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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#111

Post by stavros »

wstrange wrote: post #61
stavros wrote: post #24

As much as I hate cryptocurrency as-it-exists, I'm very much into its potential. Untraceable (eg Monero) digital cash that settles instantly? That has the potential to disrupt societies. The problem is that most societies don't have a particular need of being disrupted, so people are perfectly content paying with their credit cards, and why shouldn't they be? The UX is better and the banks are fine as long as they do…

Untraceable digital cash facilitates crime, money laundering and tax evasion. None of these things are good for a stable democracy.

And perfect law enforcement means a stagnating society. Think where we would be now if gay people were discovered and punished instantly as soon as they kissed a person of the same sex, or interracial couples were punished as soon as they started dating, etc.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#112

Post by chasd00 »

bobobob420 wrote: post #45
titzer wrote: post #20

> We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers. I must be stuck in the past. It's true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, ins…

Are you talking about physical On-prem systems or just buying a basic ec2 type server and renting some storage space? Because wouldn't the first one require a specific business line to an ISP for networking, which would require an office space and other associated costs? Or are you referring to renting a vanilla server and rolling everything yourself vs using some automated deployment and build pack system?

I just did a speed test and got 175mbs up. That is ridiculously fast and i don't have an out of the ordinary home internet connection. Entire data centers use to run on internet connections slower than that.

A mac mini, ups, and that connection is plenty to run any kind of server for personal/family use.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#113

Post by voldacar »

pshc wrote: post #72
simias wrote: post #29

>When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for purely digital goods might be a concept with a future. Having standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and query and update these goods might make sense (althou…

> Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? A serial number can be copied and engraved onto a forged watch, so not really. A more analogous scenario would be if Rolex embedded an NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that anyone could wave their…

> NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that the chip’s cert was indeed signed by Rolex.

This is an excellent idea and I am now wondering why luxury brands haven't started doing this. It would be super hot. One would do it and suddenly they would all be doing it. Watches, handbags, shoes, whatever

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#114

Post by arcticbull »

tshaddox wrote: post #108
arcticbull wrote: post #39

I'll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura, Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked. [edit] By "full node" I meant "archival node."

In what sense is it "gate-kept"? Isn't the complaint that in practice most people probably use those two services? As far as I know those two services don't do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will." The potential for single points of failure (or even intentional abuse) does exist because of this de fac…

> As far as I know those two services don't do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will."

Indeed, but one could make the same claim re any Web 2 juggernauts like Google and Facebook. You don't need to use them, sure. You can start your own social network. It's just expensive and inconvenient. This is what causes centralization and gatekeeping in the first place. It becomes self-reenforcing.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#115

Post by vorpalhex »

eatonphil wrote: post #60
vorpalhex wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a homelab, and also run a shared server for a few folks. The hardware is easy. The software can be easy (if you let it). The things that are tricky: 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because most software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication! 2. The gap in average computer skills. Some of my users are engineers, most of them are no…

> 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because most software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication! It sounds like you're referring to something specific here but I'm not understanding. What kind of software doesn't play well with SSO? And what is reverse proxy authentication? Do you mean give users SSO as in give them an account on an SSO s…

SSO is short for single sign on. It means users have only a single login across all the parts of the system. That can be something like "Login with Google" or it can be they just have a single local user account that works everywhere.

A really efficient way to make SSO work is to allow a reverse proxy to do all the work. A reverse proxy is a webserver (such as nginx or traefik) which receives all incoming requests and then hands them off to the correct bit of software, such as Plex or Heimdall.

Reverse proxies do lots of things but they help glue different pieces of software together. It allows you to have "http://plex.example.com" and "http://heimdall.example.com" on the same server as a for instance.

You can also have the reverse proxy handle authentication. Users get redirected to sign in if they don't have the right cookie and when the proxy forwards their request it includes headers that give the username, email, etc to the underlying software.

This way instead of both Plex and Heimdall having to support a bunch of different sign in options, user management, password resets, etc all that is done by the reverse proxy. Your software just has to trust the reverse proxy and get it's data from the headers.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#116

Post by SubiculumCode »

intrasight wrote: post #12

The first article on Web3 that I've read that drills into the details and was written by someone who's not only kicked the tires but taken the thing for a spin. And the conclusion: It's mostly the bad stuff of Web2 combined with the bad stuff of Crypto.

I think you are over-simplifying the conclusions of the article. The article presents a much more nuanced view, and while it points to certain limitations and deficiencies of Web 3.0 (and that only on the Eth part of it; we are in a multi-blockchain world now), it also points to several strengths of the growing ecosystems, and mostly comes across as humble; not knowing how its all going to turn out.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#117

Post by spenczar5 »

exdsq wrote: post #107
spenczar5 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New products? Would those be more centralized platforms, or is it feasible for me to connect to the blockchain, verify stuff, and so on if I am running my own server? It still seems that my users on phones and browsers would need to trust me in that case, right?

Oh it’s totally doable to run your own node on your own server! And thanks to the protocols consensus rules your users can trust that for a transaction to go through your node and be accepted onto main net your node is a good actor. So one example I’d give - every team I’ve worked on has had to build a local development environment with several nodes to easily spin up with a clean slate for deterministic testing. Tea…

Okay. Why doesn’t everyone do that, then? Why use Infura?

As is hopefully obvious, I am totally naive here; my questions are genuine. Thanks!

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#118

Post by pjsg »

ineptech wrote: post #64

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. Not really much related to web3/crypto topics, but I think this is an indictment of servers, not people. If managing a server were easy and secure, lots of people would do it - for blogs, a minecraft server for the kids, to back up their pictures, and yes, to store their bitcoins or other digital secrets - they just don't want to manage a unix or windows s…

What is the benefit to the average user of running their own server? Most people (maybe even on HN) just want things to work. We buy connectivity services for our phones and our homes. I certainly don't want to run my own Wireless ISP to connect up my neighbourhood even if it was marginally cheaper (until I account for my time).

We buy storage services (for lots of reasons) from Amazon, Google, , etc. I don't want to run a large NAS and keep it running and backed up.

We buy messaging services (voice, SMS, email, IM etc). I don't want to run my own Asterisk VOIP PBX, my own OpenBTS node, my own postfix instance, my own IRC server.

I buy power services (electricity and oil). I don't want to run my own oil well, refinery, nuclear power plant etc. I do actually run some solar panels, but the amount of cognitive load that they cost me is very small. It is probably under 3 hours per year of having to fiddle with them.

In short, the cost in terms of time and energy from me makes it far cheaper to outsource all of these services to someone else. This doesn't prevent you from running any/all of these services, but I would suggest that you are in a very small minority.

Having said all of that, if I lived on an island with no services, I might be tempted to run some of them myself.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#119

Post by PragmaticPulp »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #97

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will That's one believably accurate summary. But here's another: rather than focus on trying to make it easy, cheap and simple for everyone to run their own servers, the tech world spent 1996-today instead focused on offering to take care of this for everybody else, for a price. Everybody concluded in the late 90s that the "nobody wants to run their own servers"…

The personal server space is littered with failed startups.

Not because it's difficult to make turnkey personal servers. Embedded Linux hardware is unbelievably cheap.

They fail because they don't bring any benefit against real-world threats, but they come with significant downside risks.

If your house floods or your home server is burgled, your data is just gone. So your home server ends up backed up to the cloud anyway, and now you're maintaining a home server and a cloud server when you could have just used the cloud service for everything without the headache.

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