My First Impressions of Web3 • Hacker News Board

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#121

Post by nefitty » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

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…

This is one of the few usecases of crypto that kinda make sense. If those certs were on a blockchain, Rolex could fold and people in the future might still be able to check for authenticity.

There's more steps involved that I'm not sure could be solved, like, who controls the authenticity Oracle? Is it an API that gets pinged? Do you have to pay a gas or network fee to check authenticity? Could a smart contract be made to automate the work? Maybe it could work like credit card chips, which give out a one-time code to the retailer, who then gets it checked by an online service... except somehow replace the web API with a smart contract.

For larger scale operations, tagging individual items with NFC chips might be cost prohibitive.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#122

Post by zdw » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

superfrank wrote: post #47

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will This kind of gets at the reason why I think a lot of tech articles/blogs about what the future will be like are just terrible. The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different from the general population. Like this author says, most people don't want to run their own web server, but I'd…

> middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a Nintendo".

Using a middle aged woman as a stand-in for technologically unsophisticated user is a pretty negative stereotype both of older people and women: https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/So_simple,_your_mother_...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#123

Post by dane-pgp » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #57

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And his arguments in favour of centralization are flawed. Sure, regular people do not want to run their own (email, chat, etc) servers. But they DO want to be able to chose from a handful of available servers the one they like best (or the one they trust most), without losing connectivity with their contacts. Tired of Google's shenanigans, move from Gmail to Protonmail, tell your contacts your new email, set up an au…

Some people say they want this, but in practice, why you should trust someone you've never heard of? Network effects aside, consider the difficulty of deciding that the people behind a fork of Chrome or Signal are trustworthy. The average person doesn't have the knowledge to do due diligence, and many of us who could (in theory) don't want to bother. How do you get to the point where people think your team of softwar…

> consider the difficulty of deciding that the people behind a fork of Chrome or Signal are trustworthy.

Yet web users did decide that the people behind Chrome were trustworthy, even when there were still sites claiming to "work best in Internet Explorer". You're arguing that something is unrealistic, and yet you give an example of that thing actually happening.

> The average person doesn't have the knowledge to do due diligence

The average person knows that Facebook is bad for society, and yet they are tied to the platform because of a lack of interoperability. A minority of users have accepted the switching cost and moved to Fediverse instances, but I think it's not controversial to suggest that more people would switch to Facebook competitors if they could stay in contact with their Facebook friends.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#124

Post by ManishR » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

> The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is. So the money draws people into OpenSea, they improve the experience by building a platform that iterates on the underlying web3 protocols in web2 space, they eventually offer the ability to “mint” NFTs through OpenSea itself instead of through your own smart contract, and eventually this all opens the door for Coinbase to offer access to the validated NFT market with their own platform via your debit card.

This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an improvement? Historically, any widely adopted technological innovation has had the burden to offer and prove incremental value to society to justify paying the transition costs. But here, the incremental value is being pitched as literal "money" to be made by getting in early - which can be hard to resist for your average joe - notwithstanding their passion or stance on the underlying technology. Believe this will be an interesting race condition between dying out of the hype on one side, and technology reaching critical mass to be self sustaining on the other side. In either case however, don't see anything fundamentally changing or improving for society, except perhaps some new players displacing (or getting bought out by) old ones.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#125

Post by ptudan » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

jagger27 wrote: post #76

> [...] NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the futur…

There are plenty of use cases for NFTs with updating data. Many exist already. Most high quality NFT art project do use IPFS, yes. But that is not the only use case for NFTs

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#126

Post by jwblackwell » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will

If only 0.01% of the population ever run a node / mine, isn't that still infinitely better than what we have now? Especially so when money is involved.

The current alternative is 100% centralized. In other words, it's 1 DB vs ~700,000 or 1 company vs 700k individuals etc.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#127

Post by tailspin2019 » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #10

newfonewhodis wrote: post #8

This > After a few days, without warning or explanation, the NFT I made was removed from OpenSea (an NFT marketplace) Then > What I found most interesting, though, is that after OpenSea removed my NFT, it also no longer appeared in any crypto wallet on my device. This is web3, though, how is that possible? How indeed: > You don’t own “web3.” > The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ulti…

Please don't degenerate into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

With the greatest respect, I disagree with this reading of the parent’s comment. It doesn’t seem particularly inflammatory to me? Or at least enough to warrant this call out…

It’s expressing a strong view yes, not necessarily one I disagree or agree with (I don’t know enough on the topic yet to take a view), but this doesn’t seem to blatantly break the guidelines.

If it wasn’t for the superb track record for what I view as quite impartial moderation on HN, I’d worry that the mention of “VC” here was a trigger for moderation…!

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#128

Post by lekevicius » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

spenczar5 wrote: post #102

lekevicius wrote: post #52

While it's refreshing to hear critique from someone who actually built something on web3, there are a couple of points where I'd dare to disagree, somewhat. Particularly, regarding "early days". It really is, still, early days, because there is a lot of complexity in getting all the pieces built. It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart contracts). Other pi…

My understanding of IPFS is that there is some DNS-and-HTTP translation step that resolves content to IPFS locations. Is that correct, and is it immutable? How does that work?

There are many gateways that allow viewing IPFS content over HTTP (e.g. ipfs.io), but the "true" IPFS experience is not over HTTP, it's done via P2P and addressed using content hashes. For example, one of my NFTs has content hash of

QmTqkpmbKmciQgqhUWpML7dsJ59MBEjgQd7wH853n4ASZM

I keep a copy of it on my computer (+ backups). If for some reason it were to be unhosted by every IPFS participant, I could become one, and re-establish my NFT. Image content -> content hash, so everyone would agree about content re-establishing.

Not sure if I fully answered your question.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#129

Post by jwlake » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #87

go_to_moon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes source?

I should have said archival nodes, the ones that keep state back to the genesis block. I don't know if that number is even tracked anywhere. I've read estimates ranging from 2 to 5. I'm trying to find where I read that, happy to be wrong - or right, if anyone has data. [edit] Here. [1] And here. [2] After examining every which way we could think of to add the Trie state to our Ethereum state, we asked Vitalik for ass…

I've run quite a bit of analytics on ethereum and have downloaded the entire chain multiple times for processing and it's freely available from multiple providers. All the major API providers (infura, etherscan, etc) have the all the raw blocks available readily.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#130

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC

spenczar5 wrote: post #102

lekevicius wrote: post #52

While it's refreshing to hear critique from someone who actually built something on web3, there are a couple of points where I'd dare to disagree, somewhat. Particularly, regarding "early days". It really is, still, early days, because there is a lot of complexity in getting all the pieces built. It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart contracts). Other pi…

My understanding of IPFS is that there is some DNS-and-HTTP translation step that resolves content to IPFS locations. Is that correct, and is it immutable? How does that work?

Content on IPFS is keyed by hash values. The data is immutable at least to the extent that it's impractical to find a hash collision with sha256 (today). The content will also only remain up so long as someone (either the initial submitter or others) has it pinned. Otherwise, the content will, eventually, disappear.