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> When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple. What? Just use an RDBMS, it'll "refine" that electricity to the same end product millions

> When you view miners as electricity refineries, it's pretty simple. What? Just use an RDBMS, it'll "refine" that electricity to the same end product millions of times more efficiently. That's the argument most Web3 critics have.

motohagiography 5y ago
The efficiency of an RDBMS treats trust as both an assumption and an externality, and that's not efficient in any risk adjusted model. An RDBMS depends on trust, where web3 uses consensus, and that consensus is a different product, which also has some useful anti-technocrat and anti-leviathan properties. Are all these kids writing crypto protocols for smart contracts just too dumb to spin up postgress? Doubtful. The ideology behind it is from a generation raised on narrative and they are inventing a way to relate based on something concrete that requires proofs and truth. The problem I think web3 techs solve is the forfeit of trust that institutions and platforms have engaged in over the last decade. There's no point in even talking to anyone involved in them because there's no reason to believe they would argue in good faith. Consensus protocols and proofs provide stability and some of that trust the culture has lost. The people who still believe in those institutions are just clinging to a precarious bourgeois and managerialist aspiration to become a part of them, where it's people from wealth (material and cultural), and working class people with less education and money who are the marks of those institutions who are typically the ones flocking to cryptocurrencies and now web3. They're also where growth comes from. In this sense, web3 is less ideological than just a polarized class strategy. The question isn't why not use an RDBMS, it should be, can you reasonably expect that anyone involved in the EMV payments partners, banks, government, social platforms, google, media(hah), non-stem academia, etc, are willing or able to act or debate in good faith? Consensus protocols route around that problem.

motohagiography 5y ago

The efficiency of an RDBMS treats trust as both an assumption and an externality, and that's not efficient in any risk adjusted model. An RDBMS depends on trust, where web3 uses consensus, and that consensus is a different product, which also has some useful anti-technocrat and anti-leviathan properties. Are all these kids writing crypto protocols for smart contracts just too dumb to spin up postgress? Doubtful. The ideology behind it is from a generation raised on narrative and they are inventing a way to relate based on something concrete that requires proofs and truth. The problem I think web3 techs solve is the forfeit of trust that institutions and platforms have engaged in over the last decade. There's no point in even talking to anyone involved in them because there's no reason to believe they would argue in good faith. Consensus protocols and proofs provide stability and some of that trust the culture has lost. The people who still believe in those institutions are just clinging to a precarious bourgeois and managerialist aspiration to become a part of them, where it's people from wealth (material and cultural), and working class people with less education and money who are the marks of those institutions who are typically the ones flocking to cryptocurrencies and now web3. They're also where growth comes from. In this sense, web3 is less ideological than just a polarized class strategy. The question isn't why not use an RDBMS, it should be, can you reasonably expect that anyone involved in the EMV payments partners, banks, government, social platforms, google, media(hah), non-stem academia, etc, are willing or able to act or debate in good faith? Consensus protocols route around that problem.