871–880 of 1001 posts
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…
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…
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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.
Never in a sovereign.
1) His comment that "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will" is correct, but I think it's not the right way to think about the problem. All of us have gigabytes of cached shit on our devices. Ideally that locally stored information should be part of a decentralized web. By "decentralized web" I mean smth very different from today's web3 bs.
2) "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform" - again, he is correct, but I feel like he's not seeing the larger picture. The fact that a protocol "moves much more slowly" is actually a feature. Elaboration: He is looking only at the pace of change, not at the robustness of the system in question. Old software that was designed for use value, still works flawlessly, i.e. it doesn't break. The dependency graph of older protocols is mind blowingly small. Today's software, which most often gets designed for exchange value, breaks within a year if it doesn't get updates, because their dependency graph is enormous. It's correct that protocols rarely update, but they get forked way more. Most updates get introduced through new forks.
3) his section "Making some distributed apps" - spot on. As long as you need to have a local copy of a ledger (even if it's just the block headers) to be a validator, the majority of users will still have to trust a server. crypto fanatics will claim "yeah, but you can ask for a merklle proof of the state" miss that lying by omission is a thing (i.e. in the classic merkle tree, you can prove that smth is present, you cannot prove that smth is not present). As a result servers can still lie to you by omission. Crypto fanatics will say "yeah, but you can contact several nodes", but that assumes that there are several nodes. In reality the majority of projects will only call an Infura node. It's all insane. Nothing about today's crypto space is actually trustless & decentralized.
4) His section "Making an NFT" - Yup, the NFT space is ridiculous on several levels. His arguments against metamask are also legit, same reasoning as in the previous point.
5) Section "Recreating this world" - I think he's making the same logical mistake as in the earlier sections here. The cryptocurrency protocols did not converge to a client - server setup. They always were a client - server setup in disguise. The problems related to simplified payment verification (SPV) were never actually solved. I think it's wrong to think that things must converge to platforms. Things that are use value based often resist such dynamics, e.g. Torrents.
6) The "It’s early days" section - yup, it's not early days anymore. These problems are inherit in the architecture design of blockchain protocols.
7) "But you can’t stop a gold rush" - This whole section was spot on. It's all a gold rush. There's no use value to any of the crypto projects right now, except maybe enabling people who live under authoritarian regimes to take take their capital with them.
8) "Creativity might not be enough" - I don't agree with the first part of his conclusion, but the second part is legit.
Personally I think current web3 is going down a very bad path. The old school p2p protocol designers were still driven mainly by a socialist / anarchist zeitgeist. They were designing for use value. Today's protocols have a neoliberal zeitgeist. Use value was thrown out of the window in exchange for speculative value.
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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 t…
> Sure, it would need some massive network effect to work at scale And nobody wants to participate. These projects are doomed to be extremely niche. As TFA points out, even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. It could have worked in the days of casual piracy (kazaa, napster, certain private torrent sites etc had a shitton of users) if you managed to sell it as a way to do exactly that.. But gett…
This is why we can't have nice things. :D
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> The centralization of apis (infura > How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? Infura is merely hosting nodes for you and exposing their JSON RPC endpoints. They did not _create_ the API. There's already plenty of competitors in that space. QuickNode and GetBlock for instance, if you want mutualised/managed nodes. You can also host your own node yourself, or use e.g. AWS Blockchain to host it for you, or eve…
> If you are using JSON RPC APIs (which most people do) there is nothing that locks you to Infura or any other provider. How do you switch to another provider in Metamask?
Unless there's another equally popular extension, not made by Consensys the presence of that option is irrelevant.
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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 t…
No, we don't. IPFS guarantees that the owner can host their own NFT forever (there are multiple pinning services if they don't want to run a server). This is the best possible model. If even the owner doesn't give a shit, why should anybody else? It's true that most NFT buyers have zero idea how this works. In 2 years multiple shitty NFTs are going to turn into 404. This is fine - people will learn to only buy images…
I always thought IPFS just as a BitTorrent but with blockchainy tech stack.
But if it can indeed guarantee that my content would always be available, then IPFS is the answer.
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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 > How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? Infura is merely hosting nodes for you and exposing their JSON RPC endpoints. They did not _create_ the API. There's already plenty of competitors in that space. QuickNode and GetBlock for instance, if you want mutualised/managed nodes. You can also host your own node yourself, or use e.g. AWS Blockchain to host it for you, or eve…
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I don't know for sure, but I'd guess they don't do file hashes because image hosts so often change the file you uploaded. They might compress it, remove unnecessary metadata, or add their own metadata. All of that would change the file contents, breaking the hash. A permenantly verifiable has still doesn't really solve it though. Someone can still change or remove the file later, even if you downloaded the original b…
> What's the point of paying so much money for the right to kind of own a piece of art that anyone can legally copy and use? I don't fully understand the "collector" mindset. But let's assume there are people, similar to whales in free-to-play games, that are willing to pay ridiculous large sums for what the majority would not be willing to pay anything for. Now, think of those collectors as being willing to pay for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> Sure, it would need some massive network effect to work at scale And nobody wants to participate. These projects are doomed to be extremely niche. As TFA points out, even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. It could have worked in the days of casual piracy (kazaa, napster, certain private torrent sites etc had a shitton of users) if you managed to sell it as a way to do exactly that.. But gett…
Then forget about the anonymization features of Freenet, and build something that ties to your Google Auth, Facebook ID, Government ID, whatever.
And let LEA access all of the content and seize/prosecute illegal content. Really not that different than storing your content on any of the cloud storage providers. With the exception that your data would be always guaranteed to be highly available, and not on just one or two centralized cloud storages.
>But getting people to install apps today to donate their bandwidth and disk space
That's just a marketing headache. ;)