[edgyquant]

I’m anti-crypto as a solution to currency but I completely disagree here. Trustless databases and trustless distributed data has so many practical use cases in the corporate and political world that I think you’d have to be trying to not think of one readily.

Getting that architecture down is worth web3, even if none of the platforms and services continue on.

[tsimionescu]

There is no such thing as a trustable trustless database for anything except money. For every other piece of information that we care about, trust in the source is inevitable.

[edgyquant]

Nope not true at all. Every industry has shared information between corporations. The sciences are ripe for trustless data sets between antagonistic entities (see: nation states.)

Trustless doesn’t mean every individual human being is an equal in the chain. The more applicable situation is between organization and higher. If you think all problems are just money problems you haven’t solved many large scale real world problems.

[tsimionescu]

There are two kinds of facts: facts about the real world, and digital facts. Digital facts can be secured with fancy cryptography in various ways leading to the ability of a trustless database holding such facts - such as a (secured) git repo or the Bitcoin blockchain.

Facts about the real world are true or false about the real world, you can't cryptographically secure them. I can trustlessly store the fact "I am Donald Trump" in some DB, I can prove cryptographically that I stored that fact, but there is no way to conclude from this that I am in fact Donald Trump.

For any digital fact, the relationship between it and a physical fact can only be established by a trusted entity. A government office can digitally sign a statement that the holder of some private key is indeed Donald Trump, and you can then believe that any statement signed by that private key was signed by Donald Trump - IF you trust the government.

Similarly, whether some scientific data set is held in a Chinese RDBMS controlled by a Chinese university or whether it is stored on some public block chain, I have more or less the same amount of trust for that data set.

[bawolff]

"Trustless" and "distributed" are ambigious words that means a lot of different things. Generally there is a mismatch between the type of distributed trustlessness that web3 talks about and all those "practical use cases in the corporate and political world".

[edgyquant]

That depends on the company. Yeah Ethereum is a meme with tons of meme companies but I assure you there are web3 companies solving real problems you just haven’t heard of them because the things they’re solving aren’t sexy memes like anti-government currencies.

[bawolff]

Yeah well, people have been saying that for years, and the years go by, and yet i still haven't heard of these companies.