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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#711

Post by acjohnson55 »

_heimdall wrote: post #693
this_user wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental problem with decentralisation is that it will always be less efficient than a centralised solution due to the overhead necessary for coordinating the system. This means increased costs of some nature. In order to justify those costs, the decentralised system has to add a sufficient amount of value compared to the centralised solution. And not only is that usually not the case, but, as Moxie points out…

This is the exact argument for authoritarianism over democracy. Centralization is easier and often cheaper, but you have to trust the group in charge completely. Even then, the collective loses out on innovation and new ideas because only a small subset of the population is in a position to change anything. Centralization is often a short term win, decentralization is a long play. Unfortunately, we almost always seem…

This is what representative democracy with an executive function is for. The government / executive acts without the need of democratic micromanagement, but is subject to popular oversight through a number of mechanisms.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#712

Post by gurupanguji »

_heimdall wrote: post #693
this_user wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental problem with decentralisation is that it will always be less efficient than a centralised solution due to the overhead necessary for coordinating the system. This means increased costs of some nature. In order to justify those costs, the decentralised system has to add a sufficient amount of value compared to the centralised solution. And not only is that usually not the case, but, as Moxie points out…

This is the exact argument for authoritarianism over democracy. Centralization is easier and often cheaper, but you have to trust the group in charge completely. Even then, the collective loses out on innovation and new ideas because only a small subset of the population is in a position to change anything. Centralization is often a short term win, decentralization is a long play. Unfortunately, we almost always seem…

Even in the case of democracy, you have to put trust in the sovereign.

And whenever the sovereign enforces a law, the person facing the enforcement will consider it tyranny. It’s a known paradox of the power we, the people, grant to the sovereign.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#713

Post by angryasian »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #631
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 marke…

ehh.. why sell the item once to a person in a large open market, when you can sell the item multiple times to the same person in multiple markets.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#714

Post by des1nderlase »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #615
dcolkitt wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I second this. If history has thought us anything is that every web3 company will work toward increasing the competitive gap.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#715

Post by [deleted] »

devadvance wrote: post #17

This is a really well-thought-out, nuanced take. I really appreciate mixture of "but there are still servers", not being able to stop a gold rush, and (refreshingly) the technical take on the implementation details. It stands in such stark contrast to other content. For example, a web3 chat app announcement I saw yesterday [1]. I even joined the Discord to learn more and just found...hype. I found this parenthetical…

[deleted]

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#716

Post by mathnmusic »

astrange wrote: post #649
RoboTeddy wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

> - Crypto has been used to send remittances to economically unstable places (Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela) This would be cheaper if you didn't use the crypto part. The reason people use crypto is just that the governments have not yet noticed they're running an illegal money transmitter.

Sure, S3 is also cheaper than torrents. And HTTP/Telnet is cheaper than HTTPS/SSH. But some people do see value in math-based guarantees over those given by governments and courts. And others don't. We need both approaches to keep each other in check.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#717

Post by des1nderlase »

"We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure."

This resonated with me. If we want Web3 disruption to happen, perhaps we need better P2P networks. For example, with things like static IP per user, it would be trivial to standardize and build next gen chat apps.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#718

Post by [deleted] »

yed wrote: post #393
hooande wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the data has no value. anyone can right click copy an image. the value is that you own the blockchain address that points to a url. picture of a house = no value. deed to the house = value. even if the house is destroyed (data changed), the deed still has some kind of value

A deed is to land, the land still exists if the house is gone. Your example is more like owning a title to a car that's been shot into the sun. It has 0 value.

[deleted]

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#719

Post by biztos »

jiggawatts wrote: post #677

The author mentions that currently all NFTs are just URLs, but it is possible to store data directly in the blockchain, even if it would be prohibitively expensive. An issue with general-purpose immutable storage is that it can be permanently polluted with illegal data. Everything from child pornography, instructions for making drugs or explosives, doxing/attack information, private keys for copy protection systems,…

> That's the author's point -- his dynamically changing NFT was revoked in this manner.

For me the much scarier weaponization is to change the linked content to be something illegal after you buy the NFT. How would you prove the illegal thing is not the thing you bought? (You will certainly not be treated as innocent until proven guilty if we're talking child pornography in the USA or democracy advocacy in China, etc etc.)

I don't think making them revocable defeats the purpose, it's having the registry of NFTs effectively being "OpenSea API" and not "blockchain" that's the problem. Having the NFT content itself be erasable is probably a good thing as long as there is some way of making a local copy. Sometimes we want the government to have the ability to stop the spread of information; but (subject to the risk of your possessing it) your "ownership" of content with a hashed URL is also going to apply to the download, assuming the hash is reproducible.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#720

Post by jaxrtech »

bko wrote: post #385
devadvance wrote: post #17

This is a really well-thought-out, nuanced take. I really appreciate mixture of "but there are still servers", not being able to stop a gold rush, and (refreshingly) the technical take on the implementation details. It stands in such stark contrast to other content. For example, a web3 chat app announcement I saw yesterday [1]. I even joined the Discord to learn more and just found...hype. I found this parenthetical…

The centralization of apis (infura, opensea and ethscan used by metamask) is the biggest problem. I could be wrong, but I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech. I remember in the late 90s there were a number of search engines but no one really owned the space. Only 20 years later did Google emerge as the winner and is (IMO) by far the best in terms of relevant results. But that didn't hap…

> The centralization of apis (infura, opensea and ethscan used by metamask) is the biggest problem. I could be wrong, but I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech. I remember in the late 90s there were a number of search engines but no one really owned the space. Only 20 years later did Google emerge as the winner and is (IMO) by far the best in terms of relevant results. But that didn't happen overnight, and there wasn't a search engine dominating 90% of the market within a few years of the beginning of mainstream acceptance.

> How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? MetaMask should be incentivized to do this as they're core offering is controlled by one party.

> [edit] Never mind, metamask and infura are owned by the same company (ConsenSys). It's even worse than it appears...

Currently working in the space (graduated from doing systems-level . My hot take is what is considered a "full node" can potentially use significantly less resources. The base word size is 256-bit (size of SHA256), most is either 1s or 0s, the entire raw Ethereum blockchain is roughly 350 GiB uncompressed, probably can be much better with zstd compression on multi-core. Let's just quietly ignore that most is not using an assembly-level optimized implentations of uint256 arithmetic operations. Also all the current clients (a) afaik run transactions single-threaded, and (b) no on-disk compression, (c) at best use mmap relying on OS level paging even though you're going to have 32-byte random reads invalidating entire 4K or 16K pages out of ~3TiB of read/write space. I'm more than certain execution can be ran speculatively using STM (software transaction memory). I seriously doubt that most Ethereum transactions within a single block have that much r/w contention if you were to execute them in arbitrary order in parallel. Basically application level speculative execution (except you know the ending hash ahead of time, so you know of the ending state is valid or not). Anyhow...

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