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Web3 is expensive P2P

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Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#271

Post by nsjsuabNdi »

agentultra wrote: post #215
wmf wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given the track record of the web3 community in regulating itself, preventing fraud and corruption, and even building a tech stack that can be trusted... I don't think we should place a single bit of faith in their ability to align incentives with the kinds I'm talking about. The kinds of economic incentives I'm talking about come from industry experts working with democratically elected officials with a system of go…

“industry experts” - capitalist sponsored charlatans “democratically elected officials” - corrupted by corporate greed “Government that is concerned with the rights and freedoms of a society to have access to technology and infrastructure for the benefit of everyone” - which planet do you live on?

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#272

Post by jrochkind1 »

anamax wrote: post #225
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 started out as a p2p thing. But ultimately, video calls became a commodity where orchestrating them centrally proved to be good enough. It's my understanding that "phone" without the ability to tap is illegal in the US. IIRC, the "must be able to let the govt listen" requirement occurred at the same time as Skpye switched models and the requirement was given as the reason for said switch.

As far as I know Signal voice calls are not illegal, and do not provide an ability to tap, and are p2p in network architecture.

So I'm not sure that's accurate that there were any such legal limits on Skype, I'd like to see a citation to more info.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#273

Post by [deleted] »

diego_moita wrote: post #38

Moxie Marlinspike on Web3 [1]: * "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will" * "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform" [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

[deleted]

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#274

Post by ohthehugemanate »

anamax wrote: post #225
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 started out as a p2p thing. But ultimately, video calls became a commodity where orchestrating them centrally proved to be good enough. It's my understanding that "phone" without the ability to tap is illegal in the US. IIRC, the "must be able to let the govt listen" requirement occurred at the same time as Skpye switched models and the requirement was given as the reason for said switch.

> It's my understanding that "phone" without the ability to tap is illegal in the US.

This is not true. Else you couldn't have whatsapp or signal calls (e2e encrypted). In 2009, Skype made the argument with the ACLU that they are not a telecoms carrier, and are therefore exempt from CALEA and similar regulations. Additionally, Skype's original CSEO refused to promise that they did not support wiretaps in the original architecture. We know from Edward Snowden that "old Skype" was included in NSA data sources.

Skype changed architecture because routing calls through neighboring, always-on nodes is not practical in a mobile world where 50%+ of users pay for their data by the MB, and have spotty connections with high latency. For several years before the rearchitecture, Microsoft propped up the network by running all the supernodes itself.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#275

Post by exdsq »

bodge5000 wrote: post #153
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…

I hadn't seen Axie before, but I have seen a few other blockchain games. They seem to suffer the same pitfalls as the whole gamification trend that went around a few years ago, in that the game part feels tacked on, which of course completely misses the point. I have no doubt a good game could be built around the blockchain, as are my thoughts on gamification for fitness or whatever else, but the game has to come fir…

FWIW I quite liked the trading card games on Blockchain because you could sell cards you didn't want, buy those you did, and packs became like 'real life' in that you could get a really cool legendary and make some money (just like Pokemon/YuGiOh, but that you lose in games like Hearthstone where you just convert them into some in game currency). I've commented on this before and people have said "Oh, why does everything require a financial incentive in Web3?" but let's be fair, it exists just the same in most IRL TCGs.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#277

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

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?

>Unless you're one of those americans for whom "communist" reflexively aliases to "bad"

it's usually people who had actually lived under communism who have that reaction

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#278

Post by exdsq »

paulmd wrote: post #243
lekevicius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure! Until we can figure out how to make global consensus ridiculously scalable, I don't see "web3 social" being successful at all. It's using a very expensive resource for a frivolous need.

"web3 social" will never be successful because censorship is a desirable feature of a social-media platform. If there is no way to censor a group of people, there is no way to censor spammers either. You will be able to filter at the client level of course, or set up maintained filter-lists (which will be trivial to game with a "sybil" approach), but this is going to be "running an email server" times a million in te…

Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake. Or maybe it's just paid out on a long delay. Now spamming costs quite a bit. Add to that a blacklist feature and a shared consensus on spamming addresses and it starts to work a little better.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#279

Post by exdsq »

rvz wrote: post #147
cowtools wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you would think that P2P is mostly sufficient for a social media replacement (e.g. PeerTube, Mastodon, etc.). Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin)

> Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin) Those are the only credible use-case(s) that the cryptocurrency folks should be looking at. I can see a few projects surviving like Stellar [0], Ripple (XRP) [1], Algorand [2] and Nano [3], ENS [4], Handshake [5] and Skiff [6]. Unlike the other projects that are slapping blockchain, crypto on to anything they can fi…

Algorand was the first blockchain I ever used without knowing it - to hold the results of games on the official FIDE chess online tournaments - and I found that pretty cool. No costs etc, just a log on the chain with my matches and scores. This is coming from someone who spent 18 months working on Cardano, too.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#280

Post by rglullis »

kristjansson wrote: post #266
rglullis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The blockchain is not a data store. The blockchain is needed only when you need: - global view of the state that is taken as truth by all participants ( consensus ) - where anyone is allowed to make operations to change the state ( permissionless ) - and all operations that change the state are agreed by all participants ( trustless ) You don't need the blockchain to store your music collection. Any content-addre…

I actually agree with all of that. I don't agree that storing that sort of data on the blockchain supports statements like "the users are in control of their own data". You're make a distinction between assets/content/etc. and 'data' that I don't think most users would recognize as a difference. If I make a playlist on decentralized-Spotify, and then that service goes bust, it's weak comfort that I'm able to move a l…

> What categories of data do you see

Again, it's not about the data. Data is cheap. It's the meta-data and what you can do with it that is interesting. It's about the new classes of applications that might come up when the underlying data is not stored by any middleman.

To illustrate: the "Pirate Bay catalog" is many times larger than anything offered by any of the streaming services, but the majority of people still prefer to pay for the services. Github is the destination of almost every open source project, and companies are paying a good amount of money not for the storage of data, but for what it can be done with it.

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