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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#601

Post by magicjosh »

wmf wrote: post #241
threeseed wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is who cares if you run your own servers when everyone you know is viewing NFTs through servers which are manipulating the data like Opensea is.

In theory you should be able to build a new NFT marketplace and airdrop the shit out of it to replace OpenSea.

This is the premise [1] of $SOS token - though I haven't seen anything substantial, just what's on their website and in a few articles [2].

[1] https://www.theopendao.com/ [2] https://decrypt.co/89325/sos-token-aidrop-opendao-opensea-wh...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#602

Post by willseth »

hattmall wrote: post #501
Uehreka wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would it do that though? I’d like to hear a falsifiable theory of how that would happen, because as of right now it’s not happening, and no one seems able to explain what big thing is going to change. If the biggest part of the change (using the blockchain) isn’t causing the dynamic to shift, what future change will?

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.

Kinda sounds like RSS and Google Reader, and how did that work out?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#603

Post by Uehreka »

hattmall wrote: post #501
Uehreka wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would it do that though? I’d like to hear a falsifiable theory of how that would happen, because as of right now it’s not happening, and no one seems able to explain what big thing is going to change. If the biggest part of the change (using the blockchain) isn’t causing the dynamic to shift, what future change will?

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.

That feels like an argument that could be applied to web2 too though, and it falls apart there too: It’s never been easier to spin up some servers and whip up a basic social media site or search engine or online store, but it’d still be hard to displace Facebook, Google or Amazon. The problem isn’t with the ease of starting a competitor, it’s the psychological and social forces that cause people to prefer having one default place where they can go for a certain thing.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#604

Post by motoxpro »

tshaddox wrote: post #149
arcticbull wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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." Indeed, but one could make the same claim re any Web 2 juggernauts like Google and Facebook. You don't need to use them, sure. You can start your own social network. It's just expensive and inconvenient. This is what…

Except that you do need to use Google and Facebook if you want to interact with their data. They literally gate-keep the access to their data. It's not just inconvenient to host your own server that discovers peers and syncs the entire log of all historical events on the Facebook social network and allows you to write new events to that log which those peers will recognize. That's impossible (or at least, it would re…

Totally, but as the article points out, you only have the URL. You can't store more than a few bytes on chain so the link can point to a Facebook URL, OpenSea URL, etc which you don't own. So unless you are going to store small messages, what's different?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#605

Post by giantrobot »

RoboTeddy wrote: post #397
epolanski wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the early part. 3 years into the internet we already had emails and tcp. 13 years into blockchains we have nothing.

When writing code for a blockchain today, even on an Ethereum L2, you're in a very resource-constrained environment where you end up using bitpacking tricks and the like. That's how it was for early computers, too, of course — they may serve as a better analogy. Programmable computers have taken decades to develop, beginning in ~1950, and I expect that decentralized computation will follow a similar path. There simpl…

> It would be easy to look at the very early computers, which were perhaps not all that useful, and shrug — but that take wouldn't have extended well into the future as the technology scaled.

Early computers solved problems they were designed to solve. So they were plenty useful. Your statement is nonsensical.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#606

Post by magicjosh »

fabian2k wrote: post #80

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. My very limited understanding is that for blockchains essentially the way to distribute them is that every node has a full copy. This sounds awfully expensive…

This article also helps me appreciate how important the "small node" approach is. Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes can run on $200 of hardware (a basic Raspberry Pi + 1 TB drive). And even that investment is inaccessible to most.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#607

Post by gaogao »

Zetaphor wrote: post #549
tarkin2 wrote: post #536

The "a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card" part simultaneously made me realise how ridiculous NFTs are and, nevertheless, how popular they are, and how that popularity fuels the value of bitcoin. Essentially paper money gets its value because you need it to pay taxes; that is, there is a demand. Bitcoin gets it value because you can do interesting and popular things with it; that is, there is a…

You're confusing Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum is the platform that supports smart contracts. Bitcoins intent is to be a simple ossified protocol used as a store of value, akin to digital gold.

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

That's Bitcoin's intent as the first sentence of the original whitepaper. The intent is on transactions. In practice, it's an ossified store of value now.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#608

Post by eyelidlessness »

jagger27 wrote: post #599
eyelidlessness wrote: post #591

> Please don't post generic, shallow, obvious, indignant, and/or dismissive comments—those are repetitive and predictable, we've had more than enough of them, they're tedious, not what this site is for, and we don't need more. So the only “curious” comments are those which accept the premises of the post. Oh okay, little could make me less interested in finding out whether there’s actually something of value here tha…

Perhaps this sits better with you: > Please post unique, deep, interesting, humble, and/or inquisitive comments. Nothing about that disclaimer suggests you must accept the premises of the post, come on.

It says that dismissing anything therein can’t have any of those qualities. It presupposes accepting the topic or the discussion thereof.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#609

Post by zomglings »

jeroenhd wrote: post #81
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."

Bit that it'd be very practical, but the data itself is shared so in theory every company could set up their own API to render the blockchain into a readable, quick to access format. Even the vanished poop emoji NFT would reappear once someone else renders their view on the blockchain in the right way. The problem with this is that running servers that store and process one or even multiple blockchains in a searchabl…

It is costly, but not inefficient. This is what we do at my company and our products monetize our blockchain indexing operations. We are doing it all open source and are in the process of decentralizing our operations, so that:

1. anyone who operates a node can contribute time on their node for a share of our revenue

2. anyone can host one of our blockchain crawlers for a share of our revenue

3. anyone can contribute storage to our platform for a share of our revenue

We currently support Ethereum and Polygon, and are expanding to more chains.

I found this an excellent article, but the HN discussion (not calling out your comment specifically) seems to miss the fact that, as programmers, it is fully within OUR power to create the world we want to operate in.

Edit: To clarify - we run our own nodes. Currently on AWS but we are running out of credits soon so soon in our offices and living rooms, and eventually in data centers.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#610

Post by CameronNemo »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #506
CameronNemo wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is inherently centralized due to DNS being centralized. Furthermore there is no rule that says I have to federate with any particular entity. They will take the loss.

Email doesn't require DNS. Modern spam solutions for DNS do. You can most definitely use something like `spiped` to create a mutually authenticated, secure channel over IP, and just send mail over that. Or build a VPN overlay network and send mail to raw IPs. If you're going to cloister yourself with your fellow monks^W nerds then this is simple.

Thanks for the info. Yeah a monastery would be nice. Definitely goals.
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