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

Web3 is expensive P2P

netfuture.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 384 posts

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#321

Post by low_tech_love »

I live in a Nordic country which I semi-jokingly call a “anthropophobic” country. People simply don’t want to deal with each other. Whenever you need to do anything that is predicted by the system and happens by the book, it is an extremely pleasant and comfortable experience. The moment you “fall in the cracks” and needs to somehow have a custom solution to something, it becomes hell. And all that simply because you will actually need to talk to someone to solve your problem, and people simply don’t want to talk to you, period. When you call someone, you have to actually get them to answer the phone in the first place (in the 30 min per week that they have allocated for phone calls, if you get through the 20+ queue before the 30 min are up). Then, after a cold greeting, you explain your problem and immediately feel like you are (a) stupid because you had to ask a question and couldn’t solve your problem silently by yourself, and/or (b) a nuisance because you have to bother another human being and put them through the extremely unpleasant experience of having to talk to another human. Then, they will forward you to someone else, you go through the whole ordeal again (because the next person doesn’t know your problem and nobody explained it to them), they will forward you again, until after the 3rd or 4th jump you are back to the first attendant. The whole system is designed to wear you out in the hopes that you’ll give up, which most people do (nordic people are averse to conflicts), but if you are resilient enough you’ll eventually find someone to actually help you. And don’t even think about getting angry; in the nordic countries getting angry and making a scene is extremely looked down, and if you do, you are immediately wrong and they won. No problem solving for you.

The reason I told the anecdote is that I think the main point of the article was the last one: a bit of trust can go a long way.

It seems to me that people advocating for stuff like DAOs and “code is law” believe so strongly that the human is the broken link in the system (which it probably is) that they want to take the human out of the loop completely. They are “anthropophobes”: they want to find a way to make deals and business without having to deal with the fellow humans. Obviously, it fails miserably. You always need to deal with humans; if it’s not the person/company administrating a service, it’s the hacker who is asking for ransom or the judge who will decide about your case when you sue the DAO or whoever else. We should invest more in people and their communication instead of trying to replace them with blockchains and algorithmic contracts, IMHO.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#322

Post by blep_ »

cnity wrote: post #43
andsoitis wrote: post #3

> P2P never made it to the mainstream; instead, centralized systems still (or, again? even more?) dominate the landscape. So, because it failed, should we try Web3? I doubt it, as it is more likely to fail, due to higher complexity and more dependencies. One major reason decentralized has a hard time is because standards, public protocols cannot be innovated on rapidly. Or at least, new iterations cannot be deployed…

It is my (largely uninformed) opinion that the greatest barrier to an open web is the difficulty in securing a static address for a device that remains consistent regardless of the currently connected gateway address. So much of what third party web services actually do is simply offering a static address for routing traffic.

... huh. I had not thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right.

Not even a DNS thing. The entire concept of third party messaging platforms is because we can't just send data directly at another internet user unless they've done all the requisite setup to reliably receive it.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#323

Post by username923409 »

warkdarrior wrote: post #311
username923409 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability could be improved if all required functionality is P2P, as the program would not need to rely on a third party server. Of course, this assumes that the party/parties on the other end of the P2P connection are online, which is the downside of all P2P services. Another underrated benefit of P2P (if implemented in good faith) is that the users will have peace of mind with regards to the ownership of their da…

> if implemented in good faith ... users will have peace of mind with regards to the ownership of their data Famous last words! Not sure how users will establish the trustworthiness of P2P protocols (and there will be many competing versions), when now they cannot determine the trustworthiness of one service.

Yes, it is quite an optimistic idea, hence why I hedged it with the assumption. You make a valid point.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#324

Post by rglullis »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #320
rglullis wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will not disrupt with the assets. They will disrupt it with the new game engines , and they are already backed by billions from VCs and the money from NFT speculators. There is a reason that Valve is not too fond of crypto, and it is not "climate change".

Why would somebody be spending billions of dollars in VC money when you could just use whatever game engine you want and license a small third party library to do asset validation? VCs can't possibly be THAT eager to blow all their money unless it's as a PAAS ala Roblox.

Since the beginning of the conversation, I am saying that is not about the assets. Why do you continue to center your reasoning around that?

It's like worrying about parking lots in a world where self-driving cars are available on-demand. If you don't believe that self-driving cars are ever going to reach that state, fine. But conditional on accepting a premise (web3 games using the blockchain as the basis of the world logic), you can not try to apply the rules of the old system into the new one.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#325

Post by freeone3000 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #319
freeone3000 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were fine "running their own servers" back when Skype was peer-to-peer. Or when Team Fortress 2 let you play with your friends.

because there weren't many alternatives. Dropped calls or latency issues were simply the norm and accepted as a trade off for being able to play. The reason companies used to favor p2p was because it was cheaper for them to not run servers. But with people demanding more quality, richer content and consistent and stable connections p2p makes not much sense. Look at some Netflix blogs and how complex their infrastruct…

It's a bad deal for the consumer, though. The complicated Netflix infrastructure is way more robust and stable than SMB+VLC, but I don't need to serve video to millions of people and maintain a complex and rotating streaming library with various publisher contracts determining what shows are available where. I just queue up a show.

Division of labor with companies hosting servers for online games makes sense until the servers go away and then what? No more Warcraft III ever, I guess, the servers are gone.

When we go in on centralization, we lose availability, privacy, and control. The services are more reliable from a technical sense but less reliable from a social sense.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#326

Post by enos_feedler »

yurishimo wrote: post #314
enos_feedler wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i do think this trend is happening and will unlock some use cases. Not sure about P2P though. One reason I switched to home 5G is because i can get 40 mbps up for $25, where I needed to pay $100 to comcast for similar up speed. My main use case is streaming my playstation 4 remotely so I can play on the go.

Are you in the US? If so, who is your provider?

I am using tmobile's Home 5G right now. I was waiting for Verizon for the mmWave 5G because I think the latency will be lower. If Verizon comes around soon, I'll switch. I have both Verizon and Tmobile phone service so I can get the bundle discounts with home through either. I think both of them are ~$50/mo standalone or $25/mo with a 5G smartphone plan.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#328

Post by GekkePrutser »

Gigachad wrote: post #310
Micoloth wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. Why did this happen? I mean how could it happen that such a basic utility as the router was developed with such fundamental design flaws that hosting a webserver at home is above the skills of 99% of people? There’s a router in every home anywhere now, so this is a fact we’ll have to deal with for decades. I’m pretty young so i was not around at the time. How did it come about?

It was NAT. We ran out of v4 addresses and self hosting / p2p became much harder. And now many iot devices depend on Nat existing as some kind of security measure. But largely no one cares because you wouldn’t want to host any real website at home anyway. It’s extremely cheap and reliable to just rent a VPS.

It's also a really poor idea from a security point of view. Businesses put web servers in DMZs for that reason to if they still host them on prem.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#329

Post by chrisco255 »

arinlen wrote: post #210
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. You already have that without requiring any buzzword-driven marketingspeak. And if your goal is to stay anonymous, in the very least you'd be using independent dedicated identities in separate services.

> You already have that without requiring any buzzword-driven marketingspeak.

> And if your goal is to stay anonymous, in the very least you'd be using independent dedicated identities in separate services.

It is free to create a new identity on EVM. You just create a new public-private key pair. You can do it right now, in the browser, on the fly. If you want to have different accounts for different platforms (or multiple accounts for the same platform), you would have that ability (that is the case today, in Web3). But, if you want to integrate across platforms, it is far easier if those applications adopt an open, user-owned identity standard (rather than rely on Google or Gmail or Facebook or hotmail).

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#330

Post by chrisco255 »

threeseed wrote: post #309
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…

> How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network Web3/NFT etc doesn't solve this though. Where is the list of followers going to be stored ? It isn't on chain.

Yes, it does, see Lens Protocol as an example: https://lens.dev/ (uses Polygon, an EVM compatible low-fee chain)

Anything more data intensive than that can be stored on Ceramic/IPFS. https://ceramic.network/ https://www.arweave.org/ https://nft.storage/

Post reply on HN