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My First Impressions of Web3

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#891

Post by _heimdall »

IanCal wrote: post #865
_heimdall wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong its good that the option is there, but short of coding and operating your own full node Metamask will still be trusting a centralized third party

I'm not sure I understand, running a full node requires some consumer hardware and a few days. And most infura usage doesn't even need a full node, so it's easier to run. The API is the same, swapping out for another node is just a config change

> running a full node requires some consumer hardware and a few days

There are monthly utilities and regular maintenance as well. Networking could also be a problem, you'd really want a static IP and an unlimited high-speed network which isn't always supported by many home ISPs

> And most infura usage doesn't even need a full node, so it's easier to run

I don't know as much about the protocol details of infura. Have they found a way to verify transactions with a partial node? That'd be huge if they have, regardless of what happens to the current NFT platforms!

Many projects have chased pruning, but it always seems to get stuck when people realize that means adding trust into Tue system since you can't trace back to the genesis block

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#892

Post by egberts1 »

FTFA: “We should try to reduce the burden of building software.”

(building, compiling, linking my own copy of a Signal-Desktop app: failed, upgrade, failed, upgrade, failed, upgrade, failed, package is too new, … FAIL!)

- And Signal-Desktop app comprises of some 130,000 components/modules/archic/EOL packages, got it.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#893

Post by tomxor »

janandonly wrote: post #890

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 son…

> - People don't want to run a server... Do they not?

I think this is the most important point the article made. Most people really don't want to run a server, why? because they don't even know what a server is.

However they do have some tangible sense of some program they download and run on their device. So the only way for the masses to have truly decentralised infra is to make sure those programs are nodes in the decentralised networks.

> Or are most APPs simply not build as with server capabilities?

This. I don't know why, maybe there just aren't enough interested developers to build clients for this stuff that works like e.g a bittorrent client. The irony seems to be that most people making these "decentralised" apps are only interested in making portals into centralised platforms connected to a blockchain. Or maybe the design of the protocols simply doesn't lend itself to independent clients directly connecting to each other.

I think bittorrent is a really good example of how to do this stuff well. People will complain and say the masses don't use it, but it's been around for a couple of decades now and it "just works" and continues to "just work" and every client is a server, it is truly decentralised, with federated infra only to distribute metadata. I think the only reason it's not used by the masses is because 90% of what it's used to distribute is copyrighted material.

If web3 (or lets just call it what it is - NFTs, or the next blockchain fad) are to work in a truly decentralised manner, then whoever is designing these protocols needs to keep the whole picture in mind, end to end, to ensure clients are equal - to design it in such a way to actively work against the trend to centralised platforms, make them irrelevant.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#894

Post by teatree »

clippablematt wrote: post #841
czhu12 wrote: post #541

This post really resonates with me, I've been building https://raremints.club as a way for indie, non technical artists to create NFT's, and have really had to wrestle with all things "web3" that would've been trivial in "web2". I tried to document some of the challenges here: https://chriszhu12.medium.com/the-challenges-of-building-on-... But basically: I built an app that relied on mostly stable gas fees. A single…

It requires a change in mindset from “efficiency first” to “robust first”. That’s a tough learning curve for trad web devs, the best web3 dev I know comes from aerospace engineering where resilience and redundancy are part of the process. But ultimately succeeding in making something that can live in the sometimes hostile environment on chain means you make something that can last and is reliable. There can be awkwar…

In conventional web wasn't the same war fought as 'net neutrality' ? All packets are equal. Pardon me if I am wrong, I don't understand web3 or crypto much but what you describe looks like a capitalist version of Internet where processing of every request depends on one's ability to pay. If this is the future, history has already taught us that it is bound to fail.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#895

Post by nootropicat »

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.

Your response is different from what I posted. You can always pin the image on your ipfs node and it's going to resolve to the same, unique, hash (well, unless preimage resistance of sha2 is broken...) allowing everyone in the world to download it. That doesn't mean it guarantees availability - nothing does - someone has to host it.

Ultimately, the owner has to host it, or pay someone to host it, or hope someone else hosts it. Although nfts are small enough that any semi-popular ones may stay alive potentially forever as long as someone, somewhere, hosts it on an ipfs node. Potentially long forgotten by literally everyone alive.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#896

Post by briancl »

janandonly wrote: post #890

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 son…

Running a server means installing, configuring, and maintaining an OS and stack of software. Spotify running a server in the background isn’t what Moxie means.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#897

Post by grey-area »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #811
grey-area wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My problem with blockchains as the proposed solution here is that they solve none of the hard problems, introduce some new problems, (and no they are not an irrevocable record (as if that were even desirable), look up the DAO Hack or Bitcoin Cash fork and they certainly aren't proven to be permanent or reliable) and removing them would make the solution simpler and cheaper - the essential problem here is trust, not recording and sharing data.

You have not demonstrated any added value, and the straw-man insults sprinkled with spelling mistakes do not help persuade.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#898

Post by acdha »

spiddy wrote: post #795
betterunix2 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we ever move toward decentralization? It is almost always easier to have at least some central point of control in any distributed system, even the Internet (IANA, RIRs, etc.). It is also very difficult to remove a centralized control point after a system is already deployed, especially if the system supports heterogenous clients (as it is likely that some clients will be slow to switch to the new design, a…

There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data, which provides a big incentive to not be evil. the moment someone can make a case for bad play they have the advantage to shift the market to a different platform. Unfortunately this is not so easy on web2 because of the data that locks users on those platfo…

> There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data

This is only true of the data stored on the blockchain itself. As described in the article, that isn’t anywhere near enough to replace the centralized systems being billed as “web3”, and it’s completely unworkable for data which can’t be public, which is updated frequently, or which needs to be deleted. Combined with blockchains being unavoidably quite expensive and slow, and the challenges of standardizing protocols while the competition is shipping it seems quite unlikely that this will change.

It doesn’t reduce lock-in meaningfully if Google were to continue to store and process all of your data but now you’re using an outside authentication system. I’m sure they would love, however, the way “web3” makes their job of tracking users so much easier.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#899

Post by IanCal »

_heimdall wrote: post #891
IanCal wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand, running a full node requires some consumer hardware and a few days. And most infura usage doesn't even need a full node, so it's easier to run. The API is the same, swapping out for another node is just a config change

> running a full node requires some consumer hardware and a few days There are monthly utilities and regular maintenance as well. Networking could also be a problem, you'd really want a static IP and an unlimited high-speed network which isn't always supported by many home ISPs > And most infura usage doesn't even need a full node, so it's easier to run I don't know as much about the protocol details of infura. Have…

Perhaps I'm mixing up terminology but by full node I mean an archive node as that has larger hardware requirements.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#900

Post by whenlambo »

czhu12 wrote: post #541

This post really resonates with me, I've been building https://raremints.club as a way for indie, non technical artists to create NFT's, and have really had to wrestle with all things "web3" that would've been trivial in "web2". I tried to document some of the challenges here: https://chriszhu12.medium.com/the-challenges-of-building-on-... But basically: I built an app that relied on mostly stable gas fees. A single…

I’m actively building multichain NFT marketplace https://RareGems.io — your domain name resonates well :)
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