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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#811

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

grey-area wrote: post #763
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The issue being discussed is putting college degrees on the blockchain such that viewers can be sure they are genuine and robustly hosted without tampering - no revocation.

The blockchain solves the last two, but if your conception of them is as a magical technology that can solve every issue by virtue of hosting data then you're going to be a dissapointed simpleton.

Your core issue is that colleges are a centralized institution which decide who gets rewarded - that's what it boils down to when you say "all the value" is in trusted authorities issuing things. For starters that's a ridiculous assumption that trust is still necessary for value, but more importantly stating that blockchains are useless because they cannot replace colleges is disingenuous.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#812

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #748
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If they can verify that, how much does the blockchain add then?

Well the example clearly stated an issue of redundancy. Things which can be done off chain which as little trust should be done off chain - that doesn't mean a distributed file storage protocol which runs off some chain and uses economic and cryptographic incentives isn't the solution.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#813

Post by frabcus »

sudosysgen wrote: post #661
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…

So, the thing is, all of these things fall into two categories. Either purely technical solutions, or previously solved problems. For example, IoT scale global 5G networks you can roan into? That's a solved issue already. Same for programming bounties, proof of humanity, UBI, transferrable assets (though Bitcoin is in some ways more transferable) etc... Others are fully technical problems, like fully private digital…

However, a useful bandaid does show that early blockchain is useful, just as "Early computers solved problems they were designed to solve".

Lebanaon, Turkey and Venezuela are very much part of the real world!

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#814

Post by bambax »

This is a fascinating and absolutely brilliant article that explains so many things in very clever and intelligible ways.

Here are two things I'd like further clarification on:

1/ The article explains that NFTs are just pointers to some url and that what resides at the url can change at any time, with no control from the NFT as the standard doesn't involve a hash which would at least help verify that the content hasn't been changed. (A hash would not prevent the content to be changed but it would show it has been).

The article says "NFTs generally do not store that data on-chain. For most NFTs of most images, that would be much too expensive". Can someone elaborate on this? Why would it be too expensive to store the art on the blockchain instead of a pointer? What amounts are we talking about, and how do they correlate to the number of bytes stored?

In the case of generative art that consists of a few lines of JavaScript for example, is it different? Could it then be stored directly on the blockchain?

2/ A very surprising fact is that centralized intermediaries can indeed decide and change what's on the blockchain, with no challenge from the users. Here's the key paragraph:

> All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!

But why is that? Why can't we have independent servers that actually read the blockchain directly without using OpenSea's APIs? Is it just a matter of convenience? Is it because it would be too complex and expensive and therefore it's simpler to just use the APIs? Or is it technically infeasible, for some reason?*

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#815

Post by clippablematt »

gen220 wrote: post #391
PretzelPirate wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum light clients will make it trivial to verify the state of the blockchain and interact with it without also having to store the entire blockchain. The nice thing is that you can depend on Infura for now, but if they ever attempt to be dishonest, you can easily switch to hosting your own node or light client. The cost of moving away from these centralized services is pretty low.

I think this is “the point”. This is like saying you can switch away from GMail by running your own mail server. People don’t want to run their own mail server. Will the ethereum light client run in metamask with no configuration? I’m afraid anything short of that is too heavy.

The idea of light clients is they will be bundled inside of apps/websites/extensions. So yes running a light client will be easy because it’s just happening in the background of the app, replacing the api hopping we do now with direct call/response to the chain.

So for metamask they would replace the calls to infura with a light client instead. Easy. They’re probably a year away from adoption, this year will accelerate development as it’s something lots of us want.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#816

Post by wahnfrieden »

hk__2 wrote: post #755
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is trivially solved by including a hash of the object in the ownership certificate.

> This is trivially solved by including a hash of the object in the ownership certificate. This doesn’t fix any issue. If the URL changes, your NFT is worth nothing and you have no way to get the object back.

Wrapped NFTs

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#817

Post by peoplefromibiza »

_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…

democracies are highly centralized.

delegation is not the same thing as decentralization.

democracies and authoritarianism are both centralized, the difference is that one is a cooperative model, the other one is not.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#818

Post by tomputer »

Fantastic article. Great read!

> Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere.

This is an important line. People buying NFT's who are not aware of this may assume the NFT pictures itself are stored on-chain.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#819

Post by detaro »

bambax wrote: post #814

This is a fascinating and absolutely brilliant article that explains so many things in very clever and intelligible ways. Here are two things I'd like further clarification on: 1/ The article explains that NFTs are just pointers to some url and that what resides at the url can change at any time, with no control from the NFT as the standard doesn't involve a hash which would at least help verify that the content hasn…

> Why would it be too expensive to store the art on the blockchain instead of a pointer?

Remember that "on the blockchain" means that everybody who keeps a copy of the chain needs to store it. Thus blockchains have a huge motivation to keep that small. A chain which includes lots of data would have many nodes exclude that data from storage - functionally pretty much the same then as storing hashes pointing elsewhere. (or if it forced nodes to keep it somehow, it would have fewer full nodes and/or higher costs to compensate)

> But why is that?

Because those particular implementations are badly done (and the success of Opensea shows that many people (or at least people wielding lots of money) participating don't care about this kind of detail, or at least don't consider it a dealbreaker). Using some kind of API is useful of course to implement, but going through the platform again is not very decentralized...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#820

Post by ypcx »

1. When people are financially incentivized to run servers, they always will.

2. If a crypto protocol doesn't evolve at the pace of available innovation, that particular blockchain will be superseded by a new one. That said, a (truly democratic) evolutionary process is a core part of every blockchain specification.

3. You can get blockchain data via public (and federated/proxied) API, but you can always cryptographically verify its veracity, and your edge device (e.g. your smartphone) can do that. The same the other way around, you cryptographically sign the inputs you send to the networks, so that no federated API can tamper them, because the secret key stays on your device. This is referred to as the "trust-less model".

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