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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#691

Post by _heimdall »

hanniabu wrote: post #590
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…

Metamask lets you enter your own RPC endpoints

Don't get me wrong its good that the option is there, but short of coding and operating your own full node Metamask will still be trusting a centralized third party

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#692

Post by _1tan »

brentis wrote: post #562

Loved the perspective. It does feel like those technologies which get "wrapped" open sourced or otherwise by first movers feel this way. A few points which hope to not conflict with pinned rules: - Ethereum has outlived it's usefulness. Cost me several thousand dollars closing token positions last month. Swore off anything on this chain. People literally cannot move their $100 worth of alts because of the fees. (my k…

Could you elaborate on "mobile crypto please"?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#693

Post by _heimdall »

this_user wrote: post #520
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 fundamental problem with decentralisation is that it will always be less efficient than a centralised solution due to the overhead necessary for coordinating the system. This means increased costs of some nature. In order to justify those costs, the decentralised system has to add a sufficient amount of value compared to the centralised solution. And not only is that usually not the case, but, as Moxie points out…

This is the exact argument for authoritarianism over democracy. Centralization is easier and often cheaper, but you have to trust the group in charge completely. Even then, the collective loses out on innovation and new ideas because only a small subset of the population is in a position to change anything.

Centralization is often a short term win, decentralization is a long play. Unfortunately, we almost always seem to chose immediate gratification which is why we see decentralization abandoned early, and why we see democratic freedoms being replaced by authoritarian control.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#694

Post by _heimdall »

panarky wrote: post #686
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…

Do you know of any financial structures or corporate structures that are not pyramid shaped?

Only looming at financial and corporate systems is a seriously limited pool of data. There are non profits, collectives, employee owned businesses, etc that are not a hierarchical structure but I don't think they would fall into the pool of financial or corporate structures.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#695

Post by dmitriid »

nemothekid wrote: post #565
yed wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not unique to crypto - see, for example, HTTP, or HDMI… HTTP and HDMI provided actually useful things to regular people despite their shortcomings. Crypto has been solving technical problem after technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast. > Another issue is that the goalpost is ever-shifting. We have truly distributed apps. And the only thing they are usefu…

> 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…

> At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution

1. The internet was a solution to a very specific problem. Go and educate yourself on what ARPA was doing, will you?

2. Crypto peddlers keep equating cryptocurrencies to the internet. And never ever equating it to Juicero or Enron even if all signs point to that.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#696

Post by ece »

mjfl wrote: post #688

> Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. Even organizations building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this point. If there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned about the world, it’s that people do not want to run their own servers. Why is this true? At this point it's never been easier to make your own static website, deploy nginx, and get online. Maybe not everyone wants…

It's the things that come with running a server that everyone dreads: software updates, downtime, potential attacks and misconfigurations.

As an example, I think we would have more decentralized social networks if moderation was easier, so in a sense, these are human problems, but where the software hasn't caught up yet. So, hard agree that software should be easier to do. Servers are just one part of it IMO.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#697

Post by _heimdall »

magicalhippo wrote: post #494
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

If the NFT contained the content hash, your and the creators public keys, a signed timestamp, and the signature of those parts by the content creator, then the content could be stored elsewhere no? Obviously you'd want to keep a copy yourself, but at least you could then prove to others the file you have really is the one the creator sold, no? No expert at these crypto things, in either sense, am I missing something?

Say you add all that information to the transaction, to verify it in the future you still need to run the original file through the same hash function to prove they match.

Its common for image files to be modified, many times even automatically by the hosting service. They might compress it, remove unnecessary metadata, or add metadata for themselves. Any of that would break the hash, so you'd need to make sure any host you use to store the original absolutely never changes the file.

Then what? Well the image exists and you can verify it wasn't changed off-chain since the transaction finalized, so that's good. There's now an image publicly available online BUT a specific block chain says you own it, so that's also cool.

But wait, that hash isn't guaranteed to be unique so really anyone could make another NFT pointing to the same URL and file hash, now they also own it? And anyone could just download the file, so they own it to? And there are no legal protections for NFTs, so what was the benefit of paying to have one block chain transaction say you own it in the first place?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#698

Post by panarky »

chrisco255 wrote: post #633
sbierwagen wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The crux of the article is that the front-ends are all routing calls through centralized APIs to get their message included on the blockchain. Infura and Alchemy don't do much. They just pass a JSON-RPC message to an Ethereum node running on their servers. There is some additional indexing services they provide, but there are many open, decentralized alternatives for that such as TheGraph Protocol. And it's not unfea…

It's almost as if there's only the bare minimum decentralization needed to avoid regulation and taxation and the rest is good old fashioned centralized web apps.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#699

Post by dmitriid »

beoberha wrote: post #421
epolanski wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the early part. 3 years into the internet we already had emails and tcp. 13 years into blockchains we have nothing.

It’s extremely disingenuous to say we have “nothing”. The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciate, even if they don’t see a practical application.

> The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciate

I'm a technical person. Virtual machines and languages are a dime a dozen, and EVM is no different.

Moreover, Solidity was such a laughable attempt at a programming language that even first version of Javascript was better.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#700

Post by _heimdall »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #424
toomuchtodo wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess they don't do file hashes because image hosts so often change the file you uploaded. They might compress it, remove unnecessary metadata, or add their own metadata. All of that would change the file contents, breaking the hash.

A permenantly verifiable has still doesn't really solve it though. Someone can still change or remove the file later, even if you downloaded the original before you now have a transaction with a bad URL but a good hash. You can't update the transaction to change the URL, so what would that mean for anyone wanting to buy the NFT from you?

There's also the much bigger issue - say we solve the above problem as well. There are no legal protections for NFT ownership and there is nothing stopping people from just copying the artwork you own. What's the point of paying so much money for the right to kind of own a piece of art that anyone can legally copy and use?

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