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Web3 is centralized and inefficient

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Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#291

Post by hahaitsfunny »

Depending on how you view the world and whether you think nation states and government-backed fiat is a good or bad thing, probably defines your stance on blockchain and cryptocurrencies IMO. I still contend that blockchain has its use cases - journalism, games which wish to institute a real economy instead of a virtual one, voting, etc...

Blockchain has been maturing and bitcoin has been around for a minute, but ethereum and the whole smart contract bit is newer and POS is around the corner if you believe those working on the project.

I view bitcoin and blockchain as a big FU to fiat and I'm okay with that, because IMHO hierarchical power structures are inherently a bad thing.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#292

Post by Kiro »

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

What would the image being on the chain change? You're buying a signature.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#293

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

This is applying technical solutions to social issues. Nothing technically prevents credit card or other online payment means from being anonymous, there are implemented that way for social reasons.

This is also where I see the cryptocurrencies going: regulatory bodies putting more and more resources and restrictions to align them with other monetary systems, to a point where them being based on blockchain will just be an implementation detail.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#294

Post by miracle2k »

dthul wrote: post #263
samoit wrote: post #258

For those who want to know what is a NFT: Imagine you get the hacker news logo (or any other digital asset, like an image,video,song etc). Then I take that image and apply to it a hash funtion to generate an id, a number that later I put into any blockchain (usually ethereum). As the blockchain is ordered the first one who does this process stores in the blockchain the asset... and so its property. Later someone else…

This document describes the smart contract for an NFT: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 The base contract does not contain any info about the asset the NFT applies to and the metadata extension only allows you to store a name and a URI (which hopefully still works and still points to the object in the future). There is no object hash as far as I can tell. Afaik there can be several NFTs for the same object (URI…

> Afaik there can be several NFTs for the same object (URI) and none of them is inherently more legitimate than the other. You'd need some kind of endorsement by tha artist to know which NFT is the "real" one. But I'm not an expert so please correct my if I'm wrong.

You are correct. Note that there can be multiple different URLs pointing to the same file. And note that multiple files (unique sequences of bytes) can represent the same object, say, a JPEG with slightly different compression ratio.

The point then is that neither the the url nor the hash matters. What matters is that the artist says "this NFT represents this work of mine". Everything else is just extra.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#295

Post by black_puppydog »

Kiro wrote: post #292
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

What would the image being on the chain change? You're buying a signature.

you would be, if the reference at least contained a content hash. as is, you literally just buy a link

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#296

Post by dfabulich »

hahaitsfunny wrote: post #291

Depending on how you view the world and whether you think nation states and government-backed fiat is a good or bad thing, probably defines your stance on blockchain and cryptocurrencies IMO. I still contend that blockchain has its use cases - journalism, games which wish to institute a real economy instead of a virtual one, voting, etc... Blockchain has been maturing and bitcoin has been around for a minute, but eth…

Blockchains are hierarchical power structures. They're democracies, in fact, but instead of "one person, one vote" you get a share of votes based on how much electricity you waste.

As the article explains, mining capacity is centralized, and therefore, so is Web3.

Blockchains are no better than any other democratic institution; substantially worse, in fact, because they're wasting electricity to do it. Web3 pretends to be a big FU to hierarchical power structures, but if you believe that, you're being scammed.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#297

Post by aspenmayer »

saurik wrote: post #13

Yes: Tor is "somewhat decentralized" in that there are 9 servers run by people to maintain the directory instead of 1, and Roger Dingledine--one of the main people behind Tor--claims to have met in person only like 2/3rds of the participants; but is it as centralized as Etheteum? No. Most "web3" tech (god I hate that term as someone actively in this space :/), BTW, literally are based at least some way--if not extrem…

Now you have me digging through the stacks at seclab.cs.ucsb.edu. I recognize the webdesign and some of the titles.

Is this the UCSB I2P takedown you refer to? I'm curious who you might mean, but there are only 3 UCSB authors listed. I'll do some more digging.

https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~chris/research/doc/raid13_i2p.pdf

Only found a very little bit about their work on cryptocurrencies.

https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~chris/research/doc/ccs18_mineswee...

You have any choice links?

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#298

Post by KyeRussell »

dmitriid wrote: post #255
smt88 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital licenses and tickets are useless if the central authority doesn't honor them. There's absolutely no benefit to making NFTs out of them. For example, if I buy an NFT ticket to a concert and the venue doesn't let me in, what was the point of the decentralization?

Crypto peddlers rarely have an idea of how the world works. When it comes to tickets, this always comes up with NFTs and it's amazing how little they know (or care). I had this conversation not too long ago, see my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931

A bunch of people that probably haven’t bought a scalped ticket in their lives trying to explain how NFTs will revolutionise ticket sales is definitely peak crypto charlatan.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#299

Post by melomal »

ahtihn wrote: post #257
divs1210 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not why making an NFT out of the ticket is interesting. It's interesting because I can, for example, resell my Woodstock ticket on an open market.

What's the incentive for the ticket seller to enable that?

Royalties. The ticket seller can set that and every time the ticket is resold, they will get % of that sale. For an artist that would mean they can sell a ticket with % royalty set and then profit from future sales on an ongoing basis.

Re: Web3 is centralized and inefficient

#300

Post by smaudet »

vishnugupta wrote: post #272
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false dichotomy. Most people don't want to run their own mail servers. That isn't the same thing as saying we need a single entity to be in charge of email. There are thousands of independent email providers. Your emails get marked as spam if you have two users, not if you have two thousand. And small providers getting marked as spam isn't because it's necessary to prevent spam, it's because large providers…

It's telling that email is the last popular, useful protocol. Almost every application (chat, video conferencing, file sharing etc.,) since then have been proprietary and closed wall gardens. It is as if big corporations clearly saw open protocols being a big threat to their monopoly and either didn't bother building apps that adhere to existing protocols or were openly hostile to them.

Actually the other protocols all exist, and work fine, thanks.

The major exception was high bandwidth communication, where it remains cost prohibitive to do without scale - video has come a long way, to be sure, but large image, audio, video processing have remained difficult to do at scale and right, at least without the correct hardware and supporting algorithms.

There are solutions, most of the ones I can think of involve paying money versus using some "free" service - this is why you don't see a lot of private fileshares with random videostreams between friends, not so much technical reasons.

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