31–40 of 1001 posts
The first article on Web3 that I've read that drills into the details and was written by someone who's not only kicked the tires but taken the thing for a spin. And the conclusion: It's mostly the bad stuff of Web2 combined with the bad stuff of Crypto.
We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.
I'm not ready to give in. I am happy to leave "normal" (tech illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals.
I think instead of building centralized infrastructure that does not require trust, we can make it easier to host decentralized infrastructure. Including allowing a "server" to be offline for months at a time, come online for a minute or two, then disappear again. P2P networking is also an area we can improve on, IMO. Too much information is going across the internet instead of point to point. Bluetooth is a terrible protocol, but airdrop (and reverse engineered implementations) seems to be promising.
I'm not sure that the "mobile device can't act as a node" is fundamental (it's more a quirk of the current systems), but "nobody wants to run their own server" => "centralization" is a great reminder:
> I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds: centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired in time.
> We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers. I must be stuck in the past. It's true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, ins…
This smells like the classic "you can build your own Dropbox easily" comment. Just because it's technologically feasible doesn't mean people want to do so.
I want to run my own servers. Honestly. It has always been a somewhat easy task if you pick an OS that is secure and stable. And today with all the Foss/oss there are plenty of reasons why I would do it. More Decentralised Please.
This is not what I expected from Moxie. A writes very good account of his experience trying to do some dapp / NFT stuff. He eloquently draws attention to the problems that are based in human behavior. Definitely worth the read. Both sides of the debate could elevate their arguments if they ponder what Moxie has written.
I appreciate that he fairly tried these different things out and reported his experience. But I don't think he has noticed anything particularly interesting or novel.
It's common knowledge that the plentitude of blockchains out there now make compatibility between them almost impossible. This is how Bitcoin "maximalists" came to be in the first place. If reputation and trust is the game, it defeats the purpose to have a million different blockchains.
But soon after it became clear that it is not really possible for me (or any regular "client" as the article calls it) to look at the state of the virtual machine and evaluate view functions myself. The block chain is so large already that we need to rely on big servers which are operated by other people to do this.
Anyway, Moxie seems very focused on the decentralization aspect - that Web3 doesn’t decentralize as much as we would like.
An alternative aspect is the “global ledger of ownership and transferrence” though. Yes, interacting with blockchains is hard so it is some through APIs… but there does still seem to be something important about the idea that my ownership of something on a blockchain is permanent, and exists outside of any corporate notion of ownership, in a deep mathematical way. That’s fundamentally appealing!
But is it appealing enough to overcome market forces? I think Moxie is right to spend a lot of time on the “nobody wants to run servers” thing because it shows that most users are powerfully motivated by convenience; if the mathematically-beautiful blockchain ownership records remain inconvenient then they are likely to be a niche attraction (like running your own mail server).
[edit] By "full node" I meant "archival node."
> We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers. I must be stuck in the past. It's true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, ins…
The hardware is easy. The software can be easy (if you let it). The things that are tricky:
1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because most software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication!
2. The gap in average computer skills. Some of my users are engineers, most of them are not. My average user needs help with password resets, remembering URLs and very basic tasks. "Upload a file" is a _difficult_ task for the average user.
3. Feature requests and keeping maintenance reasonable. A lot of my technical users will ask me for feature after feature.. but not put in any time or effort to set things up or maintain. I'm one person and I set a hard cap of how much maintenance I'll do in a week, and that is a big limiter of stuff.
I have toyed with just charging my users a bit per month and hiring someone as a basic tech, and honestly more of my users would rather pay a monthly fee than actually work on the servers themselves.