[RoboTeddy]

When writing code for a blockchain today, even on an Ethereum L2, you're in a very resource-constrained environment where you end up using bitpacking tricks and the like. That's how it was for early computers, too, of course — they may serve as a better analogy. Programmable computers have taken decades to develop, beginning in ~1950, and I expect that decentralized computation will follow a similar path.

There simply are numerous hard problems to solve to make this all work at greater scale. In a healthy ecosystem like Ethereum's, there are frequent research discoveries (discovery of the concept of data availability, the application of BLS signature aggregation, proposer-builder separation, zkevm, data availability sampling, ...). The software engineering effort required to implement such research is colossal as well. Eventually we'll even see e.g. specialized hardware for efficiently producing or verifying zero-knowledge proofs.

It would be easy to look at the very early computers, which were perhaps not all that useful, and shrug — but that take wouldn't have extended well into the future as the technology scaled.

[canoebuilder]

There simply are numerous hard problems to solve to make this all work at greater scale. In a healthy ecosystem like Ethereum's, there are frequent research discoveries (discovery of the concept of data availability, the application of BLS signature aggregation, proposer-builder separation, zkevm, data availability sampling, ...). The software engineering effort required to implement such research is colossal as well.

Ok, so there is a massive amount of effort to be put forth to get something out of this, and even then it is still kind of up in the air what that "something" actually is.

Would it not be prudent to have at least some sort of roughly sketched map of what all this effort is supposed to bring about? other than Lambos...

Or maybe ask if we would be better served if all that effort was put forth in some other direction? Man hours are not a limitless resource.

[RoboTeddy]

> what all this effort is supposed to bring about

In the limit, all this effort brings about an artifact that could be thought of as a "magic" computer where:

- Everyone trusts that the computer operates to spec,

- Anyone (or any user interface) can type whatever they want into the terminal and press "enter",

- Anyone (or any other computer program) can read state out,

- The computer has immense amounts of storage and compute,

- Anyone who wants to change the computer's state in some way that cannot be achieved by using the terminal can freely make a copy of the computer with whatever changes they want, and encourage others to use their version instead.

What, one might wonder, would the use be? There are many, many potential uses — it almost boggles the mind — it's kind of like trying to imagine the uses of the internet when it was first invented.

To name one example: you could use this magic computer to operate a VR metaverse, instead of relying on a centralized Facebook one. Failing to do that would lock meaningful sections of our lives into a single vendor whose motivation is profit. Using the magic computer instead would mean that the metaverse would operate according to its predefined rules (which could leave plenty of space for human elections or other forms of collective decision-making), and that if things went awry anyone could try to set us back on track by making a modified copy of the machine and raising awareness about using it instead.

Just like regular computers, this magic computer could also have plenty of negative consequences. It depends on how people opt to use it. I think we'll probably have more luck adopting technology and trying to drive it in the right direction, though — the alternative is widespread Luddism, which might actually be a good idea, but I don't see a realistic path to achieving it.

A lot of folks who are very skeptical of web3 due to its dark sides are probably people who probably have great values and, if they adopted web3, could probably do a lot to improve its trajectory.

[giantrobot]

> It would be easy to look at the very early computers, which were perhaps not all that useful, and shrug — but that take wouldn't have extended well into the future as the technology scaled.

Early computers solved problems they were designed to solve. So they were plenty useful. Your statement is nonsensical.

[RoboTeddy]

Early blockchains have also solved the problems they were designed to solve. For example:

- Bitcoin offers a transferrable store of value which cannot be inflated by governments,

- Stablecoins, thanks to being cross-border, are often used in e.g. Argentina where the local currency is unstable and it's not legal to buy dollars,

- Proof of Humanity + universal basic income has provided extra income to Argentinian people (e.g. heard of someone who was able to purchase a ticket to visit their family for Christmas thanks to crypto UBI),

- Crypto has been used to send remittances to economically unstable places (Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela)

- Gitcoin has provided public goods funding and advanced our conception of mechanism design,

- Helium has created a new 5G network that people can actually roam onto,

- NFTs have provided a new funding model for artists (who create public goods),

- Zcash and Monero have allowed for fully private digital transfers,

- Dark Forest (https://zkga.me/) has been an amusing game,

- Snapshot has helped create a delegative voting system that governs a $3B treasury,

These might not be problems that you face or believe are important, but all these are examples of intended problems being solved.

P.S. the tone of your comment made me a little sad :(

[sudosysgen]

So, the thing is, all of these things fall into two categories.

Either purely technical solutions, or previously solved problems.

For example, IoT scale global 5G networks you can roan into? That's a solved issue already. Same for programming bounties, proof of humanity, UBI, transferrable assets (though Bitcoin is in some ways more transferable) etc...

Others are fully technical problems, like fully private digital transfers.

Others yet are pretty much just temporary workaround. The fact that you can send remittances to Lebanon or Venezuela was never inherently problematic because of the instability of their currency, rather, it's because the government (in some cases other governments) decided to make it more difficult.

If a government wanted to, they could make sending remittances via crypto just as difficult as by any other way.

NFTs as a funding model is not inherently different from the existing comission and copyright system. What NFTs brought was hype, which made people who wouldn't previously comission artwork to now do so. Attesting ownership or transfering ownership of a piece of art with a contemporary author is not more difficult without than with NFTs. Especially because you still need to trust whoever minted the NFT.

There are few, actual, real world problems that have been solved by Web3 tech. I wish it wasn't the case, but it's true.

The fundamental issue is that Web3 tech can't fully replace centralised institutions. So we need to build centralised institutions anyways. If those fail, it can provide some palliation, as long as they don't fail so hard the government tries to fight it. So in the end, it doesn't truly solve any problem in the real world, though it can in some situations act as a Bandaid.

[frabcus]

However, a useful bandaid does show that early blockchain is useful, just as "Early computers solved problems they were designed to solve".

Lebanaon, Turkey and Venezuela are very much part of the real world!

[sudosysgen]

Sure, its useful, but that's temporary. There is no actual fundamental difference between sending crypto and sending fiat to Lebanon, Turkey or Venezuela, it's just a temporary workaround.

[astrange]

> - Crypto has been used to send remittances to economically unstable places (Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela)

This would be cheaper if you didn't use the crypto part. The reason people use crypto is just that the governments have not yet noticed they're running an illegal money transmitter.

[mathnmusic]

Sure, S3 is also cheaper than torrents. And HTTP/Telnet is cheaper than HTTPS/SSH. But some people do see value in math-based guarantees over those given by governments and courts. And others don't. We need both approaches to keep each other in check.

[astrange]

Isn’t S3 actually expensive because cloud computing platforms charge so much for outbound bandwidth? That’s how they stop you from moving across providers.

[Hamuko]

>S3 is also cheaper than torrents

On what formula? Because if I have a 500 MB video file and I want to distribute to some tens of maybe even hundreds of people, I don't see S3 being cheaper. Just sending out 500 MB from S3 to the Internet 10 times costs between $0.25 and $0.45.

There's a reason why I didn't touch S3 when I had to transfer up to 1 TB of video content per day to clients.

[mathnmusic]

"Cheaper" for a use-case like hosting static assets for your website/webapp. Torrents have high overhead which only becomes justifiable for big files and high latency being acceptable.

[giantrobot]

> P.S. the tone of your comment made me a little sad :(

Good. You're trying to hock snake pyramid schemes and claiming it's a revolution. Blockchains are slow and expensive databases. That is it. They have no authority over anything so the only

Cryptocurrencies are burning through the power usage of a small country for bullshit. The worthless shit being "created" is fueled by breathless hype of hucksters looking for the next sucker to trade actual useful money for their Geoffrey dollars.

You're part of a giant scam, or multiple scams. You're listing a bunch of shit which has existing prosaic solutions. You think the blockchain solutions are new and innovative because you never looked into the issues before. Someone came up with a wasteful "solution", slapped the word blockchain on it, and you've uncritically accepted it as some super great thing.

[dang]

Your comment broke the site guidelines egregiously. Attacking another user like this will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. Perhaps you don't feel you owe people you disagree with better, but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it.

You've also been posting in the flamewar style in other comments too. Please stop doing that. It's not what this site is for, and it poisons what it is for. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here—not people smiting enemies and bashing each other.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[Liron]

Early computers augmented or replaced humans whose job title was “computer”