[MadeThisToReply]

Why would web3 be capable of anything else? Satoshi invented the blockchain to solve one specific problem: creating a decentralised currency. It was never supposed to be some kind of universal "truth machine" applicable to any other kind of real-world problem. How would it? The existence of data on a blockchain doesn't prove anything except that some data was added to a blockchain. The idea that this has practical applications for anything other than a currency (e.g. supply chain management, concert tickets, property deeds, all the other classic examples that cryptoheads have been citing for years without a single successful example in real life) is absurd, in fact it's so laughably absurd that I question the intelligence of anyone who can say it with a straight face.

Basically, I think that everything in the crypto space is bullshit, with the possible exception of Bitcoin itself, but I'm still agnostic on that front. I hope I'm wrong - it's appealing to think that we're on the cusp of another technological revolution that will make everything better, especially if it gives me a chance to get rich! - but for fuck's sake, it's been five years since this classic article and still nothing has fundamentally changed: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

[piaste]

Your vision matches mine pretty much 100%.

If an asset doesn't live exclusively the blockchain, the blockchain can't enforce its ownership. If the blockchain can't enforce its ownership, it doesn't have anything else to offer.

One small corner of potential I still see is running some low-volume Internet services with a blockchain as a backing store. There was a bit of a buzz a few years ago around distributed DNS, and it seems to fit the criteria to me. The asset itself (DNS records) is a tiny set of key-value pairs, so it can feasibly be stored on the blockchain itself. Clients can look up the blockchain directly, if operating a node is cheap enough, or use middleman servers.

I think it's fine technically, but adoption is going to be a problem. On the plus side, the current administration of this centralized resource (ICANN), has its fair share of opponents and critics[0] - of course it is extremely debatable whether an ancap-style decentralized market would be preferrable, nevertheless there is an existing group of unsatisfied users who have reasons to look at alternatives.

And snce adopting an alt-DNS doesn't mean you need to drop your traditional DNS records, there's no real cost to jumping in.

On the other side, clients will only see added value if your site *isn't* available on the ICANN DNS network, and that's a long shot. Worse, you need a 'killer app' of a site to make people switch to a different DNS system, but realistically a site isn't going to grow big enough without being available on the traditional DNS in the first place. You'd need a few major sites to announce that they're pissed off with ICANN (for example due to a high-profile name dispute) and that they're moving to an alternative DNS. Fat chance of that.

To put it more bluntly - if IPv6 is still having trouble with adoption, what chance does decentralized DNS have?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#Criticism

[notfed]

Not disagreeing with anything you're saying here but rather adding the conversation:

> There was a bit of a buzz a few years ago around distributed DNS

DNS is already distributed: records are aggressively cached across the internet. It's globally scalable and it works pretty well. There's security issues with it that we could fix (most of which we could fix without blockchain).

A blockchain-based DNS gives us what? It has the advantage of removing the "admin rights" from name registrars. This definitely sounds desirable but it comes with an obvious, massive burden/baggage: in order to retain those byzantine properties, everyone who wants to look up a DNS record has to have a multi-terabyte blockchain file locally downloaded and verified. The pro doesn't outweigh the con. And delegating to a cache brings us back to where we already are now.

[piaste]

I disagree: delegating to a cache isn't a major problem, when the single source of truth is public and relatively easily accessible. A DNS server censoring or tampering with DNS requests is already trivially detectable now by comparing it to other servers, and it would be even easier to detect when anybody can operate a "full" DNS node with a $50 hard drive and a fiber connection.