My First Impressions of Web3

Pretty much any additional freedom facilitates crime.

>A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted

Traffic between email clients and servers is encrypted so can be emails themselves; PGP can be used for encryption of emails and authentication between email senders. But another story is majority of people do not use PGP because of its bad UX.

> For example, whether it’s running on mobile or the web, a dApp like Autonomous Art or First Derivative needs to interact with the blockchain somehow – in order to modify or render state (the collectively produced work of art, the edit history for it, the NFT derivatives, etc). That’s not really possible to do from the client, though, since the blockchain can’t live on your mobile device (or in your desktop browser realistically). So the only alternative is to interact with the blockchain via a node that’s running remotely on a server somewhere.

> As it happens, companies have emerged that sell API access to an ethereum node they run as a service, along with providing analytics, enhanced APIs they’ve built on top of the default ethereum APIs, and access to historical transactions.

> Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to interact with the blockchain. In fact, even when you connect a wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to Infura!

> Imagine if every time you interacted with a website in Chrome, your request first went to Google before being routed to the destination and back. That’s the situation with ethereum today.

This is a very common complaint about anything that claims to be decentralized. It was also surprising to me years ago when I first read about Bitcoin and realized that it's not practical to maintain the whole blockchain on most clients. However, how do ISPs fit into this analogy with "web 1"? Since we're assuming that the original world wide web was worthy of being called "decentralized," doesn't this same criticism apply to ISPs? Even if you ran your own web server from your own facility, presumably the ISP was a third party that you had to (in some sense) trust.

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will

That's one believably accurate summary. But here's another: rather than focus on trying to make it easy, cheap and simple for everyone to run their own servers, the tech world spent 1996-today instead focused on offering to take care of this for everybody else, for a price.

Everybody concluded in the late 90s that the "nobody wants to run their own servers" claim was self-evidently true, and so all the tech development went into extending server capabilities, extending browser capabilities, building hosting services and infrastructure, and almost no effort went into making running a web server as easy as, oh, I don't know, running Excel.

Imagine a version of things where the server was almost a toy-like appliance. Hard to do? Yeah, I know, it's hard. But then again, in 1996 browsers with Web USB, Web Workers, Web Assembly and the like would have seemed impossibly hard and yet here we are.

We don't have it because we chose not to build it.

I have immense respect for Moxie, who has spent time building experiments and tinkering with a new technology, and as a result has a take on it that highlights very different issues than what most of the predictable web3 flamewar centers around. It makes you really think about who is really qualified to discuss said technology.