My First Impressions of Web3 • Hacker News Board

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#281

Post by password1 » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:56 PM UTC

wyck wrote: post #206

clarle wrote: post #25

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.

MetaMask is a wallet, its not ingrained into any blockchain, your free to use alternatives, and many protocols don't support it. The centralized aspect of a chrome app and marketplace like opensea is very well know issue and talked about a lot in crypto, the problem of course comes down to lack of education, which is apparent in this very post.

Can you point me to where this insightful discussion happens? And where can I educate myself? 99,99% of content and forums I find online about crypto only care about promoting coins, nfts or services basing only on futuristic visionary promises, hyping up the users and attempts at FOMO. It's almost literal spam. This is the first time I read something that just explains how thing works from a technical standpoint and what challenges are there.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#282

Post by chc » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:57 PM UTC

zdw wrote: post #122

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_...

It also seems chronologically wrong since a woman who is middle-aged today would have been in the prime age group for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#283

Post by ineptech » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:57 PM UTC

pjsg wrote: post #118

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…

> What is the benefit to the average user of running their own server?

All the server-side use cases you can't do with a client alone. I think you misunderstood my comment; I'm not saying that running your own email server is easy, nor that it's hard but still worth it; I'm saying that the fact that it's too hard to be worth doing is a statement about the software that exists today, not some sort of immutable feature of the universe.

Anyway, that's the wrong question. The right one is: what new software would we make if everyone had their own server? The answer is, I dunno, but the hardware is good enough to find out; a cheap virtual server costs about as much as a streaming service, and quite a bit less than a mobile plan. It's well within reach for everyone in America to have their own VPS running their own email server. They don't, because Gmail is way easier, but that would cease to be true if we had better software. And, once there were a few server-side apps that were actually good, we'd probably make more (just as the advent of smartphones led to a lot of new use cases that would've been difficult to imagine before they were commonplace).

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#284

Post by danans » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:57 PM UTC

> This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream

This is exactly what I've heard from lay investors in crypto (vs the techno utopians pushing crypto as the world's decentralized medium of exchange).

The lay investors welcome the centralization and the regulation of off ramps as they feel it will bring more traditional financial instruments trust and relative stability to crypto, thereby bringing in even more common investors. They see its value as a gold replacement and inflation hedge.

Their agenda is quite at odds with the original anarcho-capitalist vision of cryptocurrency, as they aren't interested undermining existing institutional structures (which they are themselves reliant on).

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#285

Post by codehalo » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #80

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…

>> 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.

Absolutely correct. Extremely flawed reasoning regarding blockchains and web3 on Moxie's part. He actually created more confusion than enlightenment.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#286

Post by jflatow » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:59 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #162

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."

Me either. I had no idea that accessing a link to NFT-described content went through OpenSea for content that isn't even hosted by OpenSea. That's apparently a MetaMask thing. Supposedly a MetaMask wallet can connect to any willing node, but in practice they use the Infuria->OpenSea server. Yes, you can run your own Etherium node and server, and connect a MetaMask wallet to it.[1] As Moxie points out, nobody wants to…

You need to know what NFT you have, it's all about the contract.

e.g. the EtherFreakers contract is immutable and contains a git commit hash (line 83: https://etherscan.io/address/0x3a275655586a049fe860be867d10c...), so you can prove you have the code which generates your freaker.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#287

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 11:59 PM UTC

not2b wrote: post #178

fabian2k wrote: post #80

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…

Except that as you say, it's too expensive for every node to have a full copy, so there will only be a few dominant players. If that's the case, web3 will be like what we have now, where instead of the dominant players being Google, Meta, and Amazon they will be the two or three dominant web3 companies, with a few smaller people trying to keep up. So I would agree with your last sentence.

[deleted]

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#288

Post by dmarcos » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 12:00 AM UTC

password1 wrote: post #267

SubiculumCode wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I keep reading that there are a ton better blockchains than eth, but then it seems that all dapps continue to use just eth, even at the cost of insane gas fees. Why is that?

I would say network effects. It’s where the users and devs are.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#289

Post by starfallg » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 12:00 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #73

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…

It's refreshing to read an article that admits this: > > Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. I actually enjoy build and running servers, but only for hobby purposes. When it comes down to anything business related or critical, I have zero desire to run and maintain it on my own. And I especially don't want to have to handle security for large amounts of money that could disappear in an inst…

It's worth making a distinction between running a server and managing it. People don't want the hassle of managing all the complexity of server infrastructure, but they appreciate the benefits of owning your data, and the hardware it is stored on. It's just that right now the centralized solutions that store data centrally are the only ones available for web-scale applications.

However, that doesn't have to be the case. If you look at consumer appliances and mobile computing, you can build managed environments that are physically distributed but partially or fully managed, with the actual code and data as close to the user as possible.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#290

Post by betwixthewires » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 12:00 AM UTC

msgilligan wrote: post #96

He's focused on Ethereum and NFTs, which is certainly the most popular/obvious place to research. I think his analysis is excellent and the article is worth reading. But he does say: > I have only dipped my toe in the waters of web3 Notably he doesn't even mention IPFS (which uses the pre-image of an JPG to form the URL.) Nor does he mention Bitcoin (which provides a shared state layer as well as a currency and makes…

While I agree that he only touched on NFTs and not really anything beyond that, his core point, "decentralized architecture is slower to iterate on, therefore centralized tools will outpace decentralized ones, therefore the market will trend towards use of centralized services" is hard to disagree with. He is only using the NFT market as an example to demonstrate this point.

Even if you don't consider it natural market forces, and you say "people are building their infrastructure on centralized services so as to place themselves in a rent seeking position", you now wind up having to explain how you intend to stop these "bad actors" from not doing the "right thing" and designing their infrastructure against their own interest. How do you align incentives to ensure a decentralized future in this way? Seems like a glaring hole in the entire plan that results in centralized services being in wider use, only bolting on top of a decentralized database that in the end doesn't really matter.

I'm a big fan of cryptocurrency and these decentralized incentive networks. I'd love to see a future where everyone doesn't rely on these centralized services and the UX is low friction. I think it can be done. I like to know that I can use decentralized uncensorable money, and other asset types, and I like the fact that these options are available today, right now, to me and anyone else who values them. But the web3 concept as it's sold by the cryptocurrency enthusiasts doesn't appear to be going that direction, and at this point I think moxie is probably right.