My First Impressions of Web3 • Hacker News Board

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#761

Post by mattwilsonn888 » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:07 AM UTC

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…

First of all, nobody participating in a blockchain protocol is running their own bank, no more than you are running the country when you vote for president.

Secondly, you are correct that in Web 2 people do not desire to run their own servers or analogously in crypto today they do not want to run nodes. But many people do want to mine - its a massive industry, but the issue stands, the nodes connecting people to the network and serving the data end up centralized; The Infura Problem is a great example of this. Infura was started by Ethereum founders to run Ethereum nodes that the standard wallets (the biggest of which, Metamask, made by the same organization) connect to by default.

The issue is that the Ethereum network is deeply reliant on both consensus and data-distribution, but it only compensates infrastructure for consensus - the miners - and in the future, stakers. Bitcoin is not as deeply affected by this because of its low data throughput, but its worth noting that non-mining nodes, which are essential to non-miners having a say in the network, are volunteering. These nodes are also responsible for distributing transaction data when miners use a modified Bitcoin Core Client designed to try and gain advantages by selectively sharing.

The miners on each network and those who run businesses around it don't want the networks to crumble, so they end up doing the work of nodes, but at the bare minimum. In Ethereum this means centralized node hosting services - that's a reality of the state of the network at this point. The solution is to start compensating both aspects of the network, because both are important. This not only re-decentralizes the nodes' motives and control, but it also means that distributing data more efficiently offers more rewards, so node operators are rewarded for scaling the network. The key concept here is that if the network does not compensate for its vital functions directly and proportionally to performance, then those functions will simply remain on life support.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#762

Post by mattwilsonn888 » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:11 AM UTC

pkcsecurity wrote: post #754

Moxie makes so many good critiques (some are so subtle, it might be worth a second read). I got the sense he’s trying very hard to be even handed and constructive about a situation he feels pretty badly about, but his true feelings are bleeding through in some of the side points / parentheticals. One point that I disagree with is his almost axiomatic premise that decentralization is an inherent good and the implicati…

To be fair, the vision of crypto isn't to revert the web back to when it was better, that is pretty much not possible. That doesn't mean it can't lead us somewhere forward, different from the past, that is also better.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#763

Post by grey-area » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:14 AM UTC

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #739

schoen wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Joer…

So now remove the blockchain entirely and what value was lost?

This is what the article demonstrates. All the value is in the trusted authorities issuing things, not the transaction record on a blockchain.

Trust is important and trustless transactions with pseudo anonymous entities are not worth much.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#764

Post by saurik » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:18 AM UTC

panarky wrote: post #698

chrisco255 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unfea…

It's almost as if there's only the bare minimum decentralization needed to avoid regulation and taxation and the rest is good old fashioned centralized web apps.

So "decentralized" doesn't necessarily mean "no servers" it means "the servers don't matter". If Infura went down tomorrow, nothing would be lost, because Infura was just hosting something anyone could have hosted. You want to be the next Infura? You just download the same code they did and run it: Infura isn't holding any state. If Facebook goes down tomorrow, everyone's accounts and all of their data is destroyed.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#765

Post by mattwilsonn888 » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:19 AM UTC

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."

Its a bit of a well kept secret. It does not represent maliciousness on the part of Ethereum or centralized node providers - its a consequence of the network doing nothing to compensate for nodes to deliver data to-and-fro. Miners and businesses stand to lose if the whole network crumbles, so the bare minimum is done to supply nodes, which means centralized node hosting.

A fully scalable, sustainable and decentralized network compensates all infrastructure important to the network, which means mining (consensus) and transaction/data routing. A nice side effect of rewarding data transmission is that you incentivize speed, so scalability can happen naturally with no conflicts of interest between miners and users.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#766

Post by lekevicius » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:20 AM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #757

ThreeToZero wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is 'vulnerable' to this. The most common use is to put financial transactions on Bitcoin, but you can put whatever binary data you want. Famously the genesis block[1] includes a newspaper headline to prove it was created after a specific day. It's possible to place illegal content onto the Bitcoin blockchain. [1] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

> It's possible to place illegal content onto the Bitcoin blockchain. I wonder if Bitcoin already has illegal content in it.

Yes, both Bitcoin and Ethereum have very illegal content. So far, nobody cared about this aspect.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#767

Post by leifg » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:23 AM UTC

> What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL.

I hear a lot that some of the smartest people work on web3/blockchain/crypto.

It blows my mind that the NFT standard doesn’t enforce a content hash. I genuinely thought that was part of the standard.

How did no one foresee that content at a URL can change?

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#768

Post by WA » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:26 AM UTC

bidder33 wrote: post #193

elliotbnvl wrote: post #18

This article seems like it neatly encapsulates and explains why I've subconsciously held off from jumping into the Web3 space. It might be confirmation bias speaking, but I don't think I've seen anyone lampoon Web3 so thoroughly, and it's nice to have some well-reasoned explanations for why I feel the way I do. EDIT: A further thought: this article is the first I've read on Web3 that feels like it's actually importan…

I guess as some counterpoints: I kind of agree in some ways but i think he underplays the critical point that you have an option for voice and exit from the forming centralising forces (which do get established because people like convenience/reliability/familiarity) without sacrificing your data or belongings, you can leave without losses. That is a critical difference. His nft is delisted from a platform and his wa…

> That sucks, up till now we have "too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone". But that isn't the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls it

Well, it is still "content on a platform", which is Ethereum. If another blockchain comes into existence and most people say that this new blockchain is the source of truth for digital ownership, your old NFTs are worthless, because nobody cares about old Ethereum.

The same is true for wallet apps. If 90 % of people use one specific thing (OpenSea) and think that only this thing is the source of truth, it simply doesn’t matter that your NFT is technically on the chain.

The sense of ownership and the value comes purely from where the attention is right now – and this being the internet, everything can change.

Compare this to the physical world. Here, the attention and trust is in your local laws. If this changes, you can lose ownership (government seizing properties).

The solution is actually to acknowledge that there is no ownership without society.

With Ethereum, people want to build another society, again based on trust/attention. That society has not much overlap to the physical world.

It is not much different than any group of people doing a thing together, like say, an open source project, a clan in EVE or whatever with the only difference that web3 enthusiasts think their hobby has some link to the real world.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#769

Post by mad182 » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:27 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #330

not2b wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article points out, many NFTs are implemented by storing a URL in the blockchain; the digital artwork sits on some server and is reachable by that link. Fine, you can prove that you own the URL. But what that URL points to can change out from under you, so there's no way to make that trustless. If you own the domain and the server that it points to, the registrar can take the domain away from you and give it t…

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…

If your solution is to trust the Internet Archive, why not just skip the blockchain part?

Any hash can match virtually unlimited number of different turd images.

And even if you trust the hash function to never be broken or brute forced with future technology, it can only verify the image, not prevent it from being deleted or altered, rendering the NFT broken and useless. Verifiably broken and useless, but still...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#770

Post by astoor » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 9:32 AM UTC

It is very refreshing to see this from a primarily technical angle.

In common with many HN-ers, I actually did a lot of cryptocurrency and blockchain dev work 5+ years ago, and was actually very exited about it at first, before realising what was behind the curtains. It is a similar story with many early Bitcoin developers, including one famously describing it as an experiment that failed[0]. I also get the distinct impression that the vast majority of pro-cryptocurrency people on HN at the moment are relatively new[1].

I stopped looking at it primarily from a technical angle because I realised that, firstly, the technology isn't anywhere nearly as useful as some people make out and might never be able to do the things which are promised, but secondly and more importantly, the technology really isn't the important part - what matters is the belief that technology might work, and sustaining that belief for long enough to make money. Moxie hints at this when he says "you can’t stop a gold rush".

There were an increasing number of people at the tech meetups etc. who knew nothing about the technology. Many were gamblers, refugees from the 2011 "Black Friday"[2], who knew full well that many of the schemes they were putting money into would never work or were even out-and-out scams, but they enjoyed the thrill of trying to get in and out and make money before the collapse.

The was also a growing sense of people being involved just to be anti-establishment. The ironic thing is that, back in 2008, you could make a reasonable case that the established banks were the bad guys and the cypherpunks were the good guys, but the situation has now definitely reversed - the banks have cleaned up their acts considerably (anyone who has worked in one for a long time will say how completely different the cultures are now vs then) with new regulations (e.g. Dodd-Frank) and most have plans to become carbon neutral, etc., and it is all the cryptocurrency scammers and fraudsters and climate-destroyers who are the bad guys now.

But there is more to it than that. There was also an increasing undercurrent of very non-technical people coming in and trying to exploit the technologists excited to work on the next new and shiny thing. I know that kind-of thing happens with everything, but this was much deeper and more malicious than in other contexts.

So while the technology isn't the important part, it is useful to be reminded of the intractable problems with the technology.

[0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...

[1] Yes I know there may be exceptions, but just for example compare all the newbie comments on the recent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29635907 with the highly technical ones on the related post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365663 from 8 years ago (including "I'm one of the thieves mentioned").

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg