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Didn't we have enough of this already? Even if we pretend for a moment that there was some merit to the “web3 smart contract”, by now it should be painfully cl

by isodev 4y ago

Didn't we have enough of this already? Even if we pretend for a moment that there was some merit to the “web3 smart contract”, by now it should be painfully clear to anyone involved that this is a technological dead end. There are a many more realistic ideas to explore and research instead of wasting time on crypto unicorns.

yieldcrv 4y ago
for developers, there is no platform that realistically competes with “web3 smart contract”. the overhead costs are insanely low and are only one time for deployment with unlimited use, no other cloud deployment platform offers that and consumers cant get enough of them and will shoulder costs of interacting with them the most irrelevant part of this equation is debating why consumers are spending money on developer’s internet vending machines its a market with demand, the market is telling you what to do for half a decade and yet
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > the overhead costs are insanely low and are only one time for deployment with unlimited use, no other cloud deployment platform offers that Every cloud platform has a free tier that can probably handle the entirety of crypto, and then some. A Raspberry Pi is a more efficient platform that realistically competes with "web3"
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    everything I wrote was about deploying smart contracts, and on a blockchain that other people want to use nobody cares about the technical feasibility of running a blockchain, development routinely requires local deployments
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > everything I wrote was about deploying smart contracts, and on a blockchain Yup. In a response to "Even if we pretend for a moment that there was some merit to the 'web3 smart contract', by now it should be painfully clear to anyone involved that this is a technological dead end." Of course there's no better platform than "web3" for developers who do the "web3" stuff. "Windows is the best platform to develop apps for Windows". However. As a platform web3 is a failure. And for developers literally everything outside crypto is a better platform. For users, too.
      - yieldcrv 4y ago
        Its cheaper to develop and host your app on and there is consumer demand in applications where the very top of the funnel is a payment Recognizing that makes you way better of a developer and entrepreneur than the 10x coder hunting for exploits and bug bounties, where making money is the goal
        dmitriid 4y ago
        > Its cheaper to develop and host your app on Cheaper than what? That's the beauty of vague unverifiable statements like "for developers, there is no platform that realistically competes with 'web3 smart contract'." For any counter example you can always say "that's not what I meant" > Recognizing that makes you way better of a developer and entrepreneur than the 10x coder hunting for exploits and bug bounties, where making money is the goal Was this sentence written by ChatGPT?
        yieldcrv 4y ago
        deploying smart contracts is the same as deploying an application to the cloud with api calls and variable storage the closest I can think of is Firebase or AWS Lambda (or similar compute instance) with some kind of rudimentary database or shoehorned in variable storage. these all charge by number of executions, bandwidth and storage, even geographic location smart contract deployments would be cheaper than that, via a one time cost for the developer, and have unlimited use. it is also convenient and valuable that the smart contract cannot be deplatformed I don't really see Firebase or AWS or other compute instances competing on any of these fronts, but if you know of a counterpoint I would love to check out their pricing and usage page
        dmitriid 4y ago
        So my very first comment remains valid. No idea what you're objecting to.
        yieldcrv 4y ago
chrisco255 4y ago
No, we didn't. There are tens of thousands of developers writing smart contracts. Some of these smart contracts, such as Uniswap (https://uniswap.org/ https://uniswap.org/), have traded more than $1.2 trillion in volume. Uniswap works 24/7 with 100% uptime. It's permissionless to create a liquidity pool or to trade on the platform. It's a novel architecture, called an Automated Market Maker, a real innovation in financial markets. Uniswap is fully auditable thanks to everything being on-chain. Source code is open. There's also on-chain lending markets (Aave: https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/), decentralized stable coins (https://www.liquity.org/ https://www.liquity.org/), on-chain arbitration (https://kleros.io/ https://kleros.io/), on-chain DAO governance (https://compound.finance/governance https://compound.finance/governance), on-chain social media primitives which are extensible (https://www.lens.xyz/ https://www.lens.xyz/), multi-sig on-chain smart contract wallets that custody hundreds of millions to billions in assets (https://gnosis-safe.io/ https://gnosis-safe.io/), decentralized strategy games that use on-chain zero knowledge proofs to maintain a fog of war and player secrets while keeping everyone honest while allowing for full hackability (Dark Forest - https://zkga.me/ https://zkga.me/), etc. Can really go on and on, but the industry is not going anywhere.
- dimgl 4y ago
  - robcohen 4y ago
    Don’t hold your breath.
  - charlieyu1 4y ago
    If you are focusing on the bad side of a tech, AI could do way worse than crypto. I mean, the most evil thing you can do with crypto is merely taking away money from people.
    - jchw 4y ago
      You're thinking too small. If you really want to get cynical, you could think about the ruinous consequences if a Proof-of-Work-based currency were to rapidly overtake the current payment networks, in terms of the cost of electricity and environmental impact. Or more realistically, what happens today: facilitation of ransomware and the sale of illegal material. You could argue that most of these theoretical consequences have nothing to do with the technologies themselves, but that's true of almost all software technology. Even a potentially devastating piece of malware is, in a vacuum, just some bytes floating in space, with no inherent meaning until someone chooses to execute it. Most discussions about morals in programming and computer science either ignore or gloss over this part as if it is already answered, but it probably matters. There's some arbitrary dividing line where you decide when the blame lies with the operator(s) vs the technology itself. In practice, I think it's more useful to look at it in terms of who's executing the code instead of who's writing it, since in practice the existence of code that does something is basically an inevitability, in a world where you can only rely on impracticality for a limited amount of time and where it's basically impossible to hold a monopoly on some piece of knowledge or information forever. I think this also is rather helpful when you look at things like exploits: if someone makes a genuine mistake in their software, for which they expressly disclaimed any warranty, it would be weird for them to be culpable when it impacts an operator; but if someone were to be using said software to store user data, and that user data were leaked via an exploit in software, it's more reasonable to say the operator is responsible. Code itself doesn't usually have much intent encoded into it, so it's unreasonable to go in from a perspective that assumes that you can judge the morality of software itself. But then, taking this to its logical extreme, it might be a little too absolutist; even if software is inevitable, that doesn't mean that culpability for intentionally destructive behavior is necessarily a bad idea. Either way, from this viewpoint, I think you can easily argue that cryptocurrency and AI both have enormous potential to cause consequences in the world. It isn't necessarily that the technologies themselves are inherently bad, but from a practical standpoint it doesn't really matter.
TarasBob 4y ago
Vitalik recently wrote a great article about this here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  "Cryptocurrency is the only thing currently being developed that can realistically combine the benefits of digitalization with cash-like respect for personal privacy." "cash-like" does a lot of heavy lifting here. Only Monero and Grin have any real expectation of privacy. Chain analysis is pretty mature, and the records exist forever.

by isodev 4y ago

yieldcrv 4y ago

for developers, there is no platform that realistically competes with “web3 smart contract”. the overhead costs are insanely low and are only one time for deployment with unlimited use, no other cloud deployment platform offers that and consumers cant get enough of them and will shoulder costs of interacting with them the most irrelevant part of this equation is debating why consumers are spending money on developer’s internet vending machines its a market with demand, the market is telling you what to do for half a decade and yet

dmitriid 4y ago
> the overhead costs are insanely low and are only one time for deployment with unlimited use, no other cloud deployment platform offers that Every cloud platform has a free tier that can probably handle the entirety of crypto, and then some. A Raspberry Pi is a more efficient platform that realistically competes with "web3"
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  everything I wrote was about deploying smart contracts, and on a blockchain that other people want to use nobody cares about the technical feasibility of running a blockchain, development routinely requires local deployments
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > everything I wrote was about deploying smart contracts, and on a blockchain Yup. In a response to "Even if we pretend for a moment that there was some merit to the 'web3 smart contract', by now it should be painfully clear to anyone involved that this is a technological dead end." Of course there's no better platform than "web3" for developers who do the "web3" stuff. "Windows is the best platform to develop apps for Windows". However. As a platform web3 is a failure. And for developers literally everything outside crypto is a better platform. For users, too.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      Its cheaper to develop and host your app on and there is consumer demand in applications where the very top of the funnel is a payment Recognizing that makes you way better of a developer and entrepreneur than the 10x coder hunting for exploits and bug bounties, where making money is the goal
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        > Its cheaper to develop and host your app on Cheaper than what? That's the beauty of vague unverifiable statements like "for developers, there is no platform that realistically competes with 'web3 smart contract'." For any counter example you can always say "that's not what I meant" > Recognizing that makes you way better of a developer and entrepreneur than the 10x coder hunting for exploits and bug bounties, where making money is the goal Was this sentence written by ChatGPT?
        yieldcrv 4y ago
        deploying smart contracts is the same as deploying an application to the cloud with api calls and variable storage the closest I can think of is Firebase or AWS Lambda (or similar compute instance) with some kind of rudimentary database or shoehorned in variable storage. these all charge by number of executions, bandwidth and storage, even geographic location smart contract deployments would be cheaper than that, via a one time cost for the developer, and have unlimited use. it is also convenient and valuable that the smart contract cannot be deplatformed I don't really see Firebase or AWS or other compute instances competing on any of these fronts, but if you know of a counterpoint I would love to check out their pricing and usage page
        dmitriid 4y ago
        So my very first comment remains valid. No idea what you're objecting to.
        yieldcrv 4y ago

chrisco255 4y ago

No, we didn't. There are tens of thousands of developers writing smart contracts. Some of these smart contracts, such as Uniswap (https://uniswap.org/ https://uniswap.org/), have traded more than $1.2 trillion in volume. Uniswap works 24/7 with 100% uptime. It's permissionless to create a liquidity pool or to trade on the platform. It's a novel architecture, called an Automated Market Maker, a real innovation in financial markets. Uniswap is fully auditable thanks to everything being on-chain. Source code is open. There's also on-chain lending markets (Aave: https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/), decentralized stable coins (https://www.liquity.org/ https://www.liquity.org/), on-chain arbitration (https://kleros.io/ https://kleros.io/), on-chain DAO governance (https://compound.finance/governance https://compound.finance/governance), on-chain social media primitives which are extensible (https://www.lens.xyz/ https://www.lens.xyz/), multi-sig on-chain smart contract wallets that custody hundreds of millions to billions in assets (https://gnosis-safe.io/ https://gnosis-safe.io/), decentralized strategy games that use on-chain zero knowledge proofs to maintain a fog of war and player secrets while keeping everyone honest while allowing for full hackability (Dark Forest - https://zkga.me/ https://zkga.me/), etc. Can really go on and on, but the industry is not going anywhere.

dimgl 4y ago
- robcohen 4y ago
  Don’t hold your breath.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  If you are focusing on the bad side of a tech, AI could do way worse than crypto. I mean, the most evil thing you can do with crypto is merely taking away money from people.
  - jchw 4y ago
    You're thinking too small. If you really want to get cynical, you could think about the ruinous consequences if a Proof-of-Work-based currency were to rapidly overtake the current payment networks, in terms of the cost of electricity and environmental impact. Or more realistically, what happens today: facilitation of ransomware and the sale of illegal material. You could argue that most of these theoretical consequences have nothing to do with the technologies themselves, but that's true of almost all software technology. Even a potentially devastating piece of malware is, in a vacuum, just some bytes floating in space, with no inherent meaning until someone chooses to execute it. Most discussions about morals in programming and computer science either ignore or gloss over this part as if it is already answered, but it probably matters. There's some arbitrary dividing line where you decide when the blame lies with the operator(s) vs the technology itself. In practice, I think it's more useful to look at it in terms of who's executing the code instead of who's writing it, since in practice the existence of code that does something is basically an inevitability, in a world where you can only rely on impracticality for a limited amount of time and where it's basically impossible to hold a monopoly on some piece of knowledge or information forever. I think this also is rather helpful when you look at things like exploits: if someone makes a genuine mistake in their software, for which they expressly disclaimed any warranty, it would be weird for them to be culpable when it impacts an operator; but if someone were to be using said software to store user data, and that user data were leaked via an exploit in software, it's more reasonable to say the operator is responsible. Code itself doesn't usually have much intent encoded into it, so it's unreasonable to go in from a perspective that assumes that you can judge the morality of software itself. But then, taking this to its logical extreme, it might be a little too absolutist; even if software is inevitable, that doesn't mean that culpability for intentionally destructive behavior is necessarily a bad idea. Either way, from this viewpoint, I think you can easily argue that cryptocurrency and AI both have enormous potential to cause consequences in the world. It isn't necessarily that the technologies themselves are inherently bad, but from a practical standpoint it doesn't really matter.

TarasBob 4y ago

Vitalik recently wrote a great article about this here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html

actionfromafar 4y ago
"Cryptocurrency is the only thing currently being developed that can realistically combine the benefits of digitalization with cash-like respect for personal privacy." "cash-like" does a lot of heavy lifting here. Only Monero and Grin have any real expectation of privacy. Chain analysis is pretty mature, and the records exist forever.