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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#51

Post by vasco »

CameronNemo wrote: post #32

I like Moxie's work and writings, and this article has some great points, but I can't get behind this: 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 th…

> I am happy to leave "normal" (tech illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals.

You realize this approximates to roughly "everyone that isn't you"?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#52

Post by lekevicius »

While it's refreshing to hear critique from someone who actually built something on web3, there are a couple of points where I'd dare to disagree, somewhat.

Particularly, regarding "early days". It really is, still, early days, because there is a lot of complexity in getting all the pieces built. It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart contracts). Other pieces too: more efficient consensus mechanisms and clever ways to express commitments, decentralized storage, etc. And the space is so far from being done.

Particulary, about servers being clients. This is true today, but it would be wrong to say that nobody cares about it. Ethereum developers spend considerable effort on pushing the idea of light clients, going as far as re-architecturing the way whole blockchain state is stored, so that browsers could actually become fully valid clients, and services such as Infura would become a lot less necessary. This requires cryptographic innovations (verkle trees), client implementations, consensus between participants, etc. It is likely to require 2+ years to get there. Early days.

Another moment I would critique is the clever NFT, that displays different things. Yes, ERC-721 allows any URL as metadata file, so you can put traditional DNS-resolved URL there. But I would struggle to find any "respected" NFT collection that actually does that. Almost every high quality NFT project (Art Blocks, BAYC, so on) has IPFS as metadata URL, and goes as far as to freeze metadata, so it couldn't ever be changed.

Lastly, his discussion about value of decentralization is very valid. Yes, Ethereum developers spend a lot of effort on light clients. Will anyone care to use them? Yes, best NFT collections freeze metadata pointed to IPFT... does anyone care? Success of OpenSea and Binance Smart Chain shows that for many, idealistic goals are irrelevant, as long as money can be made. That's fine. But there are some of us who actually care. Majority has uninteresting goals (money). There are still amazing gems to be found.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#54

Post by spenczar5 »

CameronNemo wrote: post #32

I like Moxie's work and writings, and this article has some great points, but I can't get behind this: 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 th…

What does it mean to leave normal people behind? Surely you need to interact with them.

For example, you can run your own mail server, but you will need to play by Google’s rules if you want anyone on Gmail to get your emails.

So, it’s hard for me to picture what it means to personally decentralize without caring what the bulk of people do.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#55

Post by hammyhavoc »

newfonewhodis wrote: post #13
dang wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't degenerate into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How is that a flamewar? Literally talking about the content of the article.

It isn't.

Re Dang: straight from your link, "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Personally, I found the comment insightful. I don't have all the time in the world to sit and pick something apart. Make no mistake, the smart tl;dr of HN are what gives HN any kind of value. Without that, may as well just use RSS and Reddit. I'm already subscribed to Moxie, came to HN to see what intelligent people have to say about it given that I am no longer a Signal user, and am anti-cryptocurrency in its current iteration, but pro-decentralization, which makes Moxie quite an interesting choice for me to want to actively follow the thoughts of as we feel differently about many important topics.

There is no binary black or white to be established with abstract, complex topics like these.

If it was any kind of bait, it was bait to discuss further. That the whole USP of Web3 is supposedly ownership and anti-censorship, and what's happening appears to be opposite is definitely something we should be discussing.

What's the point of comments on HN if we can't use them to discuss? It's a commentary on somebody's opinion—with opinions.

Perhaps if you don't like opinion pieces then you should simply ban them via these rules? I think HN's content might end up a little thin on the ground in that scenario though.

Worth noting is what "guidelines" actually are, they're not rules. If you would like them to be enforced as rules, and expect people to treat them as such, start calling them rules or ToS. But in that case, expect far less interest in HN if you aren't going to permit open discussion.

Have a good weekend, Dang. Hope you and yours are healthy and happy.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#56

Post by ssss11 »

dthul wrote: post #37

The views on centralized services such as Infura really resonate with me. A few months ago I looked into how Ethereum and smart contracts work and got excited that there is basically this shared "virtual machine" with persistent, public state that can only be altered by interacting with those smart contracts. But soon after it became clear that it is not really possible for me (or any regular "client" as the article…

But there are other L1 blockchains already that aren’t like that (eg. Mina) and who knows in future what will come..

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#57

Post by skybrian »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #23
purplesnowflake wrote: post #5

Moxie is no fan of decentralization. And he made why very clear with concise and incisive arguments.

And his arguments in favour of centralization are flawed. Sure, regular people do not want to run their own (email, chat, etc) servers. But they DO want to be able to chose from a handful of available servers the one they like best (or the one they trust most), without losing connectivity with their contacts. Tired of Google's shenanigans, move from Gmail to Protonmail, tell your contacts your new email, set up an au…

Some people say they want this, but in practice, why you should trust someone you've never heard of?

Network effects aside, consider the difficulty of deciding that the people behind a fork of Chrome or Signal are trustworthy. The average person doesn't have the knowledge to do due diligence, and many of us who could (in theory) don't want to bother.

How do you get to the point where people think your team of software developers is legitimate? Decisions like this are based on what everyone else is using.

One reason that app stores serving sandboxed apps are popular is that you don't have to evaluate each software developer's organization just to play their games.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#58

Post by diegocg »

titzer wrote: post #20

> 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…

I don't want to maintain my own mail server, but I definitely want to run my own server.

The irony is that modern internet infrastructure makes decentralisation _more_ feasible, but software lags behind. Why can't I buy some device for 200€ or so where I store all my data and I receive email? (with the cloud being used only for optional encrypted backups). One can even imagine a decentralised social network running in these devices, with my friends getting updates by polling it periodically (or my device sending updates to their devices). The device would be powered 24h/365d, and if it breaks you just replace it. When I'm out of home, my phone apps would just query the device to get new mail and updates.

We shouldn't really _need_ the cloud for many things yet we use it for everything.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#60

Post by eatonphil »

vorpalhex wrote: post #40
titzer wrote: post #20

> 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…

I run a homelab, and also run a shared server for a few folks. 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 no…

> 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!

It sounds like you're referring to something specific here but I'm not understanding. What kind of software doesn't play well with SSO? And what is reverse proxy authentication? Do you mean give users SSO as in give them an account on an SSO system like Google/Okta/LDAP or do you mean use SSO as authentication for a web app you're running? Even if in the latter case I still don't understand what you mean by reverse proxy authentication or what that has to do with SSO. (I've set up SSO on my apps before and I've run SSO auth servers.)

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