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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#181

Post by wyck »

arcticbull wrote: post #39

I'll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura, Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked. [edit] By "full node" I meant "archival node."

It's not gate-kept by two centralized entities at all, there are a lot of alternatives many completely decentralized. This author is clearly new to the space and hasn't really done much research, outside 5 minutes of google.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#182

Post by not2b »

omeze wrote: post #138
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…

You can do this locally though, it just takes like 200 GB. I've run an Ethereum full node + eth2 beacon chain node on my Macbook Pro for local development, took like 10 hours to sync IIRC and just worked afterwards. I still use Infura for projects though bc I don't really see the value in running my own hosted client for pet projects. If I was doing a production app I'd likely use my own w/ a 3rd party service for ba…

That's the size now. If web3 manages to take off, the requirement will grow exponentially.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#183

Post by cblconfederate »

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

This is sad to hear. People do run their own servers in their homes though, they are called routers, except they only serve one thing. Pity we don't have a lightweight self-updating system that sits in a router and does the basic job of keeping the user's data.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#184

Post by everfree »

arcticbull wrote: post #39

I'll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura, Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked. [edit] By "full node" I meant "archival node."

Full nodes contain the same data as archival nodes do, they just don't have it unpacked out to disk.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29846272

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#185

Post by wpietri »

Robotbeat wrote: post #168
jd007 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO this diagnosis is still one level away from a more fundamental truism, which is that people don't want to pay anything for digital goods. Running servers can and has been massively simplified over the last couple decades, and I don't see any inherent technical barrier preventing it from being as simple as registering for an account on FB (i.e. anyone can do it). The deeper problem is the lack of willingness to pa…

I’m not sure I agree with that. People wanna pay as little as possible but they gladly pay for Netflix or whatever. People spend a lot of money on Amazon because they make it really easy to pay. One of the original promises of cryptocurrency is it would make micro transactions easy and painless (with something to do about trust, but… that goes in the opposite direction than consumers would like as it’s the provider t…

Agreed. There are significant audiences where cognitive load is a much bigger barrier than spending actual money. But people do want privacy, independence, and control, so I think non-centralized services could still work.

I think "virtual server" is the wrong abstraction here. It's like "radio with pictures" or "horseless carriage" in that it's telling us we haven't found the right new way to think about it.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#186

Post by baash05 »

I found it interesting that the content of the NFT is held by a company that can remove it at will. To me this flies in the face of freedom and will land us in the Youtube paradigm. Where walking past a restaurant playing music gets your video ownership ripped from you.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#187

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #164
nbzso wrote: post #145

Sorry. My "specific" take: Edited and self-censored due to lack of "substance" on the topic.

If you’ve been a reader here for a long time, you should focus on being a better writer. The best HN commenters write for the community as much as for themselves. The fact of the matter is, web3 is a new phenomenon that isn’t going away. HN deserves good discussion on the topic. “Good” doesn’t mean “positive.” It means substantive — make a critique with substance. Say something that hasn’t been said countless times.…

[deleted]

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#188

Post by not2b »

dylkil wrote: post #170
endisneigh wrote: post #79

If you care about the environment even a little bit (like turning off lights in rooms you're not occupying) then you will reject Web3. Even the most efficient blockchains use more energy than the status quo unnecessarily. This is also to say nothing of the fact that it's more expensive per USD/KB transferred, slower and more complicated. I think what Web3 should be is a way to use your laptop or any commodity compute…

What about proof of stake chains, do you reject those too? How many companies with huge carbon footprint do you reject? What about cows did you reject them?

In my view it is only proof-of-work systems that must be rejected. Alternatives that are less harmful are possible.

Pretty much everything that has a large carbon footprint is going to have to be fixed to reduce that footprint, including web3.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#189

Post by wyck »

justinator wrote: post #74

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

By definition something with a finite supply cannot be a pyramid scheme, in fact in most cases there are no parallels whatsoever to crypto and pyramid schemes. There are some pyramid schemes within the shitcoin scam and yield farmer communities, but to think that's represents the industry is highly ignorant.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#190

Post by walterbell »

Uehreka wrote: post #150
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…

You’re going to run into a problem right off the bat: Your home network is likely behind a NAT and has an IP assigned by your ISP that can change at any time. You’ll need to tunnel through a server in the cloud somewhere (or use a tool like ngrok that tunnels through a server in the cloud). And now that proxy server is “really” the server, because if the business providing the tunnel decides you’re using too much of…

Take a look at Tailscale and open-source alternatives.
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