My First Impressions of Web3 • Hacker News Board

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#881

Post by derangedHorse » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:09 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #796

derangedHorse wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Should Jagex fold and the game become unplayable, what do you own? An entry in a database that says that you once had this item but you can't do anything with it? Why is that valuable? Sometimes just ownership of something is valuable in itself. That's the whole idea of collectibles, it's not always tied to its original utility. Think having an original SNES versus an emulator on a computer or an original Picasso vs…

> No but maybe I can give a Croft-esque outfit to an in-game character if the player has the Lara Croft NFT. It could be a selling point to some players to be able to play with assets inspired by another game they love Why would a company do this? They spend a load of dev time to create a valuable in-game asset linked to a non-fungible token created by a third party which only one person can possess at a time and the…

Typically people don't build features around individual NFTs but NFT collections. If 20k Lara Croft NFTs were minted in a special Tomb Raider NFT collection, then the access to the new skin would be available to any of the owners of the 20k Lara Croft NFTs in the collection. I think the misunderstanding here is that an individual NFT gives unique access to an in-game asset, sometimes NFT collections give unique ownership to a copy of the same game asset.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#882

Post by DyslexicAtheist » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:09 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #832

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's impossible to talk about trust without talking about cryptography. from an implementation pov "trust" is a distraction where anyone can quickly derail any argument citing "Trusting Trust" or "the show me the root of trust" ... So to avoid meta-discussions talking about cryptography instead of trust skips the noise and goes straight to the heart of the issue. Consider this: - Talking about cryptography is hard bu…

Instead of cookie warnings, could every NFT/web3/crypt0 discussion be preceded by a warning about implicit trust?

we need to bring back "Clippy" but instead of a paperclip it's the ghost of Ken Thompson chasing your mouse pointer around and slapping it with a copy of "Trusting Trust".

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#883

Post by democracy » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:10 PM UTC

I appreciate the author's patience and effort not to put TLDR as "it's all BS" in the beginning of his post...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#884

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:12 PM UTC

exdsq wrote: post #328

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And thanks to the protocols consensus rules your users can trust that for a transaction to go through your node and be accepted onto main net your node is a good actor. Usually, you still have the “server is selectively lying” problem; unless the users are talking to each other, how do the consensus rules help with this? (Related to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault problem, though that's about form…

> Usually, you still have the “server is selectively lying” problem; unless the users are talking to each other, how do the consensus rules help with this? If you're submitting txs to a node that doesn't communicate to the mainnet (they're isolated from it) then any txs that go to it would be void. You could just use that Eth on the proper mainnet as it wouldn't be on the chain. If the node decided to then come onto…

That's not the only way to lie. You could, for example, lie that a transaction that doesn't exist has gone through – say, in a cross-chain “currency exchange”. Or perform a double-spend attack. Or many other things, because the Byzantine fault tolerance doesn't apply in this case.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#885

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #488

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. “Illegal hacking effort”? In the EU, it's illegal for Facebook to prevent this. In fact, there's even an export button, which gives you quite a lot of the historical data (though not all of it). To get events, just scrape the Facebook website using Selenium and Python. There are online tutorials for this. Harder than it should be, I'll be the first to admit, but easier than blockchain-based systems. (Blockchain…

That covers exporting one user’s data at one point in time, sure. But you can’t read all public events without significant work on a scraper, and you certainly can’t contribute without going through Facebook’s servers. Of course you’re not forced to use Facebook, but in order to use Facebook you must go through their computer systems on their terms.

But the goal of most people isn't to use Facebook; it's to keep in contact with their friends. Scraping just the things they care about is fairly easy; scraping what Facebook chooses to put in front of their eyeballs when they're using an account (in practice, what they'd see if they were using Facebook) is really quite easy.

Then you can just reply to Facebook messages on something other than Facebook. That'll annoy your friends a bit, but that's the cost of them still using Facebook.

The problem with Facebook is not that it's hard to get your data off. It's not, really. The problem is that you have to be a programmer to do so; and blockchain stuff doesn't fix that problem.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#886

Post by pelasaco » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

the good news is that it's not the first shared database that we have to manage. Take DNS as example. We know the answer: Start a new blockchain using Ethereum technology, and let institutes around the world, host the "servers". Even better if every central bank in the world could run a node.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#887

Post by asimpletune » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:23 PM 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…

It’s pretty interesting to consider the intersection between what counts as “people” and “technical” problems.

For example, concurrent version control systems (like perforce) were horrible. This can be thought of as a technical problem, but it was actually right at the intersection of something technical and a people thing. What git understood is that having a canonical repo was a people issue, and it correctly abandoned a central “source of truth”… basically no amount of technology can fix what is a people problem, so no repos are “special” or “the one” from a technical point of view. It then forced people to sort their shit out. However, because of this insight, git was able to get the technical aspects spot on. It correctly recognized that what was needed was the right data structure. Git is extremely simple software, that basically does two things really well: branch and merge, but it needed the right data structure.

I think talking about centralization (APIs and infrastructure) vs decentralization (protocols) as a people vs tech problem is exactly the same sort of thing, and to get the correct view on it you have to really mail in detail where the people/tech problems begin/end.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#888

Post by wizzwizz4 » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

bblb wrote: post #877

nootropicat wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>IPFS guarantees that the owner can host their own NFT forever 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.

BitTorrent also guarantees that your content would always be available – if you're hosting it.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#889

Post by tomxor » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

Can we stop calling it Web3 and just call it NFTs...

Just call it what it is. If we are talking about NFTs say NFT, if we are talking about the general applicability of blockchains, say Blockchain. Every time someone attempts to describe Web3 they just end up trying to describe NFTs without actually talking about what NFTs tangibly do and are, which is why it sounds so ridiculously nebulous.

This response and the original article are both 99% literally discussing NFTs.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#890

Post by janandonly » Sat, Jan 08, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

On the one hand I am happy to read a, at first sight, well balanced and well thought out critique of "web3"...

On the other hand: I can not escape the idea that he picked specific examples to make specific point:

- People don't want to run a server... Do they not? Or are most APPs simply not build with server capabilities? In the early days of Spotify they had a limited server capacity and everyone who streamed a song simply downloaded it from a server and peers mix, and in the background uploaded it to others peers. People were feeling just fine about 'running a server', just because they didn't even knew they did. The app hid (or abstracted) away the whole client/server question. [1]

- decentralisation doesn't work because "the blockchain" is hard to query and you need centralised APIs to do it for you. Again, a very weird and false dichotomy. Why take Ethereum as an example for "the blockchain". If I wanted to write a pro-blockain piece I would pick the Bitcoin blockchain as an example of how this CAN work. At this moment I run several apps on my iPhone which all query this blockchain for their functionality and it words just fine (and decentralised). To clarify I don't have the whole chain on my phone, it connects to random nodes (or my own if I so choose) and queries the chain via Bloom-filters [2].

- OpenSea as a example of a decentralised market place that doesn't seem to work. Again, why this example? Why not BISQ, a marketplace that is truly decentralised and has been running flawless for years? [3]

So, one could write an article that is saying the exacte opposite only by picking different examples.

[1] https://siliconangle.com/2014/04/22/spotify-abandoning-p2p-i...

[2] https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/transaction-bloom-filtering...

[3] https://bisq.network