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Monegro believes that this paradigm shift affects the way that developers should think about their applications: “The combination of shared open data with an in

by rsp1984 9y ago

Monegro believes that this paradigm shift affects the way that developers should think about their applications: “The combination of shared open data with an incentive system that prevents “winner-take-all” markets changes the game at the application layer and creates an entire new category of companies with fundamentally different business models at the protocol layer.” Ok, thin protocols + fat apps --> fat protocols + thin apps. Neat theory. But this is putting the cart before the horse. Please can someone ELI5 to me: * What problem does the fat-protocol, thin-app paradigm solve? * Why would anyone be interested in developing a thin app for my fat protocol any more than anyone is interested today in developing a thin protocol that I can put my fat app on top of? * Why is thin-protocol, fat-app considered to be in need of fixing in the first place? I consider the fact that apps capture more value than protocols to be a direct consequence of the free market. Apps capture business value because they solve actual user problems. Protocols define ways to build apps. But frankly I don't see a great demand for new protocols, and I consider that reason enough for the fact that protocols can't capture much value. To say that that would change with the blockchain is IMO equivalent to saying the market has it all wrong. What am I not seeing?

adamnemecek 9y ago
It raises the low level of your app from request handling to dealing with users and their interaction.
keithwhor 9y ago
You’re seeing everything just fine. Imagine you’ve spent your whole life investing millions of dollars in entrepreneurs. Building models and testing hypotheses with no real agency: you can’t control what the CEO does or the product the engineering team builds or the way they market the product. Your job is to provide returns for your LPs. That’s it. Now imagine, instead of spending thousands of hours interacting with and managing people, their problems, watching painfully as they try to figure out the market they specialize in, I tell you that you can invest in something else. That thing, we’ll call it a token. This token does work. It can be used to compute something. Or helps make something easier. I’m not clear on the specifics, but I can tell you one thing: if you buy it, and if you tell other people about it, merely the act of owning it increases its value. I have just given you something you don’t get a lot of in your career, true, direct self agency. You are unequivocally sure that you are creating value because it’s you who is selling the value! You bought, the price rose, you know if other people get excited the price will rise again. It’s exciting, you don’t have to deal with people mucking about directly, and you’re doing your job: generating returns. The house of cards here is the assumption that these tokens can be used for something, anything beyond a store of value. Because if that’s true, it’s not really speculation. You’re an early adopter of a paradigm-changing protocol. The default assumption here is that engineers are like ants: we build for the sake of building. Give us a canvas and we will build dApps (or what-have-you) just for the sake of building them. The truth is, engineers are not ants. We build things to make our lives easier or more fulfilling. I started programming, for example, to build video games. Many people build things to automate their homes. When you build for an employer, the end goal is always to do something for the customer. The draw of Ethereum, seems to me, to be that eventually somebody will have to build something insanely valuable, right? Statistically, it’s gotta happen. I think that’s a ridiculous premise: if centralized tools are always faster with more mature ecosystems, engineers will always go there to solve their daily problems. The question to me really seems to be, “do we need truly immutable ledgers and transaction histories? Do we need 100.0% reliability in transaction history at the cost of orders of magnitude more energy expenditure, or is 99.9999999% okay?” As a cute anecdote, Life has been remarkably successful with a 10^-7 error rate in DNA polymerase. I have a feeling most industries will be fine without, and it’s actually probably cheaper to have a reasonable facsimile (or statistically insignificant approximation) of immutability (human intervention and accountants included) than a guarantee. Especially if, in order to be guaranteed, it needs to be public. So, what you’re seeing is speculation that engineers could build something one day using an application development paradigm that’s not actually clearly or obviously more powerful. It’s worse speculation than betting on startups with teams of people who reliably execute, masked by the illusion of self agency as an owner and promoter of a token. tl;dr: Somebody remind me of this post in a decade and we’ll see where it all ends up. The technology will grow and evolve. I’m not sold on any of this, and investors who aren’t building anything but themselves are holding tokens telling people to go experiment and build things isn’t an attractive signal. (It seems like VC flipped on its head and the incentives are poor for engineers - so, for now, let these investors play hot potato with each other for a while. I’ve seen a few of Vitalik’s tweets and it seems even he’s concerned about these incentives.)
- sounds 9y ago
  I can think of one scenario where being public and 100.0% reliable has meaning. The scenario where accountants and human intervention are the thing you want to be rid of. Financial transactions. Before someone just points out those are just more tokens and that we're all betting on their value, etc., etc., I'm deliberately skipping the meta-argument. The point is that finance systems do exist, already, and adding a trusted distributed transaction ledger does add value.
- indigochill 9y ago
  Thanks. This is probably the most coherent pitch I've seen for tokens (and also helps me understand a little better why certain people are so attracted to them). I was of the opinion they were a pure ponzi scheme, but this gives me a somewhat better balanced understanding of what actual expectations underpin the speculation.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    The most coherent pitch for tokens?
    - vec 9y ago
      ...is a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek dismissal of the fundamental idea. That's about par for the course for intellectual debate around cryptocurrencies of late. To be clear, I don't have a dog in this fight. Tokens may be the Next Big Thing, I don't know. But it'd be really nice to have a full conversation on the topic that didn't either go off the rails or devolve into a political diatribe as soon as I ask a question about intrinsic value or zero sum games.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        It's sarcastic? Tongue-in-cheek?
        keithwhor 9y ago
jklepatch 9y ago
Early blockchains like bitcoins might have this thin/fat protocol aspect, but this is much less true of newer blockchains like ethereum. Granted, with programming languages like Solidity we are still quite limited but there are some interesting developments ongoing, like possibly integrating the webassembly tech with some blockchains, to allow more flexibility on the application layer (see ewasm for ethereum). But generally speaking, this protocol issue is of little interest for end users. What is of interest to them is the fact that their data can become decentralized with the blockchain, and the power balance can be shifted back to them. With all the tech majors becoming so powerful thats a really big deal.
- Shoothe 9y ago
  > But generally speaking, this protocol issue is of little interest for end users. > What is of interest to them is the fact that their data can become decentralized with the blockchain I'm not really interested in putting my emails in a blockchain, or did you mean some kind of... different data?
  - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
    Bank data is one example. We don't even own our own transaction history/data - no bank provides free APIs to access this for consumers, the only option is to download manually/scrape through their websites. And as banks own this data, they could stop or handicap exports even further anytime they choose. I know if my bank gave me simple API access to my own data I would not have any use for apps like Quicken/Mint. Credit agencies like Equifax also own our credit history data, and generously sell it back to us - 1 free report a year, rest you pay for. While also selling it to other companies without our permission. Which employers can get their hands on via background checks, again without our consent. Not to mention one of them recently got hacked and leaked everyone's SSNs. Their entire model is capturing our data and selling it to others. We should own this data, and choose if and when we would like to provide it to a bank to get a loan etc. Ad tracking/browsing data is another. The current model is the people making the trackers own all your data. A model where WE own our web activity data and selectively choose what to expose to websites/advertisers would be much better for consumers.
C14L 9y ago
It solves some problems, especially when it comes to networks of shared information where no one actor trust any other single actor. But as usual, as soon as a lot of money is to be made, non-techies get dollar signs in their eyes and --without understanding the tool-- jump in and start using it for everything. It will be very amusing to watch, for sure.
- jondubois 9y ago
  What I like about Blockchain tech is that non technical people will never be as good or as quick at identifying opportunities as a technical people who can understand the whitepapers and look at the code themselves. For example, some of the coins that have been going up in price recently are complete garbage and it's a matter of time before their technical limitations become apparent to non-technical people. I think I have a pretty good idea about how easy/difficult it will be to scale different cryptocurrencies based on the algorithms they use. Many of the ones in the top 100 list right now are essentially impossible to scale beyond a certain point, eventually they're bound to hit a wall. Most investors right now are just randomly moving their money between coins. They wait until issues start showing up and then move on to another random coin. This is very inefficient.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    If this is true then name and shame a few of them (preferably some that we are likely to have heard about). Sick and tired of accusations being thrown out with no skin in the game.
    - briatx 9y ago
      > Sick and tired of accusations being thrown out with no skin in the game. This is a weak attempt at deflection by those who want to discredit criticism. Anyone who understands this sector and thinks it is a bad investment, will not invest. This doesn't mean their view is somehow incorrect. As for finding an ICO that hasn't lived up to the hype, throw a dart at the dartboard. How about Tezos, for one. How about Tron for another, whose white paper was found to have plagiarized from IPFS and/or Filecoin. See: http://www.trustnodes.com/2018/01/08/trons-whitepaper-copied-plagiarized http://www.trustnodes.com/2018/01/08/trons-whitepaper-copied...

adamnemecek 9y ago

It raises the low level of your app from request handling to dealing with users and their interaction.

keithwhor 9y ago

You’re seeing everything just fine. Imagine you’ve spent your whole life investing millions of dollars in entrepreneurs. Building models and testing hypotheses with no real agency: you can’t control what the CEO does or the product the engineering team builds or the way they market the product. Your job is to provide returns for your LPs. That’s it. Now imagine, instead of spending thousands of hours interacting with and managing people, their problems, watching painfully as they try to figure out the market they specialize in, I tell you that you can invest in something else. That thing, we’ll call it a token. This token does work. It can be used to compute something. Or helps make something easier. I’m not clear on the specifics, but I can tell you one thing: if you buy it, and if you tell other people about it, merely the act of owning it increases its value. I have just given you something you don’t get a lot of in your career, true, direct self agency. You are unequivocally sure that you are creating value because it’s you who is selling the value! You bought, the price rose, you know if other people get excited the price will rise again. It’s exciting, you don’t have to deal with people mucking about directly, and you’re doing your job: generating returns. The house of cards here is the assumption that these tokens can be used for something, anything beyond a store of value. Because if that’s true, it’s not really speculation. You’re an early adopter of a paradigm-changing protocol. The default assumption here is that engineers are like ants: we build for the sake of building. Give us a canvas and we will build dApps (or what-have-you) just for the sake of building them. The truth is, engineers are not ants. We build things to make our lives easier or more fulfilling. I started programming, for example, to build video games. Many people build things to automate their homes. When you build for an employer, the end goal is always to do something for the customer. The draw of Ethereum, seems to me, to be that eventually somebody will have to build something insanely valuable, right? Statistically, it’s gotta happen. I think that’s a ridiculous premise: if centralized tools are always faster with more mature ecosystems, engineers will always go there to solve their daily problems. The question to me really seems to be, “do we need truly immutable ledgers and transaction histories? Do we need 100.0% reliability in transaction history at the cost of orders of magnitude more energy expenditure, or is 99.9999999% okay?” As a cute anecdote, Life has been remarkably successful with a 10^-7 error rate in DNA polymerase. I have a feeling most industries will be fine without, and it’s actually probably cheaper to have a reasonable facsimile (or statistically insignificant approximation) of immutability (human intervention and accountants included) than a guarantee. Especially if, in order to be guaranteed, it needs to be public. So, what you’re seeing is speculation that engineers could build something one day using an application development paradigm that’s not actually clearly or obviously more powerful. It’s worse speculation than betting on startups with teams of people who reliably execute, masked by the illusion of self agency as an owner and promoter of a token. tl;dr: Somebody remind me of this post in a decade and we’ll see where it all ends up. The technology will grow and evolve. I’m not sold on any of this, and investors who aren’t building anything but themselves are holding tokens telling people to go experiment and build things isn’t an attractive signal. (It seems like VC flipped on its head and the incentives are poor for engineers - so, for now, let these investors play hot potato with each other for a while. I’ve seen a few of Vitalik’s tweets and it seems even he’s concerned about these incentives.)

sounds 9y ago
I can think of one scenario where being public and 100.0% reliable has meaning. The scenario where accountants and human intervention are the thing you want to be rid of. Financial transactions. Before someone just points out those are just more tokens and that we're all betting on their value, etc., etc., I'm deliberately skipping the meta-argument. The point is that finance systems do exist, already, and adding a trusted distributed transaction ledger does add value.
indigochill 9y ago
Thanks. This is probably the most coherent pitch I've seen for tokens (and also helps me understand a little better why certain people are so attracted to them). I was of the opinion they were a pure ponzi scheme, but this gives me a somewhat better balanced understanding of what actual expectations underpin the speculation.
- tptacek 9y ago
  The most coherent pitch for tokens?
  - vec 9y ago
    ...is a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek dismissal of the fundamental idea. That's about par for the course for intellectual debate around cryptocurrencies of late. To be clear, I don't have a dog in this fight. Tokens may be the Next Big Thing, I don't know. But it'd be really nice to have a full conversation on the topic that didn't either go off the rails or devolve into a political diatribe as soon as I ask a question about intrinsic value or zero sum games.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      It's sarcastic? Tongue-in-cheek?
      - keithwhor 9y ago

jklepatch 9y ago

Early blockchains like bitcoins might have this thin/fat protocol aspect, but this is much less true of newer blockchains like ethereum. Granted, with programming languages like Solidity we are still quite limited but there are some interesting developments ongoing, like possibly integrating the webassembly tech with some blockchains, to allow more flexibility on the application layer (see ewasm for ethereum). But generally speaking, this protocol issue is of little interest for end users. What is of interest to them is the fact that their data can become decentralized with the blockchain, and the power balance can be shifted back to them. With all the tech majors becoming so powerful thats a really big deal.

Shoothe 9y ago
> But generally speaking, this protocol issue is of little interest for end users. > What is of interest to them is the fact that their data can become decentralized with the blockchain I'm not really interested in putting my emails in a blockchain, or did you mean some kind of... different data?
- zaptheimpaler 9y ago
  Bank data is one example. We don't even own our own transaction history/data - no bank provides free APIs to access this for consumers, the only option is to download manually/scrape through their websites. And as banks own this data, they could stop or handicap exports even further anytime they choose. I know if my bank gave me simple API access to my own data I would not have any use for apps like Quicken/Mint. Credit agencies like Equifax also own our credit history data, and generously sell it back to us - 1 free report a year, rest you pay for. While also selling it to other companies without our permission. Which employers can get their hands on via background checks, again without our consent. Not to mention one of them recently got hacked and leaked everyone's SSNs. Their entire model is capturing our data and selling it to others. We should own this data, and choose if and when we would like to provide it to a bank to get a loan etc. Ad tracking/browsing data is another. The current model is the people making the trackers own all your data. A model where WE own our web activity data and selectively choose what to expose to websites/advertisers would be much better for consumers.

C14L 9y ago

It solves some problems, especially when it comes to networks of shared information where no one actor trust any other single actor. But as usual, as soon as a lot of money is to be made, non-techies get dollar signs in their eyes and --without understanding the tool-- jump in and start using it for everything. It will be very amusing to watch, for sure.

jondubois 9y ago
What I like about Blockchain tech is that non technical people will never be as good or as quick at identifying opportunities as a technical people who can understand the whitepapers and look at the code themselves. For example, some of the coins that have been going up in price recently are complete garbage and it's a matter of time before their technical limitations become apparent to non-technical people. I think I have a pretty good idea about how easy/difficult it will be to scale different cryptocurrencies based on the algorithms they use. Many of the ones in the top 100 list right now are essentially impossible to scale beyond a certain point, eventually they're bound to hit a wall. Most investors right now are just randomly moving their money between coins. They wait until issues start showing up and then move on to another random coin. This is very inefficient.
- matte_black 9y ago
  If this is true then name and shame a few of them (preferably some that we are likely to have heard about). Sick and tired of accusations being thrown out with no skin in the game.
  - briatx 9y ago
    > Sick and tired of accusations being thrown out with no skin in the game. This is a weak attempt at deflection by those who want to discredit criticism. Anyone who understands this sector and thinks it is a bad investment, will not invest. This doesn't mean their view is somehow incorrect. As for finding an ICO that hasn't lived up to the hype, throw a dart at the dartboard. How about Tezos, for one. How about Tron for another, whose white paper was found to have plagiarized from IPFS and/or Filecoin. See: http://www.trustnodes.com/2018/01/08/trons-whitepaper-copied-plagiarized http://www.trustnodes.com/2018/01/08/trons-whitepaper-copied...