Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#571

Post by dlubarov »

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…

I'm not sure it's even necessary to use Internet Archive or a torrent? If I own an NFT whose hash is stored on-chain, I can just ensure the availability of the preimage by storing it myself.

Then when I want to interact with a centralized NFT marketplace, I can upload the preimage to their server. They'd verify the hash and store the image. I'd continue storing it myself though, so if that marketplace goes away, I can follow the same process with another one.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#572

Post by Robotbeat »

XorNot wrote: post #318
Robotbeat wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I agree with that. People wanna pay as little as possible but they gladly pay for Netflix or whatever. People spend a lot of money on Amazon because they make it really easy to pay. One of the original promises of cryptocurrency is it would make micro transactions easy and painless (with something to do about trust, but… that goes in the opposite direction than consumers would like as it’s the provider t…

Netflix sets up a very obvious dollars-to-value relationship. "Subscribe" and watch "things you already want to watch" - easily. Most types of online monetization fail that test: subscribe and then you'll use this website for 15 minutes, then the promise is it will do something later that will be worth $10 a month to you. They're the gym-membership of digital services. They want you to pay to join, but you don't actu…

That's why micropayments are a neat idea. Sure, I'd pay a dime or a quarter to read you crappy news site. A quarter doesn't matter, as long as you don't bug me, I'm not subscribed to anything, and I just click. That's kind of what Bitcoin was promising... Of course for several reasons, that doesn't actually work with Bitcoin.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#573

Post by auston »

I think he makes legit points:

1. NFT spec is flimsy at best

2. We trust output from ETH nodes inherently

3. Most of the user facing clients for Web3 are decentralized

4. Power is easily rolled up into convenience providers like QuickNode

but I think something that is (perhaps conveniently missed) is that there is A LOT of power in having decentralized / censorship-resistant state - this is the thing that makes DeFi a real threat to orgs like exchanges and banks. They can't force people to have a certain amount of capital to trade derivatives or have a certain credit profile to borrow, the system is permissionless and the API is open 24/7.

That's pretty remarkable IMO and I think that sort of permissionless is likely to be used for very compelling things in the future, NFTs aside.

Also one thing that he notes but doesn't quite provide a solution for but I'm betting will exist in the near future is a markup language to map UI components to smart contract functions/views.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#574

Post by distrill »

sbierwagen wrote: post #561
distrill wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wo…

>and move toward the decentralized end state that apologists are hoping for. Is there any evidence that this is actually happening? It seems rather backwards! Is the maximalist argument here that these companies are going to build out all this infrastructure, move the global financial system onto it, and then rip it apart and rewrite it to be entirely distributed afterwards? Why? If the point is to be distributed, wo…

> Is the maximalist argument here that these companies are going to build out all this infrastructure, move the global financial system onto it, and then rip it apart and rewrite it to be entirely distributed afterwards

I haven't heard anyone articulate this as their vision lol. I would think they distribute the systems somewhere between trading monkey JPEGs and actually moving the global financial system onto it.

As to why start with it centralized, it's easier to get a POC working with the systems and conventions we have in place today than alongside rethinking all of the infrastructure at the same time. Work on the UI, trade some stupid goods that finance the development of these distributed systems, etc. I just don't understand the argument that this whole thing will or should be binary. Huge migrations like that fall over all the time. Gradual rollouts take longer but are generally safer and in this case probably the only option.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#577

Post by stopat11 »

>People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.

The older I get, the more I see that there is not much point in making arguments about topics. You can argue whatever you want, and it ultimately isn't about proving something is true or false, it is about feelings and what you want to happen based on your own desires.

This whole section about running servers can be argued against. I never thought I would see normal people with "gaming computers", yet here we are. "People don't want to bother with the hassle of gaming computers". etc etc. Same arguments. Things change, and the past does not dictate the future. I mean, half the reason people didn't want to run servers was because the web wasn't centralised. So now that has changed.

Other changes have occurred like the availability of the raspberry pi - a cheap, powerful, silent, relatively simple computer that can be used as a server. I remember back when Windows Home Server was a thing. It was packaged in these large noisey computers, running proprietary and expensive software. I didn't want to run a "home server" back then either.

Whether people working at businesses want to run their own servers is irrelevant. I doubt they care about any of the things that would be relevant to home servers. They are often running lots of different servers with complex security rules and various applications. The managers see the cloud as a way not to hire expensive people they don't trust. The programmers don't care because it isn't their own product, and hate IT because they make you jump through a bunch of hoops to do anything. It is all a completely different environment to one person running one server at home.

There are still impediments to running home servers that, if lifted, could make people more likely to run them. Static IP addresses are often expensive add-ons, for example. Upload speeds are sometimes too slow, and so on.

Anyway, I don't even know what web3 is.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#578

Post by schrectacular »

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…

There are voices within the space that have been talking about this issue for many years. There is at least one project which aims to use economic incentives within the design of the protocol to mitigate. Check out Saito.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#579

Post by TimJRobinson »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #434
Kognito wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not terribly up to date with IPFS (so feel free to correct me), but if I’ve understood it correctly, it’s not dissimilar to Bittorent where files are seeded by interested parties and if no one happens to be seeding any longer, the file is essentially dead? It’s almost like you want some centralised entity to preserve copies of the images these NFTs link to. I wonder how many IPFS-backed NFTs are only being seeded…

Filecoin that you pay to have any files you like mirrored by many people, in a decentralized way. Arweave is also a one off fee to have the file mirrored forever, the hosters are paid from the yield earned on that fee.

Sorry hacker news had an outage and somehow removed the first half of this comment and it's too late to edit now. Top was:

You are correct about IPFS, it's just like torrents. There are services like Arweave, Sia and Filecoin where you can pay...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#580

Post by noman-land »

I guess my beef with the whole web3 discussion is that everyone is bashing all the centralized bandaids is indicative that web3 is fake without acknowledging that those things are bandaids "until it's really ready". These bandaids (infura and the like) are mostly only necessary for mobile users who can't run a full chain. And even then there are legit solutions like Status.im as well as lots of research into lite-clients.

The "right" way to use something like Ethereum or IPFS is to download geth and go-ipfs and run the nodes yourself. You can do it on a modern laptop or a raspberry pi easily.

Then you can point Metamask at `localhost` and be using your own pristine connection to the networks.

Or you don't even need to use Metamask and can just issue commands directly in the console or you can download a local copy of of the static files for MyEtherWallet or whatever it's called these days and just double click on an HTML file and connect to your local node.

Then once you've done that, stop wasting money on buying pointless centralized NFTs.

Post reply on HN