I believe the point is that Popcorn Time is/was a shining example of the decentralized web, to the point that it accomplished some of what “web3” claims it is trying to achieve (for a specific set of use cases), and therefore is “more web3 than crypto”.
Retooling on a “web3 stack” would be pointless, because it is already accomplishing its goal without that stack.
My impression is that overall HN was generally enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies and the tech powering them until a few recent scandals and scams. To be honest that is just broadly similar to public opinion (or at least, the portion of the public who have heard of cryptocurrencies)
"I suspect that legacy industry and regulators have smothered two generations of technological improvement, largely (I suspect) by building a (mostly) closed and permissioned financial system."
It's technically possible to replace any blockchain with a database but where are you going to host it and who is the trusted central authority?
Blockchain might not the solution but it shows us an alternative to trusting some middlemen that have too much power, instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent.
A distributed ledger is more than just a database, it's a technology that can orchestrated trust online without a central authority. That's a huge deal, compared to a sql database that is owned by someone, who is the singularity that administrates the whole thing.
>It's technically possible to replace any blockchain with a database but where are you going to host it and who is the trusted central authority?
Who is hosting the blockchain? Who is the trusted authority over the maintenance of the protocol that implements the blockchain, that all miners must use if they want to participate in the system? Who is it you're trusting not to organize a malicious 51% attack against the system, when it has already happened several times to quite a few blockchains? It is a blatant falsehood that blockchains don't have any trusted authorities. They actually require trusted authorities to function. You're not trusting "emotionless code" as the code is well known to have these flaws even by the admission of its own designers; what you're actually trusting is some game theory laid out by programmers you trust, that says the miners won't do bad things because they're getting paid. But in several cases we've seen that they actually will do bad things! And that's not even considering all the other bad things like fraud and ransomware that happens on blockchains that the operators seemingly just throw their hands up and don't do anything about. They don't even consider that to be their problem.
I hate, hate, hate that this line is used so often in discussion of cryptocurrency. It makes no sense at all. In order to have any kind of real discussion around this, the crypto community needs to move past these thought-terminating cliches.
Miners/Stakers who is incentivize to validate the network and maintain the collective consensus.
All your points are valid and universally known but the more important here is whether or not those vulnerabilities are inherently caused by the nature of blockchain or tehcnical problems that we can/need to solve.
A good blockchain is not owned by anyone, any changes made need to go through multiple layers of peer review.
We are still very rooted in our current ways of doing things hence we are seeing phenomenon where companies are trying to take control by either building their own blockchain or centralised service on top of a blockchain. But if I travel back to the 70's and told you that someday you can run an Internet company, would you believe it?
We are no where near endgame but if you dig deep enough, you will see many exciting technical breakthroughs. One of the fascinating one is zero-knowledge validation. Blockchain could be the solution or maybe not, I don't care, I'm excited about the innovative opportunities that it brought upon.
> But if I travel back to the 70's and told you that someday you can run an Internet company, would you believe it?
If I understood what you were talking about, I would probably idly wonder how I could fit it in between being President of the United States, a firefighter, an astronaut, and a professional soccer player, but I wouldn't actually disbelieve it.
(Hey, in the part of the 1970s where I was alive at all, I was pretty young.)
Exactly, I don't see blockchain as a solution to cure world hunger or help us "decentralised" everything but I won't dismissed it as a possible route to a new future. I have high hopes for it to be a better future than it turning out to be a buzzword the same way that I will dismiss the dot com idea (the notion that every business and everything needs the Internet) but I strongly believe in the underlying technology that connects everyone and everything.
No, that's why many people is working on it now. If you compare old smart contract with new ones, you will see that things are slowly getting fixed.
For e.g., you could literally send NFTs to any address (including a smart contract address) which make things stuck forever. Now there's a safe way to transfer things which check whether or not it is a valid address. And this became the de facto standard for almost any NFT smart contract.
Exactly. So when you write something like this: "instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent." what you're really saying is: "we trust a bunch of programmers to write perfect code" when even those programmers cannot understand the code they write: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31692704
In an ideal world, things will be build to facilitate the trust, we don't have to trust any programmer at all.
The trust in put on the code itself which not one but all of us agreed upon. Today, we don't have the tools to allow people to actually understand it but it doesn't mean that we won't in the future. Abstraction layers will be built.
Of course this is an optimistic speculation. I'm personally not attached to crypto in anyways but I'm excited about innovative opportunities that it enabled.
There are ponies and magical unicorns that grant you wishes.
> Abstraction layers will be built.
And those abstractions will definitely be built and will be different from any existing ones because? And once again we will have to trust people building them that they are built correctly.
> I'm excited about innovative opportunities that it enabled.
And those innovative opportunities are what exactly?
An opportunity to do things differently. The Internet today have flaws and we had exhausted all the possible way to build a better one on existing technology.
Blockchain present us with a new way to coordinate online activities and transactions. It's the right path forward? We don't know, at least not until we exhaust all the possible options and therein lies a lot of opportunities for technical breakthroughs that could possible solve all the concerns we had, technically.
> An opportunity to do things differently. The Internet today have flaws and we had exhausted all the possible way to build a better one on existing technology.
Demagoguery
> Blockchain present us with a new way to coordinate online activities and transactions.
No it doesn't. Blockchain is a distributed spend-only log. There are very few if any applications for it.
> therein lies a lot of opportunities for technical breakthroughs that could possible solve all the concerns we had, technically.
Yeah, yeah, magical blockchain will solve all the issues, we just have to believe hard enough.
The argument made was that it's not about the technology itself but the transaction rules. If money are stolen from banks in a specific way (withdrawn into prepaid cards), banks will not and cannot reverse these transactions. Banks do have some rules like chargeback however to reverse legitimate transactions or delayed transactions. The same rules can be converted into Smart Contracts which governs the transaction of a certain currency.
So instead of reversing, we could make all NFTs locked from trading for 3 days after transaction which anyone could appeal for a dispute and buyback the NFT for the same price anytime.
The challenge here is, can we actually come up a set of robust rules that is not too rigid yet not abusable. It's not easy, it won't be right off the bat and it certainly require a lot of critical, innovative thinking. And maybe the solution won't have to be complex at all.
The problem that I see here, is that with the "code is law" approach if there's a bug in the smart contract that is supposed to protect you then you're screwed without recourse.
In a traditional system, if there is a bug in your bank's software that makes you loose money, you can ask the bank to give you the money back. If they refuse, you can take them to court. If instead the smart contract has a bug, there's no one you can appeal to to get your money back. So I think that having humans-in-the-loop is still important, at least for big transactions.
As others pointed out, this problems are much smaller for small transaction so maybe there could be some use there. But I have to think better about this use case.
"you can ask the bank to give you the money back"
"you can take them to court"
Which like the article argues, is not something that can be solved by any ledger, distributed or not. Even if banks reverses records, they don't change the data which is already on the database/record, instead they just issue a new transaction from the backend or withdrawing it from a legit reserve that they own. In any case, no reversing was done.
What if instead of taking the bank to the court, we have something in place for it that runs based on certain "if statements" or "switch case". Of course, is not as easy as it sounds, we need conditions that are robust enough and not vulnerable to abusers. It's a very complicated problem to solve.
> What if instead of taking the bank to the court, we have something in place for it that runs based on certain "if statements" or "switch case"
As I said in my comment, the problem is that if you have a bug in the statements that should protect you, then there is no recourse for your lost money.
No computer programs are perfect, there will be bugs and exploits.
The question then comes to whether we want to deal with unpredictable human "bug" or consistent computer bug. For the later, we can engineer our way to a minimum risk model, where it become punishing to exploit a bug.
We are doing the same thing with the current system, it's just that different banks and companies are responsible for different systems. There are bugs and exploits in systems of our finacial institution and we rely on human to mitigate the risk.
Will computer be better than human or can we build a hybrid system? That's the question we need to answer.
Not everyone needs a platform to be honest. Most people lives their lives without posting anything online, just jumping from platform to platform searching for something to consume. And the argument that people would worried if they lost access to their data is almost invalid, most don't even backup their phones, much less data on platforms.
And for people who needs to distribute stuff, they would just opt-in for every platform, self-owned or big tech.
Removing middlemen or the whole decentralization thing is a welcomed change, so we get more to be in control more. But this is a paradigm shift, like how we moved from offline to online, the ways and methods of doing things need to change. For instance, instead of self-hosting the entire thing, I imagine a way for people to actually host their own data, while big tech host the frontend and backend. When you want your data to be displayed on Facebook, you will need to provide a temporary access key that can be revoked anytime.
The whole web3 hype is that it promises a utopia version of the Internet hence no matter where you choose to attack it, it almost always seems vague.
But remember this, Internet itself is someone's utopia in very beginning but it morphed and transform from inspiration and motivation into a technology that we use almost every day. Having a vision is the necessary step for disruption to happen, the wilder and more resonating it is the bigger the disruption is going to be.
However, when someone tries to define the future (or un-define it like in this article), it is almost always cringey. The next web or the next big thing cannot be define, if it could be then it would already happened, the technology would already be accessible right from our pocket.
If one look closely underneath the web3 blanket, there are lots of innovation to was expedite as we are throwing in so much resources and talents.
Will all of them come together and form the next web? I doubt it but will one of them preserve, stood the test of time and finds its application? I remain very optimistic.
History is repeating itself, old thinking + new technology is never going to create innovation, it's just going to end like a blazing trail of a shooting star, a tale to tell. We are pretty much heading in the same direction with blockchain.
Decentralization is smexy but it comes with a price, it disrupts everything, starting from the way we build it.
I agreed entirely that VCs are building monopolies and that money are pouring into the space for no obvious practical reason but it is inevitable until we find a better model of building. And those who are trying to build a web2 version of something in web3 will most likely fail because web3 isn't a replacement or better alternative to web2. Hence it is pointless to compare what we are have, i.e. a decentralized email server.
Decentralization, in my humble opinion, is putting the decisions/ownership back to the users but it is never going to liberate the users from a centralized entity. The things we choose to use/consume will inevitably be owned by a centralized entity, the key difference is whether or not we can seamlessly migrate to another platform of choice. And instead of one big entity controlling everything, we get multiple smaller space that makes their own rule providing the same service.
NFTs marketplace is an example of this, you own the NFT, you can take it and move it to another platform and you can even access directly via your own node without any platform. The problem with NFT however, is the usefulness itself, not the nature of NFT.
Imagine having multiple social networks that you can join with a wallet address, each with their own rules and networks. Instead of a Metaverse, think Multiverse.
Imagine having multiple ads platform that you can choose to integrate with your daily browsing and earn tokens to use in a certain way while doing so. Think Brave but instead of just Brave, you get different ads agencies with different collection of ads.
The main problem here is that our old business model doesn't work here, we are most likely going to end up broke running something that is ideally "decentralized". The fallback plan? Sit and write about how centralized web3 is OR experiment by building on top of blockchain technology, fail miserably as a joke, make some noise and motivate someone to "think different".
