▲圖片標題(來源：Medium)

I previously wrote about why the most prominent ideas behind Web3 are bullshit, and how proponents of the trend confuse a technological problem with a political one. I also explained that while confronting Big Tech is necessary, blockchain isn’t the right solution.

This time I’d like to go further and talk about how what I call “Web3 thinking” is trying to obfuscate many elements of progressing late-capitalism.

Let me first explain what I mean by “Web3 thinking”: it’s the idea that blockchain based technologies not only are desirable, but can also help and empower regular people. The most extreme version of this point of view is the belief that blockchain technologies disrupt the status quo, and somehow are a middle finger pointed at the “big guys”.

“Smart” contracts

One of the reasons why fans of crypto try to find many applications of blockchain is the concept of smart contracts: in simple terms, they are a piece of code which gets executed on a blockchain when certain conditions are met.

Oranburg and Palagashvili (2018) claim that “this can solve many problems in contracting that currently need intermediation”. The idea here is that you have a trustless framework, where things are done deterministically. They give an example of a factory purchasing oil at a fixed price:

(…) instead of selling as much as the buyer claims to need and relying on courts to determine good-faith need in the event of a dispute, a smart contract can be programmed to sell as much oil as is truly needed. If a factory wants to maintain a temperature of 68 F from the hours of 9 am to 5 pm, the amount of heating oil required to do this can be calculated based on external weather conditions.

The idea here is simple. The buyer buys as much oil as they “truly need” depending on the temperature. The decision is made based on weather conditions, which are an objective source of information.

Except that they are not. What we run into here is the “oracle problem”. Who is responsible for measuring the weather conditions? Are they trustworthy? Do they have a conflict of interest? Does the data they submit get validated? If so, how, and by whom? What if the oracle gets hacked or suffers a technical issue? What if there is a dispute?

Imagine a weather station providing weather information. There could be a technical fault or an anomaly affecting some of the sensors, rendering the data invalid. The security of the station could be compromised, with an attacker modifying the data. Finally, a malicious actor could purposefully modify the data to achieve a certain result. This is all before the data gets immortalised on the blockchain.

This is why blockchain technology has found little adoption outside digital currency and assets, because the idea of achieving a trustless framework is a pipe-dream. You will always need to have some authorities, and you will always need to trust them. It is possible, and maybe even desirable, to decentralise many aspects of our lives, but the idea that everything can be independently decided and determined by a bunch of code is really naive.

轉貼自： Medium

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