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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#301

Post by majormajor »

miracle2k wrote: post #244
Animats wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the hash of the data. It very often does, and it is certainly the case for most high-value NFTs. It is indeed not the case if you create your NFT on OpenSea and do not take the additional step of freezing the metadata. Also, there are many artworks that change, so a hash to a single file is not necessarily the right solution.

So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of the actual data? Since the blockchain only has the hash? And if whatever server you originally got the data from the NFT for went down, you'd lose it if you didn't make a backup?

In those cases does the blockchain still have the URL as well? And you might end up with a collection of bits that matched the hash in the blockchain but was no longer at the original URL? What's the next step then?

(The "artwork may change" bit seems like it becomes even more weird and potentially nightmarish edge-case/potentially-losing-your-purchase-wise.)

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#302

Post by pavlov »

codehalo wrote: post #274
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.

Seems like you (and a vast majority of HN including Moxie) is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask/OpenSea). I saw this back in the 90's when a lot of people thought the internet was "Internet Explorer".

And that's one of Moxie's points: how exactly is web3 supposed to be avoiding the centralization that occurred on the web, when it's already at that point.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#303

Post by LaunchAway1 »

So several fundamental forces gave us the centralized internet, at least for the time being. Trusting a few players has never given resistance to these forces and so blockchain doesn't alter the equilibrium.

What are the forces pushing for blockchain? Some will say greed, and of course at an individual level greed has something to do with it, but greed has always been there. Greed is part of humanity. What is specific to blockchain? Maybe just the desire for decentralization.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#304

Post by ineptech »

0xCMP wrote: post #147
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…

while all true; its also true no one wants to run their own servers. the problems are practical. power and heat. noise. theft or disaster => backups; 3-2-1. updates, botnets, firewalls, static/external ips. ssh, vpn, or port forwarding. vlans? scaling? trust? each of these things is a rabbit hole of problems and issues to solve.

I'm sure some people would want to run one in their basement, but I was referring to virtual cloud servers, and assumed the last sentence would've made that clear.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#305

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dylkil wrote: post #212
not2b wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view it is only proof-of-work systems that must be rejected. Alternatives that are less harmful are possible. Pretty much everything that has a large carbon footprint is going to have to be fixed to reduce that footprint, including web3.

the public dismay at the carbon footprint of crypto is always fascinating to me. The network rewards are setup in such a way the the most profitable miners are the ones with the cheapest electricity as this is their biggest overhead. This pushes miners to the cheapest forms of electricity, i.e renewables

> This pushes miners to the cheapest forms of electricity, i.e renewables

I would love for this to be true (and that's why I used to believe it). But there are two problems with this:

• Renewables aren't the cheapest form of electricity; low-value (dirty-burning) or subsidised fossil fuels are cheaper in many places. You've heard of people buying and re-commissioning old coal power stations for crypto mining, I'm sure?

• Using any grid electricity drives up the price of other electricity, by market forces. The effect is local, but when cryptomining is happening globally, that's a global effect. That means that otherwise-infeasible inefficient (and polluting) electricity generation is now viable.

Greenest ≠ cheapest. If this were a universal truth, we wouldn't have a climate problem in the first place.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#306

Post by justinator »

zucker42 wrote: post #279
wyck wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poorly worded on my part, I meant > as long as new investors contribute new funds, and as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and still believe in the non-existent assets they are purported to own. As mentioned this happens a lot with shitcoins and yield farmers, its rather easy to setup, but is not indicative of the industry, and the main source to blame for this misconception is the media, be…

Are you claiming that nothing is a pyramid scheme until it crashes?

I think if you're invested in a pyramid scheme, it's not easy to admit such.

I have to relate this to the whole Allison Mack/NXIVM pyramid scheme.

Funny that we still don't know who the mythical "Satoshi Nakamoto" is. Seems pretty cultish to me, but believe what you wanna believe. To me that's a pretty big red flag. But I'm super into people calling me stupid so have at it.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#307

Post by arcticbull »

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…

> I think there’s tons of room for Blockchain-as-a-Service tools to improve development and testing processes without forcing centralization on main net deployments.

The big Blockchain-as-a-Services shut down - both IBM and Azure are gone.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#308

Post by exdsq »

spenczar5 wrote: post #117
exdsq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Mostly the cost of hiring a DevOps engineer to set it up and maintain it and taking on the additional risk of having to deal with upgrading the node etc... It's just cheaper and easier to go centralized at the moment.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#309

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dqpb wrote: post #293
NationalPark wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Via carbon offsets, so they emit all the co2 up front and then hope the forests their partners plant are both real and will be properly managed for the next few decades.

They emit very little co2 up front. So little that they trivially reach carbon-negative with a small amount of carbon offsets.

Very little compared to the entire planet, sure. But what's the actual amount?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#310

Post by password1 »

mediocregopher wrote: post #249

I view the final two conclusions points, that people do not want to run their own servers and that we need to make software easier to build/run, to be one and the same. Is the reason people don't want to run a server because it's just so difficult and expensive to keep a computer online in your living room (remembering that a smaller deployment doesn't need 20 nines of uptime), or is it because the UX of running serv…

This is a great point, makes me wonder if there is a market for such a service.
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