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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#741

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

It may be worth noting that all the crypto projects compete with each other and consider the others flawed, so it may be unfair to judge the whole sphere by some examples.

There are people who would say everything besides Bitcoin is a shitcoin atm. I personally am leaning towards that stance, although I wish the energy issue could be resolved.

I don't see why NFTs could not simply be "colored coins" on the Bitcoin blockchain?

As for people running servers, I think what matters is the option to run a server if you want to. In EMail most use servers by the big players, but people can also run their own servers.

It reminds me a bit of the counterargument to open source, that "nobody reads the code" - no, but some people can read the code, and if they would find something fishy, they would announce it to the world and hopefully even the nocoder users would be informed. It is still about trust, but people have a choice whom to trust.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#742

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #677

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,…

If your only solution is clunky, then sure, maybe NFT's are worthless as a distributed asset, if you can even call most of them that at this point.

But you're solution is bad, that's why no one does it. A much better solution is to use a decentralized file hosting protocol and store your base NFT file on it. These protocols are free to prune illegal data should their government force them to, but are economically motivated not to. With enough redundancy, (and if you're NFT is so valuable you'll keep a local copy) this isn't a problem.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#743

Post by colordrops »

bricemo wrote: post #377
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…

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

No you're not - it could be stored in multiple places. It's, a hash, not a URL, and if it's a properly constructed hash it would hard or impossible to fake. The content on server other than internet archive would have the same hash.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#744

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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…

> I see this repeated a lot but it's just not accurate. E-mail was invented within like 2 years of the internet and immediately allowed universities to exchange messages with one another.

This is untrue. Look at my answer here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29847559 .

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#746

Post by hk__2 »

can16358p wrote: post #733
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

What if the URL points to a decentralized and immutable file storage system instead of a regular URL with a domain/IP?

This solves the problem while creating a new (big) one: make this decentralized and immutable file storage work.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#747

Post by colordrops »

_heimdall wrote: post #697
magicalhippo wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I thought we were talking about the problem of someone pulling the rug out from under you by changing the content at a URL. The hash solves the problem, but what you are talking about is an entirely different subject, and a problem which all NFTs suffer. Or not a problem, but just a general property of NFTs and crypto as well. The network effect is extremely important with blockchains. You could also fork BTC right now and claim you own everything on the chain. Doesn't mean people will honor it.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#748

Post by tsimionescu »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #739
schoen wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove you are who you say, you’ve studied where you claim, you’ve worked at the places on your resume, and do this in ways that cannot be subverted or lost. This would be invaluable for refugees who often struggle for months or years with proving they are who they are. That's a very interesting use…

> But, how do they know that that record is really from NUU? How do they know that NUU really exists? How do they know what its signing keys were, and how long they remained under the university administration's control? How do they know whether it's a legitimate university? And, maybe most significantly, how do they know that you're the same Joeri who earned that degree back in the day, as opposed to some other Joer…

If they can verify that, how much does the blockchain add then?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#749

Post by canoebuilder »

RoboTeddy wrote: post #397
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.

When writing code for a blockchain today, even on an Ethereum L2, you're in a very resource-constrained environment where you end up using bitpacking tricks and the like. That's how it was for early computers, too, of course — they may serve as a better analogy. Programmable computers have taken decades to develop, beginning in ~1950, and I expect that decentralized computation will follow a similar path. There simpl…

There simply are numerous hard problems to solve to make this all work at greater scale. In a healthy ecosystem like Ethereum's, there are frequent research discoveries (discovery of the concept of data availability, the application of BLS signature aggregation, proposer-builder separation, zkevm, data availability sampling, ...). The software engineering effort required to implement such research is colossal as well.

Ok, so there is a massive amount of effort to be put forth to get something out of this, and even then it is still kind of up in the air what that "something" actually is.

Would it not be prudent to have at least some sort of roughly sketched map of what all this effort is supposed to bring about? other than Lambos...

Or maybe ask if we would be better served if all that effort was put forth in some other direction? Man hours are not a limitless resource.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#750

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

luhn wrote: post #388
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…

Re "early days," servers as clients, etc: There are a lot of very real problems with crypto, and the solution always lies in new technologies. Slow settlement and high gas fees? L2 networks. Limited global TPS? More L2 networks or alternative L1 chains. Wasteful energy use? Proof-of-stake. No connection to real world data? Oracles. Relying on centralized APIs? Light clients are in the works. Can't trust that you'll g…

"All the while, nothing ever actually seems to get fixed."

Meanwhile, Bitcoin just works, and it is fairly easy to understand.

Every once in a while I try to get excited about Ethereum. They really do seem to think about a lot of interesting things and try to address them. But at the end of the day, it all just seems way too complex.

As for NFTs, I think they could just be colored coins on the Bitcoin Blockchain, which would also be easy to understand.

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