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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#381

Post by betwixthewires »

ineptech wrote: post #358
betwixthewires wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an excellent point. People will run all sorts of things they don't directly interface with if the setup and functionality is low friction. People run routers for example. If you had to SSH into your router and troubleshoot it just to figure out why you're not getting connectivity people wouldn't do it. Unplug it for 5 seconds and plug it back in? Still frustrating, but the UX has low friction. If you…

I agree, except for the part about this being physical hardware rather than a cloud thing. I find it very difficult to imagine even 10% of America buying something like this; a likelier model is, imagine that your typical $50/mo wireless plan included a $5/mo virtual server, and an app to manage it that looks like an easier version of cpanel.

If even 10% of america bought something like this the product is a wild success, and it would be enough pressure to ensure silos are unable to totally wall themselves off. I'm sure apple would love to drop support for SMS, but they can't, because some large percentage of Americans don't use apple devices, and so those that do wouldn't tolerate being unable to message their friends without apple devices.

I know people that aren't tech savvy at all that would buy a box they just plug in, boot up, that for example synced their contacts, pictures, ran a social media server just for them (mastodon maybe) and an email server and IM server and all they had to do was run an app on their phone and enter a password. You could build something like that and offer it to people for under 100 bucks. People don't run those though, because it's not as simple as that. Most people would rather have a product than a service. But the product is less profitable than the service, so companies build services, and so people use services.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#382

Post by nefitty »

hooande wrote: post #314
nefitty wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the few usecases of crypto that kinda make sense. If those certs were on a blockchain, Rolex could fold and people in the future might still be able to check for authenticity. There's more steps involved that I'm not sure could be solved, like, who controls the authenticity Oracle? Is it an API that gets pinged? Do you have to pay a gas or network fee to check authenticity? Could a smart contract be ma…

So the idea would be to create a giant file of every Rolex transaction made in the future. And then search through that file for a given NFC tag to determine authenticity. Doing all of this in case Rolex goes out of business and can no longer maintain a hypothetical authenticity server? Gotta say, it sounds kind of crazy

This is about as good as it gets with crypto.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#383

Post by atweiden »

Uptrenda wrote: post #104

Thin clients that verify transactions are possible though. For something like Bitcoin you have SPV-proofs that prove chains of headers. You can prove that a transaction was included in the longest chain without having to run a node yourself just by checking proof-of-work merkle trees; Even if the vast majority of users end up running clients that don't verify the whole chain -- cryptographic trust would still be ensu…

If it’s only possible to run full nodes in datacenters, paying people to run them is fairly pointless.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#384

Post by yed »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #330
not2b wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article points out, many NFTs are implemented by storing a URL in the blockchain; the digital artwork sits on some server and is reachable by that link. Fine, you can prove that you own the URL. But what that URL points to can change out from under you, so there's no way to make that trustless. If you own the domain and the server that it points to, the registrar can take the domain away from you and give it t…

So, this has a really easy fix. The NFT points to a content hash, and the content is uploaded to the Internet Archive (and they're compensated for the storage) as part of the NFT minting process. Your ownership is now on a distributed ledger, with a cryptographic hash of the content, paired with long term storage of said digital artwork. The Internet Archive's costs are ~$2/GB to store content in perpetuity, which se…

So the answer is centralized storage?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#385

Post by bko »

devadvance wrote: post #17

This is a really well-thought-out, nuanced take. I really appreciate mixture of "but there are still servers", not being able to stop a gold rush, and (refreshingly) the technical take on the implementation details. It stands in such stark contrast to other content. For example, a web3 chat app announcement I saw yesterday [1]. I even joined the Discord to learn more and just found...hype. I found this parenthetical…

The centralization of apis (infura, opensea and ethscan used by metamask) is the biggest problem. I could be wrong, but I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech. I remember in the late 90s there were a number of search engines but no one really owned the space. Only 20 years later did Google emerge as the winner and is (IMO) by far the best in terms of relevant results. But that didn't happen overnight, and there wasn't a search engine dominating 90% of the market within a few years of the beginning of mainstream acceptance.

How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? MetaMask should be incentivized to do this as they're core offering is controlled by one party.

[edit] Never mind, metamask and infura are owned by the same company (ConsenSys). It's even worse than it appears...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#386

Post by synergy20 »

So basically web3.0 is just json-rpc calls to a cluster of peer servers that host distributed databases(e.g. blockchain that records your write-operations in stone) via a few portal servers, the portals are the gateway to the pool of blockchain-peer-servers and themselves are also part of the blockchain pool.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#387

Post by hatchoo »

This was a very interesting article.

I started learning Solana recently to try and see what the fuss was all about. After getting beyond the basics I took a look at the technical concepts behind NFTs and my first reaction was literally - "this is creating something out of nothing". It was the equivalent of just inserting some rows into a database except that the operations were all logged in an immutable audit trail.

While I appreciate the value that a decentralized system of record with immutable log entries that the blockchain offers, I struggle to see how NFTs have value. But who am I to argue when buyers put their money into it.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#388

Post by luhn »

lekevicius wrote: post #52

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…

Re "early days," servers as clients, etc: There are a lot of very real problems with crypto, and the solution always lies in new technologies. Slow settlement and high gas fees? L2 networks. Limited global TPS? More L2 networks or alternative L1 chains. Wasteful energy use? Proof-of-stake. No connection to real world data? Oracles. Relying on centralized APIs? Light clients are in the works. Can't trust that you'll get an untampered version of the dapp? I don't even know the solution for this but I saw a very complicated flowchart about it, so I assume there is one.

Every layer adding more complexity and more fingers in the pie.

All the while, nothing ever actually seems to get fixed. Like, high gas fees has been a conversation for years and clever people have made dozens of solutions, but everybody seems to still use vanilla Ethereum.

And these problems don't seem to be the usual problems of new technologies dealing with limited feature sets and primitive tooling, these problems fundamentally undermine the whole point of blockchain. It's not like you can only make simple distributed apps and more advance stuff will arrive as the space matures, you literally can't make a practical, truly distributed app at the moment.

The more I learn about web3 the more it seems like vaporware, and the end result will be a bunch of web3-in-name-only, VC cash-grab apps.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#389

Post by Kognito »

toxicFork wrote: post #337
not2b wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article points out, many NFTs are implemented by storing a URL in the blockchain; the digital artwork sits on some server and is reachable by that link. Fine, you can prove that you own the URL. But what that URL points to can change out from under you, so there's no way to make that trustless. If you own the domain and the server that it points to, the registrar can take the domain away from you and give it t…

Some NFT platforms operate with IPFS whose URLs are hashes of content. This solves that problem.

I’m not terribly up to date with IPFS (so feel free to correct me), but if I’ve understood it correctly, it’s not dissimilar to Bittorent where files are seeded by interested parties and if no one happens to be seeding any longer, the file is essentially dead?

It’s almost like you want some centralised entity to preserve copies of the images these NFTs link to.

I wonder how many IPFS-backed NFTs are only being seeded on nodes run by the big players like OpenSea?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#390

Post by jboy55 »

exdsq wrote: post #308
spenczar5 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though things are never cheaper to maintain than at the beginning of a tech bloom. Its only going to get more expensive to create and maintain as the node and the APIs get more complex.
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