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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#991

Post by phgn »

tehnub wrote: post #443

>Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers. [...] With the shift to mobile, we now live firmly in a world of clients and servers – with the former completely unable to act as the latter I've got a dumb question: Why can't the phone or browser act as a node? Are the computational requirements too ex…

Your phone is not always online, running a node on it would mean frequent synchronisation every time you want to do something.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#992

Post by phgn »

walterbell wrote: post #169

> These client APIs are not using anything to verify blockchain state or the authenticity of responses. The results aren’t even signed. An app like Autonomous Art says “hey what’s the output of this view function on this smart contract,” Alchemy or Infura responds with a JSON blob that says “this is the output,” and the app renders it. Is there a technical debt story behind these practices? Have there been attacks wh…

You mean the smart contract would sign the response? Signatures by Infura or the node client would not tell you anything, you're already trusting them by using them.

Much of the infrastructure seems quite immature, with lots of hard problems to solve on the core blockchain first (but this is being addressed) [0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_i...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#993

Post by phgn »

oconnor663 wrote: post #246

> I think changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass. I don't think I'm disagreeing with Moxie here, but I do like to emphasize that it's less that creating software has gotten harder (which is true in some ways but false in other ways), and more that our standards and expectations for what software should do h…

Chat apps are incredibly commoditised. It also seems natural that improvements to huge tech platforms today takes more time than anything previously.

But for smaller applications that innovatively solve a new problem, feature parity shouldn't be as important. I actually think now is the best time ever to build something, with all the tooling available. You can use Electron, Firebase, Auth0, GetStream etc to solve many of your points.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#994

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

ShamelessC wrote: post #974
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #935

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but the fact that the user will do what's convenient does not mean it is better. The thing about Bitcoin (as an example) is that 99% of people using can't parse the source code, but they all know that if there was an issue in it the alarm would have been sounded by now by someone who could.

> Yes but the fact that the user will do what's convenient does not mean it is better. This is irrelevant if it doesn't gain traction.

So is everything.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#995

Post by willfiveash »

When I read "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will." I thought, what an elitist (and libertarian) idea to assume people would be able to afford and manage a server in their home but also afford/have access to the required Internet bandwidth. Yuck.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#996

Post by ptudan »

jagger27 wrote: post #555
ptudan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of use cases for NFTs with updating data. Many exist already. Most high quality NFT art project do use IPFS, yes. But that is not the only use case for NFTs

I believe that it's possible for there to be a reasonable use case for a pointer to something that changes, though I'd appreciate an example because I can't come up with one. If it links to something that's not on some sort of blockchain, then what's the point? If an NFT contains a normal URL, how could that possibly be valuable? The domain could expire or be transferred, or the original server hosting it could go do…

Imagine a logistics system that uses the existing capability of NFTs to give all interested parties a clear and transparent view of ownership transfers, eg factory to container ship to port etc. The data underneath can only be modified by the current owner of the NFT. The off-chain data could be encrypted and fit the particular companies standard.

The blockchain need not contain 100% of the business logic for a use-case, but instead only the parts that are relevant to being trustless and public.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#997

Post by necovek »

acdha wrote: post #898
spiddy wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 This is only true of the data stored on the blockchain itself. As described in the article, that isn’t anywhere near enough to replace the centralized systems being billed as “web3”, and it’s completely unworkable for data which can’t be public, which is up…

Deletion and/or non-public is an interesting problem. Obviously, you can store it encrypted and delete the key, but advances in compute and algorithms might render that encryption breakable.

For data that needs to be updated, all you need is an override mechanism, which sounds simple enough.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#998

Post by greenreptar »

dlubarov wrote: post #571
toomuchtodo wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. Correct, because it's clear storing the content in web2 Internet Archive is superior ("you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive"). They will persist regardless of web3 shenanigans, and hash addressing ensures content integrity. You could even use a torrent to store and serve the content (again, which us…

I'm not sure it's even necessary to use Internet Archive or a torrent? If I own an NFT whose hash is stored on-chain, I can just ensure the availability of the preimage by storing it myself. Then when I want to interact with a centralized NFT marketplace, I can upload the preimage to their server. They'd verify the hash and store the image. I'd continue storing it myself though, so if that marketplace goes away, I ca…

tying back to the article... so you want to own a server?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#999

Post by fiachamp »

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

Isn't the solve for this to store it on a decentralized storage network like Filecoin?!?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#1000

Post by samarama »

caymanjim wrote: post #642
samarama wrote: post #632

The author’s argument is definitely not nuanced, but a a straw man and a false dichotomy. “Web3 is not 100% decentralised, so it’s not really legit.” Web3 or crypto never intended to be 100% decentralised and it is impossible to be so. There will also be dapps among the 100,000 dapps that have a centralized component. Every percent decentralisation is good, be it 1%, 5%, 50% or 90% and we are in the high double digit…

You can't quantify decentralization. What does it even mean to be 99% decentralized? Anything less than 100% is just...not.

So 100% centralized is the same as 1% centralized?
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