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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#611

Post by [deleted] »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #424
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…

Or even just include a content hash along with the URL in the NFT payload. Just a way to verify the referent of the URL hasn't changed since the NFT was minted. Where you can find the content with that hash if not the URL can be left arbitrary or out-of-band, but it's at least capturing a fingerprint of the content, not just an address. It seems like this would be absolutely trivial to implement, right? Just... add a…

[deleted]

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#612

Post by momentoftop »

To disagree with the post: I have always wanted to run my own servers. But for most of my time on the internet, my upload speeds have been garbage, my IP addresses have been dynamic, and my computers have been behind NATs.

The basic networking architecture during Web 1 wasn't suited to Web 1. Had it been, there might have been more people experimenting with running home servers, more work going into developing home server solutions, and thus more momentum to building that version of the web.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#613

Post by magicjosh »

barmstrong wrote: post #484

Really liked this post - brings up some great points, and I consider Moxie a friend. Here are a few notes that came to mind though... 1. For NFTs, some keep their data in IPFS (decentralized file storage) or in the smart contract itself for procedurally generated images. We (as a community) should probably move more to solutions like this over time, since it is indeed more decentralized to build them that way. 2. I a…

Getting Tim Wu to analyze cryptocurrencies with his lens of networks and centralization would be a real treat.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#614

Post by zomglings »

larsiusprime wrote: post #317
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."

Analysis of blockchain transactions is also consolidating around middlemen too! If you're trying to read data off of the blockchain for professional analysis purposes, you'll find a lot of working analysts are using sites like Dune.xyz, which stick a SQL interface in front of data slurped from the blockchain and charge a pretty penny to access it. (Wouldn't be surprised if they're slurping from middlemen services the…

We have built an open source tool that you can connect to any node (on an Ethereum-based blockchain) and instantly start building datasets about contracts that you care about. All you need is their ABI.

https://github.com/bugout-dev/moonworm

We are committed to keeping this code free. Our policy is only to charge for our operational expertise, but all the code that we use is open source. We are in the process of opening our platform up for decentralization (so anyone can contribute node time, storage, etc.).

Intellectual property is theft.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#615

Post by matthewdgreen »

dcolkitt wrote: post #581
sv123 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But one of the main points of article is that people don't want to run servers, developers included. Even being easy, letting someone else do it will always be easier.

But the question was how hard is it to run a competitor to Infura. And the answer is trivially easy. Infura is just an Ethereum node API that's publicly exposed. Building an Infura competitor literally is nothing more than $100/month it costs to run a Geth node on AWS.

This is true today. But the standard approach in this industry is to start by offering access to an open service and then quickly build in value-add services that aren’t available in the open service. So for example, the smart move would be for Infura to offer a proprietary chain or rollup that gets widely used but isn’t available outside of Infura. If they can pull that off, competition could get much harder.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#616

Post by Liron »

giantrobot wrote: post #605
RoboTeddy wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Early computers augmented or replaced humans whose job title was “computer”

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#617

Post by coffeecat »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #460
bricemo wrote: post #377

Earlier 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.

> I keep feeling like I’m missing something.

Nope, you're not missing anything. NFTs are the world's most convoluted and expensive way to store a bookmark.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#618

Post by RoboTeddy »

giantrobot wrote: post #605
RoboTeddy wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Early blockchains have also solved the problems they were designed to solve. For example:

- Bitcoin offers a transferrable store of value which cannot be inflated by governments,

- Stablecoins, thanks to being cross-border, are often used in e.g. Argentina where the local currency is unstable and it's not legal to buy dollars,

- Proof of Humanity + universal basic income has provided extra income to Argentinian people (e.g. heard of someone who was able to purchase a ticket to visit their family for Christmas thanks to crypto UBI),

- Crypto has been used to send remittances to economically unstable places (Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela)

- Gitcoin has provided public goods funding and advanced our conception of mechanism design,

- Helium has created a new 5G network that people can actually roam onto,

- NFTs have provided a new funding model for artists (who create public goods),

- Zcash and Monero have allowed for fully private digital transfers,

- Dark Forest (https://zkga.me/) has been an amusing game,

- Snapshot has helped create a delegative voting system that governs a $3B treasury,

These might not be problems that you face or believe are important, but all these are examples of intended problems being solved.

P.S. the tone of your comment made me a little sad :(

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#619

Post by kbenson »

> A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.

Wow. That's one of those things you kinda know, then someone puts it to words like this, and the next thing I know I'm floored by the realization that Twitter is just centralized finger.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#620

Post by nunez »

This was the best read on web3 that I’ve seen yet. I’m definitely excited to play around with it, but I agree with many of Moxie’s points, especially around the promise of decentralization diverging from the hyper-centralized reality we see today.

I’ve been stewing on a thought experiment. Diaspora was aiming to be a decentralized Facebook competitor. I can see this project (or similar ones) gaining a foothold in the web3 space. But if social events are on chain, some of which might contain PII, how would such a service securely store fragments of data like this on random computers?

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