This is a good breakdown.
Too much web3 thinkpiecing (both pro and anti) comes from people who've never looked under the hood. It's refreshing to see someone try actually try crypto as a developer, not just as a user, and go deep enough to figure out how things work in practice.
Moxie's critiques are valid. All of these are well known problems to the researchers at the core of web3 and all are the subject of active R&D.
- Point 1: people fundamentally don't want to run their own servers.
Clearly true. Vitalik gave a vivid example of this in a recent interview on Bankless pod. He visited Argentina, where hyperinflation has forced many people to use crypto or physical USD. He observed people using stablecoins, but not primarily via Eth L1 or any L2. Instead many transacted via Binance. Not BSC--Binance the centralized exchange! Which provides a Paypal-like UX.
Crypto researchers are fully aware. The plan is a couple thousand validators and millions, eventually billions of end users. Of course the end users will not run command-line geth, or run their own server in any capacity.
The plan is for them to use some combination of light clients or trust-minimized hosted services. This requires bringing transaction fees way down, the core goal of L2 rollups + sharing.
Also, today's popular clients are not particularly trust-minimized, which brings us to his second point. Paraphrasing:
- Point 2: current "web3" is really mostly web2. Under the hood, Metamask, OpenSea, etc just use trusted servers.
The fix here is trust-minimized services (= like Infura, but with every response bearing a proof of correctness) or light clients (= very similar, but using full nodes as interchangeable servers).
This exists today as a proof-of-concept. It is about to become feasible in production. The reason current Infura does not provide proofs is because Merkle proofs are 10x+ the size of the data returned for a typical query. Verkle trees fix this.
If you're curious:
- https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html
- https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/02/14/why-stateless.ht...
Zooming out. Here is the Ethereum roadmap for the next two years, summarized:
- The Merge. This removes proof-of-work. The Eth ecosystem will use >99% less energy after this point.
- The Surge. This is about data sharding. Today a transaction might cost ~$50 on a bad day on Eth L1 and ~$0.50 on a Layer 2 rollup like ZKSync. After the Surge, L2 transactions will be nearly free.
- The Verge. This is about Verkle proofs and statelessness. These allow the core user interfaces -- wallets and light clients -- to efficiently follow the blockchain without trusting central intermediaries. They enable efficient proofs of any portion of the chain or its state.
---
I think these are fundamentally powerful primitives, the implications of which we've just barely begun to explore. I actually welcome the next bear market, since it shakes out the grifters. It is day 1.