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Web3 is expensive P2P

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Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#191

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

kristjansson wrote: post #183
axg11 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some benefits that I think web3 can bring to the user: - Universal login: An alternative to "Sign in with Google/Apple/XYZ" that can't be denied by a corporation. There are countless examples of these companies deactivating accounts for questionable reasons. - Permissionless composability: I'm not sure how to word this one better. If a developer wants to build on top of blockchain data, they can. No need to apply for…

I get stuck at the point where I’m supposed to store the key material for my highly secure, persistent, web3-wide identity in … a browser extension? To which I then allow every web3 site I visit to access? I understand that it helps adoption, but there’s an enormous impedance mismatch there. Why isn’t there offline identify verification front and center?

The way you've described it, sounds like a cross domain cookie. That isn't technically a thing unless you consider one domain/company selling the tracking of their cookie for you to another domain/company or a data broker/aggregator.

So it sounds like it could make tracking of activity much easier and that doesn't sound right.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#192

Post by dwaite »

roywiggins wrote: post #154
chrisco255 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can have universal login with MetaMask, sure, but that functionality isn't reliant on a blockchain. It's decades-old public key cryptography. For sure, you can do PGP, but if it's decades old, you have to ask yourself: Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been? Mainly because it's always been a chicken and egg problem for consum…

Okay, but the login bit for MetaMask is "just" using public key cryptography though, right? You could strip out the blockchain stuff from MetaMask and that part would still work.

You could also do Web Authentication, which is based on Public Key cryptography and ships with every major browser and is integrated into many operating systems.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#193

Post by scubbo »

ehutch79 wrote: post #121
eric_cc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what would Reddit gain I think you nailed it. It’s a victory for USERS - owning your own assets in a way that does not require you to trust the platform. It’s not so great for centralized platforms.

But it's not like you can use assets/data from one website in another, unless it's something like a jpg... in which case it's not like you can't just upload that jpg You'd need everyone to agree to the same standard for stuff. Definitely more likely than game assets, but still incredibly unlikely

Yes, absolutely. This ("how can you transfer assets between platforms/context without interoperable protocols?", and the corollary "if the content is simple enough to have interoperable protocols, it's probably something uninteresting like an image rather than something valuable like a game asset") is one of the key counter-arguments that deflate a lot of web3 hype (along with "you don't need a blockchain for what you described" and "you are hyping decentralization, but the situation you've described still relies on (or is actively better with) a central authority"). A lot more detail on it here: https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-do-a-lot-o...

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#194

Post by hanniabu »

the_gastropod wrote: post #175
chrisco255 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market. Meanwhile, any digital content or rights can be represented by an NFT. Is it useful to own the commercial rights to use a pop…

> Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market. An email address? Why do we need to complicate this with blockchain tomfoolery?

Not everyone wants their email public

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#195

Post by pshc »

px43 wrote: post #179
WanderPanda wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, Skype ain't p2p anymore?

Microsoft bought it, removed the encryption and decentralization, and started piping conversations directly to the NSA.

Yup, honestly this is a good argument for web3 as a substrate on which to build an encrypted chat app that's permanently decentralized and owned/funded by the community. (Once someone figures out the encrypted privacy aspect...)

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#196

Post by rgbrgb »

_glass wrote: post #23
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #7

What is the value proposition of web3 to the user? JS web apps offloaded the compute and memory onto the browser/client, web3 to offload storage costs onto the user. You will up pay for every click. web3 and metaverse feels so dystopian. but the young generations that were raised by tiktok will probably accept it.

you could make social media where the ad revenue is shared with the users. you can already sell art where the platform can vanish (like hicetnunc did) but the artists and users can take their assets to just another platform (like objkt).

incidentally this was the argument against streaming music. Superior UX won out over philosophical arguments of data portability and custody.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#197

Post by thfuran »

10x-dev wrote: post #149
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #7

What is the value proposition of web3 to the user? JS web apps offloaded the compute and memory onto the browser/client, web3 to offload storage costs onto the user. You will up pay for every click. web3 and metaverse feels so dystopian. but the young generations that were raised by tiktok will probably accept it.

Story time. About 20 years ago, when dialup was introduced where I grew up, my uncle called me to show him what this new internet thing is. As soon as I opened "yahoo.com", he asked "how am I paying to view Yahoo?". I said you're not paying anybody, you're just paying for the Internet connection. He nodded. I then showed him Hotmail. He kept asking "ok so now, how did they charge me to view this page?". I kept tellin…

Yeah, I think everything being ad driven and free to use will be incredibly hard to move away from because it's damn hard to compete with free but it causes incentives to be profoundly misaligned.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#198

Post by kkielhofner »

web41 wrote: post #135
kkielhofner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly can point to a local blockchain node but the question is - have you ever run your own? Running your own blockchain node is nothing like BitTorrent. The required storage, memory, cpu, and IOPS performance is already pushing the limits of readily available standard hardware. This applies mostly to Ethereum. When you go to higher throughput chains like Solana and Polygon the node requirements jump to hardw…

you can run an Ethereum node without running a full node. agree IPFS client is pretty janky but the idea of content addressable p2p hosting is not a bad thing. the goal of these base systems is not to be faster or easier to use than a centralized Amazon server. the goal is resistance to centralized control. mod note: my other account “web4” is rate limited after a couple comments?

Yes you can but sync time is still a problem, even today with the minuscule transaction rates supported on most chains. There will likely be advancements there but this is obviously a hard problem as we're already over a decade in with this technology and it has yet to be solved with any kind of approach that can still claim being fully secure and decentralized.

What I'm really trying to point out is that the vast majority of users do not care about centralized control. Even those that claim to pretty quickly realize that platforms with no ability whatsoever to filter content end up with universally objectionable content (such as CASM) and/or content otherwise illegal and/or regularly denounced (revenge porn, extreme violence/murder content, etc).

With centralized platforms today this has shown to merely create platforms that better align with someone's particular worldview while still exercising just as much (if not more) moderation and control.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#199

Post by masklinn »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #146

Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it's simply overkill. Skype started out as a p2p thing. But ultimately, video calls became a commodity where orchestrating them centrally proved to be good enough. I can make video calls with meets, facebook, whatsapp, signal, slack, etc. Not a big deal. I even still have Skype somewhere and it still works even though they ripped out the p2p bits ages ago. I'm not sure what web3 is o…

> Nothing wrong with p2p.

The article doesn't imply (let alone say) that there's anything wrong with p2p?

To the extent that it says anything positive about p2p, it's rather positive. Unless you're one of those americans for whom "communist" reflexively aliases to "bad" I guess?

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#200

Post by wmf »

agentultra wrote: post #122

I'll just leave this here [0] I don't disagree that the concentration of web architecture into the hands of a small number of big corps is a bad thing. I just don't see the solution being a purely technical one. There are market forces and reasons for that consolidation: efficiency in terms of power; production, acquisition, and deployment of expensive equipment; high-availability of services, operations and staff, e…

We need economic incentives...

That's the whole point of Web3. Unfortunately the incentives as currently designed are relatively simplistic and seem to go wrong more often than they go right, but the idea is there.

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