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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#311

Post by feanaro »

superfrank wrote: post #47

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will This kind of gets at the reason why I think a lot of tech articles/blogs about what the future will be like are just terrible. The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different from the general population. Like this author says, most people don't want to run their own web server, but I'd…

> There will always be some users for technologies like web3, but until you can clearly demonstrate to that woman that this new technology has value and is easier to use than the status quo, you're never going to get mass adoption.

I think this isn't true. A large part of getting people to use something is often not ease of use, but momentum and popularity. Ease of use plays a large role but by itself, it doesn't explain the entire variance of why some technology reaches mass adoption or becomes the most popular.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#313

Post by exdsq »

password1 wrote: post #250
exdsq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it’s totally doable to run your own node on your own server! And thanks to the protocols consensus rules your users can trust that for a transaction to go through your node and be accepted onto main net your node is a good actor. So one example I’d give - every team I’ve worked on has had to build a local development environment with several nodes to easily spin up with a clean slate for deterministic testing. Tea…

> Blockchain-as-a-Service tools You mean something like AWS, but that allows me to quickly setup an server containing a node?

Yes, but with a few other things! Setting up ad-hoc chains with custom genesis files would be a huge improvement for dev teams as they'd not have to make their own solution (which everyone I've worked with has ended up doing).

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#314

Post by hooande »

nefitty wrote: post #121
pshc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is one of the few usecases of crypto that kinda make sense. If those certs were on a blockchain, Rolex could fold and people in the future might still be able to check for authenticity. There's more steps involved that I'm not sure could be solved, like, who controls the authenticity Oracle? Is it an API that gets pinged? Do you have to pay a gas or network fee to check authenticity? Could a smart contract be ma…

So the idea would be to create a giant file of every Rolex transaction made in the future. And then search through that file for a given NFC tag to determine authenticity. Doing all of this in case Rolex goes out of business and can no longer maintain a hypothetical authenticity server?

Gotta say, it sounds kind of crazy

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#315

Post by michaelsbradley »

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…

> 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.

On an Intel NUC (Core i3, low power mode) I'm running a non-mining Ethereum 1 full node[1] plus a staking Ethereum 2 node[2] (comprising two active validators) on mainnet. Measured with a Kill A Watt[3] since genesis of the beacon chain, it's using approximately USD 140 kWh of electricity per year (about USD $15/year where I live), and makes use of the Internet connection that I use for everything else personal and work related. The Ethereum 1 node also acts as my personal gateway to Ethereum vs. say my needing to connect through Infura.

There are today 279235 active validators[4] on Ethereum's mainnet beacon chain. Now, I know that Ethereum hasn't made the switch over to Proof of Stake yet (that's what Eth 2 is all about) but it's coming this year. Let's ignore the kWh usage of my non-mining full Eth 1 node and assume the 140 kWh is split evenly by the validators (it's not even close, the Eth 1 node is a pig in comparison, but for sake of argument), then round each one up to 100 kWH per year and assume that's the average per validator going forward, and let's grow the beacon chain to 1 million active validators. So that's 100k MWh per year. Amazon reported[5] that they consumed 24 million MWh in 2020.

I'm not sure how many combined MWh are consumed by the data centers for VISA, traditional banks, etc., but I'm guessing it's nothing to sneeze at. According to Statista[6], it costs about 150 kWh for VISA to process 100k transactions. According to VISA[7] they processed about 206 billion transactions over 12 months. So that's about 309k MWh.

A couple of things to consider also. Ethereum devs are concerned about energy consumption, and there are active efforts to drive down the energy cost per validator by the various projects (nimbus, teku, etc.). Also, my Core i3 Intel NUC is pretty heavy-duty compared to lower-end hardware capable of running a validator node. So I expect the energy cost/year of Eth 2 to improve in coming years.

[1] https://geth.ethereum.org/

[2] https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2#readme

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_A_Watt

[4] https://beaconscan.com/

[5] https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/sustainab...

[6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265891/ethereum-energy-...

[7] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/ab...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#316

Post by atweiden »

superfrank wrote: post #47

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will This kind of gets at the reason why I think a lot of tech articles/blogs about what the future will be like are just terrible. The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different from the general population. Like this author says, most people don't want to run their own web server, but I'd…

> People who write these articles need to be thinking about the middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a Nintendo".

In a world where the pool of capital allocated into crypto is hyperconcentrated in the hands of a tiny number of elite investors who employ teams of analysts to scour the web for opportunities to rapidly take advantage of, those people don’t matter.

This is also why no modern cryptocurrency investor can realistically be considered “early”, anymore. The only thing early about crypto is the general maturity levels of its technology, which arguably doesn’t matter to valuation based on the reality we see play out in the crypto markets on a daily basis.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#317

Post by larsiusprime »

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."

Analysis of blockchain transactions is also consolidating around middlemen too! If you're trying to read data off of the blockchain for professional analysis purposes, you'll find a lot of working analysts are using sites like Dune.xyz, which stick a SQL interface in front of data slurped from the blockchain and charge a pretty penny to access it.

(Wouldn't be surprised if they're slurping from middlemen services themselves)

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#318

Post by XorNot »

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…

Netflix sets up a very obvious dollars-to-value relationship. "Subscribe" and watch "things you already want to watch" - easily.

Most types of online monetization fail that test: subscribe and then you'll use this website for 15 minutes, then the promise is it will do something later that will be worth $10 a month to you. They're the gym-membership of digital services.

They want you to pay to join, but you don't actually know what you're getting and you don't know if you're going to find it usable at even a minimal level. Netflix deals with this too: they sell you access to a movie catalogue, not a specific movie - built into the model is a hedge against local risk for a product which already has very broad appeal.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#319

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

walterbell wrote: post #203
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #97

> 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"…

FreeNAS has ~1M deployments and the recent migration of upstream ZFS development to Linux will continue to increase the availability of ZFS-based storage. > Imagine a version of things where the server was almost a toy-like appliance. Odroid HC4 (Arm SBC, dual SATA drive slots, HDMI output, Kodi compatible) is about $100 USD, can run Armbian and LibreElec, https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4-oled/

The odroid seems to be at best only the h/w side of the sort of thing I was suggesting/imagining. It's a funky little box, and that's great, but what about the software? "Mom, nginx is gunked up again, do you want me to restart it or just reboot the server?" "Sam, did you put my new portfolio pictures on the site yet? Sorry Jan, ran into some size and format problems and am still working on it". Etc. etc.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#320

Post by hrhrhrhrhr »

fabian2k wrote: post #80

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…

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