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Web3 is expensive P2P

netfuture.ch

371–380 of 384 posts

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably Axie is pretty niche. And so are the other blockchain games out there. The thing they have in common is that they're all equally terrible. It's not because everyone tried to make a terrible game but because the blockchain is terribly limiting and the audience of people its for are not even interested in games to begin with. Part of the reason they're all kind-of samey is that you can only put so much metadat…

> no gamers are complaining about a lack of a marketplace where they can buy and sell game assets I agree, but I'm working off the assumption that buying and selling assets perhaps isn't the only way to make use of the blockchain, or perhaps even crypto in some weird fashion. > But I don't see any gamedevs chomping at the bit to make blockchain games I've been doing gamedev for, give or take, 10 years. Not profession…

Presently there's no way to make a game on a smart contract chain without cryptocurrencies, unfortunately.

My take on cryptocurrencies is that they should all be put in the trash bin and burned to the ground.

So if you're really into it for some reason I'd suggest just going with a hashed-linked list or Merkle Tree you host privately on a raspberry pi and avoid public chains/smart contracts all together if that's something that interests you.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no gamers are complaining about a lack of a marketplace where they can buy and sell game assets I agree, but I'm working off the assumption that buying and selling assets perhaps isn't the only way to make use of the blockchain, or perhaps even crypto in some weird fashion. > But I don't see any gamedevs chomping at the bit to make blockchain games I've been doing gamedev for, give or take, 10 years. Not profession…

Presently there's no way to make a game on a smart contract chain without cryptocurrencies, unfortunately. My take on cryptocurrencies is that they should all be put in the trash bin and burned to the ground. So if you're really into it for some reason I'd suggest just going with a hashed-linked list or Merkle Tree you host privately on a raspberry pi and avoid public chains/smart contracts all together if that's som…

I wouldn't say I'm really into it, to be honest its one of those things that'll probably just sit forever in my someday todo list. I just think there could be something interesting in it.

Maybe one day ;)

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For multiplayer video games, this has essentially never been true.

Yes, there was. E.g, I remember playing Nascar online with school buddies via dial-up. There was no DLC, no extensions, no pay-to-win. You bought the game once, and you played it forever.

Ah, okay, fair. I don't think anyone is super interested in a return to only direct-connect multiplayer. Third-party server browsers showed up in a hurry, to be quickly superseded by much better in-game server browsers, with official servers being preferred, to cut down on cheating.

And especially if you want any kind of global ranking to ensure reasonably fair skill levels for matches, you're going to need a centralized service.

Imagine a game like Valorant without any central server. It'd be a much different game, a lot less user-friendly. And some people would go for that, because it would appeal to their moral sensibilities, and more power to them. But it would get destroyed, market-wise, against actual, centralized, user-friendly Valorant.

That's not theory, that's history. Players demanded games have good server browsers, good official servers, and good match-making, and games that didn't provide that suffered.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there was. E.g, I remember playing Nascar online with school buddies via dial-up. There was no DLC, no extensions, no pay-to-win. You bought the game once, and you played it forever.

Ah, okay, fair. I don't think anyone is super interested in a return to only direct-connect multiplayer. Third-party server browsers showed up in a hurry, to be quickly superseded by much better in-game server browsers, with official servers being preferred, to cut down on cheating. And especially if you want any kind of global ranking to ensure reasonably fair skill levels for matches, you're going to need a central…

What you are talking about does not require locking users into the platform. It's totally okay to offer a service with your product, as long as it doesn't lock you into it.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#375
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it has everything to do with it: 1. you purchase digital items with centralized payment processors like VISA 2. the asset is transferred to your centralized iOS/Steam account. you do not "own" it, the company owns it. if you are banned from Steam, you lose all your games and game purchases. web3 is asking how these two things can be changed to remove the intermediary. the best frame for this is not "web3 ideals are n…

Can you actually see the large game houses collaborating on the standards that would permit item game-interoperability? I’m struggling.

doubtful . these will come from creators and indie game devs first whenever they get over their hatred of crypto and blockchain. eventually major game houses and consoles will follow suit.

similar thing happens in rest of digital art and media worlds. photographers, musicians, and artists all doing NFTs, then later Instagram, Spotify, Adobe, major art auction houses all begin to explore NFTs as they can then capture some of that market.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#377

Sort of agree. My initial understanding was that web3 was essentially a P2P solution with IPFS, Federated social graphs, decentralized p2p messaging and RTC stuff, and awaiting decentralized DNS. My current understanding or impression is that it's a coin wallet in my ~browser and I have to mine shit coins via storing and computing stuff on what will certainly be FAANGs behalf.

Web3 has always been an attempt to rebrand blockchain stuff, and make it appear like the next step in internet technology. Some other technologies (like IPFS) have been added to the Web3 umbrella, but blockchain an cryptocurrency has always been the core of "Web3".

I'm pretty sure "Web3" is just a term that crypto-enthusiasts have invented to mask the fact that crypto has completely failed to live up to any of its promises.

No-one can tell me anything about Web3 except that it's the future, it's the next wave, everyone is investing in it, everyone is moving into the space, it's going to be huge, you'd be a fool to miss out. But ask for details, or for a single example (just one) of a Web3 application that's unequivocally proved itself or that can't be better served by an existing pre-blockchain technology and... crickets.

Replace "Web3" with simply "blockchain" and I could have written the exact same paragraph five years ago. It's hard to keep the hype train going when you've been saying the same thing for five years and the "future" still hasn't arrived, but rename "blockchain" to "web3" and suddenly it sounds like you having something new and the hype cycle can repeat.

Give it another five years and I expect the cryptoheads will be pumping another trendy new term to mask the lack of innovation. It's the future, you've got to believe me! It's going to blow up! Any day now.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#378
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web3 has always been an attempt to rebrand blockchain stuff, and make it appear like the next step in internet technology. Some other technologies (like IPFS) have been added to the Web3 umbrella, but blockchain an cryptocurrency has always been the core of "Web3".

IPFS was added because blockchain data storage is astronomically expensive. The problem is IPFS is a layer of abstraction to hide the problem away like some shell game. People treat it like it provides storage, while what it actually does is find parties who are hosting the data - if any are left. So while your data might be independent of any single service provider in concept, it might actually be provided by a sin…

Blockchains were never intended for data storage of large files, media, binaries etc. They provide global consensus, which is useful for things like a shared ledger - but it’s expensive.

IPFS (and similar systems like Arweave) are very much like BitTorrent (except nodes seed/pin full files instead of fragments). If no one pins/seeds the file, it won’t be available to others. If you want some data to stay up for sure, you need to pin it - or pay for someone to do it for you. It’s not a magic free storage solution.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#379

Moxie Marlinspike on Web3 [1]: * "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will" * "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform" [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

I admit, I've not read Moxie's post. IMO "people" would run many of their own servers if it were easy. At the moment, it's not easy because it's not easy to safely open up to the public a server running on your computer/phone, or home network. ISPs benefit from making this hard, and (as best I understand it) the IP4 address space isn't wide enough anyway. If "people" could run servers on their phones, safely, with mi…

I agree with this. This is what projects like Matrix are trying to do - your own federated server running on your phone.

https://arewep2pyet.com/

There are issues however - mobile operating systems (especially iOS) kill background processes aggressively - and the user has very little control over this. Until that changes, you can have federated servers running on phones which will go offline frequently and will have to sync when they get back online. This is fine for some applications but perhaps not fine for others. The server also needs to be lightweight because of memory/bandwidth/battery constraints on mobile devices.

Re: Web3 is expensive P2P

#380
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that P2P never became mainstream. BitTorrent is still huge and a great way to share media with each other. The reason it's not mainstream is because without centralisation, you can't enforce copyright and DRM. If sharing movies with friends was legal, P2P platforms would sprout like mushrooms after rain. I personally think, perhaps foolishly, that if we decriminalise nonprofit filesharing and at the sa…

Most bittorrent traffic is bootstrapped by centralized trackers.

Doesn’t have to be centralised

https://boredcaveman.xyz/post/0x2_static-torrent-website-p2p...

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