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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#421

Post by beoberha »

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.

It’s extremely disingenuous to say we have “nothing”. The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciate, even if they don’t see a practical application.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#422

Post by timeon »

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?

> What about ...

really?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#423

Post by JulianMorrison »

atweiden wrote: post #415
JulianMorrison wrote: post #396

(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,…

> Everything that uses it [...] only does so because a simpler, cheaper, central alternative is somehow seen as bad. Walled garden ecosystems have a fairly obvious downside — ultimately someone has to get disproportionately enriched and empowered. By using the word “somehow”, you insinuate it’s actually hard to see this.

No, that's just a problem that lives in a different layer of how we organise the world. Right now we haven't decided to operate these centralised things as services provided by society, to society. Right now, they are owned by people who build up heaps of money, which in our current system translates to unwarranted power.

These are choices which can be changed.

Trying to work around the current system via a blockchain is certainly an option. But it's going to be worse in every other way except those externalities. And so they will tend to creep back, and the blockchain will be pushed out.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#424

Post by jrochkind1 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #330
not2b wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, this has a really easy fix. The NFT points to a content hash, and the content is uploaded to the Internet Archive (and they're compensated for the storage) as part of the NFT minting process. Your ownership is now on a distributed ledger, with a cryptographic hash of the content, paired with long term storage of said digital artwork. The Internet Archive's costs are ~$2/GB to store content in perpetuity, which se…

Or even just include a content hash along with the URL in the NFT payload. Just a way to verify the referent of the URL hasn't changed since the NFT was minted. Where you can find the content with that hash if not the URL can be left arbitrary or out-of-band, but it's at least capturing a fingerprint of the content, not just an address.

It seems like this would be absolutely trivial to implement, right? Just... add a separator token (say `#`) and a content hash (say with `sha1:` prefix, urn-style) to the end of the URL that's already in NFTs.

I don't really understand why NFT's don't already do this. I don't understand why they didn't do it from the start. It seems an obvious choice to me in designing such a thing. Like, it's so easy, and such a step up in making NFT's do something closer to what people think they do... it leaves me thinking that the design of NFT's just wasn't done seriously, and nobody using it really cares.

What am I missing?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#425

Post by TimJRobinson »

password1 wrote: post #281
wyck wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MetaMask is a wallet, its not ingrained into any blockchain, your free to use alternatives, and many protocols don't support it. The centralized aspect of a chrome app and marketplace like opensea is very well know issue and talked about a lot in crypto, the problem of course comes down to lack of education, which is apparent in this very post.

Can you point me to where this insightful discussion happens? And where can I educate myself? 99,99% of content and forums I find online about crypto only care about promoting coins, nfts or services basing only on futuristic visionary promises, hyping up the users and attempts at FOMO. It's almost literal spam. This is the first time I read something that just explains how thing works from a technical standpoint and…

Some of the most interesting tech focused people I've found on twitter:

- @VitalikButerin

- @Hasufl

- @ePolynya

- @gakonst

Can see who they're following as a launchpad into the more interesting ecosystem

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#426

Post by adam_arthur »

beoberha wrote: post #421
epolanski wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s extremely disingenuous to say we have “nothing”. The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciate, even if they don’t see a practical application.

I think OP was implying something of real world value.

I can see the hypothetical value in decentralized computing/public database.

Certain types of data could in theory be stored publicly, and anybody could build APIs around them. In particular, it would be cool if there was some common protocol and storage format for something like tweets, such that anybody could build Twitter client. Common protocol would especially benefit social media IMO.

We've long collaborated on open source code, but this would be more akin to open source data.

But all that being said, why has nothing real world value oriented materialized yet?

The decentralized experience is worse, and there are privacy concerns around storing certain data publicly, I would guess. Can those problems be solved?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#427

Post by shagie »

dylkil wrote: post #212
not2b wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the public dismay at the carbon footprint of crypto is always fascinating to me. The network rewards are setup in such a way the the most profitable miners are the ones with the cheapest electricity as this is their biggest overhead. This pushes miners to the cheapest forms of electricity, i.e renewables

> This pushes miners to the cheapest forms of electricity, i.e renewables

If renewables are the cheapest forms of energy, why did the hash rate drop when Kazakhstan went off line?

Based on https://www.iea.org/reports/kazakhstan-energy-profile

> Coal represents around half of Kazakhstan’s energy mix (50% in 2018), followed by oil and natural gas (both with 25% shares).

This means that the cheapest energy to be found for is 100% carbon based and non-renewable.

Likewise, another 5-10% ( https://www.yahoo.com/now/iran-temporarily-stops-authorized-... ) is from Iran - which again is using oil, and natural gas rather than renewable sources.

From https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ - the countries with the cheapest energy prices (and show up in the hash rates) are those that are using fossil fuels (and likely trying to subsidize those prices from the government to avoid civil unrest).

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#428

Post by CuriousCosmic »

Swizec wrote: post #413
pshc wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the same as web2. These web3 frontends don’t have moats or lock-in like Facebook or Google, because they don’t actually control the data. The data they serve is all from public ledgers. You can switch off of Infura in a second by changing your RPC url.

The problem is that they control distribution – the only thing that matters. You don't need to own the data if you own the eyeballs/mindshare. For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights, yet they own 32% of the music streaming market. The second best is Apple at 16% ... which also doesn't own any of the music. https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-s...

It's a little different than Spotify. Spotify still controls the means of distribution while the data sources for "web3" are public/decentralised (in most but not all cases). Rather I'd compare it to Google Search and AMP. The data is still accessible and there are alternatives (manually routing to the sites themselves or using other search engines) however the main path to the data is gatekept by a centralised source (Google) which is routing all the requests through their servers (AMP) instead of using the underlying protocol.

It's still a severe issue but it's a much simpler solution to simply build competitors for a tool accessing an open platform than it is to build a new platform entirely.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#429

Post by mritchie712 »

bko wrote: post #385
devadvance wrote: post #17

This is a really well-thought-out, nuanced take. I really appreciate mixture of "but there are still servers", not being able to stop a gold rush, and (refreshingly) the technical take on the implementation details. It stands in such stark contrast to other content. For example, a web3 chat app announcement I saw yesterday [1]. I even joined the Discord to learn more and just found...hype. I found this parenthetical…

The centralization of apis (infura, opensea and ethscan used by metamask) is the biggest problem. I could be wrong, but I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech. I remember in the late 90s there were a number of search engines but no one really owned the space. Only 20 years later did Google emerge as the winner and is (IMO) by far the best in terms of relevant results. But that didn't hap…

It's really not that hard (or even expensive) to run your own.

Here's[0] an example doing it on k8's. I had something similar running on GCP in a couple hours. It's been running for a month with no issues.

0 - https://messari.io/article/running-an-ethereum-node-on-kuber...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#430

Post by dylkil »

timeon wrote: post #422
dylkil wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What about ... really?

Yes really, if you don't have conviction you are just virtue signalling. I want to see which it is.
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