Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

0xfast.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 71 posts

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#51

Post by ghayes »

dsco wrote: post #38
Geee wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web3 is decentralized web, like web 1.0 - but with tokens this time! Tokens solve the issue because you can buy and hold them and get rich! Buy my shitcoin! Seriously web3 is just another way to create hype for arbitrary crypto tokens and Ethereum. In a few years there will be something else - quantum web or something to suck new buyers in.

This doesn’t provide any value to the conversation. Imagine having good intentions, working in web3, and always seeing this type of comment on HH. Would you want it that way in whatever field you’re working in?

I agree, esp. since GP asked for an explanation of Web3 (the Ethereum one). I really think we should just ban crypto from HackerNews since the conversations are the lowest quality on this site.

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#52

Post by IanCal »

acaloiar wrote: post #46
IanCal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The descriptions made absolute sense to me, the target audience - someone developing with these systems. You can complain about it if you want, but it's like complaining that serverless things need servers underneath - maybe technically accurate but not a helpful discussion to have.

"Serverless" is a terrible adjective, and yet it's still considerably more precise than "web3". Even so, in a technical setting I often hear engineers refers to "hosted function" or "function service" when referring to "serverless" infrastructure.

The description is precise enough for anyone who would be a potential customer to know exactly what was meant. As marketing copy for a product that seems like all that really matters here. I won't carry on as that's the only point I'm making and I don't think it's productive to try and convince anyone further.

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#53

Post by Snawoot »

LordHeini wrote: post #32

No sure what the purpose of this really is. But the pricing seems bizzare. Hetzner cloud costs 1€ per extra TB (20 included) while this costs 2$ per Gb. That is an order of magnitude so what am I paying for?

That's actually generous offering. Infura charges $225 per mo for 1M reqs/day. For large quantities of requests it's better to self-host own blockchain nodes, though, sometimes it's not so easy in terms of hardware requirements for a single node.

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#54

Post by IanCal »

com2kid wrote: post #43
IanCal wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not arguing about the difference between web2 and web3. It's arguing two main things 1. Web3 data is different from what most classic databases are optimised for, because of how it's accessed and the (mostly) immutable guarantees. 2. This service is better than other web3 api providers. FWIW I'm consulting in this space currently, specifically dealing with blockchain data itself and it makes perfect sense to me.…

> The only thing relevant here is that blockchain data is almost exclusively append-only and so you can build something neater because you've got guarantees that many other problems don't have. Append only databases have been around for decades. Heck Kafka is an obscenely popular example today. I've talked to people working in fields with legally mandated immutable databases, again decades old technology. In the most…

I think you're arguing around something very different to what I'm saying. None of this is to do with whether web3 stuff is a good idea, or whether the underlying Blockchain setup/concept is useful or whether distributed whatevers are good. This is a product launch giving access to that data under a common API.

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#55

Post by FeistySkink »

dsco wrote: post #38
Geee wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web3 is decentralized web, like web 1.0 - but with tokens this time! Tokens solve the issue because you can buy and hold them and get rich! Buy my shitcoin! Seriously web3 is just another way to create hype for arbitrary crypto tokens and Ethereum. In a few years there will be something else - quantum web or something to suck new buyers in.

This doesn’t provide any value to the conversation. Imagine having good intentions, working in web3, and always seeing this type of comment on HH. Would you want it that way in whatever field you’re working in?

You could defend anything with this absurd argument.

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#56

Post by pizzalife »

karanbhangui wrote: post #48
pizzalife wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one Web3 use case. There are more use cases for email than scamming.

I could list examples like this[0] or convince you that I'm a pretty healthy web3 skeptic who still doesn't round the valid use cases to 0, but I suspect you've already made up your mind and are just trying to be a stubborn internet arguer [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...

The example you listed is a person who fled Ukraine with bitcoin on a USB stick. What does storing bitcoin on a USB drive have to do with Web3?

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#57

Post by popcalc »

karanbhangui wrote: post #48
pizzalife wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one Web3 use case. There are more use cases for email than scamming.

I could list examples like this[0] or convince you that I'm a pretty healthy web3 skeptic who still doesn't round the valid use cases to 0, but I suspect you've already made up your mind and are just trying to be a stubborn internet arguer [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...

The refugee in the story you cited could have achieved the same with a Submariner tucked under his sleeve. Or a couple gold coins. That's one step from money laundering. At least the Rolex has buyers who will provide liquid demand based on its use as an accessory. Gold is functional in industrial applications. The demand side of cryptocurrency is pure speculation.

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#58

Post by ChainOfFools »

CharlesW wrote: post #24
dmitriid wrote: post #21

> The solution to this problem becomes more complex with scale. Distributed transactions, sharding, replication, and fault tolerance are notoriously slow. And yet, suprisingly (not) they power everything at scale unimaginable to anything happening in crypto. The "amazing scalable crypto" barely manages the complexity and scale you can easily run from a Raspberry Pi with a sqlite database. > We built a cheaper and sim…

> Translation: you are dumping blockchain data into traditional databases running on traditional servers and backed up by a traditional Elastic Search. It's ironic that the solution to blockchain problems is so often re-centralization.

I would go as far as saying that the problem with blockchain is not even blockchain, but in the fokloric narratives around decentralization, which is treated as if it's a binary condition (X is/is not decentralized), rather than as a blind, innate and monotonic behavioral tendency of a network. And that's being generous, because very likely decentralization - in spite of any attempt to implement it - will turn out to have been a mirage all along, and blockchainism thus amounts to our century's version of ever-more-convoluted epicycle "tech" straining to reify a philosophical dead end.

It's absurd to claim that something is decentralized when there is always team at the core of this so-called decentralized network whose self-appointed job is to maintain its state of decentralization.

I would argue that there is no such thing as any intentionally decentralized anything, and all claims as such should be treated with extreme skepticism. "trust us, it's trustless."

The only decentralized phenomena are ones that come to us from the universe itself. And even those can ultimately be traced to an origin so the decentralization is only a local phenomena anyway.

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#59

Post by IanCal »

billen wrote: post #13

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this. However - the bottleneck in the blockchain is not the read/writing of the APIs (which might be slow), but the main bottleneck is the settlement of the chain usually. For example, the settlement of a block on the Bitcoin blockchain takes about 10 mins. No matter how fast you make the throughput of all the APIs, settlement will still be slow. If this is strictly for the historical use c…

This is a service for people building apps on top of the Blockchain state. So history and "what's the current state of X".

Re: Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

#60

Post by IanCal »

CharlesW wrote: post #24
dmitriid wrote: post #21

> The solution to this problem becomes more complex with scale. Distributed transactions, sharding, replication, and fault tolerance are notoriously slow. And yet, suprisingly (not) they power everything at scale unimaginable to anything happening in crypto. The "amazing scalable crypto" barely manages the complexity and scale you can easily run from a Raspberry Pi with a sqlite database. > We built a cheaper and sim…

> Translation: you are dumping blockchain data into traditional databases running on traditional servers and backed up by a traditional Elastic Search. It's ironic that the solution to blockchain problems is so often re-centralization.

I'm not sure of the larger right term for this but it's worth pointing out this is one of a bunch of different providers all offering the same API to the same public data, and you can create your own with different open source offerings.
Post reply on HN