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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#631

Post by SkyMarshal »

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…

> I don't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept the loss of control).

The main reason would be if they could make more money on their digital goods by floating them in a large, open, heterogeneous market rather than in their smaller walled-garden. That's what traditional capital markets are good for, and the name of the game here is figuring out how to recreate those benefits in decentralized digital markets.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#632

Post by samarama »

The author’s argument is definitely not nuanced, but a a straw man and a false dichotomy.

“Web3 is not 100% decentralised, so it’s not really legit.”

Web3 or crypto never intended to be 100% decentralised and it is impossible to be so. There will also be dapps among the 100,000 dapps that have a centralized component.

Every percent decentralisation is good, be it 1%, 5%, 50% or 90% and we are in the high double digits in very many areas.

It’s 2022, 14 years after the invention of Bitcoin, and hacker news still doesn’t get crypto, one can only shake their head.

But hacker news be like “Muh, I want to be a boomer and my brain is not able to learn new things, so it’s a scam.”

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#633

Post by chrisco255 »

sbierwagen wrote: post #561
distrill wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech I actually struggled with this point throughout the article. I'm not sure I see this as a parallel trend toward centralization like we saw with web2 - but rather that this is how software is built today and this is what we're comfortable with. It doesn't seem unnatural or problematic to me that we will start with something that approximates the wo…

>and move toward the decentralized end state that apologists are hoping for. Is there any evidence that this is actually happening? It seems rather backwards! Is the maximalist argument here that these companies are going to build out all this infrastructure, move the global financial system onto it, and then rip it apart and rewrite it to be entirely distributed afterwards? Why? If the point is to be distributed, wo…

The crux of the article is that the front-ends are all routing calls through centralized APIs to get their message included on the blockchain. Infura and Alchemy don't do much. They just pass a JSON-RPC message to an Ethereum node running on their servers. There is some additional indexing services they provide, but there are many open, decentralized alternatives for that such as TheGraph Protocol. And it's not unfeasible for an application to run its own Postgres instance to index data from the ETH blockchain.

As for full-fat clients on normal mobile devices, the main issue is the data requirements. Running a full node can take hundreds of gigabytes. It is possible on light hardware. People are running Beacon chain nodes on Raspberry Pis. But you do need the storage and that tends to be scarce on mobile.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum core devs are aware of this issue and are actively working towards it. They shipped the Altair hard fork this year that has adds sync committees which make it possible to do without needing the whole chain history (using merkle trees): https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/altai...

The light clients to follow from those improvements are forthcoming but here is one in progress: https://our.status.im/nimbus-fluffly/

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#635

Post by gaogao »

guelo wrote: post #445
msgilligan wrote: post #96

He's focused on Ethereum and NFTs, which is certainly the most popular/obvious place to research. I think his analysis is excellent and the article is worth reading. But he does say: > I have only dipped my toe in the waters of web3 Notably he doesn't even mention IPFS (which uses the pre-image of an JPG to form the URL.) Nor does he mention Bitcoin (which provides a shared state layer as well as a currency and makes…

Is IPFS really web3? IPFS is a slight upgrade to bitorrent, and p2p tech was popularized by Napster over 20 years ago. It's been a part of the internet longer than "web2"

IPFS isn't even really an upgrade in many regards, at this current point in time. Auto-replication of data, tracking, some NAT stuff, DHT quality still have a bunch of gaps. Actually, browsing around with IPFS feels like being on dial up with a ton of the standard examples being super bandwidth limited.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#636

Post by derangedHorse »

uncomputation wrote: post #567
derangedHorse wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Should Jagex fold and the game become unplayable, what do you own? An entry in a database that says that you once had this item but you can't do anything with it? Why is that valuable? Sometimes just ownership of something is valuable in itself. That's the whole idea of collectibles, it's not always tied to its original utility. Think having an original SNES versus an emulator on a computer or an original Picasso vs…

> Sometimes just ownership of something is valuable in itself. That's the whole idea of collectibles, it's not always tied to its original utility. Think having an original SNES versus an emulator on a computer or an original Picasso vs a digital jpeg copy. But with a Picasso the scarcity is inherent in its physicality: there is only one in existence. With digital data, it is infinitely reproducible and fungible. If…

I think saying "an original Picasso vs a high quality knockoff" would better clarify my point. I would also like to add that scarcity is not inherent in physicality, especially when a physical copy of said physical item can be made. I would argue the recorded ownership and verifiable provenance of the item make an original Picasso valuable. People don't care about just having the art because the art can be easily replicated, physically or digitally.

And yes there may be an ongoing cost associated with storing a digital image, but you could also download it on your computer, print out the image, or try one of the decentralized solutions. Ideally the metadata and image would be stored on something like Arweave (which only requires a one-time payment) since reliability through decentralization is one of the goals of the web3 movement.

>It seems like it would be more future proof if Jagex just mailed you a physical print of the JPG and a certificate of authenticity.

If the hosting of the image goes down then you still have the attestation of owning the asset on the blockchain (signed by a private key that has been associated with Jagex on creation of the NFT). As for the physical print option, I'd say since physical things can be destroyed much easier than digital items, I'd prefer it if the certificate of authenticity was just an NFT (trying to enforce an NFT to belong to the same owner of a physical asset is a losing battle).

All in all I'd say NFTs bring value to asset collection by providing stronger attestations of ownership, public provenance, and resilient record-keeping.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#639

Post by cuteboy19 »

baby wrote: post #483
betterunix2 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we ever move toward decentralization? It is almost always easier to have at least some central point of control in any distributed system, even the Internet (IANA, RIRs, etc.). It is also very difficult to remove a centralized control point after a system is already deployed, especially if the system supports heterogenous clients (as it is likely that some clients will be slow to switch to the new design, a…

decentralization in the blockchain world is really to provide security and interoperability by emulating centralized services. So essentially it looks like a centralized service, but it's more secure than a centralized service.

From a cryptographic perspective, centralized and decentralised services are equally secure. From a user perspective, blockchains are less secure as there is no authority you can approach for chargebacks

The point of blockchain was removing trust from a single person and spreading it around over a network

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#640

Post by dfee »

pshc wrote: post #404
pavlov wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's one of Moxie's points: how exactly is web3 supposed to be avoiding the centralization that occurred on the web, when it's already at that point.

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.

Actually, this was his point exactly. OpenSea must start on a decentralized block chain (due to market forces) and must move to a more centralized (faster moving) protocol in order to remain relevant.

And the byproduct is lock-in.

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