161–170 of 377 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides ENS, there is also https://www.hdns.io/
none of these will be resolvable hostnames in an unmodified desktop operating system or networking device with default configuration
See how much of the web you can access on an old IE6 installation.
I don’t think anything behind a LetsEncrypt certificate will, for example.
Yes there are crap uses at the moment. NFTs are a bubble, tokens are overpriced. But the idea of taking ownership of your financial wallet, allowing atomic transactions of digital items, allowing fast cross-border transactions, are all cool ideas. The issue is people only see the cryptobro memes and videos about what coin will 100x, or being asked if they own ethereum by their hairdresser, or seeing news articles about NFTs being sold for 500k.
Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of "Crypto is awesome, let's make a ton of money" or "Crypto is stupid, proof of work is bad for the environment, txs are slow" take the time to actually look at some of the underlying tech. I feel most people are just parroting issues they've heard rather than actually taking a look under the hood.
Edit: I found this a particularly well-reasoned explanation of the tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSTNhBlfV_s
Many criticisms of blockchain apps, comparing their use cases to conventional technologies (databases, conventional separation of services such as that described in the article, etc) all seem to miss a major point: Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown. Immutability is important because it's guaranteed that no matter how many times you interact with a contract address, y…
One thing I don't get, maybe someone can shed some light; what happens if some trademarked content is added to the blockchain metadata or on something like arweave. If a DMCA comes in - from my reading, blockchains or ipfs stores won't take the item down, but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing. So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS? Sure, the item at the address is…
> but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing
There's no way for the blockchain to do that. The only way this is possible on ethereum is if the smart contract includes a self-destruct function, and the owner of the smart contract decides to call it (either because their private keys were compromised, or because they were coerced into doing so IRL). Otherwise, it's technically impossible to do without taking down the entire network or breaking encryption.
I'm less familiar with IPFS so can't really speak much to that -- but from what little I understand, censorship-resistance is also a major selling point there.
> So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS?
There is the ENS, but even then, nobody can take an ENS domain down except for the owner of that domain. Not even the creator of the ENS smart contract, unless they specifically included upgrade functionality into the contract, because smart contracts are immutable.
> Sure, the item at the address is immutable, but you might not be able to get it.
As long as you have access to a single Ethereum node, or access to a service that has access to an Ethereum node, you will be able to get at it. It's hard to imagine you not getting at any Ethereum nodes unless a Great Firewall of China situation exists, and even China doesn't care to ban most proxies.
Many criticisms of blockchain apps, comparing their use cases to conventional technologies (databases, conventional separation of services such as that described in the article, etc) all seem to miss a major point: Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown. Immutability is important because it's guaranteed that no matter how many times you interact with a contract address, y…
One thing I don't get, maybe someone can shed some light; what happens if some trademarked content is added to the blockchain metadata or on something like arweave. If a DMCA comes in - from my reading, blockchains or ipfs stores won't take the item down, but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing. So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS? Sure, the item at the address is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I don't get, maybe someone can shed some light; what happens if some trademarked content is added to the blockchain metadata or on something like arweave. If a DMCA comes in - from my reading, blockchains or ipfs stores won't take the item down, but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing. So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS? Sure, the item at the address is…
I think you're pretty off, yes. Censorship-resistance is one of the core selling points of Ethereum. :) > but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing There's no way for the blockchain to do that. The only way this is possible on ethereum is if the smart contract includes a self-destruct function, and the owner of the smart contract decides to call it (either because their private keys were c…
I don’t understand what problem web3 can solve that a trusted entity cannot. And let’s keep in mind your reply to this comment will be using a trusted entity. In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user
I don't understand what problem email can solve that mail cannot. Sorry to be sarcastic. I am still skeptical of most web3 use cases touted on twitter, but have personally experienced a few that have made me pause and be a bit more open minded. Personal experiences: - Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!! - Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks - Resear…
I think it's a wrong example. Email provides light-speed delivery, dirt-cheap cost, and brain-dead convenience on top of also being able to mail. So email actually never competed with mail.
Web3 is yet to strike any decisive blow against today's web (or it may never). It's more like another part of the web.
> Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!! - Very easy to loan money against crypto holdings vs stocks - ResearchDao's like ResearchHub
For a smaller amount of money (<$100k), banks already can transfer money within seconds. I've seen people sending $1Ms only using their phones, but, IIRC, you need a good record to do that.
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A typical web3 site consists of two parts: The first is the smart contract code that lives on the blockchain, which handles the tasks that a typical server backend would handle (keeping and changing state, producing outputs given certain inputs, etc). The second is a web frontend typically deployed to a decentralized service like IPFS to provide interactions with the backend contract, however this isn't the only way…
For the site you mentioned: - The hostname is resolved from Cloudflare's authoritative DNS nameservers - It has a TLS cert issued by Cloudflare - The backend IP resolves to Cloudflare's server range - It is a pretty standard React front end served entirely from https://app.uniswap.org - I can't say about the compute, but it's pretty obvious that the site isn't running on 1/5,000 the power of a Raspberry Pi for $250 a…
I'd looked at using NFTs for cross-grid ownership transfers of objects in Open Simulator. That's a set of virtual worlds run by several hundred different people and organizations, but using the same software, a rewrite of Second Life in C#. There's no moderately-secure way to pass 3D models around in that system without them being copied for free, which is why most of the good stuff stays in Second Life, which is centrally managed.
Such object instances have prices in the US$0.25 to US$20 range. When you go through a portal from one grid to another, and take some objects with you, a database transaction is required to transfer ownership from avatar A, grid X, to avatar A, grid Y. Otherwise, you could buy one copy and have a free copy in every grid.
The assets have to be hosted somewhere. Somewhere with reliable access times in the The blockchain systems just don't have the bandwidth and costs for that. As databases, they're far too slow, and transactions are too expensive. As storage, I've seen $5 for a gigabyte, forever. It's supposed to be funded by investing the $5 in a speculation that storage cost will decline. But the fine print says basically "until they get tired of doing this".
As for NFTs generally, the art is unimpressive, to put it mildly.
The NFT world is reportedly about half Axie Infinity and a quarter OpenSea, with all the little guys in the remaining quarter. (That may be bogus; there are no reliable stats on this stuff.) Axie Infinity is a Ponzi in the final stages of collapse.[1] OpenSea is becoming a stalled market. Pick some category, like "Bored Ape", which was getting news coverage a few weeks back. Look at the asking prices. Then look at "recently sold" prices. The "recently sold" prices seem to have a lot of zeros after the decimal point.
[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the site you mentioned: - The hostname is resolved from Cloudflare's authoritative DNS nameservers - It has a TLS cert issued by Cloudflare - The backend IP resolves to Cloudflare's server range - It is a pretty standard React front end served entirely from https://app.uniswap.org - I can't say about the compute, but it's pretty obvious that the site isn't running on 1/5,000 the power of a Raspberry Pi for $250 a…
The smart contract is. It's like https://xkcd.com/932/ . The static JS being served by the site is just a poster that could be hung up anywhere else. Even if that URL is taken down, your money is still safe and sound on the blockchain. You can still sign transactions and interact with the smart contracts, get your liquidity out, etc., so long as you have access to any part of the Ethereum network.
Put another way – is there a use case for Web3 which doesn't involve touting Web3? What is the "killer app" for the average user who isn't obsessed with crypto/blockchain?
I do really dislike this general attitude that blockchain/web3/crypto is some elaborate scam with no benefits. Everyone focuses on the same negatives but never look at the interesting elements like solving the double spend problem, safely transferring digital assets in a trustless environment, having a working global computing system with inbuilt incentives, etc.. Yes there are crap uses at the moment. NFTs are a bub…