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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#531

Post by threeseed »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #504
sv123 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers? If there's a strong enough need, people will run their own servers even if they'd rather not. "people don't want to run servers" arguably could be rephrased as "people don't have a reason (today) to run their own servers". I'd argue this is a key difference between web1 and cryto centralization and the web2 centralization. If Google announce…

> How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers

Every year a decreasing number as everything moves to SaaS and the cloud.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#532

Post by kllrnohj »

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.

> The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology

Are they, though? What's amazing about them? The amount of overhead per unit of useful work is mind boggling. So much so that a single raspberry pi 4 is 5,000x more powerful than the entire EVM network. And the initial smart contract language Solidity is notoriously poorly designed for the job.

Truly honestly what is the technology here that we're supposed to be appreciating?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#533

Post by marcusbrown »

I recently became a web3 developer and created Flovatar (flovatar.com) and I totally agree with all the issues outlined in this article, but I think they are mostly limited to the Ethereum ecosystem and because most projects are not thinking outside the box and using IPFS to store the images.

In my case I decided to build it on the Flow blockchain (flow.com) and to use SVG illustrations and I couldn’t be happier about both choices.

Flow provides a JS library to interact with the blockchain without the need to use browser plugins like Metamask and also allows to store data on-chain with really affordable costs.

Having the SVG stored in the NFT guarantees that all the issues outlined in the article won’t apply in my case and will be guaranteed to exist as long as the blockchain will live (unlike IPFS where someone actually has to keep paying for the servers to store the images).

I could go on by saying that I managed to build a Marketplace that handles 500k$/month transactions with a single and relatively simple smart contract. Doing that in a web2 way would have been much much harder to both implement and maintain.

So from my perspective all the problems outlined in the article are super valid, but if you look a bit outside the current “standards” of the Ethereum world there is definitely hope and lots of solutions available.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#534

Post by wbl »

mritchie712 wrote: post #429
bko wrote: post #385

Earlier 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...

As someone who has run nodes, no it is hard and expensive. Every time a geth node dies it has to resync and no persistent volume mounts and stateful sets are not solutions. They are problems. If you need to scale horizontally you get strange consistency issues with the API. All of this makes for a very unpleasant experience. It's built for TLC on a beefy box not a herd.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#535

Post by pshc »

majormajor wrote: post #301
miracle2k wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the hash of the data. It very often does, and it is certainly the case for most high-value NFTs. It is indeed not the case if you create your NFT on OpenSea and do not take the additional step of freezing the metadata. Also, there are many artworks that change, so a hash to a single file is not necessarily the right solution.

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…

> So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of the actual data?

If you purchase one that’s worth say >4 figures then, yes, yes you should! Also at that point, you’re either part of the 1% or at the very least owe some due diligence to your investments.

In reality, the internet is a big copy machine and you’re probably safe. But you should still back it up.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#536

Post by tarkin2 »

The "a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card" part simultaneously made me realise how ridiculous NFTs are and, nevertheless, how popular they are, and how that popularity fuels the value of bitcoin. Essentially paper money gets its value because you need it to pay taxes; that is, there is a demand. Bitcoin gets it value because you can do interesting and popular things with it; that is, there is a demand. As long as there are interesting and popular things to do with bitcoin, that attracts outside money, bitcoin will keep gaining in value. Obvious, I guess, but that helped it hit home.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#537

Post by AlexandrB »

wyck wrote: post #239
onychomys wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if everybody just uses the two big guys, does it matter that the little guys exist?

But everyone doesn't, that's just his impression and not researched whatsoever.

All these arguments apply to email as well - there are plenty of small providers and you can run your own email server. But, in practice, almost everybody uses gmail or outlook so we still say it's heavily centralized.

What good is running your own full Ethereum node if OpenSea blocks the NFT you're trying to sell and most of the customers who would want to buy it are going through OpenSea's node?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#538

Post by lolinder »

pshc wrote: post #404
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.

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 web3 frontends appear to be in the same place that Chrome is: yes, technically you can always switch to another browser, but if Chrome decides to boycott a new feature, it will never exist as a practical matter. If Chrome blocks a website, it will be as though it doesn't exist for most people. That in theory it still does doesn't change anything. What makes OpenSea different than Chrome in this respect?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#539

Post by grangerg »

hattmall wrote: post #501
Uehreka wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would it do that though? I’d like to hear a falsifiable theory of how that would happen, because as of right now it’s not happening, and no one seems able to explain what big thing is going to change. If the biggest part of the change (using the blockchain) isn’t causing the dynamic to shift, what future change will?

To me the argument here is because it's easy. Even if the interaction layer is centralized the underlying tech is decentralized so everything can easily be validated and that's the key difference.

I think he touched on that in the article. The masses are trusting the centralized API, not the blockchain. His NFT exists in the chain, but not the API, so it effectively doesn't exist in the eyes of the market.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#540

Post by preseinger »

lekevicius wrote: post #417
luhn wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re "early days," servers as clients, etc: There are a lot of very real problems with crypto, and the solution always lies in new technologies. Slow settlement and high gas fees? L2 networks. Limited global TPS? More L2 networks or alternative L1 chains. Wasteful energy use? Proof-of-stake. No connection to real world data? Oracles. Relying on centralized APIs? Light clients are in the works. Can't trust that you'll g…

I'm sorry, it's difficult for me to find a truly charitable interpretation of this response. But I'll do my best. Blockchains started very simply. Famously, Bitcoin's whitepaper is just a couple of pages long. Simple systems are nice, but they can't solve every problem. As problems were discovered, solutions were proposed. Most solutions were themselves the simplest solutions to a given problem, so naturally, as new…

"Successful" is an ambiguous descriptor. What do you have in mind when you say that? From where I sit, ENS and IPFS are unambiguous failures. Do you disagree?
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