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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

441–450 of 1001 posts

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#441

I was under the impression that crypto currency was thought of as nothing but yet another pyramid scheme.

I mean, yeah, nobody that buys cryptocurrencies expects to buy goods with it, only to sell it to someone else for more money down the road. A decade ago there was at least Silk Road and similar, offering something tangible in exchange for cryptocurrencies, now the best you can get is a half-assed El Salvador experiment with too many issues to list (but to give two examples, imagine not being able to pay for stuff bec…

not sure if this is what you're talking about, but there are plenty of darknet markets that use cryptocurrency in very wide use

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#442

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. This is sad to hear. People do run their own servers in their homes though, they are called routers, except they only serve one thing. Pity we don't have a lightweight self-updating system that sits in a router and does the basic job of keeping the user's data.

There are many projects to do that, such as this one started in 2010 by the founder of the Software Freedom Foundation (sibling rival of FSF?):

https://freedombox.org/about/

My memory is that it's basically a wall plug like a router, but it can run apps for you locally.

Unfortunately my sense is that there's no much incentive to donate or contribute to such projects :-( So people don't even know they exist.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#443
>Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers. [...] With the shift to mobile, we now live firmly in a world of clients and servers – with the former completely unable to act as the latter

I've got a dumb question: Why can't the phone or browser act as a node? Are the computational requirements too expensive?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of IPFS is that there is some DNS-and-HTTP translation step that resolves content to IPFS locations. Is that correct, and is it immutable? How does that work?

There are many gateways that allow viewing IPFS content over HTTP (e.g. ipfs.io), but the "true" IPFS experience is not over HTTP, it's done via P2P and addressed using content hashes. For example, one of my NFTs has content hash of QmTqkpmbKmciQgqhUWpML7dsJ59MBEjgQd7wH853n4ASZM I keep a copy of it on my computer (+ backups). If for some reason it were to be unhosted by every IPFS participant, I could become one, and…

Specifically, that gateway (and some (all?) others) needs "/ipfs/" in the URL: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTqkpmbKmciQgqhUWpML7dsJ59MBEjgQd7wH85...

Took me a while to figure it out, but the docs are here: https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/address-ipfs-on-web/

I also ran into several apparently no-longer-functional gateways in lists from just a few months ago. So yes, not the true experience.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#445

He's focused on Ethereum and NFTs, which is certainly the most popular/obvious place to research. I think his analysis is excellent and the article is worth reading. But he does say: > I have only dipped my toe in the waters of web3 Notably he doesn't even mention IPFS (which uses the pre-image of an JPG to form the URL.) Nor does he mention Bitcoin (which provides a shared state layer as well as a currency and makes…

Is IPFS really web3? IPFS is a slight upgrade to bitorrent, and p2p tech was popularized by Napster over 20 years ago. It's been a part of the internet longer than "web2"

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 blockchai…

That’s a tad bit non-specific. Do you claim walled garden ecosystems are acceptable if a state government controls it? Save for possible science fiction AI administered states, this would disproportionately empower state executives, no?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, tha…

Many NFTs are hosted on IPFS. If someone hosting it pulls the image, you can just start hosting it yourself instead, and since IPFS urls are based on the hash, it will never be "lost" so long as at least 1 person still has the content pointed to by the NFT.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#448
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.

While in theory you could change your RPC URL, in practice what difference would it make? At least IPFS offers some form of integrity checking through its generated hash. But there's no way to say, for example, that I karrot_kream at time T fetched a URL pointed to by NFT N with contents C. As demonstrated by Moxie's changing NFT and eventual deletion by OpenSea, who _knows_ what will happen to it? It's possible to a…

Changing your RPC url will make no difference because you’ll get the same result either way. Any service that lies about the state of the chain will quickly be jettisoned like so much carbon dioxide.

The bare minimum for a reputable NFT is to publish the contract source code and use immutable storage. That’s the first step of due diligence in the space.

All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized because it’s still super early and everyone’s trying to figure out how it ought to work.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#449
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 don't think that's a reality yet though. ETH 2.0 hasn't happened yet.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about physical On-prem systems or just buying a basic ec2 type server and renting some storage space? Because wouldn't the first one require a specific business line to an ISP for networking, which would require an office space and other associated costs? Or are you referring to renting a vanilla server and rolling everything yourself vs using some automated deployment and build pack system?

I just did a speed test and got 175mbs up. That is ridiculously fast and i don't have an out of the ordinary home internet connection. Entire data centers use to run on internet connections slower than that. A mac mini, ups, and that connection is plenty to run any kind of server for personal/family use.

U didnt answer my question at all. Also running a public facing server for any commercial out of your house is not recommended and may not even be allowed by your ISP
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