When people say stuff like this, I wonder what they think the state of the art in web3 innovation is. Do people just see the monkey JPGs and write off the whole technology?
What do you see? I've just had a 2 hour conversation with someone trying to get me into this "business" without being able to articulate a single use case where NFTs actually make my day better in a way that is not currently possible with other tech so, yeah...what do you see?
I see a whole new wave of fouls about to lose their money to ponzi schemes and over-hyped "investments", much like it happened with the bitcoin/crypto train.
Just write NFT or crypto in Youtube and you immediately see all the sharks promising you millions in their videos, trying to manipulate you into investing - don't read the comments though, it's even worse. I see a lot of red flags and trouble for nothing. I hold crypto assets so I'm not talking out of my but here - I must confess; I've had no real benefits yet from this new tech. The crypto I hold is because one of my products has crypto as a payment method so I decided to just hold a piece of it and try to make use of "new tech".
In the crypto space I'm most excited about the ability to have open projects where anyone who contributes can have a stake in the financial rewards of the project, and there are no barriers to becoming a contributor. A lot of the time the financial benefits of open-source contributors are fully captured by a "host" corporation, and open collaboration platforms for non-software projects like textbooks and IRL shared spaces are almost nonexistent.
Proof-of-personhood a la BrightID is something that governments could theoretically provide, but most don't, and even if they did, there are serious privacy and interoperability concerns. SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user. I'm sure you can think of other applications for that tech. Even if every government in the world provided this service, everyone who wants to use it either has to implement 195 different APIs or fork over money to a cottage industry whose sole job it is to unify those APIs.
Finance and commerce on blockchains has a lot of real-world benefits that traditional finance can't or refuses to provide. You can't easily set up a 3-of-5 multisig for your photography club in traditional finance. A lot of normal people have their payments blocked or funds frozen in TradFi for arbitrary reasons. Sex workers get kicked off of platforms all the time, and a friend recently had their PayPal frozen while raising funds for a school reunion party.
I'm not super into NFTs personally, but I can see them having a use case as a more consumer-friendly business model for gacha games and games with similar mechanics. There are probably other promising applications that I just don't know about because I don't follow that space very closely.
> SaaS companies trying to provide a free trial can prevent abuse by verifying unique personhood using web3 tech without needing to ask for any more information about the user
A trial is usually backed by a financial instrument. Usually that financial instrument is a credit card. A credit card can be uniquely identified, and so if you really are concerned about trial reuse, you can check reuse of the credit card, and that gets you pretty far. Folks can use prepaid cards, but you can also block those, which isn't totally unreasonable when you are talking about a subscription-- and a lot of subscription services do block them. Is it indefeatable? No. Is it good enough? Yeah actually. So why do I need to replace the concept of a credit card with an entirely new type of financial instrument that most users (especially non-technical users) don't have or understand?
SaaS just seemed relevant to the audience here, but there are a lot of applications which want to limit one account per natural person, not just SaaS. For example, social networks want to prevent astroturfing, and video games want to prevent cheaters from ban-evasion. Anyway, a lot of people don't want to provide their credit card info for a service they are not sure if they want to use yet (purpose of a trial), and a lot of services want to allow credit card-free trials without opening themselves up to abuse.
I think the vast majority of reflexive dismissals of crypto tech have two themes in common: "if the technology doesn't satisfy this use case, or the UX is not perfect yet, then surely there is no way to fix that and we should discard the whole idea;" and "why use this decentralized solution when we can use this centralized one which, in many cases, doesn't work as well?"
I've reached my weekly budget on the amount of time I want to spend explaining this tech online, but maybe consider if problems you see are truly insurmountable, or if you are simply uncomfortable with the idea of an economic layer that is actually open to build on.
> I've reached my weekly budget on the amount of time I want to spend explaining this tech online
Granted, take care of yourself! I hope you feel no obligation or attack in my line of questioning, and perhaps others can fill in here if they are active over the weekend.
> SaaS just seemed relevant to the audience here, but there are a lot of applications which want to limit one account per natural person, not just SaaS. For example, social networks want to prevent astroturfing, and video games want to prevent cheaters from ban-evasion
That's true, so then I wonder what stops someone from farming these identities and selling them?
> I think the vast majority of reflexive dismissals of crypto tech have two themes in common: "if the technology doesn't satisfy this use case, or the UX is not perfect yet, then surely there is no way to fix that and we should discard the whole idea;"
The main issue for me is that quite often existing well-known problems are tackled with this new hammer that ostensibly offers no real benefit on top of solutions we already have. This is not true of all applications of blockchain technology, but it's clear that there is not a strong case that it is as generally applicable as a movement like "web3" would suggest.
> and "why use this decentralized solution when we can use this centralized one which, in many cases, doesn't work as well?"
Not super familiar with BrightID but I took a look at the website. So I guess the idea is that other humans verify a human and issue cryptographic proof that they are a human.
My question: What about BrightID stops you from verifying and creating multiple identities by simply joining these Zoom-based verification parties multiple times? If someone does that, what's to stop someone from then providing those multiple identities to other people?
While personally i think the original satoshi paper was interesting, and some of the proof of stake stuff. If i'm being generous, some zero knowledge proof stuff. Its not really cryptocurrency,but cryptocurrency has caused attention to be drawn to it.
Beyond that its all minor fixes and applications that are mildly interesting at best. So yeah, very little innovation, but please enlighten me if i missed something.
Pretty much actually. Most layman regard Web3 as a joke at best, and more often a scam. Most of those same people know little, if anything, about Web3 beyond a general association with crypto, regardless of whether that association is merited.
Er blockchains are the largest deployments of non-trivial zero knowledge proofs, which are more advanced cryptography than anything used in traditional WebPKI crypto. This deployment has required tons of novel peer-reviewed (academic and industrial) research as well as massive engineering efforts to bring the tech to production.
The result of these efforts is that ZKPs have gone from a academic curiosity to widely productionized tech. this stuff is beyond the wildest dreams of people like David Chaum.
Except that ZKPs had already seen real-world use before Satoshi's whitepaper was circulated; in fact, there was an already-defunct startup that was selling ZKP-driven authentication tech. Secure multiparty computation is even more advanced than ZKPs, was already deployed in several real-world applications prior to Bitcoin, and has probably driven more research on ZKPs (as a building block in MPC protocols) than anything in the blockchain space thus far. As for how widely productionized the technology is, while I am not sure how you define "non-trivial" ZKPs, U2F was almost certainly a more widely used ZKP application than any blockchain tech, and there are plenty more real-world ZKP applications having nothing to do with blockchains that we could list.
David Chaum dreamed about a world where electronic payments could be anonymous and secure, but the demand was not there and his startup never took off. "Blockchain" sucked most of the oxygen out of the room when it comes to further work on ecash, which is unfortunate given that even the most technically complex ecash proposals were overwhelmingly more efficient than any blockchain-based payment tech ever could be. For what it's worth, the most recent ecash proposals also advanced the research on NIZKs and ZKPs more generally (it is actually hard to avoid some kind of NIZK in a system that supports offline payments) and had ecash been deployed more widely we probably would have seen at least as much research and productionization activity as we see in the blockchain space.
On the other hand, blockchain research has struggled with a foundational question that does not present a problem for any of the technology I mentioned above: how to properly define security. Especially in the permissionless setting the effort on defining security has been unconvincing so far, requiring a very stretched approach to formalizing computational resources that is hard to actually map onto a real-world application. Satoshi did not start with a well-defined problem he was trying to solve with Bitcoin, and such an approach -- clearly identifying the problem you are actually trying to solve and verifying that the definition is logically consistent and realistic -- is exceedingly rare in the blockchain space, while in mainstream cryptography research it is a de facto requirement. So while blockchain tech has not experienced a spectacular failure due to some theoretical shortcomings, the theory itself is not well developed compared to the theory of cryptography in general (including ecash, which can be rigorously defined and proposed systems can be proved to satisfy the definition).
Zerocash is an crash system in the vein of Amon Ta-Shma’s variant from 99, and has rigorous security definitions and proofs. Follow-up work like Zexe strengthens these definitions to standard ones used in MPC, namely simulation-based security.
Furthermore, the MPC deployments you speak of are rather small-scale, there have been no deployments of general-purpose MPC beyond maybe the sugar beets auction.
MPC has been deployed at large scale by numerous companies, at least for the ads industry; I know because I actually work on exactly this full time and I have seen the numbers (but unfortunately I cannot share specifics). There is nothing special about general-purpose protocols that makes them more "legitimate" or whatever; we use specialized protocols in practice because it is almost always more efficient and thus less expensive to run (and MPC is usually right on the threshold of being too expensive).
As for zerocash, the last time I looked into it what I saw were a set of security definitions that assume a reliable ledger of some kind; whether or not that ledger is implemented using a blockchain at all is not addressed in the theoretical work. The practical deployment relied on Bitcoin, but since Bitcoin security is not well-defined (or at least not convincingly defined) that makes the rest of the security argument dubious. As far as I know Zexe has the same problem: yes, the security definition is much stronger, but they do not address the realization of the ledger functionality itself and thus any real-world deployment that relies on e.g. Bitcoin, or really any permissionless blockchain, has the same theoretical shortcomings. Ultimately the permissionless setting itself is the problem; zerocoin could be implemented using a ledger managed by a trusted party, and it would achieve its security goals without those theoretical problems.
I should also be clear that when I say ecash does not share this problem, it is because ecash has a well-defined security model and all functionalities needed to realize an ecash system also have well-defined security. We can instantiate ecash using any of the security assumptions we commonly use for digital signatures, and in theory ecash can be instantiated from MPC (by using a generic MPC protocol to implement a blind signature, then using the blind signature to implement ecash), which itself can be instantiated with standard cryptographic assumptions. So ecash has a security definition that is as well-defined as a cryptographic security definition can be.
Zerocash and Zexe and Zerocoin are all strict supersets of ecash. If you instantiate them underlying ledger with a single server, you recover ecash. If you instantiate with a permissioned distributed ledger (eg via PBFT), you get a distributed but permissioned ecash system. If you use a permissionless ledger, you get a permissionless system with no central authority. The entire point of the ledger abstraction in those works is to enable a composition-based security analysis. That’s literally the way 99% of cryptography proofs are structured. Saying that “Zerocash doesn’t specify details of the ledger” is like saying that “Schnorr signatures don’t specify details of the underlying DL-hard group”; the point is to abstract away those concerns.
Re: MPC deployments, the point about deploying general-purpose MPC is that it’s a much more complex task than specialized protocols. That’s why I specified general-purpose zkps; we already have ubiquitous deployments of specialized zkps (I.e. digital signatures). And maybe your project indeed has a large scale MPC deployment, that’s awesome. Doesn’t take away from the fact that cryptocurrencies are pushing zkp innovation at unprecedented rates.
My job would be much simpler if I could deploy generic MPC; all I would have to do is maintain a library and maybe a compiler, without having to design and implement an entirely new protocol every time someone came along with some new feature or use-case. The engineering effort of productionizing a generic protocol is a one-time cost and my coworkers and I could do that work relatively quickly. On the other hand, special-purpose protocols are typically difficult to modify, we are have to do our security proofs over and over whenever we roll out anything new, and we must go through the engineering effort over and over.
Engineering effort is not what holds back the deployment of generic MPC protocols. Those protocols are just too expensive to run in the majority of real-world MPC applications. Even special-purpose protocols are sometimes too resource-intensive to be deployed. I do not see that situation changing without a radically different approach to generic protocols. I also do not understand what is so uniquely exciting about deploying a generic ZKP or MPC protocol. If it works in a giving setting and no special-purpose construction could be used, great, but it is not some kind of badge of honor.
As for Zerocash, you had originally said that blockchains are where we can finding the largest deployments of non-trivial ZKPs, which is why I pointed out that Zerocash and its followup work do not really involve "blockchains" beyond a particular instantiation of a ledger. If the construction can be implemented without any blockchain at all -- which the authors of the original paper took the time to point out -- then I do not see how any of the research on ZKPs motivated by Zerocash and its followup work supports your claim at all. You are saying that Zerocash is actually ecash, which kind of makes my point for me: we are not actually talking about something in the "blockchain space."
(Also, I have a somewhat controversial view that NIZKs and signatures are not actually "zero knowledge," since the verifier obviously cannot compute a NIZK or signature without receiving a message from the prover/signer and thus gains knowledge when it does receive those strings. Not that it matters in any way for this conversation, since the value of innovation in NIZKs or ZKSNARKs is not in doubt, but I did want to mention that signatures are a poor example of real-world deployments of ZKPs.)