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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#251

Post by bmeski »

dmarcos wrote: post #235
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…

Fortnite made $50 million selling NFL skins alone: https://www.sportskeeda.com/amp/fortnite/the-fortnite-skin-g... And the total sales volume since release is in the billions. Maybe a generational thing?

Kids who get a hold of their parents credit cards or the new generation of people who will live off stocks their parents gave them.

We’ll see how much they’ll be spending on skins when they grow up/can’t game all the time.

However I think this new class of all day gamers isn’t going anywhere. It’s the perfect time sink for the new leisure class.

Orgy porgy

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#252

Post by BEEdwards »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #214
nixpulvis wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do we mean by this? I feel like it's a matter of OS improvement that will enable people to manage the software side of their own servers in as little (or less) effort than managing cloud platforms or even VPCs. Ideally in a standard way. Why is learning Dropbox any easier than learning to copy a file to some other FTP serving software? The clouds are just making $$ to support you, though that often turns on it's…

FTP is horrible. I'm glad as a web dev I haven't touched it in 8 years not since I worked for a hosting company in tech support.... git, or even rsync over ssh is way better... The upcoming generation..even the 'non-tech' people are tech-savvy, meaning most could probably get arch linux up and running at least via a distro or follow the docs, etc...where there parents would fail. the problem is they need to create so…

>The upcoming generation..even the 'non-tech' people are tech-savvy, meaning most could probably get arch linux up and running at least via a distro or follow the docs, etc...where there parents would fail.

I don't know what members of the upcoming generation you're dealing with, but the ones I know are more computer illiterate than their parents.

Their parents played games on dos and had to configure shit, the kids use their phone for everything and don't know how to use computers beyond a basic level.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#253

Post by simias »

dsanchez97 wrote: post #192
simias wrote: post #29

>When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for purely digital goods might be a concept with a future. Having standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and query and update these goods might make sense (althou…

I definitely agree that most people/projects/etc gloss over that fact that there still needs be a 'start of authority' to be trusted with NFTS. I think a major upside of doing the digital transactions on a Blockchain (as opposed to the system you described) is that the start authority does not need to be present or keep track of any future transactions. In your Rolex example, I believe that there would be no way of p…

But see, this is where I get lost in this concept.

Should Jagex fold and the game become unplayable, what do you own? An entry in a database that says that you once had this item but you can't do anything with it? Why is that valuable?

I can sort of see the argument if other game developers allow for these items to be reused in other environments, and that's something pushed by NFT enthusiasts, but I don't see how that makes economical sense.

For one thing that puts a lot of work on the table of other game developers. If every NFT of every game needs to be usable in other games, can you imagine the headache? It's a combinatorial nightmare.

Besides devs want to make money selling their own NFTs, not adding items made by others for free, so what incentive is there for adding support for your rare Runescape item in some other game? Seems like devs would rather sell you a special "Runescape retro item set pack, only $9.99!"

And then we haven't even touched on IP issues. If you have an NFT of Lara Croft, can the devs of another game just clone the model in order to let you import her?

I feel like all of these issues by far dwarf whatever convenience NFTs bring to the table. The problems I outline above are the ones that need solving, and if you find a way around those you could very easily achieve what you want without "web3" tech (see Steam trading cards and Nintendo's Amiibos for instance).

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#254

Post by walterbell »

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…

> Including allowing a "server" to be offline for months at a time, come online for a minute or two, then disappear again.

Neo-NNTP!

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#255

Post by hrhrhrhrhr »

atweiden wrote: post #237

Apparently, 10 years and half a trillion dollars isn’t enough time or money these days for people to ship a basic SPV wallet to end users. Even assuming the Ethereum people finally ship SPV support following moxie’s critique of their infrastructure, they still don’t have even so much as a rudimentary desktop wallet designed for air gapped spending which isn’t a literal web extension . There has well and truly never b…

No post body was provided.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#256

Post by codehalo »

majewsky wrote: post #180
serverholic wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding your last sentence, I think that's fine. I know Moxie criticizes people for saying “It’s early days still" but I really do think it's early days and NFTs have driven crypto into the mainstream too quickly. Crypto researchers are still chipping away at the math and computer science required to bring the web3 vision to life. What's unfortunate is I've yet to see an article on hacker news about this research a…

Does this not prove his point though? Because decentralization is harder to get right on a technical level, centralized alternatives will always outcompete more decentralized ones.

There is no centralized competitor to the web that has outcompeted it.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#257

Post by hooande »

jeroenhd wrote: post #81
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."

Bit that it'd be very practical, but the data itself is shared so in theory every company could set up their own API to render the blockchain into a readable, quick to access format. Even the vanished poop emoji NFT would reappear once someone else renders their view on the blockchain in the right way. The problem with this is that running servers that store and process one or even multiple blockchains in a searchabl…

In practice none of this is happening. All the major wallets query OpenSea to determine what NFTs an account has (according to the article). anyone can access the data but that doesn't change what the wallets query. I can start my own wallet that directly calculates who owns what using the blockchain, but that sounds computationally expensive and there's no guarantee that anyone would use it.

"In theory" the data is open. but I believe that the point of the article is that unless I'm running my own node, data visibility is limited to what someone else tells me. and here, in reality, OpenSea has decided to delist the author's NFT and they have no recourse.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#258

Post by discardedrefuse »

ineptech wrote: post #64

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. Not really much related to web3/crypto topics, but I think this is an indictment of servers, not people. If managing a server were easy and secure, lots of people would do it - for blogs, a minecraft server for the kids, to back up their pictures, and yes, to store their bitcoins or other digital secrets - they just don't want to manage a unix or windows s…

> If managing a server were easy and secure, lots of people would do it - for blogs, a minecraft server for the kids, to back up their pictures

Easy 1-click deploy exists right now. Lots of VPS providers offer service specific deploy for things like minecraft, seedboxes, plex, nextcloud, etc. Check out Scaleway's InstantApps section to get an idea. https://www.scaleway.com/en/imagehub/

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#259

Post by cableshaft »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #214
nixpulvis wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do we mean by this? I feel like it's a matter of OS improvement that will enable people to manage the software side of their own servers in as little (or less) effort than managing cloud platforms or even VPCs. Ideally in a standard way. Why is learning Dropbox any easier than learning to copy a file to some other FTP serving software? The clouds are just making $$ to support you, though that often turns on it's…

FTP is horrible. I'm glad as a web dev I haven't touched it in 8 years not since I worked for a hosting company in tech support.... git, or even rsync over ssh is way better... The upcoming generation..even the 'non-tech' people are tech-savvy, meaning most could probably get arch linux up and running at least via a distro or follow the docs, etc...where there parents would fail. the problem is they need to create so…

> Something like an actual currency w/ basic income dividends, and identity/fraud management

Proof of Humanity is trying to do that with $UBI tokens and their method of proving who you are (basically a video of you with your wallet address saying a specific script, and putting up a collateral that could be lost if a court can provide evidence that you've signed up for it before). After you're signed up, you get one $UBI token every hour. $UBI tokens are currently worth $0.12 apiece, so it's roughly $1200 USD per year (at least for the moment, it's inherently very inflationary and seems to kind of rely on people like Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, to buy a bunch of tokens and burn them).

It does have a complex onramp, though, and will be difficult to get non-tech-savvy people onto it without some help, most likely.

We'll see if it continues to work. It's only been around since March 2021. It's an interesting idea, though.

https://blog.kleros.io/introducing-ubi-universal-basic-incom...

https://www.proofofhumanity.id/

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#260

Post by bidder33 »

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…

Running nodes is pretty easy with setups like DappNode. Full eth nodes arent that big, i synced a new one in a couple of days last week onto an old ssd.

Most heavy contract data is stored offchain on ipfs, so you can just pin the stuff you are interested in.

Where i would agree is indexing/searching lots of data is a pain. You cant just give an address and get a list of tokens associated with it, you have to call every token and get its balance. It makes sense, but its annoying, and is why opensea api is so popular for nfts. But i have hope with services like TheGraph growing that search and index also has distributed and resilient design and we become less dependant on one endpoint api.

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