3 ms·

I find both the evangelism of and the hostility towards “Web 3” kind of silly. Obviously there’s some amount of interesting stuff and obviously there’s some amo

I find both the evangelism of and the hostility towards “Web 3” kind of silly. Obviously there’s some amount of interesting stuff and obviously there’s some amount of tech bro assholes getting rich who “shouldn’t”. Just like ~2008-2012, ~1999-2002, ~1994-1996, ~1982-1986, etc. On the technology side: distributed Byzantine consensus is an open problem with some promising prototypes. It would have very cool use cases: remittance is huge, ENS is fucking cool, Brave/BAT is cool, NFTs for e.g. concert tickets or restaurant reservations or whatever would be cool, IPFS is cool. The technology isn’t there yet. POW doesn’t scale. Ouroboros Praus/Genesis needs a clock oracle (see: Spanner), Tendermint/Algorand/PBFT are too slow (global 3-phase. commit, right). Solana/ICON/etc. are expensive cloud databases. L2 rollups/Lightning/sharding are “kick-the-can” exercises. But it took time to go from the Paxos paper to Chubby as well, maybe someone solves it. Yeah, it’s mostly scams today. But it’s always been mostly scams. Microsoft bundling IE was a scam. Pets.com was a scam. Path was a scam. Uber and AirBnB were (are?) illegal as hell. Third-party cookies powering Google and FB is a scam. When the dust settles some amount of this stuff will have been worked out technically, legally, and financially, and the rest will be “lol do you remember when…”. This time some people will be rich who neither had rich parents nor knew Bay Area royalty, but YC wasn’t always part of the machine either. I’m sure Goldman and YC will eventually embrace those people with open arms. I for one look forward to us collectively getting our knickers untwisted about it so we can go back to rewriting every calculator app on earth in Rust (I kid! Don’t hit me! Doofy Haskell is better than no Haskell!). ;)

lekevicius 5y ago
This is the best take I've seen on HN. It's unfair to judge tech by its scummiest users, just as it is unfair to present future potential as if it's already here. There is remarkable amount of technological innovation being created, if you care to dig deep. I think Web3 will be a thing… we just don't know what and how exactly. It's like going to a very misty field, hoping to find something there. We'll find _something_.
- serverholic 5y ago
  By HN standards email is a scam because of phishing.
Nemi 5y ago
I agree. I think there is something here, it is just not what proponents are currently saying it is going to be. I think we are clearly still in a protracted “hype cycle” for BTC/ETH/DAO/Web3.0, just like the early internet was as well. We have yet to hit the “trough of disillusionment” that all technologies go through. Some tech dies when it hits the trough, but most go on quietly producing value in subtle ways after they get through the trough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
serverholic 5y ago
Curious why you think L2 rollups and sharding are "kick-the-can". Both pieces of tech have enormous scaling potential.
- benreesman 5y ago
  DISCLAIMER: I'm happy to be educated if I've got this wrong. I'm extremely sensitive to the fact that this is complicated, changing really fast, and I could easily be fully full of shit. But as far as I understand it's all some variation on "we're going to anchor something on the slow, expensive, trustworthy chain that represents a promise that we're going to settle stuff over here and report back to the big, slow, expensive but trusted chain". Often that anchor is some variation of a multi-sig custodial wallet with a bunch of blockchain bigshots on it, i.e. a fucking bank. If people want to evade banking regulations that's their business, but calling it cryptographic novelty is stupid. Sometimes it's "we're going to settle transactions on some shard, so it doesn't matter that it's somewhere between a slow wristwatch and a fast potato in terms of throughput", in which case the people I want to transact with need to participate in that shard, in which case you've got Metcalfe's Law working against you: you're on the wrong side of the polynomial. I want to buy some shit from merchant $FOO but they're not on my shard. Damn, guess I need to route some $COIN up through the real chain and down to the shard where my pot dealer is. The point is that if the thing you were deferring the transaction onto was both trustworthy and scalable, then you'd just use that. It's this non-terminating recursion where each invocation of the Y-combinator kicks off a fat token offering. Which is why the Lightening whitepaper is now $ZILLION pages long when it started at 18: every hole they patch creates 3 more. IO-HK is somewhere south of RenTech and somewhere north of NASA in terms of the Nobel laureates they've got working on Ouroboros [BFT|Praus|Genesis]? and they can't get it to work: ADA is getting pushed around a warmed-over Tendermint still (really fast potato). The ParityTech people seem to have learned the hard way that Google barely made it fly with friggin cesium clocks and satellites in a non-Byzantine setting when they put together BABE [BADASS|SASAFRASS|WHATEVER]? and slapped GRANDPA on it. Ethereum v2 gets delayed with roughly the same cadence as viable fusion power (but Casper the FFG!). If someone knows how to do a chain that's truly secure, truly decentralized, and doesn't cost $500 to buy a $5 ENS domain then I missed that paper. If you know of a project that actually works I want in on the governance token. It'll make BTC look like a victim of hyperinflation.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
Just about all cryptocurrencies are built on top of 'number go up' deflationary FOMO token-omics. New buyers are buying from older buyers. The older buyers are the fools that are looking for greater fools. But as you say, one day there might actually be real value here. But here's the rub, this is all decentralized, and thus anyone at any time can create their own chain, and many have already done so. And these technologies might just not need blockchain at all, for instance IPFS looks likely to lose to Torrents. So why would I buy a piece of an existing chain, when I can just wait for the technology to be created and spin it off on a new chain, for a price of $nearly_free instead of $massive? This is not the same as investing in Google or Amazon in 1999. If I am buying into the coin for the utility and not for the hype, I would never touch a mainstream coin. If a AAA game were to create their own NFTs, they would do so on their own chain. I would generate my own chain to confirm my own identity. No coin that currently exists has a long-term value above $0.
- benreesman 5y ago
  You've definitely got a point, but I think you might be oversimplifying a little in some places and maybe missing the bigger picture in some important ways. There is clearly an asset bubble in cryptocurrencies. But I'm borderline weirded out by how singled-out the crypto asset bubble is compared to say, the US equities asset bubble, or residential real-estate asset bubble, or any of the other places that we're warehousing major currencies inflation. It doesn't really matter if you look at `SPY`, or the Qs, or just one of the FAANGs: from right before the COVID overreaction to the present day a dollar (which hasn't really slipped all that badly against any of its easing-addled peers) buys you about half the amount of Big Tech as it did on Jan 1 2020. Nothing Earth-shattering has happened to the business models or 5-year outlooks of any of these companies. The smartphone market is every bit as saturated as it was 2 years ago. The FB/IG feed ad load is no less maxed out, Waymo isn't running 10MM pilot level 5 autonomous taxi rides across 50 cities in 20 countries, and Elon Musk sure as hell hasn't colonized Mars (at least his stated ambition justifies a PE ratio in the hundreds: he's on record that he's trying to own a planet). So I'd argue that Apple stock hasn't 2-3x increased in the last 2 years in any other way than dollar-denominated. I'm the last person to try to sell you a cryptocurrency token, I don't give a shit what the price of ETH is. But just because Gamestonk or `ETH` is the lottery ticket available to people who don't know a guy who knows a guy who knows Ron Conway doesn't mean that going to school, working hard, and saving a quarter of every paycheck is going to get you anywhere in a casino economy where the CPI doesn't seem to move with the cost of healthcare or education or any of the shit that's really eating the working person alive (at least in the US). `BTC` and `ETH` may turn out to be worthless tulip bulbs, it's not even all that unlikely from a Bayesian standpoint, but the pervasive implication that the `/r/crypto` people are at a casino and the A16Z people aren't is absurd. The A16Z people can just afford to lose a hand or two, and the `/r/crypto` people have nothing to lose. Doesn't make em stupid.

lekevicius 5y ago

This is the best take I've seen on HN. It's unfair to judge tech by its scummiest users, just as it is unfair to present future potential as if it's already here. There is remarkable amount of technological innovation being created, if you care to dig deep. I think Web3 will be a thing… we just don't know what and how exactly. It's like going to a very misty field, hoping to find something there. We'll find _something_.

serverholic 5y ago
By HN standards email is a scam because of phishing.

Nemi 5y ago

I agree. I think there is something here, it is just not what proponents are currently saying it is going to be. I think we are clearly still in a protracted “hype cycle” for BTC/ETH/DAO/Web3.0, just like the early internet was as well. We have yet to hit the “trough of disillusionment” that all technologies go through. Some tech dies when it hits the trough, but most go on quietly producing value in subtle ways after they get through the trough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

serverholic 5y ago

Curious why you think L2 rollups and sharding are "kick-the-can". Both pieces of tech have enormous scaling potential.

benreesman 5y ago
DISCLAIMER: I'm happy to be educated if I've got this wrong. I'm extremely sensitive to the fact that this is complicated, changing really fast, and I could easily be fully full of shit. But as far as I understand it's all some variation on "we're going to anchor something on the slow, expensive, trustworthy chain that represents a promise that we're going to settle stuff over here and report back to the big, slow, expensive but trusted chain". Often that anchor is some variation of a multi-sig custodial wallet with a bunch of blockchain bigshots on it, i.e. a fucking bank. If people want to evade banking regulations that's their business, but calling it cryptographic novelty is stupid. Sometimes it's "we're going to settle transactions on some shard, so it doesn't matter that it's somewhere between a slow wristwatch and a fast potato in terms of throughput", in which case the people I want to transact with need to participate in that shard, in which case you've got Metcalfe's Law working against you: you're on the wrong side of the polynomial. I want to buy some shit from merchant $FOO but they're not on my shard. Damn, guess I need to route some $COIN up through the real chain and down to the shard where my pot dealer is. The point is that if the thing you were deferring the transaction onto was both trustworthy and scalable, then you'd just use that. It's this non-terminating recursion where each invocation of the Y-combinator kicks off a fat token offering. Which is why the Lightening whitepaper is now $ZILLION pages long when it started at 18: every hole they patch creates 3 more. IO-HK is somewhere south of RenTech and somewhere north of NASA in terms of the Nobel laureates they've got working on Ouroboros [BFT|Praus|Genesis]? and they can't get it to work: ADA is getting pushed around a warmed-over Tendermint still (really fast potato). The ParityTech people seem to have learned the hard way that Google barely made it fly with friggin cesium clocks and satellites in a non-Byzantine setting when they put together BABE [BADASS|SASAFRASS|WHATEVER]? and slapped GRANDPA on it. Ethereum v2 gets delayed with roughly the same cadence as viable fusion power (but Casper the FFG!). If someone knows how to do a chain that's truly secure, truly decentralized, and doesn't cost $500 to buy a $5 ENS domain then I missed that paper. If you know of a project that actually works I want in on the governance token. It'll make BTC look like a victim of hyperinflation.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

Just about all cryptocurrencies are built on top of 'number go up' deflationary FOMO token-omics. New buyers are buying from older buyers. The older buyers are the fools that are looking for greater fools. But as you say, one day there might actually be real value here. But here's the rub, this is all decentralized, and thus anyone at any time can create their own chain, and many have already done so. And these technologies might just not need blockchain at all, for instance IPFS looks likely to lose to Torrents. So why would I buy a piece of an existing chain, when I can just wait for the technology to be created and spin it off on a new chain, for a price of $nearly_free instead of $massive? This is not the same as investing in Google or Amazon in 1999. If I am buying into the coin for the utility and not for the hype, I would never touch a mainstream coin. If a AAA game were to create their own NFTs, they would do so on their own chain. I would generate my own chain to confirm my own identity. No coin that currently exists has a long-term value above $0.

benreesman 5y ago
You've definitely got a point, but I think you might be oversimplifying a little in some places and maybe missing the bigger picture in some important ways. There is clearly an asset bubble in cryptocurrencies. But I'm borderline weirded out by how singled-out the crypto asset bubble is compared to say, the US equities asset bubble, or residential real-estate asset bubble, or any of the other places that we're warehousing major currencies inflation. It doesn't really matter if you look at `SPY`, or the Qs, or just one of the FAANGs: from right before the COVID overreaction to the present day a dollar (which hasn't really slipped all that badly against any of its easing-addled peers) buys you about half the amount of Big Tech as it did on Jan 1 2020. Nothing Earth-shattering has happened to the business models or 5-year outlooks of any of these companies. The smartphone market is every bit as saturated as it was 2 years ago. The FB/IG feed ad load is no less maxed out, Waymo isn't running 10MM pilot level 5 autonomous taxi rides across 50 cities in 20 countries, and Elon Musk sure as hell hasn't colonized Mars (at least his stated ambition justifies a PE ratio in the hundreds: he's on record that he's trying to own a planet). So I'd argue that Apple stock hasn't 2-3x increased in the last 2 years in any other way than dollar-denominated. I'm the last person to try to sell you a cryptocurrency token, I don't give a shit what the price of ETH is. But just because Gamestonk or `ETH` is the lottery ticket available to people who don't know a guy who knows a guy who knows Ron Conway doesn't mean that going to school, working hard, and saving a quarter of every paycheck is going to get you anywhere in a casino economy where the CPI doesn't seem to move with the cost of healthcare or education or any of the shit that's really eating the working person alive (at least in the US). `BTC` and `ETH` may turn out to be worthless tulip bulbs, it's not even all that unlikely from a Bayesian standpoint, but the pervasive implication that the `/r/crypto` people are at a casino and the A16Z people aren't is absurd. The A16Z people can just afford to lose a hand or two, and the `/r/crypto` people have nothing to lose. Doesn't make em stupid.