8 ms·

Do developers think Web3 will build a better internet?

22 points by jules-jules 4y ago

TrevorFSmith 4y ago
They asked fewer than 600 developers to answer a loaded survey. This is not useful data.
hndamien 4y ago
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.
- tjr225 4y ago
  Do you really think whatever this is, is going to take off?
  - exdsq 4y ago
    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.
- recursive 4y ago
  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.
  - exdsq 4y ago
    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 :)
  - hndamien 4y ago
    Are torrents inefficient?
- kevingadd 4y ago
  "no server costs" is blatantly false. Where do you think the data lives?
  - hndamien 4y ago
    Would you prefer "shared" server cost? It's negligible relatively.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
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.
exdsq 4y ago
Had a quick discussion about a use case for Web3 based self-hosted emails yesterday that didn’t get downvoted into oblivion by HN for once :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180379&p=2#31180968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180379&p=2#31180968
nradov 4y ago
The original Web 3.0 (the semantic web) would have built a better Internet. This new "Web3" is mostly just hype without a real use case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
No.
noTooMooch 4y ago
The future of the internet is creating, reading, updating, deleting desired electron state via new syntactic and semantic jargon; film at 11
gentleman11 4y ago
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
- exdsq 4y ago
  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.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    What cool things?
    - trainsarebetter 4y ago
      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.
    - thawaya3113 4y ago
      Or you can just bet on the many apps where this is already legal and you don’t have to code anything or pay gas fees.
      - exdsq 4y ago
        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.
throwaway1777 4y ago
It’s a mixed bag. Open financial protocols are obviously great for development.
- exdsq 4y ago
  Exactly this! It’s amazing how simple it is to add a crypto payment system into an app or write a smart contract.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    I’m sure it’s simple to write a smart contract. Is it simple to write one that won’t accidentally lose or lock people’s money?
    - exdsq 4y ago
      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.
    - xiphias2 4y ago
      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.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    Might be simple to add, but apparently a complete nightmare to actually support. https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-when-steam-accepted-bitcoin-for-payments-says-gabe-newell/ https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-w...
  - 4y ago
tayo42 4y ago
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.
stephen_g 4y ago
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.
ravenstine 4y ago
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.
halotrope 4y ago
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.
waste_monk 4y ago
I would rather leave society than interact with blockchain / cryptocurrency technologies on a regular basis.
- exdsq 4y ago
  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?
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    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"
    - exdsq 4y ago
      What if there's 100 projects and 20 are scams, and I'm saying lets chill in the middle where there aren't any?
      - cuteboy19 4y ago
        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.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    >How can you be so emotional about tech? 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.
onion2k 4y ago
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.
- Daishiman 4y ago
  > 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.
khazhoux 4y ago
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.
- gabelschlager 4y ago
  Yeah, the Semantic Web at least tried to be actually useful!
peteforde 4y ago
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?
- jollybean 4y ago
  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.
  - Vanit 4y ago
    Well, they're a type of contract. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    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"...
    - jollybean 4y ago
      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'.
jollybean 4y ago
Interesting how it was dying until NFT's came along ... and possibly the Crypto Exchange IPO's.
viksit 4y ago
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.
jasfi 4y ago
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 https://tradecast.one), which is a good a purpose as automated trading of stocks or any other asset.
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  The value here is automated trading of crypto? What’s new about this? It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Web3.
  - jasfi 4y ago
    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.
    - alphabettsy 4y ago
      In what way is automated trading of crypto derivative of Web 3? Does this use smart contracts? Otherwise what’s Web3 about it? Or is cryptocurrency just being rebranded as Web3 now?
      - jasfi 4y ago
        To me crypto forms a part of Web 3, not all of it by far.
JohnTHaller 4y ago
Anytime you see something mentioning web3, change the word web3 to blockchain, since that's generally what the thing being described is.

22 points by jules-jules 4y ago

They asked fewer than 600 developers to answer a loaded survey. This is not useful data.

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.

tjr225 4y ago
Do you really think whatever this is, is going to take off?
- exdsq 4y ago
  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.
recursive 4y ago
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.
- exdsq 4y ago
  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 :)
- hndamien 4y ago
  Are torrents inefficient?
kevingadd 4y ago
"no server costs" is blatantly false. Where do you think the data lives?
- hndamien 4y ago
  Would you prefer "shared" server cost? It's negligible relatively.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

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.

exdsq 4y ago

Had a quick discussion about a use case for Web3 based self-hosted emails yesterday that didn’t get downvoted into oblivion by HN for once :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180379&p=2#31180968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180379&p=2#31180968

nradov 4y ago

The original Web 3.0 (the semantic web) would have built a better Internet. This new "Web3" is mostly just hype without a real use case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

No.

noTooMooch 4y ago

The future of the internet is creating, reading, updating, deleting desired electron state via new syntactic and semantic jargon; film at 11

gentleman11 4y ago

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

exdsq 4y ago
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.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  What cool things?
  - trainsarebetter 4y ago
    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.
  - thawaya3113 4y ago
    Or you can just bet on the many apps where this is already legal and you don’t have to code anything or pay gas fees.
    - exdsq 4y ago
      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.

throwaway1777 4y ago

It’s a mixed bag. Open financial protocols are obviously great for development.

exdsq 4y ago
Exactly this! It’s amazing how simple it is to add a crypto payment system into an app or write a smart contract.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  I’m sure it’s simple to write a smart contract. Is it simple to write one that won’t accidentally lose or lock people’s money?
  - exdsq 4y ago
    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.
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    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.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  Might be simple to add, but apparently a complete nightmare to actually support. https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-when-steam-accepted-bitcoin-for-payments-says-gabe-newell/ https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-w...
- 4y ago

tayo42 4y ago

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.

stephen_g 4y ago

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.

ravenstine 4y ago

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.

halotrope 4y ago

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.

waste_monk 4y ago

I would rather leave society than interact with blockchain / cryptocurrency technologies on a regular basis.

exdsq 4y ago
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?
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  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"
  - exdsq 4y ago
    What if there's 100 projects and 20 are scams, and I'm saying lets chill in the middle where there aren't any?
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      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.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >How can you be so emotional about tech? 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.

onion2k 4y ago

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.

Daishiman 4y ago
> 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.

khazhoux 4y ago

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.

gabelschlager 4y ago
Yeah, the Semantic Web at least tried to be actually useful!

peteforde 4y ago

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?

jollybean 4y ago
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.
- Vanit 4y ago
  Well, they're a type of contract. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil
- Ekaros 4y ago
  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"...
  - jollybean 4y ago
    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'.

jollybean 4y ago

Interesting how it was dying until NFT's came along ... and possibly the Crypto Exchange IPO's.

viksit 4y ago

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.

jasfi 4y ago

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 https://tradecast.one), which is a good a purpose as automated trading of stocks or any other asset.

alphabettsy 4y ago
The value here is automated trading of crypto? What’s new about this? It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Web3.
- jasfi 4y ago
  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.
  - alphabettsy 4y ago
    In what way is automated trading of crypto derivative of Web 3? Does this use smart contracts? Otherwise what’s Web3 about it? Or is cryptocurrency just being rebranded as Web3 now?
    - jasfi 4y ago
      To me crypto forms a part of Web 3, not all of it by far.

JohnTHaller 4y ago

Anytime you see something mentioning web3, change the word web3 to blockchain, since that's generally what the thing being described is.