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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#581

Post by dcolkitt »

sv123 wrote: post #452
mritchie712 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the question was how hard is it to run a competitor to Infura. And the answer is trivially easy. Infura is just an Ethereum node API that's publicly exposed. Building an Infura competitor literally is nothing more than $100/month it costs to run a Geth node on AWS.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#582

Post by serverholic »

preseinger wrote: post #540
lekevicius wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Ok I'll bite. Why are ENS and IPFS failures?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#583

Post by nickysielicki »

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

What if the server is their phone and the service is an app that they install?

The problem that I personally have with web3 is that nobody seems to be building the infrastructure to accommodate this sort of setup, which the article sort of touched on. But I disagree that people will never want this. I think that there’s a lot of will and understanding among the average non-technical internet user that they don’t host their own services and I think they’d like to be a part of a distributed system, if there was a platform that made it possible.

But that’s not ethereum. IPFS and wireguard are closer to realizations of this.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#584

Post by roywiggins »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #522
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…

Well the image could also be embedded in the data of the blockchain and/or a irreversible (currently) hash made for the image sitting on the server. Now will a court enforce that digital contract as a legal contract if the person takes down the server or puts up a different image? shrug I doubt it under current law.

Isn't storing the actual image data on-chain usually prohibitively expensive?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#585

Post by serverholic »

eezurr wrote: post #568
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…

>Another moment I would critique is the clever NFT, that displays different things. Yes, ERC-721 allows any URL as metadata file, so you can put traditional DNS-resolved URL there. But I would struggle to find any "respected" NFT collection that actually does that. Almost every high quality NFT project (Art Blocks, BAYC, so on) has IPFS as metadata URL, and goes as far as to freeze metadata, so it couldn't ever be ch…

> There's nothing stopping an artist from selling a work of art as edition 1 of 1, and then a month later "minting" another copy or 10.

There is a social cost to making a promise and breaking it.

> What happens if someone steals someone else's work, mints an NFT and sells it, and the buyer finds out the next day?

Don't buy from random sources. You have similar problems with Pokemon cards, for example. Lots of fakes and it's often hard to tell a fake. However, people have found ways around the issue.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#586

Post by throaway46546 »

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...

In a discussion about people not wanting to run their own servers the fact that your first instinct was to use GCP is telling.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#587

Post by CameronNemo »

spenczar5 wrote: post #403
CameronNemo wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is inherently centralized due to DNS being centralized. Furthermore there is no rule that says I have to federate with any particular entity. They will take the loss.

Hm, I think my point might not have been clear enough. I would find it hard to function without interacting with central system, like sending an email to someone on gmail. Just today, I emailed a plumber on gmail, but it could easily have been an old friend or a relative or whatever. How do you email the plumber, is my question?

No post body was provided.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#588

Post by lawn »

tompccs wrote: post #363

"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 – and those questions seem more important to me than ever. Meanwhile, ethereum actually refers to servers as “clients,” so there’s not even a word for an actual untrusted client/server interface that will have to exist somewhere, and no acknowledgement that if successful there will…

This is more a problem with Ethereum rather than with "standard" crypto.

For mobiles you have "SPV wallets" that does communicate with many other nodes while verifying block headers and that the transactions you're interested in are included in the blocks.

So an SPV wallet doesn't contain the whole blockchain, but to cheat it (and make you see invalid transactions), you need to generate a fake block, which is just as expensive as creating a real and valid block.

And all that's needed is for you to find a single node you can communicate with

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#590

Post by hanniabu »

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…

Metamask lets you enter your own RPC endpoints
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