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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#391

Post by gen220 »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #332
pavlov wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is “the point”. This is like saying you can switch away from GMail by running your own mail server. People don’t want to run their own mail server.

Will the ethereum light client run in metamask with no configuration? I’m afraid anything short of that is too heavy.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#392

Post by imnotlost »

hooande wrote: post #349
majormajor wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of the actual data? Since the blockchain only has the hash? And if whatever server you originally got the data from the NFT for went down, you'd lose it if you didn't make a backup? In those cases does the blockchain still have the URL as well? And you might end up with a collection of bits that matched the hash in the blockchain but was no longer at the origin…

the data has no value. anyone can right click copy an image. the value is that you own the blockchain address that points to a url. picture of a house = no value. deed to the house = value. even if the house is destroyed (data changed), the deed still has some kind of value

The land is still there - that's the value. With an NFT, the image is gone and what's left? Some bits on the blockchain.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#393

Post by yed »

hooande wrote: post #349
majormajor wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of the actual data? Since the blockchain only has the hash? And if whatever server you originally got the data from the NFT for went down, you'd lose it if you didn't make a backup? In those cases does the blockchain still have the URL as well? And you might end up with a collection of bits that matched the hash in the blockchain but was no longer at the origin…

the data has no value. anyone can right click copy an image. the value is that you own the blockchain address that points to a url. picture of a house = no value. deed to the house = value. even if the house is destroyed (data changed), the deed still has some kind of value

A deed is to land, the land still exists if the house is gone. Your example is more like owning a title to a car that's been shot into the sun. It has 0 value.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#394

Post by mwattsun »

I jotted down some thoughts I want to post before this very well written and interesting article by Moxie drops off the front page. I'm sure I got things wrong, but in the spirit of blue sky thinking:

The Physical layer is centralized on the telcos, fiber providers and satellite providers. This doesn't change

The internet is decentralized at the Application layer. Is it peer to peer. BitTorrent, IPFS

The network become centralized at the services layer in Web 2.0.

A decentralized search engine or global commerce store is impractical

Centralized services like search and social are a solved problem and efficient. People expect to get them for free in their monthly internet bill

Just like no one wants to run their own server, no one wants to run their own social network

web3 says it will change decentralization at the services layer, but it probably won't

"I don’t think it’s on a trajectory to deliver us from centralized platforms" - Moxie

People want to spend money on it without really caring much about the technical details. They just want it to work.

People (mostly young) use their interest and involvement in it as a social signifier

web3, crypto and decentralization are buzz words like "the special properties of copper" or "energy balancing tea"

When everything is free, nothing has value. NFT's create a value that can be bought, sold, traded and collected

The buying and selling of digital objects has momentum and will continue.

"I think these market forces will likely continue... If the money flowing through NFTs ends up channeled back into crypto space, it could continue to accelerate forever... I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going"

Web3 is here to stay but it won't be what the techies want it to be, it will be what the market wants

"I also understand why nerds like me are excited to build for it. It is, at the very least, something new on the nerd level – and that creates a space for creativity/exploration that is somewhat reminiscent of early internet days." - Moxie

The market has spoken and people want this. Consumers don't understand it but think it's cool and are told it's the future, so they can flex at being in the know and forward thinking by getting involved. Web3 is here to stay, without the implementation details even mattering to anyone but a small set of highly technical people. It's a fun project to get involved in, it's not boring, and gives people something to get excited about. The best thing someone like me can do is try to steer it in a direction away from harming the environment by coming up with alternative to proof of work.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#395

Post by majormajor »

hooande wrote: post #349
majormajor wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of the actual data? Since the blockchain only has the hash? And if whatever server you originally got the data from the NFT for went down, you'd lose it if you didn't make a backup? In those cases does the blockchain still have the URL as well? And you might end up with a collection of bits that matched the hash in the blockchain but was no longer at the origin…

the data has no value. anyone can right click copy an image. the value is that you own the blockchain address that points to a url. picture of a house = no value. deed to the house = value. even if the house is destroyed (data changed), the deed still has some kind of value

A URL pointing to nothing with no way to view the art that supposedly lives there anymore? I don't think that "deed" is gonna be worth much for long.

Sounds like it has the same value as saying "I used to own this one famous painting before it burned down in a fire."

A hash corresponding to the bits in your file? Sure, that works, you can say "yep, this is the image, I own it." A URL plus a hash + the bits. Sure, that makes sense, even if the URL goes away, you can prove that those particular bits belong to you. A URL that's now dead and nothing else? Nah.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#396

Post by JulianMorrison »

(I deleted my previous comment, because I don't think I said what I meant. So let's try again.)

Distributed, peer to peer, is worse. Everything that uses it, as a suite of technologies ranging from torrents to Freenet to bitcoin, only does so because a simpler, cheaper, central alternative is somehow seen as bad. In general, because it would be raided by The Man.

Blockchain, is worse. You could do everything it does, cheaper and better, without it. Except the bit about lawlessness, but the whole NFT gold rush has no need for that.

For any use that doesn't actually need to evade The Man, you can always make your system work better by pulling more and more of it into centralisation and out of the blockchain. Therefore, the final "victory" of the blockchain will look exactly like its obsolescence.

Unless you want to buy contraband, of course.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#397

Post by RoboTeddy »

epolanski wrote: post #208
lekevicius wrote: post #52

While it's refreshing to hear critique from someone who actually built something on web3, there are a couple of points where I'd dare to disagree, somewhat. Particularly, regarding "early days". It really is, still, early days, because there is a lot of complexity in getting all the pieces built. It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart contracts). Other pi…

I don't buy the early part. 3 years into the internet we already had emails and tcp. 13 years into blockchains we have nothing.

When writing code for a blockchain today, even on an Ethereum L2, you're in a very resource-constrained environment where you end up using bitpacking tricks and the like. That's how it was for early computers, too, of course — they may serve as a better analogy. Programmable computers have taken decades to develop, beginning in ~1950, and I expect that decentralized computation will follow a similar path.

There simply are numerous hard problems to solve to make this all work at greater scale. In a healthy ecosystem like Ethereum's, there are frequent research discoveries (discovery of the concept of data availability, the application of BLS signature aggregation, proposer-builder separation, zkevm, data availability sampling, ...). The software engineering effort required to implement such research is colossal as well. Eventually we'll even see e.g. specialized hardware for efficiently producing or verifying zero-knowledge proofs.

It would be easy to look at the very early computers, which were perhaps not all that useful, and shrug — but that take wouldn't have extended well into the future as the technology scaled.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#398

Post by Biganon »

codehalo wrote: post #285
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…

>> 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. Absolutely correct. Extremely flawed reasoning regarding blockchains and web3 on Moxie's part. He actually created more confusion than enlightenment.

What's flawed in his reasoning?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#399

Post by Uehreka »

walterbell wrote: post #190
Uehreka wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just looked it up, this looks like a tool to let you and your friends create a “private internet” using a VPN. Which is cool (I could see a bunch of uses for this, like SSHing into my home computer while I’m on the go), but I’m talking about the ability to expose a device on your home network to the public internet.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#400

Post by Ragnarork »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #379
bricemo wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. That’s his point: this isn’t leading to trust less decentralization in practice. To do that, you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive

> But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. Correct, because it's clear storing the content in web2 Internet Archive is superior ("you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive"). They will persist regardless of web3 shenanigans, and hash addressing ensures content integrity. You could even use a torrent to store and serve the content (again, which us…

> Why would one trust a distributed ledger over a centralized archive

Isn't that the polar opposite of the promise of web3...?

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