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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#901

Post by detaro »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #781
guelo wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is IPFS really web3? IPFS is a slight upgrade to bitorrent, and p2p tech was popularized by Napster over 20 years ago. It's been a part of the internet longer than "web2"

Indeed, it's the point of the article: Web 2.0 was already supposed to be this decentralized nirvana with blogs and peer to peer software like IPFS. And look what ended up dominating ! Some day these new centralized "web3" services will just remove (or very severely restrict) their APIs, just like Twitter and Facebook did. (Hopefully the effect will not be as dramatic on the companies using them...)

> Web 2.0 was already supposed to be this decentralized nirvana with blogs and peer to peer software like IPFS.

That never was a core of how people defined Web 2.0.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#902

Post by scrubs »

betterunix2 wrote: post #476
distrill wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This discussion would benefit from a Ramsey, graph, random matrix person to expound on "random" graphs as seen in nature. Nodes with n edges in, 1 out are around but not without some centralization. Surely not robust?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#903

Post by arbol »

sbierwagen wrote: post #561
distrill wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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…

Surely development of the full fat clients will lead to the required innovations to provide light, mobile clients for blockchains that are properly distributed.

I agree there are many scams but we really are in more of a research period with regards to the tech. The research will continue through the hype cycles.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#905

Post by simsla »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #839
simias wrote: post #29

>When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for purely digital goods might be a concept with a future. Having standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and query and update these goods might make sense (althou…

I am only interested by money aspect of crypto and especially on ability to fund companies easily via labor (actually that worked well in Communism). Will see if central bank currencies will allow for the same. That could be big boost to economy and big hit to VCs so I expect this to come from EU. All those creator economy apps show that there's a need to democratise economy. I am again tempted to quote hustlers here…

> and especially on ability to fund companies easily via labor

Not sure I'm following. How would that work, and how would crypto facilitate this?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#906

Post by diab0lic »

Thorrez wrote: post #701
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

You're not fully trusting them. They can't change the content.

They can change the content, you’ll just know they did it. Much like if my watch gets stolen I’ll know, but I still don’t have a watch anymore.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#907

Post by IgorPartola »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #652
IgorPartola wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This somewhat reminds me of reading IPFS documentation (which is fucking excellent BTW) and realizing the same thing: nobody is going to run their own pinning service and Piñata is the only one they mention by name which means it’ll be the platform everyone (to a first approximation) will use.

The lack of a a few "chains" though means an ephemeral node might actually not suck though. Put another way, even IPFS nodes that for all intents and purposes are "clients" can still speak the same protocal to talk to the pinning service. The single-ish central chain idea was always terrible. "Trustless" or not, that much synchronization is a misfeature! The real world really is partial-order time/causality, that is…

I make content. I put it on IPFS. I pin it to Piñata because my laptop isn’t on all the time. Piñata decides my content isn’t acceptable and removes it. You can’t access my content. Not a problem?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#908

Post by acdha »

bblb wrote: post #880
foxfluff wrote: post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, it would need some massive network effect to work at scale And nobody wants to participate. These projects are doomed to be extremely niche. As TFA points out, even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. It could have worked in the days of casual piracy (kazaa, napster, certain private torrent sites etc had a shitton of users) if you managed to sell it as a way to do exactly that.. But gett…

>your storage may then be used for illegal material Then forget about the anonymization features of Freenet, and build something that ties to your Google Auth, Facebook ID, Government ID, whatever. And let LEA access all of the content and seize/prosecute illegal content. Really not that different than storing your content on any of the cloud storage providers. With the exception that your data would be always guaran…

> And let LEA access all of the content and seize/prosecute illegal content. Really not that different than storing your content on any of the cloud storage providers. With the exception that your data would be always guaranteed to be highly available, and not on just one or two centralized cloud storages.

It’s not that simple: if you host anyone’s content, you’re taking on personal risk (do you want to have to convince law enforcement that the pirated Disney movie or child pornography served from your home IP was served entirely without your knowledge?), giving up your resources (“Netflix is slow, turn off the mirror and see if it gets better!”), and getting slower performance/reliability (e.g. why OpenSea uses GCP instead of IPFS) immediately in the hopes that it will at some point in the future become worthwhile.

Note also that cloud storage is centralized administratively but distributed for reliability. I would give very long odds that you’re more likely to lose data through random IPFS nodes disappearing / dropping your data than on S3, and if you have to run your own geographically replicated nodes it’ll cost more in your time until you have a very large amount of data.

Statistically nobody does that, and because P2P networks need to significantly over-provision to compensate for unreliable nodes it’s hard to get anywhere close to competitive. The Linux world has the freedom ethos, no concerns about copyright/malware/etc., and still few people torrent ISOs because it’s usually slower.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#909

Post by tim333 »

_heimdall wrote: post #693
this_user wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't recall that argument in practice. In Kazakhstan just now for the leader has recently used the argument "Those who don't surrender will be eliminated" which seem more common than "centralization is easier and often cheaper" as far as I can tell in such situations.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#910

Post by acdha »

searchableguy wrote: post #525
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

There is arweave which is trying to bring permanent storage. You could store the nft on arweave chain and mint the NFT on the same. https://www.arweave.org/ Though, I'm not sure how this will "scale".

It’ll scale like S3, et al.: replicated storage requires ongoing payments because sysadmins need to be paid, storage needs to be bought & replaced, network bandwidth is metered, etc.

It could be cheaper if someone can finally make a P2P network which becomes and stays popular[1] but it’ll always require more than a one-time payment. That could be donor funded (Internet Archive) but I’d be leery of assuming anything long-term unless you’re paying for it.

1. Abuse is the hard problem here: if I host a node, when the police download something illicit my IP is the one they see and I have to prove that it was done without my knowledge. This is why nobody does this except for known sources.

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