Arguments about blockchain here on HN are frustrating. There are plenty of good examples of where it works very well but the mental gymnastic people go through to deny the obvious are incredible.
The most basic to me is the Automatic Market Maker system. For example Uniswap is a system with only a few (relatively speaking) lines of a code at its core and a team of a couple of dozen. The system does billions of dollars worth of trades every day. If anybody can point out to me a broker that does similar volumes that would allow me to make million-dollar trades with a few lines of code with no possibility of censorship I will happily concede that web3 is a failure.
Oh and BTW, love Helium, just started researching it a few days ago. As always all great projects are easy to dismiss until one can no longer do it. I think I'll get in line for a hotspot/miner.
> The system does billions of dollars worth of trades every day.
Billions of dollars? Ha. Uniswap does none of this. Uniswap allows you to convert one cryptocurrency to another.
Example:
Bill creates a coin called $FOO, it has 1,000,000 tokens and I give Mary one token in exchange for $100
My friend Josh creates a new coin called $BAR, it has 1,000,000 tokens and I give Steve one token in exchange fro $100.
Josh now gives one of his $BAR tokens to Bill for one of his $FOO tokens using uniswap 1:1. In theory $100 was "traded". Was it though?
> If anybody can point out to me a broker that does similar volumes that would allow me to make million-dollar trades with a few lines of code with no possibility of censorship I will happily concede that web3 is a failure.
If you can tell me how I get the USD that comes from my paycheck into a system that uses a few lines of code I'll be happy to concede that web3 is not a failure. Bill can't use his new $BAR token and Josh can't use his $FOO token to pay for groceries. So this whole premise is entirely useless.
> There are plenty of good examples of where it works very well but the mental gymnastic people go through to deny the obvious are incredible.
Blockchain is a very interesting technical implementation, but there's a gigantic step between being interesting technically and being world-changing. So yes, you'll find interesting applications on the blockchain, but it's not the magical solution that will revolutionize everything. Things like Uniswap are cool, but in the end it's just a currency trader. Helium looks to me like yet another attempt at crowdsourced wireless. I remember Fon from back in 2005, promised to change the communication landscape, and last I heard about them I think they pivoted to just offering WiFi tech to companies.
> Mining HNT with Hotspots is done via radio technology, not expensive or wasteful GPUs.
> Hotspots work together to form a new global wireless network and undertake ‘Proof-of-Coverage’.
Okay that's actually quite clever. I've previously wondered why no one has tried a similar idea for wired networks, implementing "Proof of possession of IPv4 address". It may be possible for a nation state to take control of a large IP range for some short period of time, but I don't think it's plausible that even conspiring adversaries could control 51% of the internet for a week without anyone noticing.
The "proof" part of proof of coverage is very weak in Helium currently. Clearly most people are in good faith, but it is inherently vulnerable to Sybil attacks, because there's a chicken and egg problem with starting a new group of hotspots in an area with no external 'trusted' hotspots to validate them.
Frankly almost everything to do with finance I would rather live without and crypto is just more of that. To me, everything blockchain related is people popping a boner over an ever increasing bureaucracy of money.
That's a valid statement. It creates a hyper-monetization of sorts. I struggle with it too, although less. I think there are other way to think about it. And feel free to accuse me of mental gymnastics. But I sort of came to blockchain for the espoused values associated with Ethereum, so I am projecting those perhaps.
There have been real-life experiments with local and community currencies, for example the Ithaca Hours and Boulder Bucks (and many others [1]). The point of them is to have something that accrues value and keeps it inside of a group, unlike the government issues currency which knows no bounds and can easily be extracted from a community. I see online (and local [2]) communities and DAOs that issue tokens and distribute them to a more restricted member group doing the equivalent of that. In effect you are not creating a parallel currency to the national one but creating a space where another means of representing value exists. For an example of a community with strong internal economics check out the builder collective 1hive [3]. What is actually happening here, I think, is not finance in traditional sense (although there is plenty of that, sure) but something that to me resembled anarcho-syndicalist utopias or restructuring of the capitalistic system around human relationships. In a world of a multitude of community currencies things like Uniswap's AMM provide interfaces between community microcosms.
Then there is another thing I think should be considered. Something like half of the population of the world has no access to banking. And then for the large portion of the ones who do the banking systems are terribly opaque and unstable. In Russia for example almost everybody holds their money in a single government-controlled bank because trust in the banking is super low. "Westerns", I feel, deeply under-appreciate the hardship shitty banking causes to people. (There are, btw, blockchains that specifically target the unbanked/underbanked populations that have limited access to financial instruments, and I do not mean in an exploitative way.) And even if you live in a place with a great financial system then plenty of people are restricted from harnessing it's potential. For example accredited investor laws might be seen as protective but they also prevent common folk from participating in all sorts of promising endeavors and getting a share of the wealth. So, yes, I am with you on that financialization is not all pretty, but at the moment it serves some people well and others very poorly or not at all and the latter group has much to gain from it.
> Did you read my comment? AMM's were impossible without blockchain.
I did. Let's see:
Me: "no one can provide even a single one that... isn't relying on circular references"
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The most basic to me is the Automatic Market Maker system. For example Uniswap is a system with only a few (relatively speaking) lines of a code at its core and a team of a couple of dozen.
--- end quote ---
Oh, look. A thing that only exists to perpetuate the never ending circle of speculation and scamming using the fictional tokens, and useless for anything else. Circular references abound. But sure, it can give you an instant price between two fictional tokens. Wow. Innovation.
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The system does billions of dollars worth of trades every day. If anybody can point out to me a broker that does similar volumes that would allow me to make million-dollar trades with a few lines of code
--- end quote ---
1. It does't do billions of dollars every day. It exchanges some mythical tokens for some fantasy tokens that are completely entirely useless outside their own systems of reference (a.k.a. almost entirely exclusively speculation and scams)
2. This is the description of algorithmic trading and HFT. Except, it's not high-frequency, and it's not trading.
3. The moment those "few lines of code" execute an erroneous trade (because, you know, code), these "multi-million traders" will immediately cry foul, and ask for reverts, regulations, hard forks and all that.
> As always all great projects are easy to dismiss until one can no longer do it.
There are very few great projects that are easy to dismiss, and there are many shitty ones that are all too easy to dismiss. Somehow every single crypto project views itself as the great one.
The most basic to me is the Automatic Market Maker system. For example Uniswap is a system with only a few (relatively speaking) lines of a code at its core and a team of a couple of dozen. The system does billions of dollars worth of trades every day. If anybody can point out to me a broker that does similar volumes that would allow me to make million-dollar trades with a few lines of code with no possibility of censorship I will happily concede that web3 is a failure.
Oh and BTW, love Helium, just started researching it a few days ago. As always all great projects are easy to dismiss until one can no longer do it. I think I'll get in line for a hotspot/miner.