So if the chain doesn't store the binary data of the file, does it at least store the hash??? How can it prove anything otherwise?
My First Impressions of Web3
451–460 of 1001 posts
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
But one of the main points of article is that people don't want to run servers, developers included. Even being easy, letting someone else do it will always be easier.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that OpenSea is successful. So it shows that people don't really care about (a) decentralisation or (b) manipulation of the true blockchain output.
>Except that OpenSea is successful. thanks to VC money looking to centralize the web3 economy.
But that's the point. So many people hyping web3 like it's going to be fundamentally different which is why it's worth all these resources (both people and energy), when it appears already heading down the same path as web2. Consolidated companies growing very large and getting a bunch of already known VCs even richer.
It's like a populist movement whose goal is to enrich the existing rich.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#454Earlier 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.
I think it's good to remember that bitcoin and ethereum were the very first cryptocurrencies. They are flawed, bitcoin in particular failed at everything it was idealized to be and will probably never improve. Ethereum seems to be moving forward at least. Slowly, but still.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Despite the various claims about how the worlds smartest most talented developers are working on web3… that’s not true. It was a significant oversight and I think technical leadership in the space is lacking. You have people who know lots and lots about crypto stuff but they are focused like a laser.
It’s like that crypto thought-leader on Twitter who didn’t know his NFT’d pfp was being served to various web clients over http.
It’s also why web3 startups are throwing huge cash at engineers from “web2” companies because, while they may not be crypto experts, they know how to build scalable systems, how web tech works etc. That knowledge is sorely lacking in the crypto space.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's non-specific because I'm not trying to write a manifesto right now. Nation state or sub-national state governments are not the only way to organise things that are done by society and for society.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> rather than give up and give in to centralization As for why Marlinspike might have abandoned the goal of decentralization, I think Upton Sinclair might have some insight.
I don't follow ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
Marlinspike is the CEO of Signal Messenger LLC, and he also coincidentally believes that people shouldn't make clients which are compatible with the official Signal messenger (even though the protocol and code are freely available), and shouldn't even try to distribute Signal from app stores that he doesn't approve of.[0]
I don't actually know if he receives a meaningful salary from his CEO role, but Upton Sinclair's adage still seems relevant for explaining Marlinspike's views on decentralization: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”[1]
It's also worth pointing out that non-official Signal clients would be less likely to include support for MobileCoin, which "gained over 450% [in value] since" Signal announced support for it.[2]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/q1jnbb/why_isnt_sig...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
[2] https://rankacoin.com/encrypted-messenger-company-signal-fac...
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair Moxie says it's only "early days" in the sense that the technology has failed to advance, since of course a significant quantity of time has passed since inception. In some ways, cryptocurrency’s failure to scale beyond relatively nascent engineering is what makes it possible to consider the days “early,” *since objectively it has already been a decade or more*.
To be fair, (and I am by no means a fanboy), blockchain's decade isn't that long of a time. Look at the history of the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet The use of technologies is not always obvious or immediately successful.
I'm just addressing the misconception re: Moxie's apparent position.
My personal opinion is that the internet solved problems from day 1 and its growth was largely constrained by the deployment of physical infrastructure. Blockchain is not similarly constrained - it just doesn't really, you know, do anything for anyone. The proof will be in the pudding.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#459This 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…
> I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech
I actually struggled with this point throughout the article. I'm not sure I see this as a parallel trend toward centralization like we saw with web2 - but rather that this is how software is built today and this is what we're comfortable with. It doesn't seem unnatural or problematic to me that we will start with something that approximates the world around us today and move toward the decentralized end state that apologists are hoping for.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
This is where it falls apart for me too, people are paying huge sums for artificially scarce links to someone else’s server? I keep feeling like I’m missing something.