Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web3 is centralized and inefficient

neelc.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 769 posts

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#211

Post by testesttest »

sirnicolaz wrote: post #199
mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

In the world of digital art, there are actually people developing NFTs that are purely generated on-chain. It's still a relatively small school, but you can check some of them out here https://www.0xchain.art/

It is about 9% on ETH. yournfts.org

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#212

Post by exdsq »

mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

To be specific, an NFT can be anything - even a Turing complete program - but common ones are simply containing a string of a URL.

Edit: I was loosely involved in some of the conversation around smart contract and token implementation on a top 10 chain and there’s actually a lot of interesting issues with on chain data, such as if child pornography is added suddenly in some countries hosting a node can be seen as distributing CP (so only allowing URLs and then having filters to remove that at a community level is an easy solution).

I currently only like NFTs as representations of digital licenses or tickets etc anyway, so simple hashes work for me.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#213

Post by seanhunter »

mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Very often the tokenURI is on IPFS meaning that the URI is in fact a hash of the digital asset. The digital asset can't change because that would result in a different IPFS uri.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#214

Post by jfkimmes »

jeroenhd wrote: post #146
yashg wrote: post #31

Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity to the early adopters and insiders. I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling. I wrote about it some time ago and and shared here on HN https://yash.info/blog/what-is-web3/

There are some use cases for blockhains, namely cryptocurrencies and their unregulated nature. There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy. Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical…

> There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy.

Private payments can easily solved without a blockchain. For private payments you don't need a completely trust-less system. Taler[1] solves this quite elegantly: they provide completetly anonymous payments for the customer but still require the merchant to be 'on-record' to make money laundering harder/impossible. For that they rely on a regulated and trusted party as you would with a regular payment provider or bank. No proof of work needed, no value volatility, just an online representation of cash with accountability for the merchant built-in.

Of course, this also means that your second point is still valid for Taler: The involved trusted parties could collectively decide that they want to discriminate against certain merchants, in the same way the current payment providers did.

[1]: https://taler.net/en/

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#215

Post by onion2k »

alexb_ wrote: post #97

People use centralized systems because they actually like the convenience that comes with it. And with that, comes the decentralized system changing in such a way that it changes to almost NEEDING centralization. The problem is that engineers and cybersecurity people all think that everyone else thinks like they do, when in actuality the complete opposite is true. The biggest example is the internet itself - the inte…

Most centralized systems exist because the best way to extract profit from whatever they do is to maintain control. It's possible to profit from part of a decentralized system, but if you want to maximize your take then centralization is the way to go.

Every decentralized system that works was created with a goal other than directly profiting from it to start with, and succeeded because someone found a way to profit from some part of it. Eventually though, in most cases, the companies and people that run the system coalesce until its effectively centralized, with a few single entities running the points of failure. See electricity generation, car manufacturing, news media, game publishing, book publishing, glasses manufacturing, etc for examples. The Internet is still in the "companies coalesce" stage which is why it still looks decentralized, but those companies merge or vanish quite regularly, with fewer and fewer getting more and more control.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#216

Post by vmception »

ShamelessC wrote: post #209
vmception wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't care about that the impractical enthusiast stuff, I care about the bloggers that make these flippant dismissals instead of talking about the impractical things that are possible. I simultaneously observe that the impractical things can be made more practical . For example, Metamask with a non-default RPC node is great compared to using crypto before Metamask. Phantom wallet on Solana is even further impro…

> Node software still sucks! It can be improved! Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Not sure what you mean or expect, but pretending - I mean assuming - that is a question in good faith, then for EVMs, I would start with Erigon

https://github.com/ledgerwatch/erigon

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#217

Post by dfabulich »

jeroenhd wrote: post #146
yashg wrote: post #31

Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity to the early adopters and insiders. I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling. I wrote about it some time ago and and shared here on HN https://yash.info/blog/what-is-web3/

There are some use cases for blockhains, namely cryptocurrencies and their unregulated nature. There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy. Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical…

Cryptocurrencies are terrible at privacy, too. Any time you try to use cryptocurrency to buy physical goods (or fiat currency), whoever you're transacting with can know every transaction you've ever made.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#219

Post by testesttest »

mmaunder wrote: post #188

I still can't get over that NFT's are just a URL pointing to the data. They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset. It's like selling a sign pointing to houses for the price of the house, and claiming you own the house, hoping that the sign will increase in value the way the house does, and bragging about it. For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

> They don't even have an on-chain hash of the digital asset

Yea... 45% of NFTs have their hash on chain https://yournfts.org/#stats. It isn't great but it isn't none.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#220

Post by telomero22 »

yashg wrote: post #31

Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity to the early adopters and insiders. I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling. I wrote about it some time ago and and shared here on HN https://yash.info/blog/what-is-web3/

Here are just some of the use cases

1. 100x cheaper, faster cross-border transfers

2. Immutable, digital, accessible, secure ownership of music, video, real-estate, cars, gaming assets, health data

3. Instant access to nearly all possible financial products (loans, lending, startup investments etc.) without a middle man

There are many, many more use cases. Crypto drastically increases accountability, transparency, accessibility, trustworthiness for every kind of use case.

It seems like you are creating a lot of straw men to not see that, for example an impossible standard such as saying not all of crypto is 100% decentralized, so it's centralized, which just makes no sense and is a very strong logical fallacy.

Post reply on HN