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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#821

Post by pmontra »

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…

We can add the hash of the content but what happens if the URL goes 404 or the web server disappears? I'll be the owner of a useless pair of URL and hash.

Or those NFT contents (and the URL domain!) are guaranteed not to disappear unless many web 1.0 and 2.0 services people was paying for and went out of business?

An article about this: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22349242/nft-metadata-exp...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#822

Post by tome »

lekevicius wrote: post #417
luhn wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re "early days," servers as clients, etc: There are a lot of very real problems with crypto, and the solution always lies in new technologies. Slow settlement and high gas fees? L2 networks. Limited global TPS? More L2 networks or alternative L1 chains. Wasteful energy use? Proof-of-stake. No connection to real world data? Oracles. Relying on centralized APIs? Light clients are in the works. Can't trust that you'll g…

I'm sorry, it's difficult for me to find a truly charitable interpretation of this response. But I'll do my best. Blockchains started very simply. Famously, Bitcoin's whitepaper is just a couple of pages long. Simple systems are nice, but they can't solve every problem. As problems were discovered, solutions were proposed. Most solutions were themselves the simplest solutions to a given problem, so naturally, as new…

> it's difficult for me to find a truly charitable interpretation of this response

> I struggle with truly charitable interpretation of your argument.

It’s the same for everyone when they come across a comment they don’t like. No need to tell us, just make your reply and everyone else can determine for themselves whether the response was charitable.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#823

Post by hooande »

So the idea of web3 is that the only thing stopping me from making my own twitter is that I don't have their past and future data. If I had real time READ access on their database of public tweets, I could make hooande-tweeter.com and it would be a viable competitor. This would mean that social media companies have less control over what we see and say due to market competition.

This obviously isn't working in the real world. OpenSea can still delete moxie's NFT. Starting a competitor to them will be difficult even though their core data is completely public. Just like twitter, OpenSea's position is based on brand awareness and first mover advantage. At this point competing would require differentiating features that solve real problems. That's a lot of work just because they deleted an NFT.

A better example might be twitter banning trump. If someone had access to all of twitter's data in real time and used it to start "twitter + trump", I could see a significant number of people using that. But then you'd kind of have half of people on regular twitter and the other half on trump twitter and it wouldn't be the same thing. In fact, it's fragmentation all the way down. I don't know if having a dozen different social media interfaces with slightly different rules and guidelines would solve anything.

The general idea seems to be that data is more powerful than branding. I don't know if that's true. Google and Facebook have a place in the zeitgeist that is more valuable than a search index or a social graph. We'll see if blockchain based open data is the answer. I think it might be way more complicated and less technical than that.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#824

Post by clippablematt »

anderspitman wrote: post #524
betterunix2 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github relies on a distributed storage architecture (local git repositories on developers' machines) and in theory anyone can take a project from github and duplicate it on gitlab etc. In reality nobody bothers and a project hosted on github will remain exclusively hosted on github and nowhere else, and likewise with other git hosting services. For the most part nobody cares if the data is hosted on a distributed sys…

I keep my projects on GitHub for discoverability and the reputation provided by stars, whatever that's worth. So essentially network effects. The reality is if I'm looking for a library to solve a problem, I'm much more likely to use one from GH with 1000 stars than a random self-hosted GitLab with 50. I would like to not feel that way, but I suspect many others do as well. It would be nice if we at least had a decen…

The closest attempt I can think of is status wallets token ranking for dapps. You could burn your tokens to say if you liked something in their listings and that would rank it for others. The issue they hit is when the lists got popular (in like 2018-19) vc funded projects just bought up the supplies of tokens and burnt them to get their project rated higher. So basically Sybil attack and they became unreliable.

It’s the same problem across all decentralised protocols, if it’s cheap to say something you get spam(see email) but introducing costs can just skew it to those who can afford to spam instead (essentially those with an advertising budget).

So there’s been a lot of research on proof of personhood (BrightID/ideas/proofofhumanity) to add Sybil resistance mechanisms so we can do 1p1v across the network. They’re working ok, but the next big step is adding zkproofs so we can anonymise the voting (which is needed to prevent collusion) which clrfund and sismo are working on.

Kleros have an interesting curated register protocol, which seems to work on small scales. Some groups are using it to token rank guy issues to prioritise work and get feedback.

The status blog has some interesting writing around these ideas over the past few years https://status.im/research/

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#825

Post by cblconfederate »

oblio wrote: post #342
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.

We have something! We have a ton of money in unregulated markets sloshing around reinventing every financial scam known to man. That's got to be something!

This but unironically. Let's put that money to use to build good things, not more pyramids.

All money was tainted at some point in the past. The modern world used to be very corrupt and violent - everywhere.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#826

Post by [deleted] »

tomputer wrote: post #818

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 importa…

[deleted]

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#827

Post by sneak »

tomputer wrote: post #818

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 importa…

This doesn't actually matter, though. When you buy an NFT, you're not buying the picture, the art, the URL, or the copyright - you're just buying the NFT.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#828

Post by bblb »

not2b wrote: post #166
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…

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…

We need a version of Freenet, where the network _guarantees_ that your content is always highly available. Well, at least as long as the tech/network itself is still alive.

Every user of the network has to provide some storage for the network itself. If there's not enough storage to safely store your new content on the network as highly available, the network would just say sorry, can't do right now, please wait on the line while we get new storage (users).

Sure, it would need some massive network effect to work at scale, but we have now, what, billions of devices connected to Internet? That ought to be enough.

I never really understood this current "decentralized" tech. Decentralized hashes with centralized gate keepers, and mixed with "old school SPOF tech", e.x. the VPS's that store the actual content. wat.

edit: 10GB per device/user and 1 billion devices. That's 10 exabytes. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10GB+*+1+billion

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#829

Post by walterbell »

lordofmoria wrote: post #759
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…

This is insightful, but a bit depressing. How do you propose solving these problems if cryptography is not the answer? At least Moxie is suggesting that there is a viable path forward by focusing on solutions that decentralize the infrastructure.

> a great legal system

We have centuries of data and precedent from human legal systems. How could human and machine governance be improved with the aid of modern technology, including but not limited to, revision control of legislation and public caselaw, graph databases for threat analytics across time/space/network, automated identification of gaps in machine governance which require human intervention, and yes, all the tools of web3/crypt0.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#830

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

pavlov wrote: post #302
codehalo wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

And that's one of Moxie's points: how exactly is web3 supposed to be avoiding the centralization that occurred on the web, when it's already at that point.

The fact that a problem exists doesn't mean it can't be solved, but any solution which does not go deep enough to address why Ethereum nodes are centralized is simply hype.
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