641–650 of 1001 posts
> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.
compare to
> virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification.
So why not just use, say, Firebase?
The author’s argument is definitely not nuanced, but a a straw man and a false dichotomy. “Web3 is not 100% decentralised, so it’s not really legit.” Web3 or crypto never intended to be 100% decentralised and it is impossible to be so. There will also be dapps among the 100,000 dapps that have a centralized component. Every percent decentralisation is good, be it 1%, 5%, 50% or 90% and we are in the high double digit…
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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…
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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…
I guess at least if you keep a copy of your NFT you can start serving it over IPFS yourself if whoever is hosting it can't be bothered anymore, or pay a service to on your behalf. It's sort of the ideal use-case for content-based addressing, I would think, since you're trying to prove some sort of connection with/ownership of/patronage over a piece of content. And it should be more long term resilient than a centrali…
I was surprised too, but only for a moment. In the end it's basically just a record that you "own" a small amount of data (url, ipfs hash, 'coin'). Unless my ownership gets me some utility (like exclusive access to the jpeg, maybe? Ability to transfer the ownership to El Salvadorian govt to pay my taxes?), I don't see how it has value
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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…
Honest question: at this point why don't we skip the NFT part and just keep the URL and the content in the Internet Archive?
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>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…
"Okay."
"But our prototype has four wheels, as a temporary prototype to test out the technology."
"That doesn't seem like it tests the technology very well."
"I don't see why you're quibbling about the details. We've sold thousands of ThreeWheels to people who are very enthusiastic about living in a three wheeled future!"
"You've sold four wheeled cars to people who want three wheeled cars?"
"They then resell them for tens of thousands of dollars more than they paid! They're ecstatically happy! Nobody is bigger fans of the three wheel car future than our customers."
"Even though these cars, the cars they purchased, have four wheels."
"Well, they could remove one wheel later, if they wanted."
"Would that work?"
"Oh no, absolutely not. You couldn't drive it at all, then. It would be much worse than a regular car. A lot of work remains to be done to gradually transition current ThreeWheels to a three wheeled form. We plan to send robots to each customer's garage to cut sections from the frame and re-weld them together. Then we need to swap out the steering rack, re-route the driveshaft, change suspension components, brakes..."
"That sounds hard."
"Yes, we think it will take hundreds of changes over years to move current generation ThreeWheels to a three wheeled mode."
"Instead of just building three wheeled cars today?"
"Wow John Cena bought a ThreeWheel and posted it on his instragram! My collection of ThreeWheels is going to explode in value! I love my job!"
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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…
Honest question: at this point why don't we skip the NFT part and just keep the URL and the content in the Internet Archive?
As an engineer, I feel like this single post helped me better understand Web3 and how it worked under the hood better than any of the heavily hyped Discord and Twitter announcements of new projects over the past year. It's interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the other big crypto / NFT marketplaces. Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.
> Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along. It has, but only a small portion of people with the engineering skills to recognize knew it. Those profiting off it hyped it, and those not either called it a scam or stayed out of the fray.
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> It would be easy to look at the very early computers, which were perhaps not all that useful, and shrug — but that take wouldn't have extended well into the future as the technology scaled. Early computers solved problems they were designed to solve. So they were plenty useful . Your statement is nonsensical.
Early blockchains have also solved the problems they were designed to solve. For example: - Bitcoin offers a transferrable store of value which cannot be inflated by governments, - Stablecoins, thanks to being cross-border, are often used in e.g. Argentina where the local currency is unstable and it's not legal to buy dollars, - Proof of Humanity + universal basic income has provided extra income to Argentinian peopl…
This would be cheaper if you didn't use the crypto part. The reason people use crypto is just that the governments have not yet noticed they're running an illegal money transmitter.
Sure a solution would be to put the NFTs on a decentralized file system (IPFS?) or a P2P sharing network. And have kind of P2P/decentralized API that can easily be validated. But then, how would you ban illegal content?
I'm sure Opensea would prefer to keep everything centralized and under control. But clearly, there is room for improvement.