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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#521

Post by pshc »

betterunix2 wrote: post #497
pshc wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the same as web2. These web3 frontends don’t have moats or lock-in like Facebook or Google, because they don’t actually control the data. The data they serve is all from public ledgers. You can switch off of Infura in a second by changing your RPC url.

Github relies on a distributed storage architecture (local git repositories on developers' machines) and in theory anyone can take a project from github and duplicate it on gitlab etc. In reality nobody bothers and a project hosted on github will remain exclusively hosted on github and nowhere else, and likewise with other git hosting services. For the most part nobody cares if the data is hosted on a distributed sys…

Few people bother because every git commit is cryptographically signed and every git repo is inherently replicated. It doesn’t matter if you use a centralized service or not as long as you can rely on SHA1 (and sha256 is coming…) Git is almost the ur-blockchain in this respect, hardly an argument for centralization.

Also, fuck Microsoft.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#522

Post by stjohnswarts »

not2b wrote: post #166
simias wrote: post #29

>When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for purely digital goods might be a concept with a future. Having standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and query and update these goods might make sense (althou…

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…

Well the image could also be embedded in the data of the blockchain and/or a irreversible (currently) hash made for the image sitting on the server. Now will a court enforce that digital contract as a legal contract if the person takes down the server or puts up a different image? shrug I doubt it under current law.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#523

Post by moneywoes »

darcys22 wrote: post #341
password1 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point me to where this insightful discussion happens? And where can I educate myself? 99,99% of content and forums I find online about crypto only care about promoting coins, nfts or services basing only on futuristic visionary promises, hyping up the users and attempts at FOMO. It's almost literal spam. This is the first time I read something that just explains how thing works from a technical standpoint and…

Its almost entirely done on crypto twitter. You follow the builders and they talk about this stuff. Tweet threads are terrible but that is where the good information is. Twitter is frustrating in that the good content is buried and if you follow the wrong people they just spam your feed. Its a constant battle to keep the signal to noise ratio of your feed high and the right people to follow constantly changes.

Who are some of these people in your experience?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#524

Post by anderspitman »

betterunix2 wrote: post #497
pshc wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the same as web2. These web3 frontends don’t have moats or lock-in like Facebook or Google, because they don’t actually control the data. The data they serve is all from public ledgers. You can switch off of Infura in a second by changing your RPC url.

Github relies on a distributed storage architecture (local git repositories on developers' machines) and in theory anyone can take a project from github and duplicate it on gitlab etc. In reality nobody bothers and a project hosted on github will remain exclusively hosted on github and nowhere else, and likewise with other git hosting services. For the most part nobody cares if the data is hosted on a distributed sys…

I keep my projects on GitHub for discoverability and the reputation provided by stars, whatever that's worth. So essentially network effects.

The reality is if I'm looking for a library to solve a problem, I'm much more likely to use one from GH with 1000 stars than a random self-hosted GitLab with 50. I would like to not feel that way, but I suspect many others do as well. It would be nice if we at least had a decentralized reaction/reputation system.

Is there an analog to this with the services Moxie talked about? Sincere question, I'm not familiar with the ecosystem at all.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#525

Post by searchableguy »

bricemo wrote: post #377
toomuchtodo wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

There is arweave which is trying to bring permanent storage. You could store the nft on arweave chain and mint the NFT on the same.

https://www.arweave.org/

Though, I'm not sure how this will "scale".

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#526

Post by pshc »

kllrnohj wrote: post #507
hattmall wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the argument here is because it's easy. Even if the interaction layer is centralized the underlying tech is decentralized so everything can easily be validated and that's the key difference.

But as noted in the article, that's not the case. OpenSea stores data that then isn't on any blockchain, like royalties. That's done as just a regular web2 feature, a database on OpenSea's backend. So no, it can't be validated, and it can't be migrated.

Royalties is a funny example because a) they’re being standardized, see eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981 and b) royalties are entirely opt-in. You can happily transfer NFTs without having to pay royalties if you forgo an exchange that respects them.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#527

Post by stjohnswarts »

tshaddox wrote: post #108
arcticbull wrote: post #39

I'll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura, Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked. [edit] By "full node" I meant "archival node."

In what sense is it "gate-kept"? Isn't the complaint that in practice most people probably use those two services? As far as I know those two services don't do anything to try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience because "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will." The potential for single points of failure (or even intentional abuse) does exist because of this de fac…

The point is if you buy a stylized poop icon but the pseudo-gatekeeper company deems they want to shut off that part of the blockchain what are you going to do? Are you going to download and maintain 20 PiB of data on a server to keep your unique one-of-kind poop icon? The same could happen in the future to actually valuable things like a contract/NFT between you and another party.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#528

Post by matheusmoreira »

tompccs wrote: post #363

"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 – and those questions seem more important to me than ever. Meanwhile, ethereum actually refers to servers as “clients,” so there’s not even a word for an actual untrusted client/server interface that will have to exist somewhere, and no acknowledgement that if successful there will…

If people want banks, they can have them. At this point exchanges have become the banks of the cryptocurrency space. Lots of people just leave their coins in the exchanges, they even have savings accounts.

The ability to withdraw the money and use it directly with no third party involved is still important. Especially since governments are already implementing digital currencies that will be fully under their control.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#529

Post by fumplethumb »

> Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL.

I've been recently exploring the Solana[0] NFT ecosystem. The situation is similar there and I admit it took me by surprise at first. However upon further inspection, there's more to the story.

As others here have mentioned, most serious ETH collections address this problem using IPFS. But on Solana, Arweave[1] is a popular solution. I had never heard of Arweave before and it's a seriously cool concept. In a nutshell, it's a system that allows you to pay for 200+ (potentially much more) years of storage _up front_. I won't pretend to understand it all, but it effectively pays the network of miners to host your assets indefinitely. The up front payment - which is steep when compared to traditional hosting - provides a "sustainable endowment" for these mining rewards. This allows you to guarantee that the asset will be available without counting on some random hosted storage system.

It seems that NFTs are the main use case for such a system at the moment. However I can imagine other use cases could emerge for an answer to this question I never really thought to ask: "How can I ensure that an asset is hosted "forever?" Interesting problem and an interesting solution that a network like this - with its marriage of decentralized technology and economic incentives - is uniquely poised to address.

[0] https://solana.com/

[1] https://www.arweave.org/

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#530

Post by strken »

betterunix2 wrote: post #497
pshc wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the same as web2. These web3 frontends don’t have moats or lock-in like Facebook or Google, because they don’t actually control the data. The data they serve is all from public ledgers. You can switch off of Infura in a second by changing your RPC url.

Github relies on a distributed storage architecture (local git repositories on developers' machines) and in theory anyone can take a project from github and duplicate it on gitlab etc. In reality nobody bothers and a project hosted on github will remain exclusively hosted on github and nowhere else, and likewise with other git hosting services. For the most part nobody cares if the data is hosted on a distributed sys…

People do bother. I don't have specific examples off the top of my head, but I've occasionally run into an read-only GitHub repo that's been moved to Gitea or GitLab, or even BitBucket.

More broadly speaking, it's important that you can migrate, even if you don't actually do it, because users who can easily churn give the developers an incentive to keep the UX solid. If you can just leave GitHub at any time, then they're less likely to add gigantic banner ads to every page, or bundle "third party offers" into installers - they know what happened to SourceForge, after all.

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