Tell me how decentralized services allow applications to be permissionless, censorship- and sybil-resistant without a blockchain. I will make both of us rich.
Tells us how blockchain allows applications to be permissionless, censorship- and sybil-resistant in any way that matters and doesn't conflict with the use of said apps.
What are you afraid of, really? People that can make innovations?
My point was that the reason that people are doing all this work on the blockchain because no other solution has been shown to be better. Anyone that says "blockchain is not needed for that" should at least provide a better solution, or say "I actually prefer to keep the status quo".
I’m not the OP, but I think there is a very real concern that a single person or single group of people who create the “new better system” can significantly drain the resources of everyone else.
We actively see this all the time on smaller scales (credit cards, global franchises, FAANG), but the idea of someone doing it at a larger scale should make us hesitate.
- You do realize that the comment was tongue-in-cheek?
- There is no "resource draining" here. Even if someone found a way to solve the problem of distributed consensus without using a blockchain and found a way to make money out of it, they would be rich by wealth creation: new products, new services, new business.
> You do realize that the comment was tongue-in-cheek?
Why would I? It's well-established that tone does not come across through text.
> There is no "resource draining" here. Even if someone found a way to solve the problem of distributed consensus without using a blockchain and found a way to make money out of it, they would be rich by wealth creation: new products, new services, new business.
While I see what you're saying, I don't think I properly explained my point as yours is not a counter to it. By "resource draining" I mean that overall the creators could get richer compared to everyone else. Even if they took say $0.01 from every transaction those pennies slowly add up. A dollar 'spent' by changing hands 10 times is actually $0.90. A dollar 'spent' 100 times has been effectively drained of all it's value with that value funnelled to the hands of those running the system. In a scenario like that, wealth creation as you've defined it actually pours fuel on the fire. Every business uses a huge amount of transactions to pay operational costs, and all of their customers generate transactions every time they pay.
We currently have this playing out in various ways (for example franchise markups) and even though it's so highly fragmented it's still an issue where wealth is concentrating at the top. So it follows that if the rich get richer, the rest must get less rich by comparison.
because I am teaching myself to make stereograms. Lipton spent a few years in the 1970s figuring out how to make quality stereo movies with the goal of developing a better system for exhibiting stereo movies. In 1980 he wrote a book (that book) which was a lot like a PhD thesis, he then invented the modern system for 3D movies with circular polarized light and sold his company in 2005. In the end he "got rich" but it wasn't quick.
The blockhead ideology is a lot like the Amway ideology... Really working, creating something, building something, serving customers, is a lot of work for not enough remuneration. There's got to be some magic secret to riches without effort, and once you've got people to believe it exists, you can exploit them.
> Web3 is often more interested in moving money around (e.g. "Ponzi Schemes") than really creating anything.
And "Web 2.0" was more interested in taking some Unix utility and turning them into a web service that could be walled off and monetized. There hardly was any ~real innovation~.
There's plenty of really good criticisms of cryptocurrencies, but that's not one of them.
The whole point of proof of work is Sybil-resistance. Because your voting power is tied to your hash rate, you can't just conjure up a bunch of voting power by creating as many wallets as you want. Ethereum's move to proof of stake keeps Sybil resistance but trades the power consumption of PoW for some amount of centralisation (because you need to hold funds to vote).
Gas doesn't do much for Cybil resistance, it's largely meant to stop you from clogging up the network by publishing a transaction that executes the busy beaver function on some nasty input, or something similarly hostile.
