Moxie Marlinspike is my technology hero.
My First Impressions of Web3
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#472>Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers. [...] With the shift to mobile, we now live firmly in a world of clients and servers – with the former completely unable to act as the latter I've got a dumb question: Why can't the phone or browser act as a node? Are the computational requirements too ex…
My understanding is that it's because the entire blockchain would need to be stored on the device which from even a data perspective is too much for a phone. The processing of data on the chain will also be too computationally difficult/expensive for the phone. You would either run out of battery immediately or the phone would crash.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then it’s just back to trust based web2, you’re trusting internet archive. That’s his point: this isn’t leading to trust less decentralization in practice. To do that, you’d have to store the NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive
This is where it falls apart for me too, people are paying huge sums for artificially scarce links to someone else’s server? I keep feeling like I’m missing something.
No, they are paying huge sums for a digital certificate of ownership of the content on some else’s server; the link is just the description of what they are certified to own, like the address on a deed.
(There's all kinds of problems with it, sure, but they aren't paying for the link.)
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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.
What's flawed in his reasoning?
He's creating confusion by treating front ends or clients like (Metamask, Opensea, and Infura) as servers when they are actually clients.
So dapp -> infura -> blockchain is really client -> client -> blockchain.
When multichain interoperability becomes widely available (See polkadot, cosmos, etc) blockchains will also become clients as well. Clients at any level won't be bounded like they currently exist in centralized networks.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just looked it up, this looks like a tool to let you and your friends create a “private internet” using a VPN. Which is cool (I could see a bunch of uses for this, like SSHing into my home computer while I’m on the go), but I’m talking about the ability to expose a device on your home network to the public internet.
One approach is to use a public proxy + tailscale VPN, https://init8.lol/expose-web-services-at-home-via-tailscale-...
Yeah, but the public proxy is exactly the thing I’m trying to avoid. If we’re talking about hosting a static site like your personal portfolio, then once you put a proxy in front of it, you might as well just host the site where you’re hosting the proxy. My complaint is that there’s no way to host a website from home without either paying for a cloud VM to proxy traffic or paying a company who uses a cloud VM to proxy traffic.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hap…
> I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech I actually struggled with this point throughout the article. I'm not sure I see this as a parallel trend toward centralization like we saw with web2 - but rather that this is how software is built today and this is what we're comfortable with. It doesn't seem unnatural or problematic to me that we will start with something that approximates the wo…
Why would we ever move toward decentralization? It is almost always easier to have at least some central point of control in any distributed system, even the Internet (IANA, RIRs, etc.). It is also very difficult to remove a centralized control point after a system is already deployed, especially if the system supports heterogenous clients (as it is likely that some clients will be slow to switch to the new design, and many will make bad assumptions about the system architecture).
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that a flamewar? Literally talking about the content of the article.
You started from the article and headed straight for a highly repetitive flamewar trope. That's just what we're trying to avoid. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site more to heart? You unfortunately have a history of violating it, and we're trying for at least a slightly better quality of discussion here.
I have to disagree like others are doing. There was nothing wrong with that comment. I've avoided this entire post so far because after reading the entire article, I was left with a distinct "huh, this looks like a pyramid scheme run by idiots and that may even include somebody I previously respected", which is pretty much what NFTs and most of digital cryptocurrency are.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#478I completely agree with his take. What I always found interesting with greener BFT consensus protocols that a lot of modern cryptocurrencies implement is that you can actually fix the problem of untrusted services: you can provide a cryptographic proof to the light clients (the real clients) when they query the blockchain, which allows them to verify the response without synchronizing to the blockchain. This is what Celo is doing, I think Zcash had a proposal to do the same? But essentially any BFT consensus protocol should be able to do this.
You don't get the same insurance that you get by verifying all of the blockchain of course, but recursive zero-knowledge proofs that attest to the state transitions might solve this (cf Mina).
Another issue is key rotations, which increase the size of the proof (as you need to give proofs to all the key rotations before you can give a proof to the latest state of the chain), but I believe that zero-knowledge proofs can fix that as well.
Bottom line: it's actually not that grim, solutions are there, but users have to care for people to implement them, apply them, and for the solutions to receive adoption.
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Couldn't agree more. Supply chain verification is inherently authority-based... if only at some point in the creation of the internet we had invented a system for verifying authoritative claims on things ;) Not to mention that with certificates... Rolex can totally disappear into the wind, yet you can still verify the certificate provided you know Rolex's root. And all this for <$300M year in mining fees!
Re: My First Impressions of Web3
#480If you care about the environment even a little bit (like turning off lights in rooms you're not occupying) then you will reject Web3. Even the most efficient blockchains use more energy than the status quo unnecessarily. This is also to say nothing of the fact that it's more expensive per USD/KB transferred, slower and more complicated. I think what Web3 should be is a way to use your laptop or any commodity compute…
What about proof of stake chains, do you reject those too? How many companies with huge carbon footprint do you reject? What about cows did you reject them?
> What about proof of stake chains, do you reject those too?
Proof of stake still use more electricity per KB transferred than the status quo.
> What about cows did you reject them?
Not sure how this is relevant to internet? Can cows run websites?