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Web3 is expensive P2P

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Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#331

Post by chrisco255 »

jl6 wrote: post #289
chrisco255 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market. Meanwhile, any digital content or rights can be represented by an NFT. Is it useful to own the commercial rights to use a pop…

> How about an open royalty standard for selling in-game music as part of an indie racing game (and by purchasing the in-game music, I get a portable copy that can be integrated in any application)? That’s a cool idea but I’ve no idea why you would need a blockchain to achieve it.

> That’s a cool idea but I’ve no idea why you would need a blockchain to achieve it.

Because otherwise you have gatekeepers and incompatible proprietary standards that don't interoperate or compose.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#332

Post by chrisco255 »

the_gastropod wrote: post #175
chrisco255 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market. Meanwhile, any digital content or rights can be represented by an NFT. Is it useful to own the commercial rights to use a pop…

> Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in the market. An email address? Why do we need to complicate this with blockchain tomfoolery?

> An email address? Why do we need to complicate this with blockchain tomfoolery?

Because I can send a message to a public key, encrypted such that only the owner of the private key that pairs with that public key, can decrypt. Since the user actually owns the keys, they can't get rugged by Google or Microsoft because they find themselves on the wrong side of big brother. Public on-chain wallets as identity are also much more spam-resistant. Verifying a cryptographic signature is completely decentralized and does not require even internet access (could be done fully offline) whereas email is tied to a server by definition. Numerous possibilities open up with public-private keys.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#333

Post by chrisco255 »

the_gastropod wrote: post #211
hanniabu wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants their email public

Oh, interesting! Wonder why? Maybe people exist who don't want the same people from Twitter to follow them on Reddit, Youtube, Steam, Spotify, etc. too, eh? Maybe independent isolated logins aren't such a bad thing? Maybe hand-waving about "BLOCKCHAIN" doesn't actually have any solutions to any of these problems that arise from the fact that: different people have different desires. There is no tech solution for reco…

> Oh, interesting! Wonder why? Maybe people exist who don't want the same people from Twitter to follow them on Reddit, Youtube, Steam, Spotify, etc. too, eh? Maybe independent isolated logins aren't such a bad thing? Maybe hand-waving about "BLOCKCHAIN" doesn't actually have any solutions to any of these problems that arise from the fact that: different people have different desires. There is no tech solution for reconciling the irreconcilable.

I have dozens of wallet addresses. In fact, while typing this message, I just created 3 more, just for fun. It's really as simple as running an ECDSA function in the browser if you want to create separate identities for separate platforms. The beauty of owning your online identities is that you are in control. It's really that simple. But if you want to compose that identity, there is really no better way.

We've already seen deplatforming, censorship, financial exclusion for protesting in a democratic nation, shadow banning, and worse from the big tech cos. That's not the internet or the values I was raised on, and I'm working to push back on it, vis-a-vis tools like SIWE (https://docs.login.xyz/general-information/siwe-overview/eip...). Take ownership.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#334

Post by chrisco255 »

roywiggins wrote: post #206
phamilton wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been? Because people haven't been financially motivated to evangelize it. I believe that's the core of blockchain/web3 innovations. It's a worse way to do it, but the social hype (driven almost entirely by get rich FOMO) is enough to push it over the edge.

The most efficient way to do it would be to bootstrap the ecosystem with blockchain buzziness and then just deprecate the blockchain part eventually. MetaMask already relies on "Web2" apis to query blockchains, who says they have to actually hit a blockchain all the time?

> MetaMask already relies on "Web2" apis to query blockchains

False. MetaMask uses Infura as a default, but you can edit your RPC URL to whatever you want. You can even run your own node and sync the chain if you've got a couple hundred gigabytes to spare (no stake required to run a non-validating node).

They don't have to hit the blockchain all the time. Only when it makes sense. For everything else, there's off-chain signatures. That's the beauty of it. Hey, you don't want to use the chain, just use the sign-in with Ethereum feature, and that's totally cool!

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#335

Post by chrisco255 »

thawaya3113 wrote: post #260
roywiggins wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most efficient way to do it would be to bootstrap the ecosystem with blockchain buzziness and then just deprecate the blockchain part eventually. MetaMask already relies on "Web2" apis to query blockchains, who says they have to actually hit a blockchain all the time?

This is exactly what’s happening with crypto. A user’s transaction on Coinbase rarely represents an actual transaction on the blockchain. A transaction actually represents a row in a Coinbase SQL database, which Coinbase will eventually batch and then convert into a blockchain operation.

Coinbase is a centralized exchange. Of course it runs in a SQL db or whatever. They only need to touch the chain when settling inflows/outflows.

But something like Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap is fully on-chain. Every trade happens on chain, because the application is an immutable smart contract liquidity protocol, called an AMM, or automated market maker.

It does as much, if not more, volume than Coinbase ($1.98B in last 24H): https://info.uniswap.org/#/

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#336

Post by pbronez »

Gigachad wrote: post #310
Micoloth wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. Why did this happen? I mean how could it happen that such a basic utility as the router was developed with such fundamental design flaws that hosting a webserver at home is above the skills of 99% of people? There’s a router in every home anywhere now, so this is a fact we’ll have to deal with for decades. I’m pretty young so i was not around at the time. How did it come about?

It was NAT. We ran out of v4 addresses and self hosting / p2p became much harder. And now many iot devices depend on Nat existing as some kind of security measure. But largely no one cares because you wouldn’t want to host any real website at home anyway. It’s extremely cheap and reliable to just rent a VPS.

So what happened with IPv6 then? Seems to me that that we solved the v4 address exhaustion problem and then just… didn’t use it? IPv6 support is mostly just a greyed out option on a buried configuration menu as far as I can tell.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#337

Post by topranks »

pbronez wrote: post #336
Gigachad wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was NAT. We ran out of v4 addresses and self hosting / p2p became much harder. And now many iot devices depend on Nat existing as some kind of security measure. But largely no one cares because you wouldn’t want to host any real website at home anyway. It’s extremely cheap and reliable to just rent a VPS.

So what happened with IPv6 then? Seems to me that that we solved the v4 address exhaustion problem and then just… didn’t use it? IPv6 support is mostly just a greyed out option on a buried configuration menu as far as I can tell.

v6 usage continues to grow on cellular and broadband networks. So lots of consumers now have it.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

I would argue many aspects of the protocol’s design made it difficult to implement, for both vendors and networks. A simple “same protocol, larger address field” and more focus on backwards compatibility probably would have fared better.

Either way it doesn’t completely solve the problem mentioned above. You need a firewall to block inbound connections to things on your LAN. So to do p2p you need a way to add rules to allow the traffic you want in. So it either remains too complex for the average person to do manually, or you run something like uPNP. But that can have its own security considerations.

v6 does remove some of the complexities for trying to run services from private address space behind NAT though. So it’s an improvement.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#338

Post by MisterBastahrd »

rglullis wrote: post #324
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would somebody be spending billions of dollars in VC money when you could just use whatever game engine you want and license a small third party library to do asset validation? VCs can't possibly be THAT eager to blow all their money unless it's as a PAAS ala Roblox.

Since the beginning of the conversation, I am saying that is not about the assets . Why do you continue to center your reasoning around that? It's like worrying about parking lots in a world where self-driving cars are available on-demand. If you don't believe that self-driving cars are ever going to reach that state, fine. But conditional on accepting a premise (web3 games using the blockchain as the basis of the wo…

Maybe it's because the technology isn't meant for being used as a storage medium for 'world logic" and the games that try to utilize it in this manner will be both expensive and terrible... so I give game dev studios and VCs enough credit that they have the common sense not to do stupid things that will fail miserably.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#339

Post by topranks »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #303
Animats wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it's simply overkill. P2P may have a comeback, because home connections are becoming more symmetrical. DSL usually had relatively low uplink rates, and COMCAST cable was worse. But fiber is usually symmetrical, and 5G wireless typically has an uplink bandwidth of half the downlink rate. This makes P2P more feasible.

Notably, GPON is not symmetrical.

Nor DOCSIS nor VDSL.

But upload speeds have risen a lot, despite many of them still being lower than downlink.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#340

Post by topranks »

qabqabaca wrote: post #284
paulmd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"web3 social" will never be successful because censorship is a desirable feature of a social-media platform. If there is no way to censor a group of people, there is no way to censor spammers either. You will be able to filter at the client level of course, or set up maintained filter-lists (which will be trivial to game with a "sybil" approach), but this is going to be "running an email server" times a million in te…

I think the main reason it won't be successful is because people simply don't care about decentralization/privacy. Historically, there have only been a handful of successful social media companies. Starting a new one with the key differentiator being decentralization, while also adding the onboarding friction of crypto wallet management, is essentially a guarantee of failure. Mastodon tried this, without the unnecess…

Same reason crypto won’t take over for payments (even if it could scale).

We already have payment networks that work well. People aren’t going to switch to a less convenient solution to what they already have for .

That’s not always good but it’s the reality.

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