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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#851

Post by mattl »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #504
sv123 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But one of the main points of article is that people don't want to run servers, developers included. Even being easy, letting someone else do it will always be easier.

How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers? If there's a strong enough need, people will run their own servers even if they'd rather not. "people don't want to run servers" arguably could be rephrased as "people don't have a reason (today) to run their own servers". I'd argue this is a key difference between web1 and cryto centralization and the web2 centralization. If Google announce…

Should be pretty easy to find the top 100/1000/10000 companies and look at their MX records.

I’d imagine it’s a large number of Office 365, GSuite by Google and Barracuda/ProofPoint which may point to a SaaS thing or an internal server.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#852

Post by mritchie712 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #581
sv123 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But one of the main points of article is that people don't want to run servers, developers included. Even being easy, letting someone else do it will always be easier.

But the question was how hard is it to run a competitor to Infura. And the answer is trivially easy. Infura is just an Ethereum node API that's publicly exposed. Building an Infura competitor literally is nothing more than $100/month it costs to run a Geth node on AWS.

Right, this was my point. People don't usually run Postgres themselves (e.g. set up Postgres in a docker container), but it's not very hard to do.

The article makes it sound like Infura has a moat. There's no moat, it's as easy to switch as it is to switch Postgres clouds.

To be clear, I agree with most of their findings, this on is just a bit off.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#853

Post by endorphine »

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…

> It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart contracts)

When was this need "understood"? When was it realized? How exactly?

I find it a bit paradoxical to say that "we understood the need for smart contracts right after the blockchain was invented". What problem did smart contracts solve when they were invented?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#854

Post by clippablematt »

gaogao wrote: post #630
barmstrong wrote: post #484

Really liked this post - brings up some great points, and I consider Moxie a friend. Here are a few notes that came to mind though... 1. For NFTs, some keep their data in IPFS (decentralized file storage) or in the smart contract itself for procedurally generated images. We (as a community) should probably move more to solutions like this over time, since it is indeed more decentralized to build them that way. 2. I a…

1) The addressing side of IPFS could probably actually be standardized to be as ubiquitous as URLs or email addresses. DNS style stuff is honestly a reasonably good blockchain fit. The storage and server side of it still has a ton of gaps, where lessons learned from torrents are being somewhat inefficiently rediscovered. 4) It sounds like the data available already from those two isn't that simple and is likely to on…

I think it really is light client development that will make a big change to being decentralised e2e. Being able to talk with the chain directly from an app or webpage without needing to make api requests to a node (be it local or infura/alchemy). If we can get light clients for indexing/search networks too that would be the dream.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#855

Post by manmal »

spiddy wrote: post #795
betterunix2 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data, which provides a big incentive to not be evil. the moment someone can make a case for bad play they have the advantage to shift the market to a different platform. Unfortunately this is not so easy on web2 because of the data that locks users on those platfo…

I don't think making all data public is the best solution for preventing companies from selling my data, or withholding it from me.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#856

Post by mritchie712 »

wbl wrote: post #534
mritchie712 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not that hard (or even expensive) to run your own. Here's[0] an example doing it on k8's. I had something similar running on GCP in a couple hours. It's been running for a month with no issues. 0 - https://messari.io/article/running-an-ethereum-node-on-kuber...

As someone who has run nodes, no it is hard and expensive. Every time a geth node dies it has to resync and no persistent volume mounts and stateful sets are not solutions. They are problems. If you need to scale horizontally you get strange consistency issues with the API. All of this makes for a very unpleasant experience. It's built for TLC on a beefy box not a herd.

What version of geth were you using? How many CPUs? When one of my geth nodes dies, another spawn without issue.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#857

Post by bertil »

sbierwagen wrote: post #646
distrill wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"You should check out my new car company, ThreeWheel. We're completely revolutionizing the business of getting around. The key innovation is that our cars have three wheels. This reduces tire cost, improves aerodynamics, and reduces rolling friction. Our three wheeled cars are the future of all wheeled transport!" "Okay." "But our prototype has four wheels, as a temporary prototype to test out the technology." "That…

I thought you were going after Aptera and Arcimoto for a second and I was wondering what they had done to deserve to be associated with that debate…

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#858

Post by bertil »

grey-area wrote: post #684
distrill wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why would the global financial system move to a blockchain?

If key financial institutions had more trust in a blockchain than in the Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England, and maybe the Central Bank of Japan to hold an account of their assets.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#859

Post by losvedir »

I am (or was?) a huge Moxie Marlinspike fan, and highly recommend this video[0] of his from Defcon several years ago. It was formative in my understanding of privacy and security.

That said, something here really doesn't add up. Being a huge fan, I took note several years ago of MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency, which listed him on the home page as one of the team.[1] Or, see this Wired article about it[2]. The big selling point, as I remember it, of MobileCoin (per the name) was that it was actually feasible for small clients (i.e. phones) to meaningfully take part in the network. But he's since been scrubbed from the site, as far as I can tell.

MobileCoin was added to Signal, much to the chagrin of HN. And Signal is intimately related to Moxie's work. I had thought that if MobileCoin becomes a thing, then the holders of the originally mined coin would become pretty rich, and I assume that would include Moxie.

So I'm a little confused by how this post fits in. I infer from it that he's new to web3 and crypto in general, but it feels like this isn't the case. (Though "web3" is ambiguous, and I suppose he's referring generally to Ethereum and dApps.) But his main point seems to be that the dominant cryptocurrency isn't suitable for involving light clients, which was the main selling point of MobileCoin.

I just wish it were clear his involvement with MobileCoin, since it feels to me like that could be a pretty significant conflict of interest with regard to Ethereum investigated here and could influence his perspective. For all I know, he answered some questions to the MobileCoin folks and they inflated his involvement. But then that wouldn't really explain how or why it was integrated into Signal.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171216012822/https://www.mobil... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#860

Post by creata »

clpm4j wrote: post #133
ssss11 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they key is: despite regular people not wanting to RUN their own server, they do want to CONTROL their own server. Current incumbents treat your data like tier asset, not like custody. This is because you pay nothing. The beginning of regular people having empowerment begins by paying some fee to own the product.

None of the regular people I'm familiar care about their data at all . If you use any of the popular social media apps (Twitter, TikTok, FB/Instagram, Snapchat), then you can't really claim that you care about your data, and most of the people I know use those apps on a weekly if not daily basis.

> If you use any of the popular social media apps (Twitter, TikTok, FB/Instagram, Snapchat), then you can't really claim that you care about your data

That's not true. I don't use any of those, and I understand the huge toll it has on my ability to participate in stuff. Many conversations happen only on Twitter or Facebook, so it's perfectly possible to "care about your data" and still, as a necessary compromise, use those services.

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