201–210 of 1001 posts
As a web3 skeptic, Marlinspike has still been quick to outfit Signal with a privileged 'house cryptocurrency', MobileCoin, whose value-appreciation-with-usage will accrue to favored projects. That's web3, too! https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...
At the risk of displaying my ignorance and lack of knowledge about this area, one part I found very familiar in this article is that the action interactions in his apps didn't actually interact with the blockchain, but essentially with two centralized services. My very limited understanding is that for blockchains essentially the way to distribute them is that every node has a full copy. This sounds awfully expensive…
Not really, since the blockchain data providers obviously need to provide the exact same data, from the decentralized blockchain.
That's not the case with centralized providers.
> 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"…
> Imagine a version of things where the server was almost a toy-like appliance.
Odroid HC4 (Arm SBC, dual SATA drive slots, HDMI output, Kodi compatible) is about $100 USD, can run Armbian and LibreElec, https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4-oled/
I was under the impression that crypto currency was thought of as nothing but yet another pyramid scheme.
By definition something with a finite supply cannot be a pyramid scheme, in fact in most cases there are no parallels whatsoever to crypto and pyramid schemes. There are some pyramid schemes within the shitcoin scam and yield farmer communities, but to think that's represents the industry is highly ignorant.
I don't like that when an actually good successor to web2 comes along it won't be called web3 because of this bullshit that they call web3.
As an engineer, I feel like this single post helped me better understand Web3 and how it worked under the hood better than any of the heavily hyped Discord and Twitter announcements of new projects over the past year. It's interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the other big crypto / NFT marketplaces. Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.
It's worth distinguishing "running" a server from "having" a server. I lost interest in "running" my own services a couple decades ago - too much work, and I don't keep up on security patches, so it felt like a huge liability too. I am quite happy to "have" a server of my own though that requires minimal babysitting.
We already have this today in some forms: I have a network attached printer that once configured to get online, removes the need for me to run my own print server. Similarly I have NAS devices that remove the need for me to run my own file server. You could argue that the little box that my HomeKit devices talks to is also a little server for coordinating all of my little HomeKit devices. Each of these are pretty popular, even amongst the general population. That popularity tells me that people are quite happy to "have" purpose-built servers, but only if they don't need to "run" them.
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…
Am I the only one who remembers Web 1.0 as "publisher-generated content" and Web 2.0 as "user-generated content"? (publisher being the one who hosts the server) The latter is dead for several years now, since we've found out content moderation is hard and even scale won't help you there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm perplexed with him writing this piece and, at the same time, adding crypto based payments to Signal... Has he written anything on Signal and payments?
I don't think there's necessarily any contradiction. This is a critique of the Web3 paradigm (crypto all the things) and not cryptocurrency itself for say, payments.