[HN Gopher] Web3 - A Vision for a Decentralized Web
___________________________________________________________________
Web3 - A Vision for a Decentralized Web
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 165 points
Date : 2021-10-01 13:04 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| ladyattis wrote:
| I think the fetishization of blockchain technology demonstrates
| that most of its proponents don't understand the Internet. The
| Internet isn't powered by mere ownership claims but by the
| ability to distribute content with little effort by its users. To
| augment enclosure of the "digital commons" is going to make the
| Internet _worse_ off than it ever has been. The more they try to
| monetize and commodify computing technology the more they just
| reinvent what already existed and diminish both the established
| forms and the new ones.
| habibur wrote:
| I was with it until it came down to NFT.
|
| ssh like crypto works. If you want to bring in blockchain, do it
| later as an added layer.
| floatboth wrote:
| Cloudflare is a major force in centralizing _the actual internet_
| on itself (the one free CDN /anti-DDoS for everyone who's not a
| giant themselves, huh, what could possibly go wrong). Are they
| attaching themselves to this coin crap in order to
| "decentralization-wash" their public image? They have to know
| that people know how fraudulent and awful the whole
| cryptocurrency space is, right?
| rchaud wrote:
| I believe you can create a Cloudflare mirror for your web3 site
| so people can access it using a regular browser.
| moffkalast wrote:
| But how do they pay the gas fees? :P
| atatatat wrote:
| Visa
| moffkalast wrote:
| American Express
| dmw_ng wrote:
| Came here to read this. Reminiscent of the early days of Google
| and it's championing of open standards, right up until their
| browser became a monopoly. As for CloudFlare, let's not forget
| their interest in efforts like DNS-over-HTTP and encrypted SNI
| standards which are in many ways antithetical to
| decentralization (Firefox DoH resolver turns CF into a giant
| log of DNS traffic, economics of ESNI encourage centralized
| megaproviders to terminate TLS traffic in order to avoid
| revealing site being contacted).
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| How is ESNI any worse than non-encrypted SNI in that regard?
| If plain SNI was sufficient, then there's no incentive to do
| anything new, and no difference. If you need to hide, then at
| least with ESNI, you can operate at all, even if behind one
| of a few providers (net positive).
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| > coin crap in order to "decentralization-wash" their public
| image
|
| I'd guess it has nothing to do with that and way less dramatic.
|
| They are a company that benefits and profits from having a
| large network. It makes sense to try and be part of alternate
| networks.
|
| A lot of people, including myself, see their growth as also
| having made small businesses/sites/apps more competitive on an
| increasingly centralized web from way more evil players in the
| game.
|
| The Crypto noise aside, I also think a decentralized Internet
| is exciting. At the very least, I'm glad they are throwing
| money at and will see where this goes research helps things go.
| RNCTX wrote:
| I'd guess it's less dramatic than your hypothetical still:
|
| They need new faces and the most obvious source of them en
| masse is people who aren't welcome on other cloud platforms.
| That means cryptocurrency people, who have been effectively
| outcast from the rest of the internet's premium tier hosting
| providers, because when they were allowed on the rest of the
| internet's premium tier hosting providers they tried to steal
| shit while they were in there.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| What?
| beckman466 wrote:
| > They have to know that people know how fraudulent and awful
| the whole cryptocurrency space is, right?
|
| unfortunately not, as this was on the front page for a while
|
| _Cryptocurrency mining using integrated photonics (tue.nl)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28715881
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| The web is already decentralized (minus the DNS), the web isn't
| really distributed. But it's a bit funny for cloudfare to talk
| about decentralization when everybody with a website hides behind
| their proxy servers.
|
| Should the web be distributed? I'd like to see a good distributed
| search engine for instance. I know there are a few peer to peer
| ones already, although the content isn't high quality and there
| is a need for a way to deal with the high volume of spam.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > At Cloudflare, we are embracing this distributed future.
|
| Cloudflare is, like, one of the most centralized parts of the
| web. How many sites/apps route all of their traffic through
| Cloudflare? How many TLS terminations do they do? How many DNS
| zones do they control? How many crosswalks do I have to find over
| and over because of them?
|
| They seem to be going quite long on centralization.
| xtracto wrote:
| Exactly, this reminded me of that time Cloudflare went down,
| and half of the internet went down with it [1]. Their marketing
| department is lying through their teeth.
|
| [1] https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/cloudflare-outage-takes-
| down-...
| gitfan86 wrote:
| This is genius marketing.
|
| Decentralization is great, but what is even better is if you host
| all of your decentralized projects on one central platform.
| beckman466 wrote:
| it's decentralization if it runs on two separate hard drives in
| the same AWS data center, right? right!?
| Spivak wrote:
| You try and define decentralization in a way that accounts
| for multiple independent hosts of content coincidentally
| using the same cloud service.
|
| If some people host content on GCP and others Amazon is it
| suddenly decentralized?
| ignoramous wrote:
| Cloudflare provides a HTTPS gateway to IPFS. It isn't the sole
| host for any IPFS content.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I can't being express my disappointment that we have somehow
| attached the idea and possible success of a decentralized web to
| the creation of artificial scarcity in the one environment we
| have that has basically infinite abundance.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I'm disappointed to see Cloudflare chasing this hype train rather
| than focusing all of its resources on its own truly valuable
| innovations, particularly the Workers platform.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| The nature of innovation is that you have to try things that
| might not pan out. Maybe web3 fizzles and dies, maybe it
| doesn't. But a small investment by our research arm means we
| can get experience with new technologies that might be years
| away from coming to fruition.
|
| And I often tell people that my goal is that if you hear about
| an Internet technology and Google it you should find that
| Cloudflare has already written about it and/or implemented it.
| That way people can trust us as a valuable source of
| information and to be on top of a changing world.
|
| Imagine a large customer of Cloudflare who's heard about web3.
| Lo and behold we've written about it, have a product offering,
| etc. Maybe they read all that and say "Nope, don't want web3".
| Doesn't matter, they still trust us to be their partner in
| whatever's next.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Touche.
| fallat wrote:
| Ethereum is not just hype. You better start educating yourself.
| mikewhy wrote:
| True, it's also accelerating the destruction of the
| environment, helped people make money off other people's
| artwork, and introduced a new generation of people to pump
| and dump schemes over receipts.
| ahallock wrote:
| And fiat has also enabled those things, to a greater degree
| I would argue -- what's your point?
| yoavm wrote:
| Fiat also enabled these things, but I can also buy bread
| with it and pay my school, and I believe that's how most
| people interact with it. The point is that
| cryptocurrencies are mostly used for the OP wrote above.
| threecheese wrote:
| Technically Ethereum is moving to proof of stake; no more
| miners, no more massive (well, less egregious)
| environmental impact. I would say that BTC is the big
| problem here, which is one reason why I personally don't
| think it will have staying power long term.
|
| You have a point about proof of work in general though.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| Ethereum has been moving to PoS next semester every
| semester for the last years.
|
| Spoiler alert: it won't happen.
| floatboth wrote:
| And everyone who still wants to make money with mining it
| would just switch to Ethereum Classic or something.
| xur17 wrote:
| Mining is a fairly efficient market over longer time
| periods, so net energy + hardware costs will naturally be
| fairly close to the value of the mined coins.
|
| Which means everyone mining Ethereum can't switch to
| Ethereum classic, or it would no longer be profitable for
| anyone.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| Ah yes, the "few understand" defence.
| base698 wrote:
| Isn't that what cloudflare always does?
| nikolay wrote:
| My point as well - pumping craptos is sickening.
| threecheese wrote:
| Is this Cloudflare looking to become the trusted off-chain
| provider? With decentralization, there's no entrenched behemoths
| pulling revenue from the system by virtue of size, but someone
| sure can hang off to the side and solve all the problems of
| linking decentralized systems to the rest of the world, and
| becoming the gateway to and from web3.
|
| Heck, one possible outcome is blockchains become free databases
| for the entrenched providers, paid for with customer bandwidth
| and power.
|
| Honestly I think something like this is what will happen; we saw
| the original decentralized web1.0 as democratizing access to
| information, but in reality economies of scale have created
| Facebook and Google - the complete opposite. No reason to suspect
| this isn't just the way of things.
| [deleted]
| justshowpost wrote:
| I'd really like to see Cloudflare Pages offer an option to deploy
| to IPFS.
|
| Integrate that with Cloudflare registrar to setup DNS
| automatically such that it's proxied to the old Web through the
| Cloudflare IPFS gateway, and I can host my entire site on
| Cloudflare. The current one-click push to deploy integration is
| key, and I'd like to see that for IPFS as well.
|
| They could use the same edge servers as IPFS nodes, offering the
| same benefits of DDOS mitigation and such. Though as is the
| benefit of IPFS, they'd receive less traffic since other IPFS
| nodes might pin the content as well. It'd probably cost them
| less, since currently each page revision is hosted indefinitely
| at <rev>.<domain>.pages.dev which would be the same as keeping
| the old versions pinned on IPFS.
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| What most people don't seem to understand is the baked-in payment
| solution.
|
| Classical stack: User pays company via a third-party payment
| provider. Then the company pays their infrastructur provider via
| another payment provider.
|
| Web3 stack: User pays infrastructure provider via the
| infrastructure's own payment system. User pays company via
| infrastructure's own payment system.
|
| I worked with Stripe, PayPal, and whatnot. Some are simpler or
| harder to integrate, but none were really a joy to work with.
|
| Solidity and in turn the Ethereum platform makes this really
| nice, since the infrastructure costs are always paid implicitly,
| because every transaction costs money.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > because every transaction costs money.
|
| Based on my observations (ETH gas) every transaction costs a
| ton of money and in a lot of jurisdictions you have to track
| capital gains / losses based on fair market values whenever you
| participate in a transaction.
|
| I'm sure it's easy for Cloudflare and other big companies to
| play around with crypto protocols because they can send the
| complicated financial end of it to their accounting department.
| For normal people like me it's insanely difficult to deal with.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| "Imagine an Internet where you can hop into an app and have
| access to all of your favorite digital goods available for you to
| use regardless of where you purchased them."
|
| I have one of these.
|
| It's called my computer's local files.
|
| It runs locally and I can even access my files when the Internet
| is down.
|
| If all your stuff is DRM-locked on someone else's computer, it is
| not your stuff.
|
| If your stuff is on someone else's computer, it is also not your
| stuff.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Their thinking: but if your stuff is on your computer and not
| mine, how can I charge you?
| joewadcan wrote:
| there's a difference between "having" and "owning" something.
| You may have it on your local file (aka access) but ownership
| implies a super set of capabilities that they're talking about.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Do you really think someone else's "ownership" of a digital
| asset impacts my use of my local files?
|
| DRM only works if you run the code that implements DRM.
|
| My copy of the bits are not impacted by someone's claim of
| ownership nor can their ownership token stop me from
| accessing my copy of the bits.
|
| Artificial scarcity is artificial.
| joewadcan wrote:
| > Do you really think someone else's "ownership" of a
| digital asset impacts my use of my local files?
|
| No I don't think so at all, but that's only a sliver of
| what is being discussed.
|
| > My copy of the bits are not impacted by someone's claim
| of ownership nor can their ownership token stop me from
| accessing my copy of the bits.
|
| > My copy of the bits are not impacted by someone's claim
| of ownership nor can their ownership token stop me from
| accessing my copy of the bits.
|
| > DRM only works if you run the code that implements DRM.
|
| Agreed.
|
| -----
|
| Here's an example:
|
| You bought a digital item, say a sword used in video games.
| Yes you can keep that image file of the sword and do
| whatever you want with it. That's only a tiny piece of
| "owning" that item.
|
| Imagine you could take the sword and bring it into lots of
| video games. The properties of that sword having value in
| those games can only exist with digital scarcity.
|
| Now say you want to sell merch, t-shirts with your sword
| printed on them. You can own the copyright to your item, so
| it's legal and protected.
|
| Again, "ownership" means more than access.
|
| If you don't like this or care about it... that's fine. But
| it's unlocking a massive amount of capability that's never
| existed before. As a personal who likes tech because it's
| an enabler... it's exciting
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> Imagine you could take the sword and bring it into
| lots of video games. The properties of that sword having
| value in those games can only exist with digital
| scarcity.
|
| It's still artificial scarcity. Unlike real swords,
| forging bits into magic swords requires no real work and
| requires no raw materials. I can make hundreds of similar
| digital magic swords with little effort, so there is no
| real scarcity.
|
| >> Now say you want to sell merch, t-shirts with your
| sword printed on them. You can own the copyright to your
| item, so it's legal and protected.
|
| Are copying, distribution, and derivative works rights
| included as part of the purchased digital goods or would
| those still be held by the creator?
|
| "On the one hand, the transfer of an NFT associated with
| a work of art or other copyright-protected work would not
| itself involve the reproduction or distribution of a
| protected work, consistent with the first sale doctrine.
| But, if the new owner of the NFT accesses the underlying
| work, and this access involves the creation of a new copy
| of the work or distribution of it, then the transfer of
| the NFT may potentially fall outside the scope of the
| first sale doctrine and create potential copyright
| liability.
|
| Despite this doctrinal murkiness, many NFT sales
| agreements appear to skirt the first sale issue by
| explicitly providing that NFT buyers have the right to
| resell the NFT. Some sales agreements go further and
| provide that the artist is to receive a set percentage of
| resale royalties. If NFTs remain a fixture of the art
| market, courts may be forced to decide whether to fashion
| a digital first sale doctrine that is responsive to new
| technological developments, including the rise of NFTs."
| Source: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/what-
| copyright-lawyers-...
|
| It seems that the rights of NFT buyers with regard to
| copying, distribution, and derivative works is not
| legally settled yet.
| joewadcan wrote:
| > It's still artificial scarcity. Unlike real swords,
| forging bits into magic swords requires no real work and
| requires no raw materials. I can make hundreds of similar
| digital magic swords with little effort, so there is no
| real scarcity.
|
| Yes, it's intentional scarcity. Why is it assumed that's
| a bad thing? When we license our code, there's a choice
| to limit it's use or not (intentional scarcity). The same
| concept hasn't been available for millions of creative
| professions in the online world (unless you go through a
| expensive middleman to manage rights).
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> Yes, it's intentional scarcity. Why is it assumed
| that's a bad thing?
|
| Artificial scarcity is not necessarily bad, but it is not
| realistic on its own.
|
| The amount of piracy on the Internet shows that
| artificial scarity alone is insufficient.
|
| >> When we license our code, there's a choice to limit
| it's use or not
|
| Yes and the choice to impose artifical scarcity or not
| impacts how widely the code is used. Code released under
| unrestricted licenses is more widely used than
| artifically restricted code.
| joewadcan wrote:
| Yup agreed all around. How nice :)
| yoshyosh wrote:
| And that last statement is where all the magic is happening.
| Currently your statement is true, but in the future that's what
| changes.
|
| My money that is stored in some bank's DB is not on my local
| computer, but I sure hope it's mine. In some countries they
| aren't so lucky and it's exactly as you say, the money doesn't
| belong to them.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> Currently your statement is true, but in the future that's
| what changes.
|
| You can chose to let others do your computing for you, but
| don't be surprised when they want to charge you for it.
|
| >> My money that is stored in some bank's DB is not on my
| local computer, but I sure hope it's mine.
|
| I trust my bank to hold my money because there are legal
| protections in place to protect against bad behavior. I can
| sue them if they violate the laws that protect me.
|
| What can be done if someone steals your cryptocurrecy?
| vienarr wrote:
| > I trust my bank to hold my money because there are legal
| protections in place to protect against bad behavior. I can
| sue them if they violate the laws that protect me.
|
| I don't think it would be that easy in third-world country
| or dictatorial government or country in wars
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Agreed. Legal protections only work where rule of law
| works.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>What can be done if someone steals your cryptocurrecy?
|
| Not much, but at least you don't have to:
|
| * ask a bank's permission, or
|
| * divulge trade secrets, including private investment
| strategies, to a bank's employees, to meet the bank's AML
| "source of income" disclosure requirement
|
| To gain access to banking services. Truly owning your own
| assets, with no dependence on others, has its benefits.
| roughly wrote:
| > You can chose to let others do your computing for you,
| but don't be surprised when they want to charge you for it
|
| Computing for yourself isn't free either, you just paid the
| bulk of the costs up front.
|
| One of the areas of decentralized computing that's actually
| interesting to me - and I mean this in the idealized
| version, not whatever cloudflare's thing is - is the idea
| of being able to "burst" compute when I need additional
| power. The fixed cost of having a personal machine capable
| of anything I might want (note: _I_ might want - I'm an
| outlier, I know most people's needs are met by the most
| rudimentary toaster available) is remarkably high compared
| to the cost of my average compute needs - being able to
| "rent" the excess could be both cheaper and less wasteful
| on the mean.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> Computing for yourself isn't free either, you just
| paid the bulk of the costs up front.
|
| True, but I control the computers in question. The
| decentralized web is more a question of who controls what
| and what they can do. Cost does definitely come into
| play, but to a lesser extent.
|
| >> the idea of being able to "burst" compute when I need
| additional power. >> The fixed cost of having a personal
| machine capable of anything I might want is remarkably
| high compared to the cost of my average compute needs -
| being able to "rent" the excess could be both cheaper and
| less wasteful on the mean.
|
| Again, the larger part of the argument is control and
| decentralization. I completely agree that cloud computing
| is useful, especially when you have computing needs that
| change elastically and you are aware of the limitations
| of renting storage space or computing time on someone
| else's computers.
|
| My concern about Web3 computing is where my local
| computing capabilities are reduced and I would need to
| rely on hundreds of computers owned and controlled by
| other people to get capabilities that are not worth the
| opportunity cost to me.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > My money that is stored in some bank's DB is not on my
| local computer, but I sure hope it's mine.
|
| You have a contract with your bank which says that they owe
| you a certain amount of money based on your past
| interactions. That contractual claim against the bank is what
| you actually own. The number in their database is just a
| summary of those interactions. Just see what happens when the
| bank messes up and enters a larger number in their database
| than what the contract says they owe you: The DB is not
| authoritative; the contract is.
|
| Physical possession is not, of course, a requirement of
| ownership, though it certainly helps.
|
| There is also a difference between owning specific property,
| such as the contents of a safe deposit box, and an
| entitlement to be paid according to the terms of a contract.
| In a very real sense, until you make that demand for a
| withdrawal in accordance with the contract the actual _money_
| belongs to the bank, and as a depositor you are merely one of
| the bank 's creditors, just as you do in fact _own_ your home
| even while it 's serving a collateral for a mortgage and
| could be claimed by the bank if you fail to keep up with the
| payments.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Money is a really bad example, in that its utility/value is
| defined by consensus of people who are not you. If the market
| for $currency crashes, your money is not worth anything,
| regardless of where it is. If no one wants to do business
| with you, your money is worthless even if you hold it.
|
| The concept of "mine" is not well defined in money. Perhaps
| the proof of having a debt can be in your hands, but the debt
| itself (=money) is a contract between parties, and owned as
| much by you as the society.
|
| So I'm not really sure what point your example illustrates.
| beckman466 wrote:
| yep, the name of the game here is misdefining: intentionally
| distorting words, terms and definitions away from their
| original meaning
| sandofsky wrote:
| This is where Web3 comes in. The last two decades have proven
| that building a scalable system that decentralizes content is a
| challenge. While the technology to build such systems exists, no
| content platform achieves decentralization at scale.
| There is one notable exception: Bitcoin.
|
| I don't consider myself well versed in crypto, but there's a
| whole wikipedia page on its scalability problem:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem
| The transaction processing capacity maximum estimated using an
| average or median transaction size is between 3.3 and 7
| transactions per second.
|
| And that page doesn't touch on the energy consumption:
| According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF),
| Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year --
| 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to
| the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or
| Sweden.
|
| https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
|
| I'm guessing that these problems get brought up a lot, but as it
| relates to this article, I wouldn't build my argument on Bitcoin
| being a pillar of scaling. Perhaps virality, but I'd argue that
| has more to do with financial speculation than solving end-user
| problems.
| rglover wrote:
| Re: Bitcoin scaling it's worth looking at the Lightning
| Network. Much faster and significant throughput:
| https://lightning.network/
|
| This is what Twitter is in the process of implementing through
| Strike.
| RNCTX wrote:
| None of this addresses the ever-increasing and mostly-
| pointless power consumption aspects.
|
| And sorry if I don't trust the self-described "trust-less"
| money developers to get batching right on the first try. The
| only reason this isn't being exploited is because no one is
| using it.
| rglover wrote:
| Now do the petrodollar.
| floatboth wrote:
| It's an unprecedented global scale for a Ponzi scheme as
| measured in dollars, that's for sure.
| jzm2k wrote:
| While Bitcoin certainly has scalability issues, I think the
| point they are trying to make is that is there any other
| decentralized system that has been able to reach the scale of
| Bitcoin.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| > is there any other decentralized system that has been able
| to reach the scale of Bitcoin.
|
| You're litterally sending this message accross a
| decentralized system that outscaled bitcoin by many many
| orders of magnitudes in a fraction of the time.
|
| I don't think cryptobros and the rest of the world have the
| same definition of "decentralized" because clearly we don't
| understand each other
| acdha wrote:
| > I don't think cryptobros and the rest of the world have
| the same definition of "decentralized" because clearly we
| don't understand each other
|
| This is true of most of the common sales points: for
| example, you'll see people claim blockchains are censorship
| resistant or anonymous, beneficial to the global unbanked,
| etc. with little ability to explain how that's actually
| true in practice.
| rchaud wrote:
| What about torrents? Those have been around forever, and I
| just downloaded Gimp over one instead of using their server's
| bandwidth.
|
| Maybe they're talking purely about dollar value, but I'd say
| more useful information has been passed back and forth with
| torrents.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Imagine if the database of what.cd has been distributed as
| well.
|
| We'd definitely have the most comprehensive and accurate
| catalogue of the musical output of humanity ever created.
|
| Instead now we have Spotify and Apple Music. We've only
| scratched the surface of the good that torrent technology
| can do.
| magila wrote:
| Yes, bittorrent is a much better example of a scalable
| decentralized system. The problem with bittorrent is that
| no one has come up with a good way to monetize it. What
| makes bitcoin exceptional among decentralized systems is
| not its scalability, but rather its ability to make people
| rich.
| dicethrowaway1 wrote:
| >The problem with bittorrent is that no one has come up
| with a good way to monetize it.
|
| That decentralized software aligns much easier with
| commons than with markets is something that I would
| consider a feature, not a bug.
| erk__ wrote:
| Could you not see e-mail as decentralized as well?
| acdha wrote:
| Email and DNS have been doing more transactions per second
| since the 1980s. The Web started later and passed it by the
| mid-90s.
|
| All of those are truly decentralized with a wide range of
| implementations and operators, not to mention proven real-
| world robustness as opposed to Bitcoin's hard requirement on
| a massive amount of always-on hardware and network capacity.
| jzm2k wrote:
| It's not my argument really, I was trying to interpret what
| they meant with Bitcoin being the exception.
|
| You're right that there may be better examples but how much
| of the world's email and DNS content is served by
| Google/Microsoft, I wonder. People are also complaining in
| other threads that Cloudflare is actually making the
| internet more centralized.
| thibmeu wrote:
| *author's here.
|
| Agree with you 110 Terawatt Hours per year is likely too much,
| even though it's `less alarming than you might think` (quote
| from the last paragraph of HBR article). Core of the post was
| not much on the usage of Bitcoin rather than the trend towards
| decentralisation. Resource usage of proof-of-work based
| blockchain is definitely a discussion for a later post though.
|
| I also invite you to look at the source for this number
| (https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons), which is nuanced, and
| makes the distinction between electricity and energy
| consumption.
| sandofsky wrote:
| Bitcoin consumes more energy than Sweden. There is no nuance.
| If you'd like to address that, feel free engage here, but I'm
| not wasting my time on the mental gymnastics course you
| linked to.
| skybrian wrote:
| I was surprised there wasn't a "to be sure" paragraph where they
| talk about some of the current limitations of decentralization
| and cryptocurrency.
|
| (In particular, there is no mainstream way to keep an important
| private key safe enough to use as your primary identity.
| Cellphones break, and even Yubikeys are a niche.)
|
| There's also no real announcement to this blog post, or enough
| meat to it for "Web3" to catch on. What's the real purpose? Is it
| just about hiring?
| uniclaude wrote:
| META: The hate for pretty much anything blockchain-related in the
| comments is real. I clicked on this link expecting the usual load
| of criticism, and I wasn't disappointed.
|
| Now, to actually add to the discussion, it would be great to see
| clearer use cases that Cloudflare has to help publishers and
| users of web3, as the blog post describes what's behind the name
| but goes only very briefly on what Cloudflare actually wants to
| bring to the table. A very fast, yet privacy-focused or
| anonymous, and affordable decentralized CDN would be interesting.
| soco wrote:
| Just as real as the fascination... there are two sides to any
| idea, more often than not. To your point, indeed it's not very
| clear to me what does Cloudflare want to achieve in this area.
| steve76 wrote:
| In favor of centralization, two really big computers processing
| reliable data like solar panels switching on or satellite
| positions can garbage collect everything. The 4.5 petabytes of
| astronomy data from the event horizon global telescope array
| becomes two numbers for a memory address.
|
| Decentralization is not serverless or device to device
| communication. Peer discovery isn't decentralized. Browsers don't
| do it because of privacy and tracking. Users will need to go to
| an app store for your implementation. The big national
| infrastructure that makes the devices will do it better and won't
| drain the battery. So you really should get rid of the populism.
| It's more of a liability transfer. All risk is offloaded and
| assigned to the consumers now. Amazon never saw your credit card
| number.
| itsbits wrote:
| There are strong reasons why peer - peer network is not
| mainstream. Not a single internet giant using this in their
| infra.
|
| if Cloudfare is replacing CDN keyword with Web3, may be it's
| fine.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Blockchains are finite, the future of the web is fuzzy.
|
| Do we really need bulletproof consensus on Wikipedia edits? Let
| alone your blog...
|
| Idk what "Web3" will be, but the future of the internet is a
| tolerant(fuzzy) mesh network.
| dmantis wrote:
| People are so offensive to decentralized stuff in comments. Many
| do really think that the whole thing is about printing money
| (which is a fun process, lol), but I'd like to explain a bit from
| the other side of perspective.
|
| Today's web have an obvious problem - it is run by oligopolies.
|
| CF/AWS and Google don't like you (like with Parler case or recent
| youtube shields on discussing elections on several countries) and
| you have a problem.
|
| Torrent-like static distributions (IPFS) with distributed
| backends like Ethereum basically broke this oligopoly - even US
| gov wouldn't be able to shut down truly "web3" service, which is
| pretty cool, like in the old days when you could setup a server
| in third-world country. These days are different - there are
| state backed DDOS gangs in town with an INSANE amount of
| resources. You are banned from several CDNs, Google and AWS - and
| you are done if they want you to be shut down. For example, just
| a week ago Russian "elections" have happened, opposition sites
| were under complete ddos the whole time and Google+Apple just
| deleted opposition apps from the appstore after the small talk
| with gov guys, so there is no trust in big tech - they are not
| interested in anything but moneymaking.
|
| Yes, crypto has a lot of scammers and bastards but those bastards
| would setup ANY website for you for one another coin. Any
| torrent, any porn payment processing (hello Christian fanatics
| and blocked card payments on pornhub), any content distribution
| (hello Apple in China and blocked Hong Kong flags !). Maybe that
| market-based approach is better if those "scammers" broke
| censorship and white-suite Silicon Valley boys prefer to deploy
| censorship mechanisms because that will make them another
| investment round without a scandal. Maybe censorship-free global
| distributed backends for critical apps are more important than a
| few bucks stolen. Freedom comes with a price.
| angryasian wrote:
| wouldn't opensea.io be considered a closed platform. Didn't one
| of their employees get in trouble for buying and hyping up NFT's
| to profit. I find the whole Web3 really deplorable.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| This is much bigger than anyone realises. As a demo of the power
| of something like this, you'd have to look at the bootleg market
| for live sport and AceStream in particular[1]
|
| Streams at a quality I haven't seen from any broadcaster over the
| internet, comparable to 4K 60fps cable AND IT GETS BETTER, THE
| MORE PEOPLE THAT JOIN!
|
| A truly decentralised social network for content is the stuff of
| lore. There are so many things to be said about use cases that
| arise from infrastructure such as this, it's impossible to fathom
| the potential.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Stream
| rvz wrote:
| Is that a sell signal?
| punkspider wrote:
| Same thought crossed my mind.
| jancsika wrote:
| I would like to know more. :)
|
| In what way does this alert you that some fundamental thing is
| wrong with the company?
| rvz wrote:
| Sure. I already gave the buy signal years ago on Cloudflare
| [0] since they released their S-1 in 2019. Now I am >500% up
| since buying on IPO day and sold some today.
|
| Overall bullish, but you make money by taking profits. Buy
| the rumour, sell the news.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306
| pornel wrote:
| I'm so disappointed that our* company is peddling this bullshit
| :( I'm going to raise it internally.
|
| (yes, I'm an employee)
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| > our company
|
| Are you an employee? Or, speaking generally here to a company
| this community commonly roots for?
|
| I guess either way. What's your beef with them experimenting to
| try new and wild ideas?
|
| Edit:
|
| > (yes, I'm an employee)
|
| If true, wow. If not, troll...
|
| Publicly trashing another co-workers work/team is in poor
| taste, immature, and creates a hostile work environment -- if
| you agree or not with the tech or direction. I hope you get
| what's coming to you. Classic Dev God ego and suggest maybe
| disconnecting online a bit and apologizing to them. I can't
| imagine Cloudflare's hiring team likes to see this type of
| hostile banter allowed.
| floatboth wrote:
| > new and wild ideas
|
| Only "wild" as in "stupid". Ethereum has been around for
| ages, and it still has nothing to do with "decentralizing the
| web". Its advanced functionality is only used for building
| things like automated Ponzi schemes.
| nikolay wrote:
| I would leave a company who uses this BS to pump
| craptocurrencies - its either dishonest management or no
| control over the publishing on behalf of the company, and both
| are equally alarming!
| dgb23 wrote:
| Hey, I agree with you! Even though I think it's bad etiquette
| to write a comment like that, I was kind of relieved to read
| it.
|
| I have almost always been impressed with Cloudflare's blog
| posts (and documentation). Good and explicit marketing, clear
| language, interesting and smart products. Just really
| attractive stuff that demonstrates competency.
|
| This one feels like a mumbo-jumbo of cryptocurrency buzzwords
| that no one needs or even wants to hear. Just thinking about
| the term "Web3" pains me to the bones.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| > bad etiquette to write a comment like that
|
| I guess I don't understand the standard for etiquette.
|
| One of the first comments of an announcement by Cloudflare is
| by an employee of Cloudflare publicly calling it "peddling
| bullshit" with no additional context to what or why.
|
| It's not fair to the authors and the people who are working
| on this.
|
| Calling another researcher and team's work "bullshit" in a
| forum highly trafficked by the CEO and CFO and then saying
| you will raise it internally, is not "raising it internally"
| but "slandering it publicly" and flexing your high value /
| can't touch this employee muscles at everyone else. It's a
| giant middle finger to the company and teams from a jerk
| employee.
|
| Cloudflare is one of my favorite companies to follow, but I
| had no idea how toxic it was working there for some.
| Definitely enlightening.
| sneak wrote:
| I don't see anything being peddled in TFA. Your comment seems
| like ideological bias.
| rchaud wrote:
| I would suggest editing it to provide more detail on IPFS and
| existing methods of decentralization like torrents, which
| regular people can understand and use, and whose reputation is
| free of "get rich quick" snake oil.
| taytus wrote:
| Every time I see someone talking about web3, I roll my eyes so
| hard I can see my brain.
| [deleted]
| necovek wrote:
| Ok, while I fully respect Cloudflare's contribution to some
| aspects of privacy and open internet, there's a few things where
| they are actively working on centralising the web.
|
| Or what to take of:
|
| - captchas so things like recently discussed marginalia.nu can't
| easily index sites behind CF?
|
| - per-country restrictions for visiting their customer web sites
| (stopping legitimate users from visiting parts of the web
| depending on their current location, but also reducing the value
| of VPNs)?
|
| Basically, coming from Serbia, I've been stopped from visiting
| US-based web sites by CF increasingly commonly in the last few
| years: they make this all too easy for their misled customers
| (companies thinking that their US-based-businesses might not get
| significant business outside US).
|
| And sure, each individual company could block visitors based on
| GeoIP data itself, but if this was not a few clicks, they would
| probably not bother. A large player like Cloudflare thus provides
| a net negative for the decentralisation of the web.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Cloudflare's vision, especially about decentralization, smells a
| lot.
| Pils wrote:
| An abridged history of decentralized storage:
|
| * DHTs are "invented" at Berkeley/MIT. Online storage is too
| expensive for most end users, so the target market is helping
| large companies index data in their filesystems.
|
| * A bunch of content distribution protocols get built on top of
| the concept, the most popular being Bittorrent. Torrent protocols
| run into issues with the free rider problem, resulting in slow
| downloads. Meanwhile, storage on the web is becoming cheaper and
| cheaper.
|
| * To solve the free rider problem, IPFS was created. A brilliant
| incentive structure was created so that asset hosting no longer
| relied on the benevolence torrent seeders. Meanwhile, companies
| like Cloudflare, Mega, Google and Amazon make online storage
| essentially free.
|
| * Cloudflare starts hosting IPFS assets for free. Decentralized
| storage still exists, but is still slow in comparison and, in
| IPFS's case, is more expensive than free, so people only use IPFS
| addresses to download assets from large, centralized services.
|
| * IPFS is mostly used as a distributed network of hashed
| addresses that can be used to look up data in a large company's
| filesystem.
| saurik wrote:
| Cloudflare's Ethereum gateway is sadly super unstable :(. The
| biggest issue it has is that often requests will be returned back
| with errors saying that the node doesn't have any blocks synced,
| as they seem to keep bringing in new nodes that sync from scratch
| but they aren't excluded from their backend set until they are
| ready, and so you'll do requests and get back failures constantly
| (but there are also other "silly" issues such as some kind of
| JSON parsing front-end that is using a "falsey" check on the id
| field, which is causing it to disallow spec-valid values such as
| 0). FWIW, I'd love to be using them in production constantly for
| our product, but they just have never worked even for small
| periods of time really... I'd _love_ to have some good way to
| send feedback on these issues to Cloudflare and have them get
| fixed, so if anyone from Cloudflare reads this and would be
| excited about that, I 'm saurik@saurik.com?
| prdonahue wrote:
| Drop me a note and I'll connect you with the right PM: pat at
| cloudflare.com.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| https://solidproject.org/
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Solid is much more "Web 3.0" than "Web3" - it leverages
| decentralisation and HTTP rather than cryptocurrency nonsense.
|
| Although there is a bunch of overlap via DIDs and such.
| nikolay wrote:
| The hijacking of the successor to Web 2.0 by craptocurrency
| enthusiasts is sickening. No, I'm not interested in their
| perverted vision of the next web!
| rchaud wrote:
| The web as it's understood by most people is about sharing
| messages, images, games, audio and video. Wasting time, having
| fun.
|
| So why does all talk of Web3 always shoehorn in blockchain and
| smart contracts? Who cares about that besides crypto buyers, who
| are mostly conducting their business via clearweb exchanges
| anyway?
|
| The best part of Web 1.0 era was that you didn't have to pay to
| access information beyond what your ISP charged. Ethereum and its
| dApps are pay-to-play. I'd be interested to know how many of the
| cited 7000 dApps offer free information, and not just overpriced
| digital trinkets.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > beyond what your ISP charged
|
| This is misleading. Very little on the internet is actually
| free. Right now (and back then) there is tons of content that
| is either paywalled or supported by advertising.
|
| I think by-in-large most people consume less "usage" than what
| they pay for with subscriptions, etc., and generate much more
| revenue via advertising for the sites they visit than the cost
| of the bandwidth they are consuming. Imagine if instead of
| being bombarded with ads or subscription CTAs, you are simply
| charged $0.00001 for your visit to [insert cool blog here], or
| $0.0001 per second of video you watch on [awesome youtube
| equivalent here]. That is the dream.
| ladyattis wrote:
| I'll simply refuse to use such sites then. Just like I often
| turn off javascript because NYT or Wapo demand I login to see
| an article. No and no. If your site is online without
| authentication restrictions by default then whatever content
| you host outside of that authentication process is free in my
| opinion and you have no right to soft block me and others
| into giving you something for it.
| awsthro00945 wrote:
| >That is the dream.
|
| It is? That sounds horrible to me. I don't want to have to
| constantly think about the ticking price meter every time I
| open a video. It also screws over anyone without means, or
| the developing world. The paid-for-by-advertising model
| lowers the barrier to entry and allows anyone, even those
| without change to spare, to participate.
|
| I dislike ads, especially in their current state, but I
| dislike the "dream" you're describing even more.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| In this kind of web, it would also be quite possible for a
| single developer to run a site as big as Youtube without
| needing tons of up-front cost. Bandwidth is free from the
| perspective of the site developer, and doing some small
| finite amount of video conversion work for the network before
| your video starts playing could also be built into the smart
| contract. Not all problems scale well this way, but video
| conversion is embarrassingly parallel at the keyframe level
| AFAIK. Conversely, the site operator could just calculate the
| cost of running video conversions in AWS and spread this cost
| out to all users by increasing the page view fee slightly.
| acdha wrote:
| > In this kind of web, it would also be quite possible for
| a single developer to run a site as big as Youtube without
| needing tons of up-front cost. Bandwidth is free from the
| perspective of the site developer,
|
| How would that work? Blockchains are far too inefficient to
| host video files and nobody is hosting that much data for
| free so you still need to set up a paid hosting environment
| or learn why P2P video hosting has failed every time it's
| been tried in the past. You can charge people to host their
| video, at which point you'll learn that it's really hard to
| compete with ad-supported hosting because the number of
| people who say they want to pay up front for their stuff
| and actually do so is a rounding error of the number of
| users a major video site will have.
| phponpcp wrote:
| Check out IPFS, this is already happening in the NFT
| world. Have you noticed how all NFTs are high quality and
| not compressed to shit? That's because of the IPFS.
| threecheese wrote:
| IPFS is technically off-chain, though still
| decentralized.
| acdha wrote:
| I'm familiar and it doesn't change this in any way
| because IPFS is not a magic want which provides infinite
| storage and bandwidth at no cost. Those have real costs
| and someone needs to pay for them.
|
| Many NFTs reference third-party hosting services for this
| reason (that's the real service; the part on the
| blockchain is the expensive vanity link) and anyone using
| IPFS for real will need to pay for ongoing hosting if
| they want their content to remain available.
|
| Part of what dictates this will be abuse: if you provide
| free hosting to strangers on the internet, they will
| exhaust your capacity and some will try to host material
| which violates copyright or other laws. Over time, anyone
| not getting paid to deal with that will stop offering
| free hosting to random strangers on the internet.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| > how many of the cited 7000 dApps offer free information, and
| not just overpriced digital trinkets
|
| My guess is that number is zero.
|
| It would make no sense otherwise.
|
| No reasonable person would open a classic book store on Rodeo
| Drive. What's the difference?
| kvark wrote:
| Computers 40 years ago, as understood by most people, would be
| giant calculators. Who cares about sound, graphics,
| portability, aside from a few nerds? It turns out, people will
| care, once they discover the new ways.
| verdverm wrote:
| Those are small technical things and while blockchain has
| technology, it is more of a social change, which is harder
| and different.
|
| Blockchain is getting the heat social networks should have up
| front. There are sufficient bad actors that blockchain will
| be dangerous for most people's financial well being, like
| social networks are for most peoples mental well being.
| continuational wrote:
| That's a great argument - it works for any upcoming
| technology!
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| >So why does all talk of Web3 always shoehorn in blockchain and
| smart contracts? Who cares about that besides crypto buyers,
| who are mostly conducting their business via clearweb exchanges
| anyway?
|
| Nobody - those are exactly the people who push "Web3" (which
| has little to do with the web) as they're in desperate need of
| a Greater Fool in order to realise their "investment" in
| cryptocurrency-related assets.
| edoceo wrote:
| Right, one can do distributed/federated apps w/o blockchain
| (see email). It's too practical to be exciting
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| A blockchain doesn't necessarily have to be currency in the
| sense of something you use to buy and sell things. It's also a
| decentralized to store data that shouldn't change unless
| authorized by an owner (owner here = possessor of a private
| key). Namecoin is an example - a domain owner can update a name
| record whenever desired and as long as everyone is using the
| blockchain a centralized authority cannot prevent the owner
| from making changes, and a centralized authority cannot make
| changes the owner doesn't want without the owner's private key.
| cl0ne wrote:
| Revolution Populi is another interesting project that is
| working on a decentralized database with user controls and an
| SDK for creating social networks. According to them,
| preliminary testing of their blockchain showed support for
| +100k transactions per second:
| https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1414962828335894536
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Ah, the term "Web 3.0". I wrote a Ruby book with "Web 3.0" in
| the title, which to me is semantic web and linked data added to
| "Web 2" many years ago, and I was disappointed how quickly the
| book's content quickly seemed irrelevant, even to me the
| author.
|
| I wish the NFT and blockchain enthusiasts better luck with the
| term than I had.
| bko wrote:
| > I'd be interested to know how many of the cited 7000 dApps
| offer free information, and not just overpriced digital
| trinkets.
|
| Blockchain is open by default. So all information is free. You
| can see who owns the trinkets, and the entire history of the
| trinkets from inception. You can't claim you "own" that
| trinket, but the information is free
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