My First Impressions of Web3 • Hacker News Board

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#131

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

> 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.

Wait, really?! Indeed, that seems insane to me — links change or die all the time!

I had thought the whole point was to prove a kind of ownership of some specific piece of art/data and just assumed that a hash of that data would be involved in a significant way.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#132

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC

CameronNemo wrote: post #32

I like Moxie's work and writings, and this article has some great points, but I can't get behind this: We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. I'm not ready to give in. I am happy to leave "normal" (tech illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals. I th…

> I'm not ready to give in. I am happy to leave "normal" (tech illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals.

I don't think we have to "leave "normal" [...] people behind". I don't like devices like Alexa, but FFS, look at what millions of people have installed and running 24/7 in their homes. Is someone seriously telling me that a dedicated engineering and marketing effort couldn't build a similar consumer-centric device that functioned as a server (purposes to include but not necessarily limited to http and smtp).

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#133

Post by clpm4j » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC

ssss11 wrote: post #62

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…

I think they key is: despite regular people not wanting to RUN their own server, they do want to CONTROL their own server. Current incumbents treat your data like tier asset, not like custody. This is because you pay nothing. The beginning of regular people having empowerment begins by paying some fee to own the product.

None of the regular people I'm familiar care about their data at all. If you use any of the popular social media apps (Twitter, TikTok, FB/Instagram, Snapchat), then you can't really claim that you care about your data, and most of the people I know use those apps on a weekly if not daily basis.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#134

Post by 0xluminous » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

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

I just wrote an article about this — what's really new about web3 is the incentives not the tech.

> People don’t want to run servers. It’s okay for markets to specialize and service providers to receive economies of scale.

> Email is a decentralized protocol, and customer behavior shows people just want to click and have things work, like Gmail.

> What’s important is ensuring protocols stay competitive.

> Federated servers following a decentralized blockchain with layers of competitive protocols for storing data, with semi-interoperable apps built on top, seem like a pretty workable solution.

> Forcing everything P2P will be painful; there’s a reason the Cloud exists. Offline apps are great, and P2P app architecture is great, but expecting users to run P2P nodes is a losing battle. Some power users and volunteers will run nodes, but most will use a 3rd party. It’s better to accept this reality, minimize trust and make it competitive as possible.

It's the best thing I've ever written, if you're into this kind of thing I hope you check it out.

Disintermediating Network Effects for Fun and Profit, How to prevent Web3 from ending up like Web2

https://medium.com/@0xluminous/disintermediating-network-eff...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#135

Post by kylehotchkiss » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

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 (eg Monero) digital cash that settles instantly? That has the potential to disrupt societies

With where the world is with Debit/Credit cards and all other trackable digital payments, the world going back to untraceable physical cash could have the potential to disrupt societies (people should make sure to put their phone/watch/entire car in a faraday cage so their cell phone providers don't have real time access to where they spent their untraceable physical cash)

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#136

Post by dane-pgp » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

newfonewhodis wrote: post #53

purplesnowflake wrote: post #5

Moxie is no fan of decentralization. And he made why very clear with concise and incisive arguments.

At least wrt Signal, I think he prefers the trust be in the protocol and not the organization or business model.

It seems that with Signal he actually prefers that people trust specifically the organization that he founded, and not compatible implementations of the protocol, or even self-built copies of the same binary.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/q1jnbb/why_isnt_sig...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#137

Post by spenczar5 » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

lekevicius wrote: post #128

spenczar5 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks, that is indeed a good description. It does sound like this is basically the content hashing Moxie was hoping for.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#138

Post by omeze » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

dthul wrote: post #37

The views on centralized services such as Infura really resonate with me. A few months ago I looked into how Ethereum and smart contracts work and got excited that there is basically this shared "virtual machine" with persistent, public state that can only be altered by interacting with those smart contracts. But soon after it became clear that it is not really possible for me (or any regular "client" as the article…

You can do this locally though, it just takes like 200 GB. I've run an Ethereum full node + eth2 beacon chain node on my Macbook Pro for local development, took like 10 hours to sync IIRC and just worked afterwards. I still use Infura for projects though bc I don't really see the value in running my own hosted client for pet projects. If I was doing a production app I'd likely use my own w/ a 3rd party service for backup/HA.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#139

Post by rockbruno » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

I always had trouble understanding what web3 was all about because I just couldn't figure out why anyone would be excited for it. I found this article to be excellent at explaining what the platform is but I still can't figure out why people keep bringing up this topic when it's clearly a classic example of a "Solution in Search of a Problem".

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#140

Post by threeseed » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #81

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."

Bit that it'd be very practical, but the data itself is shared so in theory every company could set up their own API to render the blockchain into a readable, quick to access format. Even the vanished poop emoji NFT would reappear once someone else renders their view on the blockchain in the right way. The problem with this is that running servers that store and process one or even multiple blockchains in a searchabl…

Problem is who cares if you run your own servers when everyone you know is viewing NFTs through servers which are manipulating the data like Opensea is.