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My First Impressions of Web3

moxie.org

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Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#921

Post by mattdesl »

iskander wrote: post #674
doopy1 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art Blocks is completely on-chain :)

That's not quite right. The JS source code is committed on chain via a contract interaction and every minted token gets a token hash which, when run through the JS source, can recreate the art. But...the execution environment is still your web browser and non-animated Art Blocks NFTs still have a "preview" stored off-chain like most other. Neither running the code in your browser or retrieving the preview is an on-ch…

it is pretty trivial to retrieve JS code and the hash from the ArtBlocks smart contracts, and save them into a HTML file to run it locally.

probably a more reasonable concern (rather than the on/off chain question) is one of dependencies (some depend on common libraries like p5) and possible incompatible changes to JS and/or browser spec in the future. At which point emulators may need to be created to continue to display this work.

Generally, the burden of maintenance for AB pieces is quite low and archivability quite accessible, relative to many other digital real-time artworks in museums and galleries today.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#922

Post by doopy1 »

mattdesl wrote: post #921
iskander wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not quite right. The JS source code is committed on chain via a contract interaction and every minted token gets a token hash which, when run through the JS source, can recreate the art. But...the execution environment is still your web browser and non-animated Art Blocks NFTs still have a "preview" stored off-chain like most other. Neither running the code in your browser or retrieving the preview is an on-ch…

it is pretty trivial to retrieve JS code and the hash from the ArtBlocks smart contracts, and save them into a HTML file to run it locally. probably a more reasonable concern (rather than the on/off chain question) is one of dependencies (some depend on common libraries like p5) and possible incompatible changes to JS and/or browser spec in the future. At which point emulators may need to be created to continue to di…

Agreed. I think the biggest "existential threat" to Art Blocks is that browsers change very quickly and different browser engines do things differently. In that respect, the art is truly just the code and not the visual product the code produces. If Art Blocks pieces are goin to live forever in "live view" it will probably be up to some digital archivists to make that happen.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#923

Post by biztos »

walterbell wrote: post #829
lordofmoria wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

> revision control of legislation and public caselaw

Even in pseudo-democracies, even in many outright autocracies, the information needed to build such a thing exists and is public. I don't know if anyone's built a git repo for all US federal law, but the information is there if you want to do it and it'd probably be a really fun project.

A quick search suggests there are repos but not with all the history.

I wonder if anybody has tried modeling real-world legal systems in a DAO. Probably too complicated, but I think you could pretty much cover the US constitution just as a thought experiment.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#924

Post by unkulunkulu »

_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…

I might be crazy, but reading this I imagine a blockchain based temporary democracy: full proof-of-whatever correct voting scheme choosing a temporary centralized “government” with measurable goals to move the system to eventual decentralization.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#925

Post by pshc »

meheleventyone wrote: post #772
pshc wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, one can’t easily tie an NFT to a physical object. Nothing guarantees that the watch and NFT change ownership in tandem. All I’m saying is that a serial number doesn’t really prove anything because it’s trivial to copy. A private key inextricable from the object would be better, because it could generate timestamped signatures as proof.

Even with time stamped signatures you can clone the signature onto a fake watch.

The point of a signed timestamp (and/or challenge string) is that it demonstrates the signature is freshly generated, proof that the device is authentic right then and there. An old copied signature would not have this property.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#926

Post by notahacker »

derangedHorse wrote: post #881
notahacker wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 owner…

Fair enough, creating an asset which 20k people with access to a collection theoretically might use is more attractive than creating a unique asset for a unique token. It does seem strange that the supposed "killer app" for NFTs in exchangeable game stuff wouldn't have any use for their core feature (uniqueness on the blockchain) though.

If a developer wanted to market games by offering inducements to players of other games in the form of unique content it seem like a lot of other solutions would be more attractive than the blockchain. Partnership with other developers or platforms like Steam gives you an actual marketing channel to hype the special add on for Tomb Raider players, and to a lot more than 20k people. The only case where I can see them preferring to attract small numbers of players of a third party game who paid that developer for NFTs rather than every player of that game is if their game is pure pay-to-win bullshit and there's no point in targeting the sort of player who doesn't buy NFTs...

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#927

Post by tompccs »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #528
tompccs wrote: post #363

"With the shift to mobile, we now live firmly in a world of clients and servers – with the former completely unable to act as the latter – and those questions seem more important to me than ever. Meanwhile, ethereum actually refers to servers as “clients,” so there’s not even a word for an actual untrusted client/server interface that will have to exist somewhere, and no acknowledgement that if successful there will…

If people want banks, they can have them. At this point exchanges have become the banks of the cryptocurrency space. Lots of people just leave their coins in the exchanges, they even have savings accounts. The ability to withdraw the money and use it directly with no third party involved is still important. Especially since governments are already implementing digital currencies that will be fully under their control…

How is withdrawing your crypto keys from an exchange functionally different from hiding jewellery around the house? At least the value of the jewellery is far less volatile, plus you can wear and enjoy it, which makes you less likely to lose it.

Yes yes you can memorise some encryption key, but that poses its own problems - what happens to your money if you die or become non-compos mentis?

Ultimately any sane person ends up trusting someone, whether a bank, an exchange, a lawyer or safe deposit box. Crypto removes the need for trust with a pretty extraordinary and elegant idea, but nobody actually wants it.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#928

Post by giantrobot »

RoboTeddy wrote: post #618
giantrobot wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be easy to look at the very early computers, which were perhaps not all that useful, and shrug — but that take wouldn't have extended well into the future as the technology scaled. Early computers solved problems they were designed to solve. So they were plenty useful . Your statement is nonsensical.

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…

> P.S. the tone of your comment made me a little sad :(

Good. You're trying to hock snake pyramid schemes and claiming it's a revolution. Blockchains are slow and expensive databases. That is it. They have no authority over anything so the only

Cryptocurrencies are burning through the power usage of a small country for bullshit. The worthless shit being "created" is fueled by breathless hype of hucksters looking for the next sucker to trade actual useful money for their Geoffrey dollars.

You're part of a giant scam, or multiple scams. You're listing a bunch of shit which has existing prosaic solutions. You think the blockchain solutions are new and innovative because you never looked into the issues before. Someone came up with a wasteful "solution", slapped the word blockchain on it, and you've uncritically accepted it as some super great thing.

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#929

Post by 0xluminous »

0xluminous wrote: post #134

> People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. I just wrote an article about this — what's really new about web3 is the incentives not the tech. > People don’t want to run servers. It’s okay for markets to specialize and service providers to receive economies of scale. > Email is a decentralized protocol, and customer behavior shows people just want to click and have things work, like Gmail. > What’s i…

thanks to whoever downvoted this without giving a reason, wasn’t trying to spam, just thought it was relevant

Re: My First Impressions of Web3

#930

Post by petenick »

I have been looking for an objective, skeptical evaluation of web3 and this delivers. Despite all of the discussion around decentralization, market forces like network effects, switching costs, and winner-take-all will likely occur and with it some degree of centralization.
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