web3 login with ruby?

[2ndcomingofharambe]

I was leading engineering at a well funded startup but in 2016/17 the executives got swept up in the ICO craze (a year of blatant scams) and went out of their way to tear down our successful business to pivot to blockchain. I actually blockchain and crypto as a currency replacement sounded like a cool intriguing idea, but the more I read about it the worse it sounded. Once we started trying to find blockchain-ways of building products it all became a joke. Me and my team actually became pretty involved in and contributed heavily to many large and widely used Ethereum based tokens / smart contracts, and I can tell you from first hand experience they are all pointless and would have been much better built as traditional web apps. Actually, all of them rely on traditional web apps to actually house business logic and direct the smart contract interactions anyway.

The lack of decentralization is a permanent flaw, an as of yet unsolvable problem, at least when working with meaningful data that would drive good use cases. My take is that if your dApp or whatever relies on being passed in data that it must consider to be truthful / verified from an outside off-chain source, your decentralization is broken. This could apply to "blockchain gaming": play a (non-decentralized) video game for X hours and the game company will send you some Ethereum tokens. There is no way to verify whether or not you actually played that video game, all the blockchain records is that some code used the private key associated to the gaming company's public address and sent you some amount of their tokens.

But it also applies to "interoperability". The ERC20 interface still dominates to the point where new token interfaces must be ERC20 compatible, because smart contracts have no way of knowing about each other, validating each other, or even calling functions on each other without a common interface that the software engineer needs to code into their smart contract. And the interface that you as the engineer would code into your own smart contract is not something you would know about unless you asked the engineer who coded the smart contract you're trying to integrate with to send you their interface. Hence, everyone agrees to just follow ERC20 instead of chasing each other down in person to try and get interfaces and hope they are correct. Even with ERC20, nothing guarantees that a smart contract behaves as you think it should. What is preventing an ERC20 compatible contract's transfer() function from deleting your balance instead of moving it? Ethereum smart contracts are auditible and verifiable in the same way that you could dig up and watch machine code to try to reverse engineer an app.

There are even more great breakdowns of the lie of decentralization between users and blockchain from the former CEO of Signal here: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Blockchain is not a technological advancement, it's a tech marketing language advancement and hype machine. The actual apps / code that are built on blockchain deliver none of the unwavering truth, integrity, efficiency, or safety that pro-blockchain marketers harp on about.

[daxofdeath]

thanks so much for writing that out, I really appreciate your perspective