791–800 of 1001 posts
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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
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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…
So why hasn't this been deployed yet then? And why are NFT links so common, because they just seem short sighted to me and borderline dumb considering how volatile everything in the crypto space is? Nothing about NFT's seems long term viable as they are now.
https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305
I can still see it on OpenSea:
https://opensea.io/assets/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57822130...
Maybe it was blocked and later unblocked?
Anyhow, I think he is painting too black of an image of Web3. Even if OpenSea blocks his NFT, Ethereum scanners will still show it:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57822...
It would take an Ethereum hard fork to tamper with it. That is a very big undertaking and rarely happens.
So he can prove that he minted it.
This is something we do not have on Web2. If FB deletes something, you do not have proof. And you cannot see it anymore. Neither in Chrome nor in Edge nor in Firefox.
On Web3, if OpenSea blocks an NFT and MetaMask uses the OpenSea API to display it, you can use another browser and see it again.
Moxie makes so many good critiques (some are so subtle, it might be worth a second read). I got the sense he’s trying very hard to be even handed and constructive about a situation he feels pretty badly about, but his true feelings are bleeding through in some of the side points / parentheticals. One point that I disagree with is his almost axiomatic premise that decentralization is an inherent good and the implicati…
from an implementation pov "trust" is a distraction where anyone can quickly derail any argument citing "Trusting Trust" or "the show me the root of trust" ...
So to avoid meta-discussions talking about cryptography instead of trust skips the noise and goes straight to the heart of the issue.
Consider this:
- Talking about cryptography is hard but it's unambiguous.
- Talking about trust is easy but ambiguous.
But we forget trust isn't "a thing", it constantly changes, it's useful only as a tool to accept randomness/chaos of life. And so we'll perpetually fail when discussing trust in the digital space or try to pin it down in order to allow converting it into a spec or an implementation.
And I think Moxie understands this and so skips the noise by going straight to cryptography which is the only "tool" that is meaningful when we talk about the things we base trust assumptions on (cia triad).
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> I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech I actually struggled with this point throughout the article. I'm not sure I see this as a parallel trend toward centralization like we saw with web2 - but rather that this is how software is built today and this is what we're comfortable with. It doesn't seem unnatural or problematic to me that we will start with something that approximates the wo…
Why would we ever move toward decentralization? It is almost always easier to have at least some central point of control in any distributed system, even the Internet (IANA, RIRs, etc.). It is also very difficult to remove a centralized control point after a system is already deployed, especially if the system supports heterogenous clients (as it is likely that some clients will be slow to switch to the new design, a…
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But see, this is where I get lost in this concept. Should Jagex fold and the game become unplayable, what do you own? An entry in a database that says that you once had this item but you can't do anything with it? Why is that valuable? I can sort of see the argument if other game developers allow for these items to be reused in other environments, and that's something pushed by NFT enthusiasts, but I don't see how th…
>Should Jagex fold and the game become unplayable, what do you own? An entry in a database that says that you once had this item but you can't do anything with it? Why is that valuable? Sometimes just ownership of something is valuable in itself. That's the whole idea of collectibles, it's not always tied to its original utility. Think having an original SNES versus an emulator on a computer or an original Picasso vs…
Why would a company do this? They spend a load of dev time to create a valuable in-game asset linked to a non-fungible token created by a third party which only one person can possess at a time and then... hope the NFT owner pays $34.99 for a retail copy of the game, otherwise the asset goes unused?
That doesn't sound like a scalable marketing strategy.
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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
This is where it falls apart for me too, people are paying huge sums for artificially scarce links to someone else’s server? I keep feeling like I’m missing something.
People that earn money on NFT don't have feeling that they miss something.
I love the Gmail analogy, that even though email is decentralized, everyone just uses Gmail (probably because it's a better UX)
At the risk of displaying my ignorance and lack of knowledge about this area, one part I found very familiar in this article is that the action interactions in his apps didn't actually interact with the blockchain, but essentially with two centralized services. My very limited understanding is that for blockchains essentially the way to distribute them is that every node has a full copy. This sounds awfully expensive…
Except that as you say, it's too expensive for every node to have a full copy, so there will only be a few dominant players. If that's the case, web3 will be like what we have now, where instead of the dominant players being Google, Meta, and Amazon they will be the two or three dominant web3 companies, with a few smaller people trying to keep up. So I would agree with your last sentence.
You can store the entire blockchain on a 1 tb harddrive.
The cost prohibitive nature is only running an open rpc that you tell hundreds of thousands of people about. Then you will have to deal will letting all those people access that 1tb of data.
Quicknode lets you have a private rpc with the full history of the chain for dollars a month.
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> 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…
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