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Web3 is expensive P2P

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Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#251

Post by Melatonic »

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.

I suspect Web3 will be a spectacular marketing fail and then eventually nerds will figure out a real Web 3.1 that is not nearly as easily hyped but actually brings us some nice advances

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#252

Post by xg15 »

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…

I think this conflates a bit p2p as a technical means and p2p as a means to organise control.

Like, there are all kinds of products which use p2p architectures internally to solve some technical problem - bit torrent is sometimes used inside updaters, elasticsearch organizes its nodes as a p2p network for greater robustness and scalability, WebRTC let's you make direct connections between browsers to save roundtrips, etc etc. But those are just technical details - the products themselves are still controlled and administered by a central entity.

In contrast, crypto, file sharing and federated systems use p2p as a technical means but they are also administered in a decentralised fashion, where no person or entity has ultimate control (or should have at least).

I think Skype was falling squarely in the first category here: They were experimenting with decentralised network protocols, but the nodes were all pretty clearly belonging to a singular and centrally controlled product. That's why p2p really just was an implementation detail that could be replaced by a different technical architecture by a simple update.

(Weird thought as an aside: I think most companies or organisations follow a sort of similar pattern: They are communist with respect to coworkers of equal status ("everyone should chip in for Carol's birthday present"), authoritarian with respect to management and owners - and libertarian/anarchist with respect to the outside world ("freedom! ...from annoying rules and regulations..."). But that doesn't mean leadership necessarily follows communist, authoritarian or anarchist principles when deciding strategy)

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#253

Post by crate_barre »

axg11 wrote: post #69
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.

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#254

Post by 8note »

axg11 wrote: post #69
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.

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…

All of those usecase are going to suck for handling fraud and abuse though, same as everything else crypto related.

Permissionless composability means you have no control over which apps use your data, the universal login makes sure that spam is present and unbannable, and Reddit communities benefit heavily from being able to have top mods removed when they turn abusive

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#255

Post by thawaya3113 »

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…

Skype’s quality, and subsequently popularity, dropped significantly after they removed the P2P bits.

There’s still nothing that comes close to the call quality Skype provided for long distance calls, especially when the network may not be as good on 1 end.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#256

Post by giantrobot »

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…

> At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could support their existence without ads, since each customer would be a paying customer.

No one would bother with the web if they had to pay for every visit to every website, especially if they had to pay before any content got delivered. It's a certainty that as soon as the client is paying per byte or per transaction that pages will do everything they can to nickel and dime clients by bloating even more than they do today. For clients that's fees on top of what their ISP is charging for the privilege to be charged more money.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#257

Post by MisterBastahrd »

rglullis wrote: post #238
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in the real world, companies have to build and test assets. Blockchains are ledgers, and NFTs are receipts: they're far too expensive to hold a lot of data. They're never going to hold game assets. If you want to say that Activision or Square-Enix come up with a tokenized platform for their own assets, which you can then use in other future games, that's marginally interesting. But Activision isn't going to care…

Who cares about Activision or Square-Enix? It's not going to be Activision that is going to build the blockchain-powered generation of gaming platforms. It's going to be one of the many small dev teams that wants to find a way to disrupt the market.

Well, for one, they're the prime use-case for this sort of thing because they have the resources. None of these podunk little developers is going to "disrupt" the market with blockchain assets, because of ALL the developers and studios, they're the LEAST capable of designing and testing assets that did not come from their studio.

"Hey Jim, we have a hotfix we need you to work on."

"No time for that, Bob, XYZ Gamecorp just created a pair of shoes on the blockchain, and even though it's only going to net us a nickel, we're going to spend the next week working on getting it into the game."

Might as well just light their studios on fire and try to recoup the insurance money, because it'd ultimately be more profitable.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#258

Post by Sargos »

trenchgun wrote: post #231
axg11 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens. What could they possibly have to gain by doing this? Like what would Reddit gain by moving Reddit Gold to the blockchain? We have to reimagine everything, I don't think a successful web3 platform will emerge from simply tacking on tokens to existing platforms. Successful internet communities become walled gardens to protect a…

>A creator on TikTok today can't easily give their most loyal followers discounts on their Shopify store, perks for moderating a Discord, early access to YouTube content, etc. That could easily be done with plain old public key cryptography.

Blockchains are really just a shared public key cryptography system. It solves the key distribution problem and makes using keys easy for developers and users.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#259

Post by slowmovintarget »

masklinn wrote: post #199
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?

Collectivism as a means of ordering a society necessarily tramples individual liberty, which yes, generally speaking, is bad. Communism is a subset of collectivism, just one of the flavors we've seen, so it is a collection of ideas that may be judged by their outcomes as bad.

Has zero to do with tech, however.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#260

Post by thawaya3113 »

roywiggins wrote: post #206
phamilton wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Because people haven't been financially motivated to evangelize it. I believe that's the core of blockchain/web3 innovations. It's a worse way to do it, but the social hype (driven almost entirely by get rich FOMO) is enough to push it over the edge.

The most efficient way to do it would be to bootstrap the ecosystem with blockchain buzziness and then just deprecate the blockchain part eventually. MetaMask already relies on "Web2" apis to query blockchains, who says they have to actually hit a blockchain all the time?

This is exactly what’s happening with crypto.

A user’s transaction on Coinbase rarely represents an actual transaction on the blockchain. A transaction actually represents a row in a Coinbase SQL database, which Coinbase will eventually batch and then convert into a blockchain operation.

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