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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#331

Post by ineptech »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #258
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/

Yes, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about, but I think it also demonstrates that there's a ways to go yet. I suspect that one part of the solution will be abandoning linux and windows. They were built for performance and versatility, which just aren't that important in a server I use to host my blog and email, and come with a lot of baggage that isn't needed in a virtual-only OS.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#332

Post by PretzelPirate »

pavlov wrote: post #302
codehalo wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you (and a vast majority of HN including Moxie) is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask/OpenSea). I saw this back in the 90's when a lot of people thought the internet was "Internet Explorer".

And that's one of Moxie's points: how exactly is web3 supposed to be avoiding the centralization that occurred on the web, when it's already at that point.

Ethereum light clients will make it trivial to verify the state of the blockchain and interact with it without also having to store the entire blockchain.

The nice thing is that you can depend on Infura for now, but if they ever attempt to be dishonest, you can easily switch to hosting your own node or light client. The cost of moving away from these centralized services is pretty low.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#333

Post by wepple »

mrkramer wrote: post #93

>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.

>A protocol

Running email protocols over TLS isn’t an improvement to the protocol, it’s tunneling. PGP isn’t an improvement to the protocol, it’s encapsulating data in another protocol/format.

Your comment proves he point; email has evolved so slow we’re running it through tunnels and embedding PGP encryption to overcome the weaknesses that the protocol has not been able to fix.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#334

Post by walterbell »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #319
walterbell wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For those who have more money than time, Synology NAS devices include mobile apps for common use cases, e.g. photo sharing. There's apparently an open-source clone called XPenology. For simple photo backup, Photosync works on all major desktop/mobile operating systems and can sync to a wide range of local or cloud storage.

After 2 decades and billions of investment in web services, it's not realistic to expect a generic "home server" to serve all possible use cases. Those that work best are usually based on an open protocol (e.g. WebDAV, SSH/SCP, SMB).

> did you put my new portfolio pictures on the site yet?

As an example, the UX for client-side workflow for blog publishing (WordPress, Jekyll, Hugo) is likely independent of the infrastructure for blog hosting (VPS, self-hosted, WordPress.com, GitHub Pages, etc.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#335

Post by exdsq »

arcticbull wrote: post #307
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…

> I think there’s tons of room for Blockchain-as-a-Service tools to improve development and testing processes without forcing centralization on main net deployments. The big Blockchain-as-a-Services shut down - both IBM and Azure are gone.

I don't mean these sorts of simple host-a-node services but something where you can run custom chains for your dev and testing. For example, this week I had to build a separate Polkadot chain for a client that had reduced governance term durations so they only took 5 minutes instead of 120 day and with a smaller council size so tests are easier to manage. This needs to run in CI so has to be in a position to spin up and tear down on command and the genesis block has to fund the appropriate accounts for testing. This could be pretty easily abstracted to a Web App for people to build this without needing to know how the underlying nodes operate, what to change, etc...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#336

Post by wmf »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #261
wmf wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people don't want to pay anything for digital goods Which brings up a different problem: Web3 assumes that everything you do online will cost money . Even assuming that fees go to zero, virtually nobody wants that. Web3 advocates will say that the money you earn will offset what you spend, but you only have to look at Patreon/Substack/OnlyFans earnings to see that it won't happen for most people.

It also strikes me that there’s an implicit requirement to “already have sufficient capital” to operate in the crypto space - even more so that normal finance. I don’t see middle-to-low income people being willing to adopt this as any interaction will burn even more of a limited resource than normal mechanisms. If the majority of people can’t get in, or can’t afford to do anything in the space, is there any real chan…

Buy $10 of crypto, use play-to-earn to turn it into $100, then you can afford to use Web3. /sarcasm

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#337

Post by toxicFork »

not2b wrote: post #166
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…

As the article points out, many NFTs are implemented by storing a URL in the blockchain; the digital artwork sits on some server and is reachable by that link. Fine, you can prove that you own the URL. But what that URL points to can change out from under you, so there's no way to make that trustless. If you own the domain and the server that it points to, the registrar can take the domain away from you and give it t…

Some NFT platforms operate with IPFS whose URLs are hashes of content. This solves that problem.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#338

Post by da39a3ee »

Can anyone explain clearly and objectively and succinctly what an NFT is, for an audience who knows how the internet works, what a hash function is and what properties they have, and how bitcoin works.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#339

Post by dqpb »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #309
dqpb wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They emit very little co2 up front. So little that they trivially reach carbon-negative with a small amount of carbon offsets.

Very little compared to the entire planet, sure. But what's the actual amount?

Sustainable Blockchain: Estimating the Carbon Footprint of Algorand’s Pure Proof-of-Stake

https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/sustainable-blockcha...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#340

Post by baash05 »

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…

But that's just it.. One would have to stand up a server that hosted the 200gb, so their Iphone users could consume the data. Or they'd go through a central server.
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