermediary to at least verify who won, and possibly to transfer the money; or both people are trustworthy and you can have a simple agreement. If it’s a third party, you have to trust that third party. We can’t get rid of the trust requirement. If the third party is software, what if there is a bug ? More like, when there are bugs
I don't have a solution for trading but betting can be fixed by parimutuel wagering. Since that form of betting and payout is entirely algorithmic (and not based on the event itself), it can be done safely and transparently in software.
For anyone not familiar, this style of betting (used in horse racing) pays out based on the relative amounts waged on the winners. The house takes a cut of the entire pool and (in theory) isn't interested in the outcome.
Huge frameworks exist in the crypto world too (huge in relation to the EVM's miniscule capabilities). Frameworkization is a software phenomenon that is orthogonal to trust or anything like that
But if an abstraction exists that makes things much simpler to work with, maybe it's worth considering? Just imagine the code required on-top of digital banking to buy a ticket to a gig from me online. Those companies that manage this charge huge fees, have huge teams, and it's all sorts of complex. Approaching it from a Web3/NFT standpoint, you mint a series of tickets to your gig. You sell those tickets to people for crypto in a single atomic transaction. Metadata says it's a resellable ticket? Then those people who bought it can sell it to others too! Skeptical it's an authentic ticket? Check if it was minted by the band. Skeptical it's not resellable? Check the meta data. Skeptical they won't send you the genuine ticket? Atomic txs and NFTs mean it's one single tx - a gig ticket for some money. Want to make resellable tickets but you want 5% of the resale? Add a creator rule to the token. Want to check people have valid tickets at the gig? QR code that reads a wallet for a token from the sent of minted tokens. These things that right now span multiple businesses, have multiple fees, constant fraud, are slow, and require signing up in multiple places are literally free with crypto. It's just part of the technology. I think that's pretty cool and has some use cases in an increasingly digital world.
NFTs as tickets have a fundamental flaw: it is a decentralized front end to a centralized backend. Ultimately there is only one person in full control: the organizer of the event.
So we can easily dismiss all of the claims you made because all these things can be done more easily via non blockchain solutions.
I’ve been doing it for years and never had a problem but people write bugs! The trick, as a beginner, is to use well tested contracts and compose them. But fuzzing/static analysis tools are helping move the industry forward leaps and bounds too! So give it a few years and the space will mature.
It depends. If you use software with many years of stability, it's safe (Bitcoin has a 9 year uptime). There are some very reputable companies, like Casa or Unchained Capita that help you store your money safely using multisig contracts and hardware wallets very safely without trust in them.
With newer, faster changing software of course the risk is much higher, so I'm not comfortable using them, but many people take that risk.
The future of the internet is more simplicity, more optimization for attention from the places we centralize on. Tech doesn't matter that much. The "next big thing" is always something we all kind of get blind sided by. If you writing articles saying this will be it, you're already wrong.
I don't think blockchain or cryptocurrency is the future of the Internet and I think they will remain as niche interests and a lot of the hype will wane. Perhaps they'll have some considerably sized niches, but for the most part what's called 'web3' I don't think is actually web3.
Web3 is yet another attempt of the Ethereum hammer in finding a nail, and is just another word for "blockchain" because even the crypto evangelists realize they've said it too many times and sound cringe.
I'm sorry, but until "Web3" manages to solve a real problem, people who actually believe that it will build a better internet with no evidence are misguided.
Web1 was fairly decentralized as you could just host your websites and even mail server on a small box yourself. Web2 seemed to have sucked everything into (semi-) walled platforms. I still don’t fully understand how the decentral web would work at any scale. I imagine it being like trying to use Youtube with the TOR-Browser. It feels like crypto is 90% fraud, fomo and false hope. I hope this is not yet another hype-bubble with little practical application. But then again I don’t really get what the whole web3 is supposed to be in the first place.
This is as hardcore pointless fanboy-ism as the speculative JPEG trading nutters. How can you be so emotional about tech? Maybe there’s a middle ground?
The middle ground is not always the right choice. If you say we have to participate in 100 scams and I say that we shouldn't participate in any scam, the right answer isn't to say "Let's just do 50 scams then"
If you go by numbers alone then I'd say somewhere around 99.99% of them are scams. If you go by market cap then I would lower that number to only like 95%.
I think an unflinching belief in crypto in the face of so many scams is the consequence of having a good percentage of your wealth tied up in it. Even if the person himself was scammed, it would be in his interest to not admit it in the hopes that he can pass the bag on to some other greater fool.
For the same reason people get emotional whenever they see something they like being captured by hucksters. If you like woodworking would you not be mad if the workshop next door gets replaced by a Pachinko parlor?
"Maybe there's a middle ground" is the same kind of statement as "NFTs are awful, but the blockchain itself is brilliant!". Yet the crazy financial schemes keep proliferating and you still don't see blockchains anywhere else.
The web is only 30 years old, and it's moving so fast no one can tell what it'll be like more than a few years ahead. At any point in the past few decades people trying to predict what the future looks like were pretty much always wrong. In the 90s CGI scripts, table layouts, and more and more multimedia HTML tags were the big thing. They're essentially dead now. In the 2000s people thought browser plugins like Flash, VRML, and Wild Tangent were the future because people wanted fancier brochure sites. They were wrong too. In the 2010s it was Web 2.0, PHP, and jQuery, which are slowly becoming less popular in favor of SSR/SSG JavaScript frameworks now. No doubt in the 2030s we'll have moved from JS frameworks on servers to something else. Maybe Web3. Maybe WASM. Maybe WebGPU. Maybe something that hasn't been invented yet.
There is a rich history of developers saying something is the future and being wrong. Generally speaking, when a dev says something is Important or The Future of Tech, it means they think they can make a few bucks out of it or they enjoy working with it. We have no special insight into what's going to happen in 10 years time. Guessing is fun and there's no reason to stop, but there's no reason to believe anyone is right either, and that applies even more to groups.
> The web is only 30 years old, and it's moving so fast no one can tell what it'll be like more than a few years ahead.
I've been using the web for 20 of those years. The browsing experience is, structurally, mostly the same. We did online payments back then, there was chat, there was multimedia consumption, from back when it was a buzzword.
You're making a substantial confusion between new modes of consumption and uses cases versus the individual technologies that support them. Flash, VRML, Applets and other technologies we just the mediums there were back then, but fundamentally they're all just a method to consume rich content and to bypass feature limitations of browsers, many of which have been lifted by now.
Crypto can have a limitless number of various underlying technological substrates, but the fundamental idea is still about a decentralized financial instrument.
Regardless of the implementation details of said technology, it will always face the same issues the current financial system faces: regulatory controls, KYC, requirements for taxation, legal limitations in its uses for money laundering and hiding crimes, and a long list of etceteras. That has little to do with technology, and a lot to do with international legal frameworks, politics, lobbying, and a long list of etceteras where the dynamics are not really different from that of other industries.
None of those issue will, generally speaking, be solved by technology, because they are related to the way that human institutions work. And the products built upon that technological substrate are still limited by our known principles in how people consume digital tools.
The things about web3 is that none of the supporters fundamentally address the latter areas. I don't see compelling products where the technological substrate really "changes everything". I don't see the proponents address the very real institutional and social issues around it.
For the most part, I see the same misguided idealism I saw in the web of the past, where various proponents of libertarian ideological strains waxed poetic about how the freedoms brought by new technology will dramatically alter social dynamics. How we believed that immediate access to the world's knowledge would makes us wiser and help us progress towards peace and unity.
If anything, a deep study of the exponential advance of technological developments of the last century should shows that human nature is pretty impervious to change.
As an active participant in Web2.0, I'm kinda offended that people appropriated the "Web3" term for blockchain, which has zero to do with the evolution of the web.
I have noticed that with a few notable exceptions, it seems like enthusiasm for "Web3" seems inversely correlated with web development experience. The conclusion I draw from this is that the longer you've been building web apps, the more concerned you will be that nobody can explain how these "Web3" apps could possibly work at scale, or why you would choose a "Web3" stack when your problem case doesn't explicitly require it.
For the optimists, I really want you to think about this when you go to sleep tonight: if larger smart contracts cost more than smaller smart contracts, it's a forgone conclusion that developers will skip type and boundary checks. Do you really want to bet on a future where developers are perversely incentivized to write code that is easier to exploit?
Yeah - that second part is neat, but existential problems arise with 'smart contracts' long, long before we get to nuances of perverted expenses with respect to saving costs on contract length.
Smart 'contracts' are not really 'contracts' - they're kind of bits of code. They're going to effectively be governed more broadly by 'real' contracts in in the regular sense whereupon the Blockchain contracts are merely terms of a specific exchange i.e. something like placing a 'buy/sell' order on an exchange.
I haven't dig enough to them. But it seems that they are mostly shitty code moving numbers around or creating new variables and doing stuff with them... So pretty standard, but scary part is that those numbers are "money"...
The courts will decide what exactly they mean and it could take a very long time for the kind of legal clarity we need to really go ahead with meaningful things.
Maybe something will establish itself as kind of a de facto standard long before that which may in and of itself be the 'legal precedent'.
While true that more complex smart contract executions are more cost (gas) intensive, zkRollup solutions solve this by actually becoming cheaper as they scale!
the reason gmail allows users to reply to google docs comments inline vs outlook/apple mail dont is that google owns the identity cookie and the api key and the front end.
if there was a way to do so, outlook would do it too. but google won’t let them.
to me —- blockchains fundamentally open up two things - an open api (think lambdas) and an open database (think kv pair). you pay per use for compute and you pay per byte to store. and the payment comes in dollars, just that you need to push it through a translation layer (“tokens”).
the rest of the crypto ponzi schemes are just that. it’ll take some time for that noise to clear before this usecase becomes more well known.
I think that Web 3 will add value to the internet, and that its particular value will be determined over the years. The bad ideas will eventually be filtered out, and the good ideas made stronger and more identified.
Right now I'm using crypto pairs for automated trading (https://tradecast.one), which is a good a purpose as automated trading of stocks or any other asset.
Automated trading of crypto is a derivative of crypto/Web 3. What I'm saying is that there are offshoots that may not seem directly related to it. There's still innovation going on.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadEdit: Someone listed two examples inc Geocities but deleted their comment as examples of Web2 options. These work (although now defunct) by sticking ads down people’s throats. Tokens let you work out other ways to incentivize people to host them than the normal ad revenue model.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180379&p=2#31180968
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
if you can come up with a set of proofs for a particular action/solution that you can boot strap a network without the need for a company, that’s huge if actually true.
Creating opportunities for people to gamble - new casinos, scratch-off tickets, those sad machines you see in bars - all of these are cash generation vehicles that historically have highly negative outcomes for members of the communities they are dropped into. Especially for groups that are already disadvantaged. This isn't academic speculation.
As for gambling on every day outcomes - otherwise known as living your life - it's reasonable to say that one of the fundamental measures of progress as a species and a society is our distance from accidentally eating poisoned food, dangerous driving, a lack of opportunity and self-determination, and being forced to accept bad partners.
In other words, the more we remove gambling, the better our lives become.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about truly free markets, for sure.
However, the modern stock market is neither fair nor random. It's not accessible to you or I in the same way that it is to financial institutions. Front-running and dark pools are accepted as normal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP74RBTE8kI
I would also suggest that Warren Buffett does not see the stock market as random or gambling. When he buys a company, it comes after huge amounts of research. A good stock trader obsessively researches the companies that they invest in. While it might not be anything like a guarantee of success, I sure hope you have better than Vegas odds when investing in a company that you've learned everything you can learn about without becoming an employee.
Add crime too I guess.
They are (probably) governed by some kind of broader contract, and can probably be 'undone' or come under regulator scrutiny.
'Smart contracts' are a neat way for parties to 'agree' on something in a distributed way - but there's just no way that they will live up to being 'regular contracts'.
Maybe for some things like currency exchange - maybe.
But for anything else that happens in this world, contracts are complicated and require nuance. And there's always lawyers and a Judge and regulators that might want to have a say.
And while the application you've described is 'neat' - it doesn't really accomplish much. It's a novelty.
I see zero use for blockchain thus far - other than the eventual appearance of a possibly useful kind of crypto asset that doesn't exist yet because BTC and Etherium are full of flaws.
By smart contract, in this regard, I mean an Ethereum Solidity contract connected to an Oracle that has an Escrow component.
The way I see it is there are many companies at the moment that sit in the middle and mediate things by offering escrow services and trust that if you send X you'll receive Y. Crypto lets you start moving those things into a P2P setting by its nature of atomic transactions, programatic contracts/money, etc... Which I find pretty cool and I think a lot of people who spend some time in the space find cool too. FWIW I was skeptical when I first found a bitcoin ATM at Google Campus in 2014 and only really 'got it' in 2020 after years of saying WTF is the point? And for me that was when I was trying to organise an esports tournament with some strangers online and couldn't decide on how payments would work, while the services that managed this (read some API results and paid out after 7 working days) took a 15% fee.
So for the first part - this isn’t as simple as you suggest. First off, you need to be in the same country as most require KYC for your specific location (SSN or NI numbers). Second, few let you make your own peer-to-peer bets! Third, they tend to have significant fees or minimum deposits etc… regarding your second point layer 2 chains solve that issue and have done for the last year or more, fees are far far lower and sometimes even non-existent.
Also we probably don’t get to pick our own oracles! I don’t know of any site anywhere that does.
In comparison this is a fairly simple DApp to build.
Doesn't really sound that appealing since I don't think gambling is an useful application of anything, blockchain or not.
Come on man, don't strawman discussions or why would I bother continuing to talk to you? If you have decided that you dislike a tech for whatever reason fine, but do something more productive with your time than just chatting crap on the internet.
This is probably because social gambling is still illegal in some places and any legitimate company will not want to participate in your illegal activity. But using crypto tech for facilitating illegal things tracks..
You may not personally find it useful but it's much harder to solve on the "Web2 stack" than the "Web3 stack" if such descriptions exist.
Are you really asking this question as though this isn't a thing that's already happening, right now, today, without the need for crypto snake oil?
For anyone not familiar, this style of betting (used in horse racing) pays out based on the relative amounts waged on the winners. The house takes a cut of the entire pool and (in theory) isn't interested in the outcome.
So we can easily dismiss all of the claims you made because all these things can be done more easily via non blockchain solutions.
With newer, faster changing software of course the risk is much higher, so I'm not comfortable using them, but many people take that risk.
https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-w...
I'm sorry, but until "Web3" manages to solve a real problem, people who actually believe that it will build a better internet with no evidence are misguided.
I think an unflinching belief in crypto in the face of so many scams is the consequence of having a good percentage of your wealth tied up in it. Even if the person himself was scammed, it would be in his interest to not admit it in the hopes that he can pass the bag on to some other greater fool.
For the same reason people get emotional whenever they see something they like being captured by hucksters. If you like woodworking would you not be mad if the workshop next door gets replaced by a Pachinko parlor?
"Maybe there's a middle ground" is the same kind of statement as "NFTs are awful, but the blockchain itself is brilliant!". Yet the crazy financial schemes keep proliferating and you still don't see blockchains anywhere else.
There is a rich history of developers saying something is the future and being wrong. Generally speaking, when a dev says something is Important or The Future of Tech, it means they think they can make a few bucks out of it or they enjoy working with it. We have no special insight into what's going to happen in 10 years time. Guessing is fun and there's no reason to stop, but there's no reason to believe anyone is right either, and that applies even more to groups.
I've been using the web for 20 of those years. The browsing experience is, structurally, mostly the same. We did online payments back then, there was chat, there was multimedia consumption, from back when it was a buzzword.
You're making a substantial confusion between new modes of consumption and uses cases versus the individual technologies that support them. Flash, VRML, Applets and other technologies we just the mediums there were back then, but fundamentally they're all just a method to consume rich content and to bypass feature limitations of browsers, many of which have been lifted by now.
Crypto can have a limitless number of various underlying technological substrates, but the fundamental idea is still about a decentralized financial instrument.
Regardless of the implementation details of said technology, it will always face the same issues the current financial system faces: regulatory controls, KYC, requirements for taxation, legal limitations in its uses for money laundering and hiding crimes, and a long list of etceteras. That has little to do with technology, and a lot to do with international legal frameworks, politics, lobbying, and a long list of etceteras where the dynamics are not really different from that of other industries.
None of those issue will, generally speaking, be solved by technology, because they are related to the way that human institutions work. And the products built upon that technological substrate are still limited by our known principles in how people consume digital tools.
The things about web3 is that none of the supporters fundamentally address the latter areas. I don't see compelling products where the technological substrate really "changes everything". I don't see the proponents address the very real institutional and social issues around it.
For the most part, I see the same misguided idealism I saw in the web of the past, where various proponents of libertarian ideological strains waxed poetic about how the freedoms brought by new technology will dramatically alter social dynamics. How we believed that immediate access to the world's knowledge would makes us wiser and help us progress towards peace and unity.
If anything, a deep study of the exponential advance of technological developments of the last century should shows that human nature is pretty impervious to change.
For the optimists, I really want you to think about this when you go to sleep tonight: if larger smart contracts cost more than smaller smart contracts, it's a forgone conclusion that developers will skip type and boundary checks. Do you really want to bet on a future where developers are perversely incentivized to write code that is easier to exploit?
Smart 'contracts' are not really 'contracts' - they're kind of bits of code. They're going to effectively be governed more broadly by 'real' contracts in in the regular sense whereupon the Blockchain contracts are merely terms of a specific exchange i.e. something like placing a 'buy/sell' order on an exchange.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil
Maybe something will establish itself as kind of a de facto standard long before that which may in and of itself be the 'legal precedent'.
https://polynya.medium.com/addressing-common-rollup-misconce...
https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...
if there was a way to do so, outlook would do it too. but google won’t let them.
to me —- blockchains fundamentally open up two things - an open api (think lambdas) and an open database (think kv pair). you pay per use for compute and you pay per byte to store. and the payment comes in dollars, just that you need to push it through a translation layer (“tokens”).
the rest of the crypto ponzi schemes are just that. it’ll take some time for that noise to clear before this usecase becomes more well known.
Right now I'm using crypto pairs for automated trading (https://tradecast.one), which is a good a purpose as automated trading of stocks or any other asset.
It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Web3.
Does this use smart contracts? Otherwise what’s Web3 about it? Or is cryptocurrency just being rebranded as Web3 now?