My First Impressions of Web3

> Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature?

A serial number can be copied and engraved onto a forged watch, so not really.

A more analogous scenario would be if Rolex embedded an NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that the chip’s cert was indeed signed by Rolex.

I was under the impression that crypto currency was thought of as nothing but yet another pyramid scheme.

> [...] NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image.

How did we go from trapdoor functions being the foundation of everything in the space to forgetting to hash a link? Is the rational that these links should only ever be IPFS links? That's fine I guess, at least those are hashed. Why does the protocol allow for this to happen?

> Like this author says, most people don't want to run their own web server...

I know I certainly don't. I want to write my software and I want to be able to deploy it somewhere and manage the things I may care about for that specific software. As much as possible I don't want to have to care about hardware, or routing, or server administration, or user permissions, etc. Learning it once? Sure. Dealing with it every time I have a new project? No thanks.

So, I totally agree. decentralization and privacy on their own are difficult to market, as they aren't nearly as in demand as convenience.

At the risk of displaying my ignorance and lack of knowledge about this area, one part I found very familiar in this article is that the action interactions in his apps didn't actually interact with the blockchain, but essentially with two centralized services.

My very limited understanding is that for blockchains essentially the way to distribute them is that every node has a full copy. This sounds awfully expensive in the long run. My intuition would be that once running a node is expensive enough, this would not be truly decentralized. If I can't get the fundamental information out of a blockchain myself on hardware I can afford, the actual properties of the blockchain don't matter anymore as I cannot access them myself.

The moment you need to rely on third parties, you lose any unique properties a blockchain might have. I don't know how this would work if blockchains inherently are inefficient enough that you always need a way around querying them directly. I find the idea of a distributed trust-less database interesting, but if it is so inefficient that I can't actually access it myself that idea doesn't seem that interesting anymore.