My First Impressions of Web3 • Hacker News Board

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#671

Post by grog454 » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:31 AM UTC

yed wrote: post #596

nemothekid wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto has been solving technical problem after technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast. This is too dismissive of Crypto. I’m not a crypto bro but Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely digital decentralized immutable record. I hesitate to call it a currency, but it created something that was digitally scarce . The economic value it created can…

> Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely digital decentralized immutable record. That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a technical solution. > I hesitate to call it a currency, but it created something that was digitally scarce. My comment was about web3 really and the associated hype, not so much cryptocurrencies themselves. I agree there's something there, though not entirely convinc…

> That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a technical solution.

I'll present a problem that that solution solves. That cryptographically backed record establishes a closer approximation to the abstract idea of "ownership" than anything has before.

I was a pretty naïve first-time home owner in that I was surprised to learn about something called "property tax". "property rent" would be a better description, since its not a one time fee (like most taxes) but something you have to pay to a government entity in perpetuity. Don't feel like paying it? You get booted off "your" "property".

Title theft and fraud are also a thing, and we even have "title insurance" to help mitigate falling victim to it.

Neither of these things is possible on a cryptographic blockchain (eviction or theft). Ownership of the NFT cannot physically be altered without the owner's volition. Establishing a link between the NFT and the underlying asset is certainly a problem, but it's not one that blockchains are attempting to solve.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#672

Post by iskander » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:32 AM UTC

medion wrote: post #503

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…

This was insanely surprising to me - I actually always thought the jpeg/art was stored as a kind of ‘blob’ on the blockchain that it was authenticated against the owners wallet/private key.

Some NFTs are stored this way (e.g. Blitmaps, Terraforms, Corruption(*s), &c); it's a more restrictive artistic medium since storage costs are high and technical limits feel like a trip back to the 80s. If you can fit nice art into the constraints then it can become quite popular/valuable since fully on-chain NFTs are actually decentralized (rather than the more common practice of linking to an external image).

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#673

Post by spullara » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:38 AM UTC

strken wrote: post #530

betterunix2 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github relies on a distributed storage architecture (local git repositories on developers' machines) and in theory anyone can take a project from github and duplicate it on gitlab etc. In reality nobody bothers and a project hosted on github will remain exclusively hosted on github and nowhere else, and likewise with other git hosting services. For the most part nobody cares if the data is hosted on a distributed sys…

People do bother. I don't have specific examples off the top of my head, but I've occasionally run into an read-only GitHub repo that's been moved to Gitea or GitLab, or even BitBucket. More broadly speaking, it's important that you can migrate, even if you don't actually do it, because users who can easily churn give the developers an incentive to keep the UX solid. If you can just leave GitHub at any time, then the…

That is like saying that some people bother to host their own email.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#674

Post by iskander » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:38 AM UTC

doopy1 wrote: post #144

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…

Art Blocks is completely on-chain :)

That's not quite right. The JS source code is committed on chain via a contract interaction and every minted token gets a token hash which, when run through the JS source, can recreate the art.

But...the execution environment is still your web browser and non-animated Art Blocks NFTs still have a "preview" stored off-chain like most other. Neither running the code in your browser or retrieving the preview is an on-chain operation.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#675

Post by cmroanirgo » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:38 AM UTC

jonnydubowsky wrote: post #542

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…

Tally is a community-owned, open-source fork of MetaMask. From first impressions it looks like it will also solve some of the issues brought up in Moxie's (excellent) blog post, i.e decentralizing the node-> NFT->wallet Metadata routes. Regarding the immutability of NFT image pointers: Some emerging solutions to this issue are: Use ERC2477 (DRAFT). This allows you to have some control over the metadata to ensure the…

The Firefox extension for tally seems to be absent... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tally/

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#676

Post by dmitriid » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:43 AM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #622

clarle wrote: post #25

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.

I keep saying that there are exactly two kinds of people in the crypto space: scammers who know exactly what they are doing, and gullible fools

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#677

Post by jiggawatts » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:43 AM UTC

The author mentions that currently all NFTs are just URLs, but it is possible to store data directly in the blockchain, even if it would be prohibitively expensive.

An issue with general-purpose immutable storage is that it can be permanently polluted with illegal data. Everything from child pornography, instructions for making drugs or explosives, doxing/attack information, private keys for copy protection systems, etc...

It would be possible to make Ethereum or any similar blockchain illegal to the level of "penalty of death" in many countries by simply adding some horrendously blasphemous text content to it.

Even if bulk image or video data is too expensive to store, an option would be to simply use torrent "magnet:" links.

Bitcoin is just for financial transactions, so I doubt it would be vulnerable to this, but the more generic chains don't seem to have any way to protect themselves from this kind of attack.

Seriously, what would happen if a bunch of paedophiles started minting NFTs of their favourite child pornography and trading it? They would be "protected" by the inertia of the block chain. Governments eventually would have to step in and make it totally illegal, and then.. that's it. The value would instantly go to zero!

Alternatively, NFTs would have to be made revocable or erasable in some way, but that then totally defeats the purpose. That's the author's point -- his dynamically changing NFT was revoked in this manner.

I just don't see a way around this. Either you allow indelible illegal content, or allow forced revocation. Either way, the value of NFTs must go to zero.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#678

Post by dang » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:44 AM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #477

dang wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You started from the article and headed straight for a highly repetitive flamewar trope. That's just what we're trying to avoid. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site more to heart? You unfortunately have a history of violating it, and we're trying for at least a slightly better quality of discussion here.

I have to disagree like others are doing. There was nothing wrong with that comment. I've avoided this entire post so far because after reading the entire article, I was left with a distinct "huh, this looks like a pyramid scheme run by idiots and that may even include somebody I previously respected", which is pretty much what NFTs and most of digital cryptocurrency are.

The comment consists of "This", "Then", and "how indeed", followed by the biggest recent inflammatory tweet on the topic. That is not an interesting or substantive comment. Many users in this thread have posted far more substantive things. HN is for that, not this.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#679

Post by Xavdidtheshadow » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:45 AM UTC

I really love their example of an NFT that changes based on where you see it.

I've been kicking around an idea of selling a bushel of NFT's and then later changing all the images to the text "I spent money on a monkey but all I got was this stupid text" and then abandoning the project.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#680

Post by Galanwe » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 6:45 AM UTC

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…

> The centralization of apis (infura

> How hard is it to create a competitor to infura?

Infura is merely hosting nodes for you and exposing their JSON RPC endpoints. They did not _create_ the API.

There's already plenty of competitors in that space. QuickNode and GetBlock for instance, if you want mutualised/managed nodes. You can also host your own node yourself, or use e.g. AWS Blockchain to host it for you, or even use the public free hosted nodes that most blockchain project provide. It's just a Metter of trade-off between cost, time and security.

If you are using JSON RPC APIs (which most people do) there is nothing that locks you to Infura or any other provider.