Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 1001 posts

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#651

Post by astrange »

beoberha wrote: post #421
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.

It’s extremely disingenuous to say we have “nothing”. The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope any technical person could appreciate, even if they don’t see a practical application.

There is nothing amazing about being able to run a computer program. That's what computers do. EVM is also not a distributed computing service since every node has to run the same thing. It is slightly interesting watching people try to reinvent high-assurance computing from scratch without doing any research first, but it's not technically interesting.

Actually, the more "interesting" crypto projects are the more likely they are to be a scam using a "courtier's reply" defense.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#652

Post by Ericson2314 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #648
SkyMarshal wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along. It has, but only a small portion of people with the engineering skills to recognize knew it. Those profiting off it hyped it, and those not either called it a scam or stayed out of the fray.

This somewhat reminds me of reading IPFS documentation (which is fucking excellent BTW) and realizing the same thing: nobody is going to run their own pinning service and Piñata is the only one they mention by name which means it’ll be the platform everyone (to a first approximation) will use.

The lack of a a few "chains" though means an ephemeral node might actually not suck though.

Put another way, even IPFS nodes that for all intents and purposes are "clients" can still speak the same protocal to talk to the pinning service.

The single-ish central chain idea was always terrible. "Trustless" or not, that much synchronization is a misfeature! The real world really is partial-order time/causality, that is a feature not a bug.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#653

Post by vishnugupta »

codehalo wrote: post #274
clarle wrote: post #25

As an engineer, I feel like this single post helped me better understand Web3 and how it worked under the hood better than any of the heavily hyped Discord and Twitter announcements of new projects over the past year. It's interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the other big crypto / NFT marketplaces. Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.

Seems like you (and a vast majority of HN including Moxie) is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask/OpenSea). I saw this back in the 90's when a lot of people thought the internet was "Internet Explorer".

For a non-tech regular user who just want to get some work done Internet Explorer was indeed the internet.

In India even to this day for a vast majority YouTube/FB/WA is all the internet is. It's not at all unusual for people to walk up to a mom-and-pop store to top-up their data plan asking them to "recharge my WhatsApp balance". Even carriers have specialised data packs that are tied to a specific product/service.

And to be fair this is just how it'll be with any product/tech. As an example, in India Xerox literally stands for photocopy https://imgur.com/a/66TnCog

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#654

Post by astrange »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #594
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…

Can you transparently see all the code and databases for the websites you use and all the bank code and transactions?

It doesn't matter, because banks can undo mistaken transactions.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#655

Post by preseinger »

serverholic wrote: post #582
preseinger wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Successful" is an ambiguous descriptor. What do you have in mind when you say that? From where I sit, ENS and IPFS are unambiguous failures. Do you disagree?

Ok I'll bite. Why are ENS and IPFS failures?

Because they don't work. They're too slow and unavailable to meaningfully address the goals they were meant to solve.

That's my opinion. But you didn't give me yours.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#657

Post by iskander »

Are there any chains whose clients can run successfully on a cell phone, avoiding the need for intermediaries like Infura?

Does a recursive zero-knowledge rollup like Mina create a sufficiently small state to remove the need for client/server distinction?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#658

Post by astrange »

gaogao wrote: post #607
Zetaphor wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, it's not that because you can't actually store value. Saving money works as a temporary defection from everyone else trading it; the trading is what maintains the value.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#659

Post by polyomino »

iskander wrote: post #657

Are there any chains whose clients can run successfully on a cell phone, avoiding the need for intermediaries like Infura? Does a recursive zero-knowledge rollup like Mina create a sufficiently small state to remove the need for client/server distinction?

bitcoin can run on a raspberry pi, so probably. It'll probably take a few days to sync though.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#660

Post by astrange »

diegocg wrote: post #58
titzer wrote: post #20

> We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers. I must be stuck in the past. It's true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, ins…

I don't want to maintain my own mail server, but I definitely want to run my own server. The irony is that modern internet infrastructure makes decentralisation _more_ feasible, but software lags behind. Why can't I buy some device for 200€ or so where I store all my data and I receive email? (with the cloud being used only for optional encrypted backups). One can even imagine a decentralised social network running i…

You can't receive email this way because your spam filter wouldn't work; Gmail's works because they can see what's being sent to multiple people at once.

You can't send email (reliably) locally because other email servers don't trust you like they do Gmail.

Post reply on HN