51–60 of 66 posts
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In the process of pulling an app off the app stores. Yea, there will be more friction, but to me, a person finding my app organically and having a more direct relationship with them means more to me and has been more valuable than the low conversion sales I get from casual app store browsing.
I’d love To hear more about this
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EDIT: Thanks for this comment — I edited the original for clarity. I'm talking about crypto as in Ethereum, which are designed to resist centralization. HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system (which it can do, for good and bad reasons thanks to its permissionlessness), instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics (blockchains).
But why do these protocols need built-in economics? No user is going to want to have a wallet that slowly drains as they use the web -- it's just not convenient and will be thoroughly rejected by the mainstream. Compare this to something like torrenting - people give, people take. Sure, indexing is centralized, but once you have the index, it's all p2p. That's the direction decentralization should be taking, instead…
Also, there is a misconception that the cryptocurrency based web is like dial up. It isn't. What it is is: 1. a way to decouple the ownership of the digital goods from the service that gave them to you 2. a way to actually do privacy preserving computing 3. an open layer to build added value things that can interact with assets and services others have created (think web2.0 in the bookmarklets era but your bookmarklets can talk with any site)
One of the biggest problems for "apps" and entrepreneurs is distribution. Everything this article is talking about was true when HTML5 launched (2010 era) and so many mobile device APIs became web standards. What the App store has, that is hard to reproduce, is distribution.
The web already cracked the distribution problem. Javascript on the browser was the only choice for your frontend code , however, WASM is already shipping on all current browsers except IE and Opera Mini (which is a miniscule percentage of browsers in use today). It is just a matter of time where WASM becomes the ABI of choice for crossplatform app development as the binary deployment vehicle where you can program in…
I think the biggest problem here is that these icons on the home screen are great retention drivers and if you go through an app store the OS creates it for you while through the browser you have to actively decide to do it. Its also funny how the iPhone initially only had web shortcuts for the screen (and arguably invented the pwa) only to immediately change course once they noticed that Apps are their moat.
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I don't see hate for protocols or cryptography on HN. But I do see (a) skepticism about the actual decentralized (vs distributed) nature in practice (especially where the topic is financialized tech or even an end run around all the learning that's gone into the social codebase about finance). (b) realize that decentralization presented by things like the web are essentially "good enough" that capabilities are strong…
EDIT: Thanks for this comment — I edited the original for clarity. I'm talking about crypto as in Ethereum, which are designed to resist centralization. HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system (which it can do, for good and bad reasons thanks to its permissionlessness), instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics (blockchains).
https://cryptoslate.com/research-ethereum-is-neither-decentr...
> permissionlessness
The existing internet is sufficiently permissionless for the vast majority of potential activities. Where it isn't, you start to reach into the boundaries past which there are often reasons for permissions to exist.
> HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system... instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics
A system with "built-in economics" is a financial system.
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But why do these protocols need built-in economics? No user is going to want to have a wallet that slowly drains as they use the web -- it's just not convenient and will be thoroughly rejected by the mainstream. Compare this to something like torrenting - people give, people take. Sure, indexing is centralized, but once you have the index, it's all p2p. That's the direction decentralization should be taking, instead…
You now too have a wallet that slowly drains while you use the internet. Web3 wallets are just better integrated into it. Also, there is a misconception that the cryptocurrency based web is like dial up. It isn't. What it is is: 1. a way to decouple the ownership of the digital goods from the service that gave them to you 2. a way to actually do privacy preserving computing 3. an open layer to build added value thing…
1. There's no question that ownership is going to be a hot-button issue going forward, but I don't see how decentralization solves that problem (i.e NFTs being on ten different chains).
2. How does it preserve privacy? If I share data with a third party, what's to stop them from copying it over and ignoring my request to cut it off?
3. What is that added value? If you're talking about data portability that's certainly an argument in favor of decentralization, but that has a mess of competing & conflicting standards to wade through (see #1)
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EDIT: Thanks for this comment — I edited the original for clarity. I'm talking about crypto as in Ethereum, which are designed to resist centralization. HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system (which it can do, for good and bad reasons thanks to its permissionlessness), instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics (blockchains).
But why do these protocols need built-in economics? No user is going to want to have a wallet that slowly drains as they use the web -- it's just not convenient and will be thoroughly rejected by the mainstream. Compare this to something like torrenting - people give, people take. Sure, indexing is centralized, but once you have the index, it's all p2p. That's the direction decentralization should be taking, instead…
I believe, in this time of humanity where economy matters, that Blockchains have built-in economics for two reasons:
1. They all started copying Bitcoin, which by nature is an economic system (this is the goal of the Bitcoin's paper). 2. Reward by money is a common way to attract a sustainable amount of active users that keep the network alive without evil intention appart from making "quick bucks". In contract to volunteer networks such as Tor, where a lot (even a majority) of nodes are run by gov. agencies with the goal of identifying users, popular blockchains are still run properly since users are focusing on money and not destroying the network.
One of the biggest problems for "apps" and entrepreneurs is distribution. Everything this article is talking about was true when HTML5 launched (2010 era) and so many mobile device APIs became web standards. What the App store has, that is hard to reproduce, is distribution.
The web already cracked the distribution problem. Javascript on the browser was the only choice for your frontend code , however, WASM is already shipping on all current browsers except IE and Opera Mini (which is a miniscule percentage of browsers in use today). It is just a matter of time where WASM becomes the ABI of choice for crossplatform app development as the binary deployment vehicle where you can program in…
It should be obvious to everyone now that centralized platforms (like Apple's App Store) might be generous and foster innovation during their growth stages, but then become extractive and limit innovation in later stages. After all, they have total control of the platforms. This is why decentralization matters.[1] The problem is that "decentralized" protocols often end up becoming de facto centralized because they la…
It's called dweb. Sometimes people do get it confused with 'web3' but that was just the name of the massive 2-billion-dollar shit a16z took on everything. Dwebcamp just extended ticket sales if you want to go talk to real dweb people: https://dwebcamp.org/
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EDIT: Thanks for this comment — I edited the original for clarity. I'm talking about crypto as in Ethereum, which are designed to resist centralization. HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system (which it can do, for good and bad reasons thanks to its permissionlessness), instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics (blockchains).
But why do these protocols need built-in economics? No user is going to want to have a wallet that slowly drains as they use the web -- it's just not convenient and will be thoroughly rejected by the mainstream. Compare this to something like torrenting - people give, people take. Sure, indexing is centralized, but once you have the index, it's all p2p. That's the direction decentralization should be taking, instead…
The reality is that in current networks, which are totally financial but only implicitly and in a way that is opaque to most users, computation and data costs are still subsidized. Crypto networks open a huge design space that simply makes the economic flows explicit — and not necessarily borne by users.
[1]: https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...
[2]: https://medium.com/coinmonks/ethereum-meta-transactions-101-...
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> Video fundraisers, paid messages, creator subscriptions, tips, interactive live streams and tiered subscriptions As a user, that doesn’t sound great to be honest.
Monetisation always hurts users, it’s just a matter of picking the least painful poison. You probably don’t enjoy VPN adverts in the middle of your YouTube videos either, but people need to get paid somehow.