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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#731

Post by prox »

Robotbeat wrote: post #168
jd007 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO this diagnosis is still one level away from a more fundamental truism, which is that people don't want to pay anything for digital goods. Running servers can and has been massively simplified over the last couple decades, and I don't see any inherent technical barrier preventing it from being as simple as registering for an account on FB (i.e. anyone can do it). The deeper problem is the lack of willingness to pa…

I’m not sure I agree with that. People wanna pay as little as possible but they gladly pay for Netflix or whatever. People spend a lot of money on Amazon because they make it really easy to pay. One of the original promises of cryptocurrency is it would make micro transactions easy and painless (with something to do about trust, but… that goes in the opposite direction than consumers would like as it’s the provider t…

This the Zinger comment for me. Low friction.

Steam does amazing because it’s all so easy and well developed. Steam is also very conservative in its development and doesn’t add stuff for the sake of it, like so many other companies fall for (Norton Crypto anyone?)

Also, we think we are there when it comes to UX, but I feel we haven’t even started to make good UX paradigms.

I am fervently anti crypto, and haven’t seen any argument that makes me move an inch, because all of the current alternatives are so much safer and easier. However, the idea of an internet wallet does appeal that’s distributed rather than centralized does appeal on some level. Crypto enthusiasts should focus on that more.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#732

Post by tsimionescu »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #504
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.

How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers? If there's a strong enough need, people will run their own servers even if they'd rather not. "people don't want to run servers" arguably could be rephrased as "people don't have a reason (today) to run their own servers". I'd argue this is a key difference between web1 and cryto centralization and the web2 centralization. If Google announce…

> How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their own email servers?

Office 365 financials alone suggest that the answer is "very few, and rapidly decreasing". I work for a ~30k employee technology company that doesn't run it's own email servers.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#733

Post by can16358p »

bricemo wrote: post #377
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…

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

What if the URL points to a decentralized and immutable file storage system instead of a regular URL with a domain/IP?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#734

Post by TimJRobinson »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #724
TimJRobinson wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filecoin that you pay to have any files you like mirrored by many people, in a decentralized way. Arweave is also a one off fee to have the file mirrored forever, the hosters are paid from the yield earned on that fee.

Arweave nodes can choose not to store data (and will likely drop data that's not profitable over time also), so I'm not sure that it's really a solution.

Individual nodes can choose not to store it, but your data is sharded amongst many nodes. Usually it's something like 64/96 redundancy - it's sharded across 96 nodes and at least 64 must be online to retrieve the data. It gets re-distributed if some nodes are offline for a while (not sure on specific numbers)

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#735

Post by TimJRobinson »

ShamelessC wrote: post #621
serverholic wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing stopping an artist from selling a work of art as edition 1 of 1, and then a month later "minting" another copy or 10. There is a social cost to making a promise and breaking it. > What happens if someone steals someone else's work, mints an NFT and sells it, and the buyer finds out the next day? Don't buy from random sources. You have similar problems with Pokemon cards, for example. Lots of fakes a…

"social cost" sounds like another way of saying "real-world trust".

Yes. The point of blockchains is to be able to trade value without middlemen. You still have to verify that what you're buying is legitimate.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#736

Post by tsimionescu »

searchableguy wrote: post #525
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

There is arweave which is trying to bring permanent storage. You could store the nft on arweave chain and mint the NFT on the same. https://www.arweave.org/ Though, I'm not sure how this will "scale".

> Though, I'm not sure how this will "scale".

It fundamentally can't - you need X amounts of storage * replication factor to store X amounts of data * replication factor.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#737

Post by TimJRobinson »

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…

It's about freedom of choice. People are no longer forced to use big corporations to manage their finance, they can still choose to if they want.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#738

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #405
miracle2k wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the hash of the data. It very often does, and it is certainly the case for most high-value NFTs. It is indeed not the case if you create your NFT on OpenSea and do not take the additional step of freezing the metadata. Also, there are many artworks that change, so a hash to a single file is not necessarily the right solution.

So if I own an NFT and make sure to store the hash, does that mean I also own all collisions?

I don't think any sha256 collision has ever been found. That seems kind of the smallest problem.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#739

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

schoen wrote: post #727
Joeri wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with traditional authority models is that the authority may disappear or be subverted. In regions with unstable governments you cannot rely on the government to keep saying that your house is your house. This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove you are who you say, you’ve studied where you claim, you’ve worked at the places…

> This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove you are who you say, you’ve studied where you claim, you’ve worked at the places on your resume, and do this in ways that cannot be subverted or lost. This would be invaluable for refugees who often struggle for months or years with proving they are who they are. That's a very interesting use…

> But, how do they know that that record is really from NUU? How do they know that NUU really exists? How do they know what its signing keys were, and how long they remained under the university administration's control? How do they know whether it's a legitimate university? And, maybe most significantly, how do they know that you're the same Joeri who earned that degree back in the day, as opposed to some other Joeri? Are these records including some kind of digitally signed biometrics?

Asking blockchain to solve those problems is a bit ridiculous. Those are problems that need to be solved in any system, and are solved enough in many today. For starters, its not hard to archive your signing keys somewhere safe and public, especially on the blockchain - the group of Universities and employers who care about that validity will have some central organization in identifying that archive.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#740

Post by tsimionescu »

astrange wrote: post #647
lmarcos wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: at this point why don't we skip the NFT part and just keep the URL and the content in the Internet Archive?

What does it mean to keep a URL in the Internet Archive?

I think they mean you keep the URL and the content stays in the Internet Archive.

But it could also mean that the Internet Archive creates a special page, say, "Owned URLs", where they list a username owner for each URL that someone has payed for. If you wanted to trade your URL, the IA would get a small cut to modify the contents of that page with the new owner.

This is 1:1 equivalent to the proposed scheme, but cuts out the inefficient "mint NFT on Ethereum blockchain" step, replacing it with a simple database on the IA side.

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