[HN Gopher] My First Impressions of Web3
___________________________________________________________________
My First Impressions of Web3
Author : natdempk
Score : 3106 points
Date : 2022-01-07 21:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (moxie.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (moxie.org)
| tompccs wrote:
| "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 ultimately be
| billions (!) more clients than servers."
|
| Finally someone articulates the problem with crypto. People don't
| want to run their own servers, and they sure as shit don't want
| to run their own banks. So in theory you have a decentralised
| trustless web or financial system, but in practice, everyone is
| trusting someone to run a node for them. Which is exactly how the
| web and finance work now.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Can you transparently see all the code and databases for the
| websites you use and all the bank code and transactions?
| astrange wrote:
| It doesn't matter, because banks can undo mistaken
| transactions.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| And they can hide so many other illicit and bogus
| transactions and investments in their favor.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| The average user (the same user that doesn't want to be
| bothered with running a server at home) doesn't care about
| this, I don't think. Most people would prefer to rely on a
| trusted authority or expert for this sort of thing.
|
| When talking about democratization, the average user is
| probably the only user that matters.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Yes but the fact that the user will do what's convenient
| does not mean it is better. The thing about Bitcoin (as an
| example) is that 99% of people using can't parse the source
| code, but they all know that if there was an issue in it
| the alarm would have been sounded by now by someone who
| could.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| tompccs wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'm not gonna claim it's different. It's not. Holding funds
| in a paper wallet means you have a piece of paper that's
| worth thousands, millions. It's a fact that there are
| inherent risks to holding that paper.
|
| At some point this becomes about principles. Even if you
| have banks, even if banks manage to provide a good service
| without screwing up the economy in the process, you always
| have the choice to simply opt out of it. You can withdraw
| all of your money if you want and still maintain the
| ability to transact with anyone in the world. Now banking
| is no longer something that's imposed on everyone, it's an
| individual choice. It's a lot like the right to bear arms.
|
| Your question about what happens to the money if you die is
| extremely relevant. My father asked me that exact question
| about cryptocurrencies. I came to the conclusion that if we
| own crypto then we must somehow make these arrangements
| ourselves because we can't depend on some government or
| bank to do it and certainly not some exchange that doesn't
| even answer emails. It should be possible for family to
| inherit a physical paperkey but I have to admit I know of
| no concrete examples of such a thing happening.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| First of all, nobody participating in a blockchain protocol is
| running their own bank, no more than you are running the
| country when you vote for president.
|
| Secondly, you are correct that in Web 2 people do not desire to
| run their own servers or analogously in crypto today they do
| not want to run nodes. But many people do want to mine - its a
| massive industry, but the issue stands, the nodes connecting
| people to the network and serving the data end up centralized;
| The _Infura Problem_ is a great example of this. Infura was
| started by Ethereum founders to run Ethereum nodes that the
| standard wallets (the biggest of which, _Metamask_ , made by
| the same organization) connect to by default.
|
| The issue is that the Ethereum network is deeply reliant on
| both _consensus_ and _data-distribution,_ but it only
| compensates infrastructure for consensus - the miners - and in
| the future, stakers. Bitcoin is not as deeply affected by this
| because of its low data throughput, but its worth noting that
| non-mining nodes, which are essential to non-miners having a
| say in the network, are volunteering. These nodes are also
| responsible for distributing transaction data when miners use a
| modified Bitcoin Core Client designed to try and gain
| advantages by selectively sharing.
|
| The miners on each network and those who run businesses around
| it don't want the networks to crumble, so they end up doing the
| work of nodes, but at the bare minimum. In Ethereum this means
| centralized node hosting services - that's a reality of the
| state of the network at this point. The solution is to start
| compensating both aspects of the network, because both are
| important. This not only re-decentralizes the nodes' motives
| and control, but it also means that distributing data more
| efficiently offers more rewards, so node operators are rewarded
| for scaling the network. The key concept here is that if the
| network does not compensate for its vital functions directly
| and proportionally to performance, then those functions will
| simply remain on life support.
| baby wrote:
| This is not a problem with crypto, because there are solutions
| to this, it's a problem with how people use it. The real danger
| is that people get too comfortable with this way of doing
| things and we never switch to more secure solutions.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| If you expect the crypto system to be participated only by
| high-effort members you're bound for dissapointment.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The same thing can be said of the web in general. The linked
| article even makes this point! If in the early web users all
| wanted to run their own servers the centralization of web 2.0
| would not have happened. Is there any reason to think that
| history won't repeat itself and users will choose to use web3
| technologies the "right" way?
| baby wrote:
| Without Chrome and their push to force https I doubt that
| the web would have become so encrypted. But then CDN
| services did start centralizing https as well (because
| users don't want to deal with certificates). Metamask and
| popular wallets, as well as layer 1 projects, have to
| decide to invest in these areas.
| preseinger wrote:
| If one person uses your tool incorrectly, it's a problem with
| that person.
|
| If nearly everyone uses your tool incorrectly, it's a problem
| with your tool.
| baby wrote:
| I'm not saying Metamask is a good tool, it's not that easy
| switching to a good tool today anyway, we will see what
| happens in the next years but I expect that this will be an
| active area of research and improvement.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| As the person said, it is not a problem with crypto because
| there are indeed solutions to the problem. The tool you are
| referring to are the set of crypto currencies, of which
| there are many, which do not compensate data handling.
| preseinger wrote:
| The point I'm trying (and failing) to make is that if a
| solution to a problem is reliably mis-used by its users,
| then it's not actually a solution in practical terms. The
| problems in this space are ultimately social, not
| technical. Success is measured by usage, not passing
| tests.
| lawn wrote:
| This is more a problem with Ethereum rather than with
| "standard" crypto.
|
| For mobiles you have "SPV wallets" that does communicate with
| many other nodes while verifying block headers and that the
| transactions you're interested in are included in the blocks.
|
| So an SPV wallet doesn't contain the whole blockchain, but to
| cheat it (and make you see invalid transactions), you need to
| generate a fake block, which is just as expensive as creating a
| real and valid block.
|
| And all that's needed is for you to find a single node you can
| communicate with
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| It's about freedom of choice. People are no longer forced to
| use big corporations to manage their finance, they can still
| choose to if they want.
| zaroth wrote:
| I love so much of what moxie is saying here. I also feel
| differently on some important points.
|
| I believe all the issues discussed here are real. Some are even
| mildly terrifying to the point of being hysterical.
|
| Interestingly, I think all these issues are solvable and it's
| made me immensely more interested in doing some research.
|
| I find it oddly inspiration so thanks for that as well! Really
| great read, just the kind of content I want to see!
| mrkramer wrote:
| >A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+
| years, email is still unencrypted
|
| Traffic between email clients and servers is encrypted so can be
| emails themselves; PGP can be used for encryption of emails and
| authentication between email senders. But another story is
| majority of people do not use PGP because of its bad UX.
| wepple wrote:
| >A protocol
|
| Running email protocols over TLS isn't an improvement to the
| protocol, it's tunneling. PGP isn't an improvement to the
| protocol, it's encapsulating data in another protocol/format.
|
| Your comment proves he point; email has evolved so slow we're
| running it through tunnels and embedding PGP encryption to
| overcome the weaknesses that the protocol has not been able to
| fix.
| [deleted]
| arendtio wrote:
| > We should accept the premise that people will not run their own
| servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without
| having to distribute infrastructure.
|
| My biggest issue with that concept is that cryptography isn't
| timeless. Most cryptography system just work, because they delay
| information retrieval to a point were its value has degraded.
| However, if I want to store information securely for the long
| term, I prefer having it protected by more than just encryption
| (e.g. locality).
|
| So even though I understand the argument, that most people don't
| want to run their own servers, I think the proposed alternative
| is even worse than the status quo :-/
| debt wrote:
| Just quickly from a technical perspective: web3 is like a useful
| wrapper around json-rpc which etherereum nodes use as a comms
| protocol.
|
| You can just use whatever off the shell cli thing that supports
| json-rpc and talk directly to the mainnet.
|
| Web3 is more of a concept that involves wrapping those
| complicated and cumbersome raw json-rpc calls(deploy a contract,
| compile a contract etc) into simple libraries. There's literally
| a bazillion web3 libraries in many different programming
| languages. It simplifies talking to the ethereum mainnet.
|
| I think they tackled it a little too high level in their post;
| missing the fact it's really just a costly distributed state
| store you interact with via json-rpc with a shitty wrapper
| everyone basically calls web3.
| endorphine wrote:
| Disclaimer: I don't have much knowledge around web3. I would
| probably consider my self a skeptic, if I had to.
|
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will.
|
| Just wanted to point out that the last part of this sentence is
| merely a prediction.
|
| > If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult
| to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for
| technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very
| quickly, and if you don't keep up you will fail.
|
| By that logic, has email failed? I wouldn't say so.
|
| > Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website
| for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project
| can't start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics,
| but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of
| centralization will likely drive it to end up there.
|
| I find it hard to imagine that NFTs will eventually not be backed
| by a blockchain, since this is what provides all the hype.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > What I found most interesting, though, is that after OpenSea
| removed my NFT, it also no longer appeared in any crypto wallet
| on my device. This is web3, though, how is that possible?
|
| Key takeaway here.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > For example, whether it's running on mobile or the web, a dApp
| like Autonomous Art or First Derivative needs to interact with
| the blockchain somehow - in order to modify or render state (the
| collectively produced work of art, the edit history for it, the
| NFT derivatives, etc). That's not really possible to do from the
| client, though, since the blockchain can't live on your mobile
| device (or in your desktop browser realistically). So the only
| alternative is to interact with the blockchain via a node that's
| running remotely on a server somewhere.
|
| > As it happens, companies have emerged that sell API access to
| an ethereum node they run as a service, along with providing
| analytics, enhanced APIs they've built on top of the default
| ethereum APIs, and access to historical transactions.
|
| > Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to
| interact with the blockchain. In fact, even when you connect a
| wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the
| blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to
| Infura!
|
| > Imagine if every time you interacted with a website in Chrome,
| your request first went to Google before being routed to the
| destination and back. That's the situation with ethereum today.
|
| This is a very common complaint about anything that claims to be
| decentralized. It was also surprising to me years ago when I
| first read about Bitcoin and realized that it's not practical to
| maintain the whole blockchain on most clients. However, how do
| ISPs fit into this analogy with "web 1"? Since we're assuming
| that the original world wide web _was_ worthy of being called
| "decentralized," doesn't this same criticism apply to ISPs? Even
| if you ran your own web server from your own facility, presumably
| the ISP was a third party that you had to (in some sense) trust.
| dthul wrote:
| The views on centralized services such as Infura really resonate
| with me. A few months ago I looked into how Ethereum and smart
| contracts work and got excited that there is basically this
| shared "virtual machine" with persistent, public state that can
| only be altered by interacting with those smart contracts.
|
| But soon after it became clear that it is not really possible for
| me (or any regular "client" as the article calls it) to look at
| the state of the virtual machine and evaluate view functions
| myself. The block chain is so large already that we need to rely
| on big servers which are operated by other people to do this.
| sva_ wrote:
| I think you can use _geth --syncmode snap_ to get a snapshot
| quickly with which you can interact with the Blockchain.
| ssss11 wrote:
| But there are other L1 blockchains already that aren't like
| that (eg. Mina) and who knows in future what will come..
| dthul wrote:
| Good to know! I don't know much about the blockchain space
| and have only looked more closely at Ethereum so far.
| ssss11 wrote:
| Yeah that's fair enough, and it's changing so fast. I
| imagine alot of the current problems will be fixed over
| time... it'll get there eventually. There are some good
| educational resources cropping up now e.g. Web3 University
| and rabbithole.gg
| bidder33 wrote:
| Running nodes is pretty easy with setups like DappNode. Full
| eth nodes arent that big, i synced a new one in a couple of
| days last week onto an old ssd.
|
| Most heavy contract data is stored offchain on ipfs, so you can
| just pin the stuff you are interested in.
|
| Where i would agree is indexing/searching lots of data is a
| pain. You cant just give an address and get a list of tokens
| associated with it, you have to call every token and get its
| balance. It makes sense, but its annoying, and is why opensea
| api is so popular for nfts. But i have hope with services like
| TheGraph growing that search and index also has distributed and
| resilient design and we become less dependant on one endpoint
| api.
| solarmist wrote:
| Doesn't matter how easy it is if no one wants to do it to
| begin with.
|
| I hate running servers even for my business. I want someone
| else to do that as the article pointed out.
| omeze wrote:
| You can do this locally though, it just takes like 200 GB. I've
| run an Ethereum full node + eth2 beacon chain node on my
| Macbook Pro for local development, took like 10 hours to sync
| IIRC and just worked afterwards. I still use Infura for
| projects though bc I don't really see the value in running my
| own hosted client for pet projects. If I was doing a production
| app I'd likely use my own w/ a 3rd party service for backup/HA.
| not2b wrote:
| That's the size now. If web3 manages to take off, the
| requirement will grow exponentially.
| everfree wrote:
| Ethereum has plans for state expiry, so that to maintain a
| verified copy of the blockchain you won't be expected to
| maintain a growing list of state transitions since genesis
| anymore.
|
| A sister initiative, weak statelessness, means that you
| will be able to verify the validity of the chain without
| needing to store state at all.
|
| https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/verkle_and_state_expir
| y...
|
| https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/state_expiry_eip
| baash05 wrote:
| But that's just it.. One would have to stand up a server that
| hosted the 200gb, so their Iphone users could consume the
| data. Or they'd go through a central server.
| msgilligan wrote:
| He's focused on Ethereum and NFTs, which is certainly the most
| popular/obvious place to research. I think his analysis is
| excellent and the article is worth reading.
|
| But he does say:
|
| > I have only dipped my toe in the waters of web3
|
| Notably he doesn't even mention IPFS (which uses the pre-image of
| an JPG to form the URL.) Nor does he mention Bitcoin (which
| provides a shared state layer as well as a currency and makes it
| much easier to run a full node than Ethereum, which by most
| measures makes the network more decentralized.)
|
| I prefer to use the term "Decentralized Web" or "Decentralized
| Internet" and I agree with Moxie that it will take a long time.
|
| I think Ethereum is fascinating and an amazing innovation and
| (who knows) maybe eventually the off-chain pieces of its
| ecosystem will become more decentralized.
|
| Keep building, folks!
|
| (Slightly edited to fix/improve punctuation)
| guelo wrote:
| Is IPFS really web3? IPFS is a slight upgrade to bitorrent, and
| p2p tech was popularized by Napster over 20 years ago. It's
| been a part of the internet longer than "web2"
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Indeed, it's the point of the article: Web 2.0 was _already_
| supposed to be this decentralized nirvana with blogs and peer
| to peer software like IPFS. And look what ended up dominating
| !
|
| Some day these new centralized "web3" services will just
| remove (or very severely restrict) their APIs, just like
| Twitter and Facebook did. (Hopefully the effect will not be
| as dramatic on the companies using them...)
| detaro wrote:
| > _Web 2.0 was already supposed to be this decentralized
| nirvana with blogs and peer to peer software like IPFS._
|
| That never was a core of how people defined Web 2.0.
| gaogao wrote:
| IPFS isn't even really an upgrade in many regards, at this
| current point in time. Auto-replication of data, tracking,
| some NAT stuff, DHT quality still have a bunch of gaps.
| Actually, browsing around with IPFS feels like being on dial
| up with a ton of the standard examples being super bandwidth
| limited.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| While I agree that he only touched on NFTs and not really
| anything beyond that, his core point, "decentralized
| architecture is slower to iterate on, therefore centralized
| tools will outpace decentralized ones, therefore the market
| will trend towards use of centralized services" is hard to
| disagree with. He is only using the NFT market as an example to
| demonstrate this point.
|
| Even if you don't consider it natural market forces, and you
| say "people are building their infrastructure on centralized
| services so as to place themselves in a rent seeking position",
| you now wind up having to explain how you intend to stop these
| "bad actors" from not doing the "right thing" and designing
| their infrastructure against their own interest. How do you
| align incentives to ensure a decentralized future in this way?
| Seems like a glaring hole in the entire plan that results in
| centralized services being in wider use, only bolting on top of
| a decentralized database that in the end doesn't really matter.
|
| I'm a big fan of cryptocurrency and these decentralized
| incentive networks. I'd love to see a future where everyone
| doesn't rely on these centralized services and the UX is low
| friction. I think it can be done. I like to know that I can use
| decentralized uncensorable money, and other asset types, and I
| like the fact that these options are available today, right
| now, to me and anyone else who values them. But the web3
| concept as it's sold by the cryptocurrency enthusiasts doesn't
| appear to be going that direction, and at this point I think
| moxie is probably right.
| msgilligan wrote:
| > "decentralized architecture is slower to iterate on,
| therefore centralized tools will outpace decentralized ones,
| therefore the market will trend towards use of centralized
| services"
|
| This is a good point and something I find very concerning.
| But remember, the Internet itself is a decentralized tool and
| it eventually triumphed over the centralized ones. Even with
| Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. we're still more decentralized
| than if everyone were still on CompuServe or AOL.
|
| > He is only using the NFT market as an example to
| demonstrate this point
|
| I don't think so, he pretty clearly issues a disclaimer about
| the limits of his knowledge. He's extrapolating (with an
| admittedly insightful proposition) from a limited amount of
| knowledge and is being honest about that.
|
| > How do you align incentives to ensure a decentralized
| future in this way?
|
| That's a very good question. Many smart people are working on
| answers to it. I like to think I'm one of them.
|
| > Seems like a glaring hole in the entire plan
|
| There is no plan -- and ultimately that's a good thing.
|
| > results in centralized services being in wider use
|
| Actually, I fear the result will more likely be failure for
| these centralized services that results in a backlash that
| delays the decentralized ones from emerging.
|
| > I'm a big fan of cryptocurrency and these decentralized
| incentive networks.
|
| Me, too. Obviously.
|
| > UX is low friction
|
| That is an incredibly important point.
|
| > web3 concept as it's sold by the cryptocurrency enthusiasts
| doesn't appear to be going that direction, and at this point
| I think moxie is probably right.
|
| *Some* cryptocurrency enthusiasts, but yeah it's a problem
| and unfortunately Moxie is _mostly_ right.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| This is the first enlightening article I have read about Web3.
| Maybe that says more about how little I have read than about how
| good the article is.
|
| Anyway, Moxie seems very focused on the decentralization aspect -
| that Web3 doesn't decentralize as much as we would like.
|
| An alternative aspect is the "global ledger of ownership and
| transferrence" though. Yes, interacting with blockchains is hard
| so it is some through APIs... but there does still seem to be
| something important about the idea that my ownership of something
| on a blockchain is permanent, and exists outside of any corporate
| notion of ownership, in a deep mathematical way. That's
| fundamentally appealing!
|
| But is it appealing enough to overcome market forces? I think
| Moxie is right to spend a lot of time on the "nobody wants to run
| servers" thing because it shows that most users are powerfully
| motivated by convenience; if the mathematically-beautiful
| blockchain ownership records remain inconvenient then they are
| likely to be a niche attraction (like running your own mail
| server).
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| > Please don't post generic, shallow, obvious, indignant, and/or
| dismissive comments--those are repetitive and predictable, we've
| had more than enough of them, they're tedious, not what this site
| is for, and we don't need more.
|
| So the only "curious" comments are those which accept the
| premises of the post. Oh okay, little could make me less
| interested in finding out whether there's actually something of
| value here than proscribing I give its contents merits before I
| even form my own opinion. I'll see myself out again.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Perhaps this sits better with you:
|
| > Please post unique, deep, interesting, humble, and/or
| inquisitive comments.
|
| Nothing about that disclaimer suggests you must accept the
| premises of the post, come on.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| It says that dismissing anything therein can't have any of
| those qualities. It presupposes accepting the topic or the
| discussion thereof.
| golf1052 wrote:
| This is a really interesting breakdown of web3 (or as he calls it
| later on web2x2). I haven't dove into the world of web3 yet but
| it does seem incredibly ironic that there's already seemingly a
| large amount of consolidation around platforms to make web3 more
| accessible to people. This is good for early adopters and artists
| who are generating wealth during the gold rush but I don't think
| it's good for "web3 the idea" as a distributed protocol.
| ssss11 wrote:
| It feels like there's alot of get rich quick types involved (is
| a gold rush as you say) but over time the decentralised
| principles will play out
| arcticbull wrote:
| I'll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is
| effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura,
| Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-
| nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked.
|
| [edit] By "full node" I meant "archival node."
| Animats wrote:
| Me either. I had no idea that accessing a link to NFT-described
| content went through OpenSea for content that isn't even hosted
| by OpenSea. That's apparently a MetaMask thing. Supposedly a
| MetaMask wallet can connect to any willing node, but in
| practice they use the Infuria->OpenSea server.
|
| Yes, you can run your own Etherium node and server, and connect
| a MetaMask wallet to it.[1] As Moxie points out, nobody wants
| to do that.
|
| Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the hash of
| the data. You can't even prove you even have access rights to
| the data if the hosting service goes down. All you own is a
| link to a URL.
|
| There are more Ethereum full nodes than two, but how many will
| accept web queries? That's a service.
|
| [1] https://media.consensys.net/how-to-install-and-
| synchronize-y...
| miracle2k wrote:
| > Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the
| hash of the data.
|
| It very often does, and it is certainly the case for most
| high-value NFTs. It is indeed not the case if you create your
| NFT on OpenSea and do not take the additional step of
| freezing the metadata.
|
| Also, there are many artworks that change, so a hash to a
| single file is not necessarily the right solution.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| So if I own an NFT and make sure to store the hash, does
| that mean I also own all collisions?
| phire wrote:
| You don't even own the hash. You just own a database
| entry pointing at the hash.
|
| There is no mechanism on the Blockchain preventing
| someone else creating a new NFT with the exact same hash.
| mac-chaffee wrote:
| I'd argue you don't even own the database entry. You own
| _a private key for a wallet that appears in_ the database
| entry for the hash of the image.
|
| But to truly _own_ something, all the cryptographic
| guarantees in the world won't change the fact that true
| ownership can only be enforced through violence. And if
| your private key can be stolen by hackers in countries
| without extradition treaties, one could argue that
| anything digital is only "owned" in the absolute weakest
| sense of the word: no one has tried disputing it yet.
| solarmist wrote:
| What about the same url? Or one with query parameter
| adds?
|
| What's to prevent another NFT from pointing to the same
| data and copying the hash?
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| I don't think any sha256 collision has ever been found.
| That seems kind of the smallest problem.
| majormajor wrote:
| So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local copy of
| the actual data? Since the blockchain only has the hash?
| And if whatever server you originally got the data from the
| NFT for went down, you'd lose it if you didn't make a
| backup?
|
| In those cases does the blockchain still have the URL as
| well? And you might end up with a collection of bits that
| matched the hash in the blockchain but was no longer at the
| original URL? What's the next step then?
|
| (The "artwork may change" bit seems like it becomes even
| more weird and potentially nightmarish edge-
| case/potentially-losing-your-purchase-wise.)
| pshc wrote:
| > So if you purchase an NFT, you need to make a local
| copy of the actual data?
|
| If you purchase one that's worth say >4 figures then,
| yes, yes you should! Also at that point, you're either
| part of the 1% or at the very least owe some due
| diligence to your investments.
|
| In reality, the internet is a big copy machine and you're
| probably safe. But you should still back it up.
| hooande wrote:
| the data has no value. anyone can right click copy an
| image. the value is that you own the blockchain address
| that points to a url. picture of a house = no value. deed
| to the house = value. even if the house is destroyed
| (data changed), the deed still has some kind of value
| [deleted]
| imnotlost wrote:
| The land is still there - that's the value. With an NFT,
| the image is gone and what's left? Some bits on the
| blockchain.
| yed wrote:
| A deed is to land, the land still exists if the house is
| gone. Your example is more like owning a title to a car
| that's been shot into the sun. It has 0 value.
| [deleted]
| majormajor wrote:
| A URL pointing to nothing with no way to view the art
| that supposedly lives there anymore? I don't think that
| "deed" is gonna be worth much for long.
|
| Sounds like it has the same value as saying "I used to
| own this one famous painting before it burned down in a
| fire."
|
| A hash corresponding to the bits in your file? Sure, that
| works, you can say "yep, this is the image, I own it." A
| URL plus a hash + the bits. Sure, that makes sense, even
| if the URL goes away, you can prove that those particular
| bits belong to you. A URL that's now dead and nothing
| else? Nah.
| hooande wrote:
| You're not getting it. This is a game where the point is
| to collect deeds to houses, not the houses themselves.
| What's valuable to NFT enthusiasts is owning the deed to
| a famous home, even if the home is destroyed. Like saying
| you have the deed to Lincoln's first cabin
|
| You can say that this is a stupid game and people
| shouldn't be playing it. I didn't make it up and I don't
| take part in it. I'm just trying to tell you what they're
| doing
| acdha wrote:
| This is leaving out the real reason: they hold lots of
| Ethereum and were concerned that not enough people wanted
| to buy their tokens. So many NFTs have been made under
| suspicious circumstances that I wouldn't take the stated
| goals at face value.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| Many NFTs are hosted on IPFS. If someone hosting it pulls
| the image, you can just start hosting it yourself
| instead, and since IPFS urls are based on the hash, it
| will never be "lost" so long as at least 1 person still
| has the content pointed to by the NFT.
| Animats wrote:
| IPFS isn't magic. Someone has to store it.
|
| IPFS is basically Bittorrent plus a financing system.
| Arweave charges US$5/gigabyte for permanent storage on
| IPFS. This is supposed to be forever, funded by investing
| the money and speculating in the declining future price
| of storage.
|
| You can supposedly put academic papers on Arweave's
| version of IPFS.[1] But if you try "Browse", nothing
| appears. This acts like another one of those distributed
| systems that isn't.
|
| [1] https://ss6puabcq3ch.arweave.net/5Yeg3wT4COQL6Bz-
| tdp9xlmeiwg...
| magicjosh wrote:
| I haven't heard of Arweave before, but yes, the [1] link
| above doesn't show any results either in the "Browse" or
| "Search" mode. The premise sounds interesting though. Is
| this a bug of some sort or does someone with more info
| know what's up?
| Animats wrote:
| Dunno. Their Twitter feed has nothing about downtime.[1]
| It's all about another funding round and their token
| being listed on some crypto exchange.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/ArweaveTeam
| magicjosh wrote:
| Strange! An aside, their press release introduced me to
| the handy term "permaweb". I wonder when the Internet
| Archive will move to IPFS.
|
| https://arweave.medium.com/arweave-announces-new-funding-
| fro...
| ShamelessC wrote:
| `IPFS is basically Bittorrent plus a financing system.`
|
| That doesn't match my definition of IPFS at all which is
| simply "P2P immutable content hosting". How is it a
| "financing system"?
| tough wrote:
| > There are more Ethereum full nodes than two, but how many
| will accept web queries? That's a service.
|
| https://thegraph.com/en/
| jflatow wrote:
| You need to know what NFT you have, it's all about the
| contract.
|
| e.g. the EtherFreakers contract is immutable and contains a
| git commit hash (line 83: https://etherscan.io/address/0x3a27
| 5655586a049fe860be867d10c...), so you can prove you have the
| code which generates your freaker.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| I'm curious what would happen if somebody uploaded illegal data
| (e.g. child porn, sensitive PII, or government secrets) to an
| Ethereum contract. Would these nodes be legally required to
| filter it? If you look at something like the Pirate Bay, it's
| not simply enough that you are an allegedly content-unaware
| service -- once you become aware of your service being used for
| or distributing something illegal, you are required to mitigate
| it. At the end of the day, these are businesses which operate
| within a jurisdiction and must act in self-preservation.
|
| But at the point where they start filtering
| transactions/addresses, there's going to be big questions about
| what is the true view of the blockchain.
| als0 wrote:
| FYI it's already happening
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47130268
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| IIRC this happened years ago on the bitcoin blockchain. I
| guess that nobody seems to care about that data being shared
| across every full wallet because bitcoin's primary use case
| is too remote from data sharing ?
| Scott_Sanderson wrote:
| You're not wrong, but it can be a fantastic experience if you
| do have your own self-hosted node. I run the geth node on a
| linux server and can connect to it to send blockchain
| transactions or retrieve information from the chain. Example:
| my tax prep software took my wallet addresses and found all my
| uniswap trades by querying the local node.
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| tshaddox wrote:
| In what sense is it "gate-kept"? Isn't the complaint that _in
| practice_ most people probably use those two services? As far
| as I know those two services don 't do anything to try to force
| you to use them, and people just use them out of convenience
| because "People don't want to run their own servers, and never
| will."
|
| The potential for single points of failure (or even intentional
| abuse) does exist because of this de facto dominance of two
| service providers, but as far as I can tell there's nothing
| stopping anyone from running their own node and connecting
| their various cryptocurrency wallets to them other than the
| money and inconvenience of running your own server.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > As far as I know those two services don't do anything to
| try to force you to use them, and people just use them out of
| convenience because "People don't want to run their own
| servers, and never will."
|
| Indeed, but one could make the same claim re any Web 2
| juggernauts like Google and Facebook. You don't _need_ to use
| them, sure. You can start your own social network. It 's just
| expensive and inconvenient. This is what causes
| centralization and gatekeeping in the first place. It becomes
| self-reenforcing.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Except that you _do_ need to use Google and Facebook if you
| want to interact with their data. They literally gate-keep
| the access to their data. It 's not just inconvenient to
| host your own server that discovers peers and syncs the
| entire log of all historical events on the Facebook social
| network and allows you to write new events to that log
| which those peers will recognize. That's impossible (or at
| least, it would require some significant and very illegal
| hacking effort).
| motoxpro wrote:
| Totally, but as the article points out, you only have the
| URL. You can't store more than a few bytes on chain so
| the link can point to a Facebook URL, OpenSea URL, etc
| which you don't own. So unless you are going to store
| small messages, what's different?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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 isn't
| the appropriate solution for social media; use a proper
| federated protocol like ActivityPub or XMPP.)
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| There was a discussion recently about gmail and hotmail
| misbehaving in silently dropping mails sent from small
| mail servers.
|
| As you can imagine it's kind of hard to push back against
| these bad actors by threatening them to do the same thing
| to them, due to their sheer size.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| The point is if you buy a stylized poop icon but the pseudo-
| gatekeeper company deems they want to shut off that part of
| the blockchain what are you going to do? Are you going to
| download and maintain 20 PiB of data on a server to keep your
| unique one-of-kind poop icon? The same could happen in the
| future to actually valuable things like a contract/NFT
| between you and another party.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| The concern is that since these companies are iterating
| faster than the protocol and providing their own API services
| that apps/products built on these platforms will not in fact
| be portable, and in practice will suffer from the same lock-
| in and network effects as web2.
| hrhrhrhrhr wrote:
| wyck wrote:
| It's not gate-kept by two centralized entities at all, there
| are a lot of alternatives many completely decentralized. This
| author is clearly new to the space and hasn't really done much
| research, outside 5 minutes of google.
| onychomys wrote:
| Sure, but if everybody just uses the two big guys, does it
| matter that the little guys exist?
| wyck wrote:
| But everyone doesn't, that's just his impression and not
| researched whatsoever.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| All these arguments apply to email as well - there _are_
| plenty of small providers and you _can_ run your own
| email server. But, in practice, almost everybody uses
| gmail or outlook so we still say it 's heavily
| centralized.
|
| What good is running your own full Ethereum node if
| OpenSea blocks the NFT you're trying to sell and most of
| the customers who would want to buy it are going through
| OpenSea's node?
| [deleted]
| everfree wrote:
| Full nodes contain the same data as archival nodes do, they
| just don't have it unpacked out to disk.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29846272
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Analysis of blockchain transactions is also consolidating
| around middlemen too! If you're trying to read data off of the
| blockchain for professional analysis purposes, you'll find a
| lot of working analysts are using sites like Dune.xyz, which
| stick a SQL interface in front of data slurped from the
| blockchain and charge a pretty penny to access it.
|
| (Wouldn't be surprised if they're slurping from middlemen
| services themselves)
| zomglings wrote:
| We have built an open source tool that you can connect to any
| node (on an Ethereum-based blockchain) and instantly start
| building datasets about contracts that you care about. All
| you need is their ABI.
|
| https://github.com/bugout-dev/moonworm
|
| We are committed to keeping this code free. Our policy is
| only to charge for our operational expertise, but all the
| code that we use is open source. We are in the process of
| opening our platform up for decentralization (so anyone can
| contribute node time, storage, etc.).
|
| Intellectual property is theft.
| baby wrote:
| It's not gate-kept, it's just that it's not easy to run your
| own node and synchronize to the chain (especially if you're on
| mobile) so people don't do it and instead decide to trust
| public nodes.
|
| It's the early days, remember how long the internet worked with
| http:// ? It's only in 2009 I believe that Facebook switched to
| https://
|
| Check my other comment to see that the future doesn't look that
| bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29847881
| soffer wrote:
| Check out Pocket Network, it's a web3 network protocol that
| incentivizes node operators to run ethereum nodes (and other
| blockchains). Effectively decentralizes Infura / Alchemy
| https://www.pokt.network/
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Its a bit of a well kept secret. It does not represent
| maliciousness on the part of Ethereum or centralized node
| providers - its a consequence of the network doing nothing to
| compensate for nodes to deliver data to-and-fro. Miners and
| businesses stand to lose if the whole network crumbles, so the
| bare minimum is done to supply nodes, which means centralized
| node hosting.
|
| A fully scalable, sustainable and decentralized network
| compensates all infrastructure important to the network, which
| means mining (consensus) and transaction/data routing. A nice
| side effect of rewarding data transmission is that you
| incentivize speed, so scalability can happen naturally with no
| conflicts of interest between miners and users.
| go_to_moon wrote:
| only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes
|
| source?
| arcticbull wrote:
| I should have said archival nodes, the ones that keep state
| back to the genesis block. I don't know if that number is
| even tracked anywhere. I've read estimates ranging from 2 to
| 5. I'm trying to find where I read that, happy to be wrong -
| or right, if anyone has data.
|
| [edit] Here. [1] And here. [2] After
| examining every which way we could think of to add the Trie
| state to our Ethereum state, we asked Vitalik for assistance.
| His first comment to us was "oh you're one of the few running
| one of those big, scary nodes." We asked him if he knew of
| anyone else running a "big, scary node" to see if we could
| possibly sync with them. He knew of no one, not even the
| Ethereum Foundation keeps a full archival copy of the
| Ethereum chain. [2].
|
| [1] https://librehash.org/ethereum-archival-node-review/
|
| [2] https://blog.blockcypher.com/ethereum-woes-d9b2af62da67
| everfree wrote:
| Archival nodes also keep state back to the genesis block,
| it's just stored in delta format so you could say that it's
| not "unpacked" out to the disk. It's a common misconception
| that "full nodes" don't have all this data.
|
| > Every now and then someone will argue on CT that Ethereum
| full nodes are not complete nodes because archive nodes
| exist. I decided to run a little experiment to disprove a
| few things
|
| > The goal was to convert a full node into an archive node,
| demonstrating that Ethereum full nodes contain all the
| necessary blockchain data.
|
| > 28 days later, I can confirm that it worked. I started
| with a 150 GB full node and expanded it to an archive node
| weighting 2.3 TB, without external network connectivity.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/marcandu/status/1116807660882530305
| [2] https://medium.com/@marcandrdumas/are-ethereum-full-
| nodes-re...
| phire wrote:
| The fact that all the data is there is kind of irrelevant
| if you can't query it.
| everfree wrote:
| Why would you want to query it, though?
|
| A full node lets you fully verify the chain's historical
| states and it lets you interact with the current state.
| Unless you're running a service that exists solely to
| allow people to query historical states (like a block
| explorer service), I don't see why it would be useful to
| be able to query historical state.
| phire wrote:
| You need an archival node to see a list of all
| transaction that transfer eth into an address.
|
| A full node can only give you the current balance, and a
| list of all transactions that directly transfer eth to
| that address. Any transaction that transfers eth as the
| side effect of a smart contract is invisible.
|
| I personally see it as a flaw in the design of eth. You
| shouldn't need the complete history of states just to
| find all relevant transactions, but you do.
|
| Besides, the argument that regular users shouldn't need
| to query such information it doesn't change the fact that
| the information is unqueriable in a full node, short of
| spending 28 days transforming it into an archival node.
| everfree wrote:
| I'll give you that. If you need to query a list of all
| contract transactions that have ever transferred ETH to
| your address, I believe you would need an archive node to
| do so although don't quote me on that.
|
| > Besides, the argument that regular users shouldn't need
| to query such information it doesn't change the fact that
| the information is unqueriable in a full node, short of
| spending 28 days transforming it into an archival node.
|
| If you don't need to query the data, then the data
| doesn't have to be unpacked and indexed for querying.
| Seems simple to me.
| phire wrote:
| It's kind of misleading to claim the archival is packed.
| It's not compressed into some archival format. Instead,
| the full node contains all the inputs to regenerate the
| data.
|
| To transform into an archival node, a full node has to
| rewind to the very first block, and replay every single
| transaction.
|
| Since the EVM is Turing complete, this is roughly
| equilvent to stimulating a computer with years of
| recorded keyboard and mouse inputs, taking care to record
| how each input effects state of the computer.
|
| You can't jump to the middle, you have to replay the
| whole thing.
| everfree wrote:
| I don't think it's misleading to call Git history
| "packed", and the mechanism for regenerating historical
| states is similar to Ethereum's (though of course Git's
| delta function is changeset-only with no turing-
| completeness). In fact, Git calls its own delta-storage
| "Git packfiles".
|
| The EVM is a very simple and rudimentary virtual
| computer, so replaying the whole thing isn't an
| impossible task. According to the tweet, it took this
| guy's computer 28 days to replay 4 years of history.
| phire wrote:
| Git also adds snapshots to the mix, which makes it
| possible to rapidly jump to fixed points in history and
| only use deltas for the fine grained seek. Git also has
| indexes to find stuff.
|
| Git justifies the viability of it's "packing scheme" by
| actually making everyday use of it.
|
| A full eth node has no snapshots or useful indexes into
| the archival data. It has to apply the deltas linearly
| from the beginning. Applying the deltas is very slow,
| very IO bound, seeking all over the disk.
|
| The data might be there, but it's practically useless. A
| user who discovers they need some archival data is never
| going to consider waiting weeks for the nearly 7 years of
| history to be replayed before running their query.
| Instead they will head over to etherscan and trust
| whatever it says.
| everfree wrote:
| Those all sound like local database features that one
| could add to an Ethereum client if they found them useful
| enough to bother, they aren't protocol-level concerns or
| "flaws in the design of eth" as you put it earlier.
|
| > The data might be there, but it's practically useless.
|
| The availability of the packed data is useful, just not
| to the end user of the node. Having this data widely
| available on the network means that anyone can spin up an
| archive node by peering with other full nodes, they don't
| need to discover and peer with the very limited number of
| other archive nodes, and the network doesn't need to
| worry about losing that data permanently if all archive
| nodes go offline.
|
| > A user who discovers they need some archival data is
| never going to consider waiting weeks for the nearly 7
| years of history to be replayed before running their
| query. Instead they will head over to etherscan and trust
| whatever it says.
|
| Call me unprincipled but I don't think it's an issue that
| if a user needs data above and beyond what's needed to
| fully verify the chain and read and write to it, they're
| expected to either spin up a more resource-intensive node
| or retrieve the data from a specialized history service.
| Statelessness is on the roadmap, so in the long-term the
| historical data that Etherscan and similar services serve
| up to you will come with a validity proof anyways.
| phire wrote:
| I'm fine with you dropping the principles of
| decentralization and accepting that the current situation
| is ok.
|
| You can construct many great arguments that the increased
| centralization is a good thing, or that the upsides are
| better than the downsides.
|
| What I take issue with is attempts to classify ethereum
| "Full Nodes" as more than what they are. Yes, they
| technically contain all the information requires to
| reconstruct an archival node (at least until
| statelessness becomes a thing).
|
| They are simply not anywhere near the same thing, and
| attempts to brand them as the more or less same thing
| just comes across as denial.
| everfree wrote:
| > They are simply not anywhere near the same thing, and
| attempts to brand them as the more or less same thing
| just comes across as denial.
|
| They are the same thing specifically when it comes to:
|
| * Downloading, verifying, and storing every transaction
| that has ever happened on the network
|
| * Maintaining a tamper-proof, data-complete copy of the
| blockchain
|
| * Interacting with the blockchain in a maximally
| verified, maximally secure way
|
| I never said that they were exactly the same thing or
| that they should be branded as the same thing, I said
| that they store the same data (by which I mean from an
| information-theoretic standpoint), which is true.
|
| > What I take issue with is attempts to classify ethereum
| "Full Nodes" as more than what they are.
|
| I take issue with the attempts to classify them as _less_
| than what they are.
|
| What needs to be squashed is the common idea in the OP
| that "full nodes are not actually full" because there's a
| "fuller" "archive" node that has the states indexed on-
| disk. The difference between a full node and an archive
| node is perfomant historical queryability, not security
| or data-completeness.
|
| OP says that "access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept
| by two centralized entities", which is untrue because you
| don't need an archive node to access Ethereum, only a
| full node. OP's idea that an archive node is the only
| "true Ethereum full-node" is common baloney that pops up
| often in the cryptocurrency community.
| jwlake wrote:
| I've run quite a bit of analytics on ethereum and have
| downloaded the entire chain multiple times for processing
| and it's freely available from multiple providers. All the
| major API providers (infura, etherscan, etc) have the all
| the raw blocks available readily.
| dylkil wrote:
| everyone running erigon nodes (like myself) are running
| full archival nodes, currently there are ~300,
| https://www.ethernodes.org/.
|
| Many geth nodes are archival, but we cant see which ones
| are.
| jlokier wrote:
| Some Erigon nodes run with pruning enabled. You can't
| tell which ones those are, or how much pruning.
|
| Technically you _can_ tell which Geth nodes are archive
| nodes with a GetNodeData query over devp2p, although that
| call is deprecated and will eventually be removed. Its
| replacement, GetTrieNodes, cannot be used for this.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| Erigon nodes are full archival by default, and dont use
| much space, about 1.7TB, which is quite thrifty consider
| geth uses like 10TB.
|
| So, many people run full archive nodes now. Thanks erigon
| team!
| IanCal wrote:
| This is highly unlikely to be true. I've got the full thing
| working with erigon, the idea it's 5 at most is hilarious.
| exdsq wrote:
| There's no real reason for this to be honest. The Web3 projects
| I've worked on tends to fall for centralized services like
| Infura because of development needs at first and then it's just
| easier to use it for production. I've made a decent living for
| the last two years setting up test infrastructure for Web3
| projects due to its complex nature. This is true across all
| blockchains, not just Ethereum. It's an area ripe for new DX
| products.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| New products? Would those be more centralized platforms, or
| is it feasible for me to connect to the blockchain, verify
| stuff, and so on if I am running my own server?
|
| It still seems that _my_ users on phones and browsers would
| need to trust _me_ in that case, right?
| exdsq wrote:
| Oh it's totally doable to run your own node on your own
| server! 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.
|
| So one example I'd give - every team I've worked on has had
| to build a local development environment with several nodes
| to easily spin up with a clean slate for deterministic
| testing. Teams get sucked into tools like Infura to set
| these up and then it's so easy to do the same for
| deployment they do just that. I think there's tons of room
| for Blockchain-as-a-Service tools to improve development
| and testing processes without forcing centralization on
| main net deployments.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > I think there's tons of room for Blockchain-as-a-
| Service tools to improve development and testing
| processes without forcing centralization on main net
| deployments.
|
| The big Blockchain-as-a-Services shut down - both IBM and
| Azure are gone.
| exdsq wrote:
| I don't mean these sorts of simple host-a-node services
| but something where you can run custom chains for your
| dev and testing. For example, this week I had to build a
| separate Polkadot chain for a client that had reduced
| governance term durations so they only took 5 minutes
| instead of 120 day and with a smaller council size so
| tests are easier to manage. This needs to run in CI so
| has to be in a position to spin up and tear down on
| command and the genesis block has to fund the appropriate
| accounts for testing. This could be pretty easily
| abstracted to a Web App for people to build this without
| needing to know how the underlying nodes operate, what to
| change, etc...
| password1 wrote:
| > Blockchain-as-a-Service tools
|
| You mean something like AWS, but that allows me to
| quickly setup an server containing a node?
| exdsq wrote:
| Yes, but with a few other things! Setting up ad-hoc
| chains with custom genesis files would be a huge
| improvement for dev teams as they'd not have to make
| their own solution (which _everyone_ I 've worked with
| has ended up doing).
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Okay. Why doesn't everyone do that, then? Why use Infura?
|
| As is hopefully obvious, I am totally naive here; my
| questions are genuine. Thanks!
| exdsq wrote:
| Mostly the cost of hiring a DevOps engineer to set it up
| and maintain it and taking on the additional risk of
| having to deal with upgrading the node etc... It's just
| cheaper and easier to go centralized at the moment.
| jboy55 wrote:
| Though things are never cheaper to maintain than at the
| beginning of a tech bloom. Its only going to get more
| expensive to create and maintain as the node and the APIs
| get more complex.
| exdsq wrote:
| Sure but these aren't crazy complicated beasts - a binary
| installation and some unix experience gets you 90% of the
| way there! I don't think they'll get far more complex in
| the next few years at least, and documentation/user
| support is really good
| jboy55 wrote:
| Its all the dependencies, security updates and keeping
| all of them up to date and in check. One word, Log4j.
| unionpivo wrote:
| same reason people are moving to aws, and people which
| used to use aws instances are moving to serverless.
|
| Leave infrastructure work for other people.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Economies of scale basically.
|
| It's way simpler to just connect to Wikipedia.org and
| download the pages you want to read instead of
| downloading the whole Wikipedia.org database and keeping
| it stored and updated on your devices. Same principle.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _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 forming consensus rather than
| determining trustworthiness.)
| exdsq wrote:
| > 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 the
| mainnet it's chain would be vetoed by the other nodes
| states and would fork back onto the main chain. Ethereal
| has Byzantine-Fault Tolerance up to 50% and you don't
| gain anything by running an isolated node to try trick
| people.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Bit that it'd be very practical, but the data itself is shared
| so in theory every company could set up their own API to render
| the blockchain into a readable, quick to access format. Even
| the vanished poop emoji NFT would reappear once someone else
| renders their view on the blockchain in the right way.
|
| The problem with this is that running servers that store and
| process one or even multiple blockchains in a searchable way is
| terribly costly and inefficient. In theory the public ledgers
| are all safe against locking away data, like Google or
| Microsoft could do with your accounts in the real web, but in
| practice nobody wants to be the guy making a loss on serving
| blockchain views.
|
| If web3 ever gets off the ground, it needs more of these access
| provider companies. Perhaps even a prebuilt system you can
| throw onto your own server to participate, like IPFS and other
| existing decentralised systems provide.
|
| I'm still not clear on the actual benefit of the cryptocurrency
| web other than the concept of "owning things without legal
| protection or oversight" which I (and I believe most people)
| have very little interest in if it comes at the premium it
| comes at today. From a technical standpoint all of this
| blockchain stuff is awesome, but it's an awesome solution in
| search of a problem.
| hooande wrote:
| In practice none of this is happening. All the major wallets
| query OpenSea to determine what NFTs an account has
| (according to the article). anyone can access the data but
| that doesn't change what the wallets query. I can start my
| own wallet that directly calculates who owns what using the
| blockchain, but that sounds computationally expensive and
| there's no guarantee that anyone would use it.
|
| "In theory" the data is open. but I believe that the point of
| the article is that unless I'm running my own node, data
| visibility is limited to what someone else tells me. and
| here, in reality, OpenSea has decided to delist the author's
| NFT and they have no recourse.
| zomglings wrote:
| It is costly, but not inefficient. This is what we do at my
| company and our products monetize our blockchain indexing
| operations. We are doing it all open source and are in the
| process of decentralizing our operations, so that:
|
| 1. anyone who operates a node can contribute time on their
| node for a share of our revenue
|
| 2. anyone can host one of our blockchain crawlers for a share
| of our revenue
|
| 3. anyone can contribute storage to our platform for a share
| of our revenue
|
| We currently support Ethereum and Polygon, and are expanding
| to more chains.
|
| I found this an excellent article, but the HN discussion (not
| calling out your comment specifically) seems to miss the fact
| that, as programmers, it is fully within OUR power to create
| the world we want to operate in.
|
| Edit: To clarify - we run our own nodes. Currently on AWS but
| we are running out of credits soon so soon in our offices and
| living rooms, and eventually in data centers.
| threeseed wrote:
| Problem is who cares if you run your own servers when
| everyone you know is viewing NFTs through servers which are
| manipulating the data like Opensea is.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| That's true, but if the NFTs show up on some places and not
| on others then you could start a "resistance" against the
| existing market places. Outside of DMCAs and other such
| legal requirements, an exchange needs to be impartial about
| the stuff being sold and published on there to remain
| credible.
|
| The cryptocurrency crowd is usually drawn to the
| decentralised, unregulated market, and OpenSea has turned
| out to be the exact thing blockchains are trying to
| overthrow.
| threeseed wrote:
| Except that OpenSea is successful.
|
| So it shows that people don't really care about (a)
| decentralisation or (b) manipulation of the true
| blockchain output.
| absoluteharam wrote:
| >Except that OpenSea is successful.
|
| thanks to VC money looking to centralize the web3
| economy.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| But that's the point. So many people hyping web3 like
| it's going to be fundamentally different which is why
| it's worth all these resources (both people and energy),
| when it appears already heading down the same path as
| web2. Consolidated companies growing very large and
| getting a bunch of already known VCs even richer.
|
| It's like a populist movement whose goal is to enrich the
| existing rich.
| wmf wrote:
| In theory you should be able to build a new NFT marketplace
| and airdrop the shit out of it to replace OpenSea.
| magicjosh wrote:
| This is the premise [1] of $SOS token - though I haven't
| seen anything substantial, just what's on their website
| and in a few articles [2].
|
| [1] https://www.theopendao.com/ [2]
| https://decrypt.co/89325/sos-token-aidrop-opendao-
| opensea-wh...
| threeseed wrote:
| And in theory I can build a social network and become
| bigger than Facebook.
|
| The reality however is that market dynamics, acquisition
| costs, network effects etc prevent this from happening.
| And these aren't things that crypto can really solve.
| v1vek wrote:
| No you can't - the social graph is private.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Why would that stop you?
| Sargos wrote:
| The social graph is 90% of the value of a social network
| and the hardest resource to build. Without it an exact
| copy of Facebook built by someone else is useless.
| arcticbull wrote:
| It's only useless if your goal is to have an archival
| copy of the entire social network. That isn't the goal
| for most social networks. The build around communities
| and grow/evolve over time.
| [deleted]
| bidder33 wrote:
| full nodes have access to all the data in an archive node.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| From the post:
|
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will...
|
| Fair enough, but there are active efforts to develop ultra-light
| clients for Ethereum together with the concept of "portal
| network":
|
| https://github.com/ethereum/portal-network-specs/
|
| https://our.status.im/nimbus-fluffly/
|
| > 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 ultimately be
| billions (!) more clients than servers.
|
| I would not say there's "no acknowledgement" of this; depending
| on how deep you are in the space, it's pretty obvious that the
| goal is to have layered networks and mission specific networks
| (storage vs. messaging vs. consensus), all economically
| incentivized, that are p2p through and through, from the resource
| constrained devices of end consumers to the staking nodes that
| secure the networks. That's the hope, the goal, and the focus of
| ongoing efforts.
|
| The opposite of the missing word is "a node in a p2p network".
|
| The points made about the difficulty in evolving protocols
| quickly are not lost on me, but I guess I'm more optimistic than
| the author that it will happen relatively quickly in coming
| years, including this one. In the process, there will be
| opportunities seized where the protocols fall short and half-
| measures or worse (with respect to decentralization) will
| generate excitement for a time. That seems like "growing pains"
| to me.
| Thorentis wrote:
| > I have not found myself particularly drawn to "crypto."
|
| Says the person that tried (and is trying) to shove a new crypto
| currency down our throats in Signal? This is incredible.
| bsldld wrote:
| > Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not
| designed such that it's really possible for your mobile device...
|
| If I am not mistaken Hyperledger Iroha[0] has(had?) that as one
| of its goals.
|
| [0] https://github.com/hyperledger/iroha
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| This
|
| > After a few days, without warning or explanation, the NFT I
| made was removed from OpenSea (an NFT marketplace)
|
| Then
|
| > What I found most interesting, though, is that after OpenSea
| removed my NFT, it also no longer appeared in any crypto wallet
| on my device. This is web3, though, how is that possible?
|
| How indeed:
|
| > You don't own "web3."
|
| > The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their
| incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity with a different
| label.
|
| > Know what you're getting into...
|
| > https://twitter.com/jack/status/1473139010197508098
| dang wrote:
| Please don't degenerate into flamewar.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| How is that a flamewar? Literally talking about the content
| of the article.
| dang wrote:
| You started from the article and headed straight for a
| highly repetitive flamewar trope. That's just what we're
| trying to avoid.
|
| Would you mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of this site more to heart? You
| unfortunately have a history of violating it, and we're
| trying for at least a slightly better quality of discussion
| here.
| dekhn wrote:
| I have to disagree like others are doing. There was
| nothing wrong with that comment. I've avoided this entire
| post so far because after reading the entire article, I
| was left with a distinct "huh, this looks like a pyramid
| scheme run by idiots and that may even include somebody I
| previously respected", which is pretty much what NFTs and
| most of digital cryptocurrency are.
| dang wrote:
| The comment consists of "This", "Then", and "how indeed",
| followed by the biggest recent inflammatory tweet on the
| topic. That is not an interesting or substantive comment.
| Many users in this thread have posted far more
| substantive things. HN is for that, not this.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| I think the thing that swings it for me is that I wasn't
| previously aware of Jack Dorsey's view on Web 3 and while
| I don't share his extreme position on it, I did find this
| comment useful and informative as a result, especially
| given Jack's very unique position and viewpoint in the
| industry.
|
| Is linking to an inflammatory tweet the same as posting a
| directly inflammatory comment?
|
| I still think the comment was acceptable. Not the most
| substantive, but not deserving of moderation.
|
| I know it's a very fine line to tread. But I come to HN
| to read all viewpoints - even those that might be on the
| outer edges.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| It isn't.
|
| Re Dang: straight from your link, "Please don't post
| shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
| good critical comment teaches us something."
|
| Personally, I found the comment insightful. I don't have
| all the time in the world to sit and pick something apart.
| Make no mistake, the smart tl;dr of HN are what gives HN
| any kind of value. Without that, may as well just use RSS
| and Reddit. I'm already subscribed to Moxie, came to HN to
| see what intelligent people have to say about it given that
| I am no longer a Signal user, and am anti-cryptocurrency in
| its current iteration, but pro-decentralization, which
| makes Moxie quite an interesting choice for me to want to
| actively follow the thoughts of as we feel differently
| about many important topics.
|
| There is no binary black or white to be established with
| abstract, complex topics like these.
|
| If it was any kind of bait, it was bait to discuss further.
| That the whole USP of Web3 is supposedly ownership and
| anti-censorship, and what's happening appears to be
| opposite is definitely something we should be discussing.
|
| What's the point of comments on HN if we can't use them to
| discuss? It's a commentary on somebody's opinion--with
| opinions.
|
| Perhaps if you don't like opinion pieces then you should
| simply ban them via these rules? I think HN's content might
| end up a little thin on the ground in that scenario though.
|
| Worth noting is what "guidelines" actually are, they're not
| rules. If you would like them to be enforced as rules, and
| expect people to treat them as such, start calling them
| rules or ToS. But in that case, expect far less interest in
| HN if you aren't going to permit open discussion.
|
| Have a good weekend, Dang. Hope you and yours are healthy
| and happy.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| With the greatest respect, I disagree with this reading of
| the parent's comment. It doesn't seem particularly
| inflammatory to me? Or at least enough to warrant this call
| out...
|
| It's expressing a strong view yes, not necessarily one I
| disagree or agree with (I don't know enough on the topic yet
| to take a view), but this doesn't seem to blatantly break the
| guidelines.
|
| If it wasn't for the superb track record for what I view as
| quite impartial moderation on HN, I'd worry that the mention
| of "VC" here was a trigger for moderation...!
| [deleted]
| verdverm wrote:
| If you read why indeed, it is because metamask calls the
| OpenSea API.
|
| All one has to do is call a different API for the same
| information. It's not like it was actually gone
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will
|
| That's one believably accurate summary. But here's another:
| rather than focus on trying to make it easy, cheap and simple for
| everyone to run their own servers, the tech world spent
| 1996-today instead focused on offering to take care of this for
| everybody else, for a price.
|
| Everybody concluded in the late 90s that the "nobody wants to run
| their own servers" claim was self-evidently true, and so all the
| tech development went into extending server capabilities,
| extending browser capabilities, building hosting services and
| infrastructure, and almost no effort went into making running a
| web server as easy as, oh, I don't know, running Excel.
|
| Imagine a version of things where the server was almost a toy-
| like appliance. Hard to do? Yeah, I know, it's hard. But then
| again, in 1996 browsers with Web USB, Web Workers, Web Assembly
| and the like would have seemed impossibly hard and yet here we
| are.
|
| We don't have it because we chose not to build it.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The personal server space is littered with failed startups.
|
| Not because it's difficult to make turnkey personal servers.
| Embedded Linux hardware is unbelievably cheap.
|
| They fail because they don't bring any benefit against real-
| world threats, but they come with significant downside risks.
|
| If your house floods or your home server is burgled, your data
| is just gone. So your home server ends up backed up to the
| cloud anyway, and now you're maintaining a home server and a
| cloud server when you could have just used the cloud service
| for everything without the headache.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Not because it's difficult to make turnkey personal
| servers.
|
| It's crazy hard to make turnkey personal servers that will be
| usable by ordinary people.
|
| > They fail because they don't bring any benefit against
| real-world threats,
|
| For a vocal contingent online, real-world threats involve
| lack of control over hosting, over their data, over
| encryption. Your own servers would address (at least
| partially) all these problems, but of course, these are not
| problems that most people in the world using walled gardens
| even consider to be problems.
|
| > So your home server ends up backed up to the cloud anyway,
| and now you're maintaining a home server and a cloud server
|
| Utilizing an online/network backup service as part of running
| your own server is qualitatively different from running a
| server in the cloud.
| solarmist wrote:
| > For a vocal contingent online, real-world threats involve
| lack of control over hosting, over their data, over
| encryption. Your own servers would address (at least
| partially) all these problems, but of course, these are not
| problems that most people in the world using walled gardens
| even consider to be problems.
|
| Vocal? Yes, but my no means the majority.
|
| I'm in tech running my own software company and I don't
| even want to upkeep centrally maintained hardware like my
| PlayStation. It's just a pain (often enough) and for the
| non-tech people in my life it's just barely tolerable.
|
| Apple TV is the best, but it still has really problems that
| pop up now and then.
| shagie wrote:
| I was a webmaster back in the days when one could debate cern
| vs ncsa and which provided a better server and for a while, I
| ran my own web servers at home on some static IPs from
| Speakeasy...
|
| The issue is that the complexity of the modern systems have
| gone beyond what one person can keep in their head and
| maintain. This is _doubly_ true when one considers the amount
| of time investment to keep on top of patches and CVEs.
|
| The simple servers are still there. Grab a web server and put
| static files for it to be served - but people don't want that.
| They want a fully functional web application with persisted
| data with a maximum outage window less than the duration of a
| good night's sleep.
|
| Those things aren't easy. Keeping a few servers up and running
| and the databases behind them backed up and the servers load
| balanced with failover so that if one of them goes down you
| _don 't_ need to wake up at 2am to fix it.
|
| Making a Raspberry Pi web server in a box wouldn't be too hard.
| Put it on your home network. Open up your device on the home
| network (note: if the home network isn't to be opened up,
| advanced network configuration to establish a dmz or putting
| the device external to the internal network is needed) to the
| world.
|
| And then you've got to find some way to keep that device
| patched and the ISP not unhappy with the traffic you're getting
| when your home blog page shows up on HN.
|
| For me, even imagining the work that I'd need to do to my home
| network to set up that... I can't see it making sense anymore
| to get what I could get by creating a GitHub pages site and
| doing it there - and then I don't have to worry about all the
| _other_ parts of my home network.
|
| While I can't find my copy of it now, I have a memory of
| reading a quote from Ansel Adams about the darkroom and that it
| was a necessity for photography - but he'd rather be out there
| taking photographs than in the room making the print.
|
| So too, I would rather be writing a program or writing a blog
| post than dealing with maintaining the infrastructure that
| maintains that. There are too many concerns and too many things
| where I know that I _don 't_ have deep enough knowledge anymore
| to keep a modern web server in my home network secure when
| facing the world.
|
| Consider all the people on HN who are skeptical of having an
| Amazon echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod because they're
| concerned about a small appliance from a company on their
| network is possibly listening with an open microphone but only
| communicates to one Big Tech server... imagine a device on the
| network that is accepting all incoming traffic and talking to
| anyone who listens.
|
| Spin up that server as an instance on AWS instead and then the
| worst that will happen is you'll rack up a large bill when it's
| compromised and someone runs a crypto miner on it.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Responding to this in particular:
|
| > The issue is that the complexity of the modern systems have
| gone beyond what one person can keep in their head and
| maintain. This is doubly true when one considers the amount
| of time investment to keep on top of patches and CVEs.
|
| I dislike that this myth keeps getting thrown around. I'm not
| the brighest person around but the state of my self hosted
| applications, be it config, patch level, etc is probably the
| easiest part of running them. Configs aren't archaic like
| they used to be, OS patches itself when setup, and everything
| just _works_. I somehow manage to run this, with a busy work
| schedule, a busy home life and a 2 year old who just wants my
| attention all the time.
| shagie wrote:
| Hosting and keeping home intranet things up and running
| isn't too much of an issue.
|
| Hosting and running a 3rd party instagram clone on my home
| intranet that is available to the outside world isn't
| something that I'd be comfortable doing.
|
| On the other hand, the bluehost Wordpress instance keeps
| itself nicely updated. I'm ok with that. Likewise, the
| GitHub pages site is out there and I don't even have to
| slightly think about that one.
|
| The difference between the home intranet and home hosted
| intranet available services is a significant distinction
| for me.
|
| I wouldn't be comfortable running home hosted intranet
| available solutions for anything. Nor would I want my
| parents or siblings to be running such.
|
| I shudder to consider how many home networks were
| compromised with Minecraft systems last month... and how
| many are _still_ vulnerable.
|
| While you and I may be practicing safe and reasonable
| network policies and staying up to date with
| vulnerabilities for services running on our systems - that
| level of technical understanding and responsibility isn't
| something that is commonly found in the general populace.
|
| I would be hesitant to suggest that people should be
| hosting their own services on their own networks and
| without a managed solution.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I was a webmaster back in the days when one could debate
| cern vs ncsa and which provided a better server and for a
| while, I ran my own web servers at home on some static IPs
| from Speakeasy...
|
| I fired up my first httpd when the current chair of
| UWashington CS&E was pissed off about a NYT article on how
| physicists were building this new-fangled computer network
| thing. So we have that in common ....
|
| > The simple servers are still there. Grab a web server and
| put static files for it to be served - but people don't want
| that. They want a fully functional web application with
| persisted data with a maximum outage window less than the
| duration of a good night's sleep.
|
| That's actually what most people who've ended up posting
| pictures on Instagram and blogging on Wordpress want. They
| need something one or maybe two steps up from a static site.
| Essentially, something like Squarespace but self-hosted.
|
| > And then you've got to find some way to keep that device
| patched
|
| Most linux distros can do a perfectly reasonable job of this
| already.
|
| > For me, even imagining the work that I'd need to do to my
| home network to set up that
|
| That reflects the incredibly limited work that has gone into
| making self-run servers easy, stable and correct over the
| last 25+ years.
|
| > a quote from Ansel Adams about the darkroom and that it was
| a necessity for photography - but he'd rather be out there
| taking photographs than in the room making the print.
|
| The difference is that we've have the capability to change
| the analogy stand-in for the dark room so that you have to
| spend almost no time on it at all. We haven't done it,
| because we took the path towards server-hosting companies and
| left the software to be as technical and fussy as almost
| anything out there. Adams would likely have been entirely
| fine with spending 15-30 mins a month in his darkroom.
|
| > imagine a device on the network that is accepting all
| incoming traffic and talking to anyone who listens.
|
| What web server does this? If such a machine was the only
| solution, then I'd agree with you - this would be a
| catastrophic issue. But we really don't use such systems
| anywhere and certainly would not do so for a toy-level home
| appliance.
|
| > Spin up that server as an instance on AWS instead and then
| the worst that will happen is you'll rack up a large bill
| when it's compromised and someone runs a crypto miner on it.
|
| Now that's a fair point.
| walterbell wrote:
| FreeNAS has ~1M deployments and the recent migration of
| upstream ZFS development to Linux will continue to increase the
| availability of ZFS-based storage.
|
| _> Imagine a version of things where the server was almost a
| toy-like appliance._
|
| Odroid HC4 (Arm SBC, dual SATA drive slots, HDMI output, Kodi
| compatible) is about $100 USD, can run Armbian and LibreElec,
| https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4-oled/
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The odroid seems to be at best only the h/w side of the sort
| of thing I was suggesting/imagining. It's a funky little box,
| and that's great, but what about the software? "Mom, nginx is
| gunked up again, do you want me to restart it or just reboot
| the server?" "Sam, did you put my new portfolio pictures on
| the site yet? Sorry Jan, ran into some size and format
| problems and am still working on it". Etc. etc.
| walterbell wrote:
| For those who have more money than time, Synology NAS
| devices include mobile apps for common use cases, e.g.
| photo sharing. There's apparently an open-source clone
| called XPenology. For simple photo backup, Photosync works
| on all major desktop/mobile operating systems and can sync
| to a wide range of local or cloud storage.
|
| After 2 decades and billions of investment in web services,
| it's not realistic to expect a generic "home server" to
| serve all possible use cases. Those that work best are
| usually based on an open protocol (e.g. WebDAV, SSH/SCP,
| SMB).
|
| _> did you put my new portfolio pictures on the site yet?_
|
| As an example, the UX for client-side workflow for blog
| publishing (WordPress, Jekyll, Hugo) is likely independent
| of the infrastructure for blog hosting (VPS, self-hosted,
| WordPress.com, GitHub Pages, etc.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > After 2 decades and billions of investment in web
| services, it's not realistic to expect a generic "home
| server" to serve all possible use cases. Those that work
| best are usually based on an open protocol (e.g. WebDAV,
| SSH/SCP, SMB).
|
| Surely HTTP is the common, open protocol here? Other than
| email, at least. Is anyone using SMB-from-the-cloud for
| network file systems? Are they serious? :)
| walterbell wrote:
| The most widely deployed "home server", FreeNAS, is
| historically based on NAS/LAN protocols. Most home users
| want to share file storage across multiple devices, which
| historically has been SMB/NFS/DLNA. Over time, NAS
| devices have added cloud/WAN protocols, like WebDAV, S3,
| etc.
|
| The most expensive aspect of server software development
| is data integrity/availability, e.g. ZFS or other high-
| integrity filesystem. Services atop the storage layer are
| usually built by different teams, often from different
| eras.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "home server" here was intended to mean "network-facing
| http and maybe smtp server", not "server for domestic
| duties". Sorry if that wasn't more clear.
|
| of course, no reason why the same box couldn't do both.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| It may be worth noting that all the crypto projects compete with
| each other and consider the others flawed, so it may be unfair to
| judge the whole sphere by some examples.
|
| There are people who would say everything besides Bitcoin is a
| shitcoin atm. I personally am leaning towards that stance,
| although I wish the energy issue could be resolved.
|
| I don't see why NFTs could not simply be "colored coins" on the
| Bitcoin blockchain?
|
| As for people running servers, I think what matters is the option
| to run a server if you want to. In EMail most use servers by the
| big players, but people can also run their own servers.
|
| It reminds me a bit of the counterargument to open source, that
| "nobody reads the code" - no, but some people can read the code,
| and if they would find something fishy, they would announce it to
| the world and hopefully even the nocoder users would be informed.
| It is still about trust, but people have a choice whom to trust.
| chachra wrote:
| Great read and explains the concepts and some of the web3
| craziness so elegantly. Well done!
| tfang17 wrote:
| Fails to address that users on centralized Web3 platforms have
| ability to exit platform, which isn't an option in Web2.
|
| I can transfer out an NFT from OpenSea ecosystem. I can transfer
| BTC out of Coinbase.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> These client APIs are not using anything to verify blockchain
| state or the authenticity of responses. The results aren't even
| signed. An app like Autonomous Art says "hey what's the output of
| this view function on this smart contract," Alchemy or Infura
| responds with a JSON blob that says "this is the output," and the
| app renders it._
|
| Is there a technical debt story behind these practices?
|
| Have there been attacks which took advantage of this gap?
| pcmaffey wrote:
| Nerds seek out constraints in order to unlock their private
| creativity is a really apropos observation.
| ericjang wrote:
| I have immense respect for Moxie, who has spent time building
| experiments and tinkering with a new technology, and as a result
| has a take on it that highlights very different issues than what
| most of the predictable web3 flamewar centers around. It makes
| you really think about who is really qualified to discuss said
| technology.
| bambax wrote:
| This is a fascinating and absolutely brilliant article that
| explains so many things in very clever and intelligible ways.
|
| Here are two things I'd like further clarification on:
|
| 1/ The article explains that NFTs are just pointers to some url
| and that what resides at the url can change at any time, with no
| control from the NFT as the standard doesn't involve a hash which
| would at least help verify that the content hasn't been changed.
| (A hash would not prevent the content to be changed but it would
| show it has been).
|
| The article says " _NFTs generally do not store that data on-
| chain. For most NFTs of most images, that would be much too
| expensive_ ". Can someone elaborate on this? Why would it be too
| expensive to store the art on the blockchain instead of a
| pointer? What amounts are we talking about, and how do they
| correlate to the number of bytes stored?
|
| In the case of generative art that consists of a few lines of
| JavaScript for example, is it different? Could it then be stored
| directly on the blockchain?
|
| 2/ A very surprising fact is that centralized intermediaries can
| indeed decide and change what's on the blockchain, with no
| challenge from the users. Here's the key paragraph:
|
| > _All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it
| also disappears from your wallet. It doesn't functionally matter
| that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the
| wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is
| just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning
| 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!_
|
| But why is that? Why can't we have independent servers that
| actually read the blockchain directly without using OpenSea's
| APIs? Is it just a matter of convenience? Is it because it would
| be too complex and expensive and therefore it's simpler to just
| use the APIs? Or is it technically infeasible, for some reason?*
| detaro wrote:
| > _Why would it be too expensive to store the art on the
| blockchain instead of a pointer?_
|
| Remember that "on the blockchain" means that everybody who
| keeps a copy of the chain needs to store it. Thus blockchains
| have a huge motivation to keep that small. A chain which
| includes lots of data would have many nodes exclude that data
| from storage - functionally pretty much the same then as
| storing hashes pointing elsewhere. (or if it forced nodes to
| keep it somehow, it would have fewer full nodes and/or higher
| costs to compensate)
|
| > _But why is that?_
|
| Because those particular implementations are badly done (and
| the success of Opensea shows that many people (or at least
| people wielding lots of money) participating don't care about
| this kind of detail, or at least don't consider it a
| dealbreaker). Using some kind of API is useful of course to
| implement, but going through the platform again is not very
| decentralized...
| jwlake wrote:
| Some of his points are out of date (given state of the art is
| old), like royalties and immutable data. See ipfs, eip-2981, etc.
|
| Other parts are very on point, specifically everyone using
| opensea as authoritative for NFTs, which is crazy town. Opensea
| has a dog in the fight, and they are very opinionated about
| what's allowed in the tent and not. Things like etherscan and
| infura are less scary. I can't imagine building a wallet and
| depending on opensea for anything though, because your users are
| not going to appreciate that choice.
| davidgerard wrote:
| > Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found
| myself particularly drawn to "crypto."
|
| I would give this intro more credence if it hadn't been posted
| literally a day after he put his MobileCoin shitcoin into Signal.
|
| It's annoying, because the rest of the article is good and
| apposite - but then he did that.
| codeptualize wrote:
| Really great article, it's so nice to read a nuanced article on
| such a flame war topic.
| bern4444 wrote:
| I'm a large doubter of Web3 and crypto in general though there is
| one problem space I can it can do well in:
|
| Ownership and transfer of digital assets (though I would imagine
| this is better and more easily solved by web2 technologies as
| well by cooperation among platforms).
|
| This could take the form of lending a friend a purchased copy of
| a video game, Ebook, etc.
|
| The transfer would take place on the blockchain and could be
| performed regardless of platform - xbox vs playstation vs steam -
| Apple Books vs Kindle vs Android books etc.
|
| Though this would require agreement by these platforms who
| operate these services.
|
| But again, I don't see this really happening because these
| platforms have no incentive to enable sharing of digital assets
| over selling new copies.
| techsin101 wrote:
| except those files/data has to be stored somewhere, and if
| server decides you don't own it, then regardless of how many
| NFTs you own for that data it is gone. Buying NFT is buying a
| referral to actual product, not even IOU.
| bern4444 wrote:
| I agree but those files are already stored somewhere - your
| PC, kindle, cloud account etc.
|
| On top of which, purchasing a movie via the Google Play Store
| or a book via Kindle doesn't mean you actually own that
| digital asset, just that you have access to it (which can be
| revoked by the platform).
|
| What I imagine being possible here is to transfer ownership
| of the pointer to that digital asset from your account to a
| friend's account and commit that ownership transfer on the
| blockchain as proof to everyone.
|
| If you want your copy back, either you have to have your
| friend transfer it back, or purchase a new digital copy.
|
| If we move more in the direction of owning digital assets,
| this might be a big field for block chain to solve. Though
| this is certainly shrinking as we move to a subscription
| service economy for these goods - Spotify, Stadia, etc.
|
| TLDR I think blockchain can lead us back to full and complete
| ownership of digital assets outside of any platform
| equivalent to owning a physical copy that I can lend out and
| get back.
| techsin101 wrote:
| If I buy something from Google Play Store, then I'm legally
| entitled to it, and if Google refuses to give it to me I
| can make them refund the money or give me the digital asset
| I own via legal system. NFT has no such requirement and NFT
| NEEDs legal system then written paper with two parties
| signature is just as valid.
| mewse wrote:
| > Though this would require agreement by these platforms who
| operate these services.
|
| If it requires agreement by the platforms, then how do Web3 or
| cryptocurrencies help the situation at all?
|
| Isn't this something that the companies could do on their own
| using their own databases at a lower cost and lower complexity,
| if they wanted to do it?
| isItpossible8 wrote:
| lngnmn2 wrote:
| This is cancer, right?
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Thin clients that verify transactions are possible though. For
| something like Bitcoin you have SPV-proofs that prove chains of
| headers. You can prove that a transaction was included in the
| longest chain without having to run a node yourself just by
| checking proof-of-work merkle trees; Even if the vast majority of
| users end up running clients that don't verify the whole chain --
| cryptographic trust would still be ensured by checking headers.
| This requires no centralization.
|
| Satoshi wrote about this architecture early on in scaling the
| blockchain. Ethereum also allows light clients and I think it
| even has checkpoints that make downloading headers faster.
| Cryptographic protocols that verify smart contract results could
| be included in Metamask. I feel like not mentioning this in the
| essay shows a lack of familiarity with the literature even if he
| was extremely opened minded (enough to create dapps himself.)
|
| He did make valid observations about third-party trust: OpenSeas
| and Infura. But in both cases: these protocols can be implemented
| without centralized architecture. A decentralized alternative to
| Infura (that provides reliable results to users and easy-to-check
| attestations) is possible to build. One should also note that in
| blockchain land the lack of incentives to run a full node is a
| problem people are working to address. It's actually a perfect
| illustration of how the blockchain can lead to emergent systems.
| Some ledgers already have rewards for running full nodes. So yes
| -- people do want to run full nodes -- they just want to be paid
| for it.
| viewfromafar wrote:
| I understand the criticism to be targeted at the "web3" idea,
| which is assumed to be about the infrastructure for
| decentralized applications. What is possible to implement is
| less relevant than what is likely to get implemented: here the
| clients (read: the app on the mobile) and their means of
| accessing the decentralized goodness matters. The argument as I
| understand it is: if access/usage to whatever decentralized
| goods is always mediated by the old centralized approach (you
| have to ask the server whether the transaction is valid) then
| you trust the operators of the servers and those folks have the
| option of making "everything" (access to those services/goods)
| faster & better. It is like the "last mile" problem where a
| company may well operate a global network but have no setup to
| act as ISP for end consumers, which is left to mediator. This
| is compatible with "web2" (https vpns etc) but the "web3"
| answer seems to be missing.
|
| The problem is that benefits of well-thought out incentive
| systems evaporate when access is mediated. If every dapp comes
| with its own mobile client and app-specific servers to address
| this, there is nothing decentralized about it.
| atweiden wrote:
| If it's only possible to run full nodes in datacenters, paying
| people to run them is fairly pointless.
| hda2 wrote:
| Moxie is missing a very important point:
|
| 0. People want control.
|
| People run servers because they don't want their operations to be
| affected by the arbitrary whims of some third party. When issues
| inevitably occur, they want to have as much control over the
| situation as possible so that they can remedy the issue as
| optimally as possible.
|
| This issue was wonderfully illustrated to you by OpenSea when
| they unilaterally removed your poop NFT and offered the generic
| "You violated our ToS, we wont tell you how, and no there is no
| appeal". This is the fundamental reason why cryptocurrencies took
| off. No more arbitrary rules from whimsical payment processors.
|
| I agree that Web3, as currently implemented, is a regression.
| Hopefully they manage to fix their flaws before the whole thing
| falls apart.
| contravariant wrote:
| If people want a blockchain based decentralized web couldn't we
| cut out the middleman and just make hosting data the proof of
| work?
|
| Edit: After all of ~10 minutes of uninformed thought I'm leaning
| towards an unholy marriage of torrents, IPFS and banking with
| each server acting as IPFS node, torrent tracker/seed and bank,
| issuing letter of credits to seeds of the data.
| nvr219 wrote:
| Moxie Marlinspike is my technology hero.
| atweiden wrote:
| Apparently, 10 years and half a trillion dollars isn't enough
| time or money these days for people to ship a basic SPV wallet to
| end users.
|
| Even assuming the Ethereum people finally ship SPV support
| following moxie's critique of their infrastructure, they still
| don't have even so much as a rudimentary desktop wallet designed
| for air gapped spending which isn't a literal _web extension_.
|
| There has well and truly never been a more deserving poster child
| for the phrase "the market can remain irrational longer than you
| can remain solvent", than Ethereum. If there's one societally
| valuable thing Ethereum can be credited for doing, it's laying
| bare that cryptocurrency valuation really is just a Keynesian
| beauty contest with absolutely no fundamentals whatsoever. The
| entire cryptocurrency space consists of pure and simple
| confidence games, all of them claiming to be anything but.
| hrhrhrhrhr wrote:
| des1nderlase wrote:
| "We should accept the premise that people will not run their own
| servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without
| having to distribute infrastructure."
|
| This resonated with me. If we want Web3 disruption to happen,
| perhaps we need better P2P networks. For example, with things
| like static IP per user, it would be trivial to standardize and
| build next gen chat apps.
| treelovinhippie wrote:
| kureikain wrote:
| The server here is actually not a centralize server in a
| traditional world. It's a node that connect to the network and
| replica state.
|
| When running transaction, you send it to that node, that node
| then broadcast it to network. This node here is like a replica in
| a traditional database.
|
| You can run that node, and talk to it through http, websocket.
|
| The point about trusting server signature the author bring up is
| bad IMHO. Even with a database, if you install some malicious
| Postgres package that return fake data for example, it doesn't
| help you at all if you enable TLS or not.
|
| The point about verification is that read-only data isn't
| important because write always get verified. If you connect to a
| malicious node, that change the data it returns to you on
| purpose, then it's fine. But when you write data to the system,
| it always get verify so it isn't a problem at all.
|
| The point here is that you are the one that run that node, and
| you are responsible for it. Entire point of Ethereum is that
| anyone can run node that connect to the network to replicate its
| state.
|
| If you take out all the hype(OpenSea is a massive scam here no
| argue), I found web3 is really amazing.
|
| 1. It's a public dataset that anyone can read data and listen to
| event
|
| anyone know something like that in current web1/2? Example, when
| I bough a domain name on namecheap or google domain. Can anyone
| know that? When I change my DNS, do anyone know that?
|
| With Ethereum when you run a WRITE method on a smart contract,
| when you transfer event. Everything can be emitted. And you can
| listen to it.
|
| The code is almost always open source.
|
| 2. Build-in Authentication System
|
| Many website use wallet to sign in but didn't verified a
| signature. In fact, that signing is very cool in deed. That
| signature verifcation ensure that only you can sign that data,
| send it to server and server can verified it with your public
| key, which is part of your address
|
| 3. No one can stop you
|
| If you search hacker news, you will found many people got
| blocked/suspended randomly by Stripe, Paypal then what do you do?
|
| 4. Openness
|
| This is a system that anyone can read. Think about that for a
| second. Anyone can read its data. Without the need of any API.
| Everything follow a standard, which is smart contract.
|
| Anyone can write, if you're willing to pay.
|
| You're pretty much can see the code of any legitimate company.
| Pretty much all of them published their contract on ethscan, to
| make it convenience for you to run directly.
|
| If you don't like some webui, you can just write to its directly.
|
| Literally just a `curl`, without you to even register for an
| account.
|
| I know that many people like to dismiss web3, the term is broad
| and bad IMHO, but think about the thing that it gives us. I can
| think of some example how web3 is great.
|
| 1. ACL: any changes is published, if a malicious activity happen,
| pretty much anyone can monitor it 2. Charity Fund: we can see
| what happen with the fund, transfer to where, when, who made it
| gorgoiler wrote:
| "Protocols move slowly. After 30 years, email is still
| unencrypted."
|
| OK, so I know what moxie means but in terms of sniffability: how
| much SMTP traffic is actually conducted in plaintext these days?
| Could someone put a ballpark value on the amount?
|
| For starters: 50% must be big-webmail-provider to either
| themselves or another big-webmail-provider. Do the long tail not
| have their LetsEncrypt certificates configured?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| I do not look forward to immense backlash against "techies" when
| normal people have been grifted out of what they thought were
| their "savings" in crypto and NFT's.
| milofeynman wrote:
| > The project can't start as a web2 platform because of the
| market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental
| forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.
|
| Great insight.
|
| I didn't realize for maybe 8 months that NFTs were not actually
| storing the art on the Blockchain. I appreciate Moxie pointing
| out the problems with this in an eloquent way.
| dbmikus wrote:
| I would like it if Metamask connected to a distributed hash table
| of Ethereum node providers and sent transactions to random
| subsets of those nodes. Then if there was some way to track the
| reliability of these nodes to make some kind of ranking of
| quality. Perhaps the client (Metamask) and a given server could
| mutually sign the transaction so when it eventually makes it into
| the mempool it is clear who put the transaction there.
| LaunchAway1 wrote:
| So several fundamental forces gave us the centralized internet,
| at least for the time being. Trusting a few players has never
| given resistance to these forces and so blockchain doesn't alter
| the equilibrium.
|
| What are the forces pushing for blockchain? Some will say greed,
| and of course at an individual level greed has something to do
| with it, but greed has always been there. Greed is part of
| humanity. What is specific to blockchain? Maybe just the desire
| for decentralization.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Seems like the image is back up of OpenSea:
| https://opensea.io/assets/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57822130...
| egberts1 wrote:
| 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.
| intrasight wrote:
| The first article on Web3 that I've read that drills into the
| details and was written by someone who's not only kicked the
| tires but taken the thing for a spin. And the conclusion: It's
| mostly the bad stuff of Web2 combined with the bad stuff of
| Crypto.
| [deleted]
| pavlov wrote:
| This article helped me understand why OpenSea was able to raise
| money at a $13 billion valuation. They're even more centralized
| than I had assumed. VCs look at that and see an impressive
| moat.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| A deep dive into this stuff is certainly useful. The question
| is, of the people who were offended by shallowness of people
| saying "this is obviously garbage though I can't be bothered to
| investigate it", how many will say "ah, so here's a thorough,
| technical and soft-spoken explanation why this is all garbage,
| thanks".
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I think you are over-simplifying the conclusions of the
| article. The article presents a much more nuanced view, and
| while it points to certain limitations and deficiencies of Web
| 3.0 (and that only on the Eth part of it; we are in a multi-
| blockchain world now), it also points to several strengths of
| the growing ecosystems, and mostly comes across as humble; not
| knowing how its all going to turn out.
| intrasight wrote:
| Yes - a bit over-simplifying I admit. And Moxie said that
| it's "early days". However it turns out, it'll be fun to
| watch.
| arcticbull wrote:
| To be fair Moxie says it's only "early days" in the sense
| that the technology has failed to advance, since of course
| a significant quantity of time has passed since inception.
| In some ways, cryptocurrency's failure to scale beyond
| relatively nascent engineering is what makes it possible to
| consider the days "early," *since objectively it has
| already been a decade or more*.
| intrasight wrote:
| Advancement in this space is going to be very non-linear.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| To be fair, (and I am by no means a fanboy), blockchain's
| decade isn't that long of a time.
|
| Look at the history of the internet:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
|
| The use of technologies is not always obvious or
| immediately successful.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I'm just addressing the misconception re: Moxie's
| apparent position.
|
| My personal opinion is that the internet solved problems
| from day 1 and its growth was largely constrained by the
| deployment of physical infrastructure. Blockchain is not
| similarly constrained - it just doesn't really, you know,
| do anything for anyone. The proof will be in the pudding.
| password1 wrote:
| I keep reading that there are a ton better blockchains than
| eth, but then it seems that all dapps continue to use just
| eth, even at the cost of insane gas fees. Why is that?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| dappradar rankings indicate a lot of non-ethereum dapps
| that are relatively popular. https://dappradar.com/rankings
| dmarcos wrote:
| I would say network effects. It's where the users and devs
| are.
| serverholic wrote:
| I find these articles to be a lot like criticizing tcp/ip
| because Facebook exists.
| Guest42 wrote:
| Exactly,and it's also intentionally misnamed as web3 as if it's
| an inevitable extension of current internet practices, rather
| than a scifi buzzword fantasy of a small pocket of investors
| (or small to moderate hedge of larger investors).
| pkcsecurity wrote:
| 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 implication
| that the Internet went wrong because it failed to stay
| decentralized. To hint at great cryptography as the solution, as
| he does im his conclusion, is baked deep in his bones as an
| amazing cryptographer, but I think he's prescribing the wrong
| cure. The problems with the Internet are fundamentally not about
| decentralization - they're about trust. It's a people problem,
| not a technology problem. Because of this, cryptography (I do not
| mean crypto) simply cannot be the answer - even the best
| cryptography is, like a great legal system, only capable of
| dramatically reducing the overhead costs and risk of operating in
| a given environment. When it comes to what great cryptography can
| achieve, I think HTTPS and maybe some E2E stuff that's happening
| with Signal is as good as it can get (interestingly, HTTPS is
| good in large part thanks to Moxie) - it cannot bring us back to
| some golden Internet age.
| playpause wrote:
| > it cannot bring us back to some golden Internet age
|
| Why? Because trust is a human problem not a technological one?
| What does that actually mean?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| The golden internet age was innovation and community. You
| wanted your own X? Code it yourself. You looking for a
| certain subject? You may find a forum.
|
| Web2 has been polluted by frameworks, modules, libraries and
| that the generic website now looks like the next. It hasn't
| gotten any easier its gotten harder. Where do you actually
| start if you want to create a new website or "app"?
|
| My mother knows html, she has her own website. When it comes
| down to wanting a gallery to display her portfolio the
| easiest answer is to say "install wordpress". Which isn't
| easy in any shape or form.
|
| And then if you wish to be part of Googles Search Engine you
| have to pay sponsorship.
|
| The golden age was the innovation, the new, creativity,
| surprisingly freedom. Folk putting work in to developing a
| new platform. Sadly we are now surrounded by walled gardens
| and one of the caveats are that if you want it on display,
| you have to pay.
| asimpletune wrote:
| 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.
| lordofmoria wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> 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, all the tools of web3
| /crypt0.
| biztos wrote:
| > 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.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| To be fair, the vision of crypto isn't to revert the web back
| to _when it was better,_ that is pretty much not possible. That
| doesn 't mean it can't lead us somewhere forward, different
| from the past, that is also better.
| neuronic wrote:
| Isn't the fundamental discussion we should be having if
| decentralization embodies trust? Is something decentralized
| automatically trustful? Or can trust only be established in a
| decentralized way? Which way is it?
|
| The only thing I see people agreeing on is that centralized
| setups are never (infinitely) trustworthy.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| 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 but it's unambiguous. - Talking about trust is easy
| but ambiguous.
|
| Cryptography forces us to look at the reality of implementation
| instead of a "meta-psychological concept" from meat space.
| Problem with talking about trust in engineering is that we like
| to lift things from meatspace and model it within the digital
| space.
|
| But we forget trust isn't "a thing", it constantly changes,
| it's useful only as a tool to accept randomness/chaos of life.
| And so we'll perpetually fail when discussing trust in the
| digital space or try to pin it down in order to allow
| converting it into a spec or an implementation.
|
| And I think Moxie understands this and so skips the noise by
| going straight to cryptography which is the only "tool" that is
| meaningful when we talk about the things we base trust
| assumptions on (cia triad).
| walterbell wrote:
| Instead of cookie warnings, could every NFT/web3/crypt0
| discussion be preceded by a warning about implicit trust?
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| 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".
| jarbus wrote:
| This post taught me more about the current state of ethereum than
| nearly all other ethereum content online combined. Incredibly
| well researched and thought out.
| tehnub wrote:
| >Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not
| designed such that it's really possible for your mobile device or
| your browser to be one of those peers. [...] 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
|
| I've got a dumb question: Why can't the phone or browser act as a
| node? Are the computational requirements too expensive?
| Haydos585x2 wrote:
| My understanding is that it's because the entire blockchain
| would need to be stored on the device which from even a data
| perspective is too much for a phone. The processing of data on
| the chain will also be too computationally difficult/expensive
| for the phone. You would either run out of battery immediately
| or the phone would crash.
| gojomo wrote:
| As a web3 skeptic, Marlinspike has still been quick to outfit
| Signal with a privileged 'house cryptocurrency', MobileCoin,
| whose value-appreciation-with-usage will accrue to favored
| projects. That's web3, too!
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...
| [deleted]
| samarama wrote:
| The author's argument is definitely not nuanced, but a a straw
| man and a false dichotomy.
|
| "Web3 is not 100% decentralised, so it's not really legit."
|
| Web3 or crypto never intended to be 100% decentralised and it is
| impossible to be so. There will also be dapps among the 100,000
| dapps that have a centralized component.
|
| Every percent decentralisation is good, be it 1%, 5%, 50% or 90%
| and we are in the high double digits in very many areas.
|
| It's 2022, 14 years after the invention of Bitcoin, and hacker
| news still doesn't get crypto, one can only shake their head.
|
| But hacker news be like "Muh, I want to be a boomer and my brain
| is not able to learn new things, so it's a scam."
| caymanjim wrote:
| You can't quantify decentralization. What does it even mean to
| be 99% decentralized? Anything less than 100% is just...not.
| grouphugs wrote:
| amai wrote:
| ,,Unfortunately, I think distributed systems have a tendency to
| exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more
| difficult, not less complicated and less difficult."
|
| His conclusion about distributed web3 is also true for
| microservices.
| NotyoBiz wrote:
| With regard to the last paragraph: Take a look at what Agoric is
| doing. Basically making programming smart contracts less
| difficult with JavaScript. Very interesting, worth a look.
| tomputer wrote:
| Fantastic article. Great read!
|
| > Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a
| URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the
| standards was that there's no hash commitment for the data
| located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular
| marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of
| dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache
| somewhere.
|
| This is an important line. People buying NFT's who are not aware
| of this may assume the NFT pictures itself are stored on-chain.
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| This doesn't actually matter, though. When you buy an NFT,
| you're not buying the picture, the art, the URL, or the
| copyright - you're just buying the NFT.
| irwt wrote:
| As he's expressing several opinions, let's comment on each one
| separately:
|
| 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.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Wait I assumed that NFT marketplaces like OpenSea stored a hash
| of the artwork in the layer 1 blockchain. Please someone tell me
| this is actually happening?!
| phire wrote:
| It's usually a URL of the artwork that is stored on the
| blockchain.
|
| That URL is sometimes an IPFS url, which is a hash of the
| content. But it could be anything, that's why you can create
| NFTs which change their image based on where they are viewed,
| or eventually 404.
|
| 3rd party wallets often don't bother looking up the blockchain
| to find the URL. They just query a centralised API like the one
| run by OpenSea. That's why OpenSea blocking an NFT can make it
| show up as blank in 3rd party wallets.
| aestetix wrote:
| Perhaps Moxie could think more about decentralizing Signal before
| thinking about how to decentralize the web ;)
| superfrank wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will
|
| This kind of gets at the reason why I think a lot of tech
| articles/blogs about what the future will be like are just
| terrible. The wants of someone who is driven enough read and
| write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very
| different from the general population. Like this author says,
| most people don't want to run their own web server, but I'd go
| even farther and say, most people don't really care about
| decentralization or even data privacy. Getting most people to
| care about privacy and decentralization is like getting a kid to
| eat vegetables. They know they should, but the alternative has
| more short term benefits. I think most people care about ease of
| use over almost everything else.
|
| People who write these articles need to be thinking about the
| middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a
| Nintendo". There will always be some users for technologies like
| web3, but until you can clearly demonstrate to that woman that
| this new technology has value and is easier to use than the
| status quo, you're never going to get mass adoption.
|
| Connecting this back to web3, we're clearly not there yet. Almost
| anything being done on web3 is slower, more expensive, and more
| complicated than its web2 alternative. We may or may not get
| there one day, but until we do, I don't see web3 being anything
| more than a niche product.
| [deleted]
| jd007 wrote:
| IMO this diagnosis is still one level away from a more
| fundamental truism, which is that people don't want to pay
| anything for digital goods. Running servers can and has been
| massively simplified over the last couple decades, and I don't
| see any inherent technical barrier preventing it from being as
| simple as registering for an account on FB (i.e. anyone can do
| it). The deeper problem is the lack of willingness to pay
| (directly) for anything online.
|
| The reason for this is complex, with lots of unclear cause and
| effect dynamics (e.g. did our unwillingness to pay push the
| ecosystem to gravitate towards ad-based revenue models, or the
| other way around?). The inevitable race to the bottom between
| competitors, under the massive incentive for platforms to
| centralize/consolidate (if you charged any amount for your
| service I can always under-price and out-compete you) is likely
| a major contributor. We do not exhibit such reservations
| against payment for anything physical, probably because of the
| innate sense we have that anything in physical reality should
| have a cost, yet not so in the digital world.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with that. People wanna pay as little as
| possible but they gladly pay for Netflix or whatever. People
| spend a lot of money on Amazon because they make it really
| easy to pay. One of the original promises of cryptocurrency
| is it would make micro transactions easy and painless (with
| something to do about trust, but... that goes in the opposite
| direction than consumers would like as it's the provider that
| doesn't have to trust the consumer instead of the other way
| around like with credit cards which allow you to back charge
| stuff).
|
| The key is still making stuff easy to pay for. Low
| transaction fees. Low risk _to the consumer_. Low friction
| overall. Ideally we would want to enable that without
| enabling monopolies like Amazon. Because the low friction is
| Amazon's real moat.
| wpietri wrote:
| Agreed. There are significant audiences where cognitive
| load is a much bigger barrier than spending actual money.
| But people do want privacy, independence, and control, so I
| think non-centralized services could still work.
|
| I think "virtual server" is the wrong abstraction here.
| It's like "radio with pictures" or "horseless carriage" in
| that it's telling us we haven't found the right new way to
| think about it.
| XorNot wrote:
| Netflix sets up a very obvious dollars-to-value
| relationship. "Subscribe" and watch "things you already
| want to watch" - easily.
|
| _Most_ types of online monetization fail that test:
| subscribe and then you 'll use this website for 15 minutes,
| then the promise is it will do something later that will be
| worth $10 a month to you. They're the gym-membership of
| digital services.
|
| They want you to pay to join, but you don't actually know
| what you're getting and you don't know if you're going to
| find it usable at even a minimal level. Netflix deals with
| this too: they sell you access to a movie catalogue, not a
| specific movie - built into the model is a hedge against
| local risk for a product which already has very broad
| appeal.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That's why micropayments are a neat idea. Sure, I'd pay a
| dime or a quarter to read you crappy news site. A quarter
| doesn't matter, as long as you don't bug me, I'm not
| subscribed to anything, and I just click. That's kind of
| what Bitcoin was promising... Of course for several
| reasons, that doesn't actually work with Bitcoin.
| prox wrote:
| This the Zinger comment for me. Low friction.
|
| Steam does amazing because it's all so easy and well
| developed. Steam is also very conservative in its
| development and doesn't add stuff for the sake of it, like
| so many other companies fall for (Norton Crypto anyone?)
|
| Also, we think we are there when it comes to UX, but I feel
| we haven't even started to make good UX paradigms.
|
| I am fervently anti crypto, and haven't seen any argument
| that makes me move an inch, because all of the current
| alternatives are so much safer and easier. However, the
| idea of an internet wallet does appeal that's distributed
| rather than centralized does appeal on some level. Crypto
| enthusiasts should focus on that more.
| dmarcos wrote:
| Fortnite made $50 million selling NFL skins alone:
|
| https://www.sportskeeda.com/amp/fortnite/the-fortnite-
| skin-g...
|
| And the total sales volume since release is in the billions.
|
| Maybe a generational thing?
| bmeski wrote:
| Kids who get a hold of their parents credit cards or the
| new generation of people who will live off stocks their
| parents gave them.
|
| We'll see how much they'll be spending on skins when they
| grow up/can't game all the time.
|
| However I think this new class of all day gamers isn't
| going anywhere. It's the perfect time sink for the new
| leisure class.
|
| Orgy porgy
| [deleted]
| wmf wrote:
| _people don 't want to pay anything for digital goods_
|
| Which brings up a different problem: Web3 assumes that
| _everything you do online will cost money_. Even assuming
| that fees go to zero, virtually nobody wants that. Web3
| advocates will say that the money you earn will offset what
| you spend, but you only have to look at Patreon
| /Substack/OnlyFans earnings to see that it won't happen for
| most people.
| IanCal wrote:
| Arguably, everything does. You just also either sell
| something at the same time or someone else subsidises it
| for you. Neither of those approaches are forbidden in web3.
| It may be more explicit at least.
|
| More generally though, "everything" there means state
| changing operations. Read only doesn't.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| It also strikes me that there's an implicit requirement to
| "already have sufficient capital" to operate in the crypto
| space - even more so that normal finance. I don't see
| middle-to-low income people being willing to adopt this as
| any interaction will burn even more of a limited resource
| than normal mechanisms.
|
| If the majority of people can't get in, or can't afford to
| _do anything_ in the space, is there any real chance this
| will actually take off?
|
| Now I'm sure someone will respond along the lines of
| "crypto is an investment/asset not a currency, etc etc etc"
| in which case, why is it trying to do all these currency
| things?
| wmf wrote:
| Buy $10 of crypto, use play-to-earn to turn it into $100,
| then you can afford to use Web3. /sarcasm
| nixpulvis wrote:
| What do we mean by this?
|
| I feel like it's a matter of OS improvement that will enable
| people to manage the software side of their own servers in as
| little (or less) effort than managing cloud platforms or even
| VPCs. Ideally in a standard way. Why is learning Dropbox any
| easier than learning to copy a file to some other FTP serving
| software? The clouds are just making $$ to support you, though
| that often turns on it's head when they try to protect their
| interests. This conflict is why everything is shit right now
| IMO.
|
| If we are talking about the hardware... That _might_ be a
| harder sell. But at the same time, I don 't see why a company
| like Apple couldn't market a product like the HomePod as a
| personal server. It falls into the privacy narative and would
| be a way to make more device sales by supporting faster local
| services.
|
| Personally, I want my ISPs to give me a static IP more easily
| so I can more in this direction without worrying about weird
| dynamic DNS issues. IPv6 should have enabled this years ago,
| but it remains an issue.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> I want my ISPs to give me a static IP more easily so I can
| more in this direction without worrying about weird dynamic
| DNS issues._
|
| Tailscale appears to have solved this problem. There are
| related open-source projects.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I'm not sure I would call this "solved", since it's
| effectively just a replacement for the DNS servers in
| effect.
|
| What I want is no additional dependencies, esspecially on
| dynamic and slow to propagate services. Not to mention that
| my current dynamic DNS (through tplink) seems to be
| filtered by a lot of firewalls or something.
|
| ISPs providing a static IPv6 would be a simple solution
| that I should be able to create my own DNS records for
| convienence. No external VPN or otherwise.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| FTP is horrible. I'm glad as a web dev I haven't touched it
| in 8 years not since I worked for a hosting company in tech
| support.... git, or even rsync over ssh is way better...
|
| The upcoming generation..even the 'non-tech' people are tech-
| savvy, meaning most could probably get arch linux up and
| running at least via a distro or follow the docs, etc...where
| there parents would fail.
|
| the problem is they need to create something w/ a big enough
| value proposition but at the same time, easy enough for the
| masses to assimilate and understand it, and that serves
| enough utility to make it worth it.
|
| Something like an actual currency w/ basic income dividends
| (taxed $ goes to lowest 50% who have a minimum utilization
| score), and identity/fraud management, that has a built in
| tax and cap system so whales can't abuse it, and zero
| transaction fees, instead fees are taxes for hodling and lack
| of utilizing (less daily/weekly transactions lower your
| utilization score, so you might lose a couple coins/day until
| you start spending more). Fraud/ID comes in handy here so you
| can't just spend it to yourself or other accounts you own.
| 1:1 only.
|
| It'd need wide adoption to make utilization scores
| accessible, and maybe the price be pegged at or near a loaf
| of bread... and somehow make that global to be a universal
| price-setter to.. like say it's 1000 x currency for a loaf of
| bread in X country and 100y currency for a loaf of bread in y
| country, the c (coin) to y trade rate would be 100:1, and
| 1000:1 for x.
|
| I also feel that decentralization can be bad, full
| democratization is good, and DAO's would be good assuming
| every member gets equal voting rights (protect against
| whales), but sometimes esp. in the beginning centralized
| aspects like identity verifiers could go a long way towards
| building something resilient, and make tweaks/iterate changes
| faster than blockchain tech, and then when the tech is more
| sound in 10 years, move 100% decentralized... or only parts
| if that's what the org votes on....etc...
|
| When this expands to include metaverse it even becomes more
| important to have liquid democracy at its core, to ensure
| fairness and that companies don't control everything.
| baash05 wrote:
| Not a chance on that mate.. No way on Arch. Most of my
| neighbours can't change their wifi password. Heaps of the
| 20 somethings can't even run "ls" in a terminal.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| come on, ls? that's easy. Anyone can do that... now try
| exiting VIM without a tutorial, or previous knowledge....
| BEEdwards wrote:
| >The upcoming generation..even the 'non-tech' people are
| tech-savvy, meaning most could probably get arch linux up
| and running at least via a distro or follow the docs,
| etc...where there parents would fail.
|
| I don't know what members of the upcoming generation you're
| dealing with, but the ones I know are more computer
| illiterate than their parents.
|
| Their parents played games on dos and had to configure
| shit, the kids use their phone for everything and don't
| know how to use computers beyond a basic level.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| My mom had some data entry/BASIc programming skills,
| today she can't even work wordpress or her cellphone...
|
| I grew up in the 80s, and can learn just about any
| tech... my 4 year old can work any electronic device like
| he was born with it.
| cableshaft wrote:
| > Something like an actual currency w/ basic income
| dividends, and identity/fraud management
|
| Proof of Humanity is trying to do that with $UBI tokens and
| their method of proving who you are (basically a video of
| you with your wallet address saying a specific script, and
| putting up a collateral that could be lost if a court can
| provide evidence that you've signed up for it before).
| After you're signed up, you get one $UBI token every hour.
| $UBI tokens are currently worth $0.12 apiece, so it's
| roughly $1200 USD per year (at least for the moment, it's
| inherently very inflationary and seems to kind of rely on
| people like Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, to buy a
| bunch of tokens and burn them).
|
| It does have a complex onramp, though, and will be
| difficult to get non-tech-savvy people onto it without some
| help, most likely.
|
| We'll see if it continues to work. It's only been around
| since March 2021. It's an interesting idea, though.
|
| https://blog.kleros.io/introducing-ubi-universal-basic-
| incom...
|
| https://www.proofofhumanity.id/
| jka wrote:
| You're correct about ease-of-use being key, I think.
|
| It was easier for "us" (the industry) to build hosted web
| servers, and so that's the paradigm that has won out. It's a
| direct evolution from client-server computing in the mainframe-
| and-terminal era.
|
| But the user doesn't need to care what a server is, or what
| running one involves; it's a bit of a red herring.
|
| A winning platform wouldn't communicate to people that they're
| running a server at all; they'd upload their
| messages/profile/etc, and the application user experience would
| be akin to that of any other application, with the difference
| that -- at an implementation level -- their data would be
| encrypted, replicated and hosted across multiple devices. The
| platform provider then goes on to win-in-competition because
| their hosting and bandwidth costs reduce to near-zero.
|
| That of course conflicts with the second point: evolving the
| protocols for that is hard. I'd wager that a winning platform
| will get 98%+ of the protocol design and implementation correct
| up-front, because it would have to be based on simple,
| iterable, secure and near-correct fundamentals that stand the
| test of time.
| feanaro wrote:
| > There will always be some users for technologies like web3,
| but until you can clearly demonstrate to that woman that this
| new technology has value and is easier to use than the status
| quo, you're never going to get mass adoption.
|
| I think this isn't true. A large part of getting people to use
| something is often not ease of use, but momentum and
| popularity. Ease of use plays a large role but by itself, it
| doesn't explain the entire variance of why some technology
| reaches mass adoption or becomes the most popular.
| atweiden wrote:
| > People who write these articles need to be thinking about the
| middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a
| Nintendo".
|
| In a world where the pool of capital allocated into crypto is
| hyperconcentrated in the hands of a tiny number of elite
| investors who employ teams of analysts to scour the web for
| opportunities to rapidly take advantage of, those people don't
| matter.
|
| This is also why no modern cryptocurrency investor can
| realistically be considered "early", anymore. The only thing
| early about crypto is the general maturity levels of its
| technology, which arguably doesn't matter to valuation based on
| the reality we see play out in the crypto markets on a daily
| basis.
| zdw wrote:
| > middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a
| Nintendo".
|
| Using a middle aged woman as a stand-in for technologically
| unsophisticated user is a pretty negative stereotype both of
| older people and women:
| https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/So_simple,_your_mother_...
| chc wrote:
| It also seems chronologically wrong since a woman who is
| middle-aged today would have been in the prime age group for
| the Nintendo Entertainment System.
| homarp wrote:
| yes, now I use "C-Suite manager" instead.
|
| "So simple, a C-Suite manager could do it"
| BrissyCoder wrote:
| What's is C-Suite?
| [deleted]
| homarp wrote:
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/c-suite.asp
|
| "C-suite, or C-level, is widely-used vernacular
| describing a cluster of a corporation's most important
| senior executives. C-suite gets its name from the titles
| of top senior executives, which tend to start with the
| letter C, for "chief," as in chief executive officer
| (CEO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief operating
| officer (COO), and chief information officer (CIO). "
| baash05 wrote:
| I've used "So simple a Marketing guy can do it." for years.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| It's refreshing to read an article that admits this:
|
| > > Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this
| point.
|
| I actually enjoy build and running servers, but only for hobby
| purposes. When it comes down to anything business related or
| critical, I have zero desire to run and maintain it on my own.
| And I especially don't want to have to handle security for
| large amounts of money that could disappear in an instant if I
| make one wrong misstep.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. I ran my own servers for many years. And I still
| enjoy playing with hardware at home. But a couple years back
| I shut down my last colocated physical server and I do not
| miss it. The background stress of knowing that at any point I
| might have to wake up, haul my ass down to a colo, and swap a
| motherboard just got to me.
|
| Now all my must-stay-up stuff is built via Terraform in a a
| public cloud. If there's a hardware failure, it's not my
| problem. It's such a relief!
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > The background stress of knowing that at any point I
| might have to wake up, haul my ass down to a colo, and swap
| a motherboard just got to me.
|
| I would miss mine terribly. I couldn't afford colo and
| hosted on VPS for a while but just didn't cut it. The Cloud
| is the same. Kind of like having two monitors and
| downgrading to only one.
|
| In all honesty how often does that requirement come about?
| Did you not have fail over? 2u is mandatory if you want to
| fully exercise colo, 4u is ideal.
|
| > If there's a hardware failure, it's not my problem. It's
| such a relief!
|
| Not for me, if AWS or Azure fall over I'm at the mercy of
| the engineers to fix which could take hours just due to the
| processes standing up the cloud. And when those occurrences
| happen its normally fatal. If the same happens in colo
| their are only three reasons.
|
| Datacentre, Server or DDoS
|
| Granted you can either live on the edge and having no spare
| hardware and hope they don't die. Or have kit ready to ship
| and rack. My colo servers are eight hours from me and
| always happy to jump down to my rack to fix whatever.
|
| But I do respect your opinion because I don't know the
| variables you live in. Colo forever with me.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Is hardware failure a common problem making you can't
| sleep? I don't get it. I run several desktops and servers
| at home for decades. Other than my baby pulled keys out of
| keyboards, I never had any hardware problem at all. And
| some of computers are more than ten years old.
| starfallg wrote:
| It's worth making a distinction between running a server and
| managing it. People don't want the hassle of managing all the
| complexity of server infrastructure, but they appreciate the
| benefits of owning your data, and the hardware it is stored
| on. It's just that right now the centralized solutions that
| store data centrally are the only ones available for web-
| scale applications.
|
| However, that doesn't have to be the case. If you look at
| consumer appliances and mobile computing, you can build
| managed environments that are physically distributed but
| partially or fully managed, with the actual code and data as
| close to the user as possible.
| serverholic wrote:
| Regarding your last sentence, I think that's fine.
|
| I know Moxie criticizes people for saying "It's early days
| still" but I really do think it's early days and NFTs have
| driven crypto into the mainstream too quickly.
|
| Crypto researchers are still chipping away at the math and
| computer science required to bring the web3 vision to life.
| What's unfortunate is I've yet to see an article on hacker news
| about this research and, instead, articles about the hacked
| together shit that is unfortunately the face of web3 at the
| current moment.
|
| If you're interested, I'd recommend people check out some of
| the following topics:
|
| - Smart Wallets for better UX for your average user.
|
| - Zero-Knowledge Proofs (and zk-snarks, zk-starks).
|
| - Rollups (specifically zkRollups) for scalability.
|
| - Single-slot finality for fast transaction confirmation.
|
| - Ethereum Sharding and Data-Availability Sampling. Again for
| scalability.
|
| - Sign-In With Ethereum.
|
| - And of course, Proof-Of-Stake (specifically Ethereum's Casper
| algorithm which is being tested right now).
| majewsky wrote:
| Does this not prove his point though? Because
| decentralization is harder to get right on a technical level,
| centralized alternatives will always outcompete more
| decentralized ones.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Centralized alternatives will always have the first mover
| advantage, but decentralized alternatives are potentially
| superior in the long run.
| codehalo wrote:
| There is no centralized competitor to the web that has
| outcompeted it.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > Like this author says, most people don't want to run their
| own web server...
|
| I know I certainly don't. I want to write my software and I
| want to be able to deploy it somewhere and manage the things I
| may care about for that specific software. As much as possible
| I don't want to have to care about hardware, or routing, or
| server administration, or user permissions, etc. Learning it
| once? Sure. Dealing with it every time I have a new project? No
| thanks.
|
| So, I totally agree. decentralization and privacy _on their
| own_ are difficult to market, as they aren 't nearly as in
| demand as convenience.
| baash05 wrote:
| Amen. I don't even get why most companies have Dev-ops. For
| the price of one Dev-ops you can get the most expensive plan
| on many providers. Running the most expensive Heroku plan
| (with a concierge service) is cheeper than an employee, and
| office space, and medical insurance, and .... And that's just
| the one provider I know.
|
| I want to type git push master, and that's the end of my
| involvement in standing things up.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write
| about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different
| from the general population.
|
| This is very insightful. I wonder what else it applies to. I
| bet there are tons of media sectors writing to irrelevant but
| interested audiences.
|
| > People who write these articles need to be thinking about the
| middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a
| Nintendo". There will always be some users for technologies
| like web3, but until you can clearly demonstrate to that woman
| that this new technology has value and is easier to use than
| the status quo, you're never going to get mass adoption.
|
| I don't get it. I thought this used to be common knowledge. I
| mean it's basically a TV trope, so why and how do industries
| "forget" this?
| majewsky wrote:
| Being easy to use is not usually thought of as a feature.
| Just look at the reaction of telephone hardware vendors to
| the original iPhone: There's nothing new about this, there
| have been tons of devices with touchscreens, we already know
| the customer does not want those, yada yada. They did not
| even consider the possibility that the selling point was not
| a list item on the spec sheet, but the user experience.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It like getting a kid to compost, sew seeds, tend to the veggie
| patch, pull weeds and 10 weeks later cook and eat the
| vegetables.
|
| Im the sort of person who should be interested in web3 (i
| dreamt of this kind of stuff years ago although had no
| technical idea how it might work) but now I've seen the culture
| of the space I have no interest.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I agree, my distaste of the culture that's associating itself
| with crypto and web3 is far outweighing the technical
| benefits they're claiming.
| arealaccount wrote:
| Web2 was more about ajax than centralization. It was being able
| to interact with websites without needing a full server rerender
| on every interaction. Why is everyone trying to rewrite history.
| zrm wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will.
|
| This depends on what you mean by servers.
|
| Nobody wants to pay money for dedicated hardware and experience
| service interruption if they fail to constantly provide it with
| power and internet.
|
| But a lot of the need for "servers" could be eliminated by
| running a Tor onion service on your phone and accepting
| connections from peers. You can get e.g. direct messaging from
| this without any "servers" of your own, but also without any
| Facebooks playing MITM between you and your peers.
|
| > A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform.
|
| I could make two criticisms of this.
|
| One, sometimes stable is good. We all whinge about the decades-
| old protocols that were designed for mainframes the size of
| buildings with less memory than a toothbrush, but now try to
| think of something you want from current day Reddit that you
| didn't get from ten years ago Reddit. Maybe the problem is some
| things got frozen before they were cooked, not that stability is
| bad once you have something that works.
|
| Two, a lot of this is survivorship bias. If it's easy to push
| changes to all the clients you're either already centralized or
| you're susceptible to EEE. Protocols like that got absorbed into
| some centralized product already, so the ones that are left are
| the ones with more protocol implementations than there are tech
| companies. Then if there is any problem with the protocol at all
| it's impossible to make changes, but that's the very reason it's
| still in use.
|
| If the other protocols eventually get replaced by something
| centralized, that eventuality only comes after the defects become
| fatal. When they're so bad that the problems exceed the network
| effect. But that's also the same time when you can release a new
| protocol version and people will adopt it for all the same
| reasons. You just need the replacement to be another protocol
| instead of a platform.
|
| > Recreating this world
|
| This seems to be a problem. We know generally what we want, e.g.
| P2P to the extent possible and completely fungible untrusted
| commodity servers when it isn't.
|
| Then the people writing the code are also the people running the
| servers, so they're willing to write code that makes the servers
| stop being fungible and untrusted and we're right back where we
| started.
|
| > This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually
| of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of
| people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization
| people want is the minimum amount required for something to
| exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these
| forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal
| outcome as the days become less early.
|
| Nobody cares about decentralization until the centralized entity
| becomes adversarial or unreliable, but then it's too late. The
| time to start caring about fire safety is not when you are
| already on fire.
| fcanesin wrote:
| Great post, but IMHO it should have been called "My First
| Impressions of Ethereum". The web3 ideal and movement is much
| larger than Ethereum only, and many are focused on solving these
| issues. For example Mina allows for mobile clients to verify the
| blockchain using recurring ZK proofs.
| nathanyz wrote:
| Concise, well thought out analysis by a cryptographer on Web3. If
| you believe in Web3, then you shouldn't dismiss this out of hand
| as a hater. He truly tried to understand how it works by actually
| building dApps. And the holes seem glaringly obvious.
|
| What you should do if you believe in Web3, is take this as
| constructive criticism and improve so that they holes are no
| longer there.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| My takeaway from this article: decentralization is usually bad UX
| (gas fees, slow to add features...), so people tend to aggregate
| to platforms w/ better UX that sit on top of decentralized
| services, which leads back to centralization
|
| I love the Gmail analogy, that even though email is
| decentralized, everyone just uses Gmail (probably because it's a
| better UX)
| oconnor663 wrote:
| > I think changing our relationship to technology will probably
| require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I've
| seen the opposite come to pass.
|
| I don't think I'm disagreeing with Moxie here, but I do like to
| emphasize that it's less that creating software has gotten harder
| (which is true in some ways but false in other ways), and more
| that our standards and expectations for what software should do
| have gotten higher. If I wanted to make a chat app today, for
| example, it would obviously need to:
|
| 1. run on iOS, Android, and probably also Windows/macOS/Linux or
| at least desktop browsers
|
| 2. have some notion of persistent user identity and message
| history, including something like passwords and something like an
| account recovery flow
|
| 3. support group communication among these persistent users,
| hopefully allowing for multiple devices per user
|
| 4. be internationalized into many languages
|
| 5. with some sort of abuse reporting/detection/response
| mechanisms and some posture towards law enforcement requests
|
| It doesn't need all those things on day one, but it will need
| them if and when it gets popular. And of course this is without
| even beginning to think about discretionary features like
|
| 6. searching, sending, and displaying animated GIFs
|
| If my goal is to build an app that me and my friends can use for
| fun, of course I don't need to do most of this. But if my goal is
| to _compete for market share_ with apps that do these things, I
| 100% have to do all this and more.
| baby wrote:
| I completely agree with his take. What I always found interesting
| with greener BFT consensus protocols that a lot of modern
| cryptocurrencies implement is that you can actually fix the
| problem of untrusted services: you can provide a cryptographic
| proof to the light clients (the real clients) when they query the
| blockchain, which allows them to verify the response without
| synchronizing to the blockchain. This is what Celo is doing, I
| think Zcash had a proposal to do the same? But essentially any
| BFT consensus protocol should be able to do this.
|
| You don't get the same insurance that you get by verifying all of
| the blockchain of course, but recursive zero-knowledge proofs
| that attest to the state transitions might solve this (cf Mina).
|
| Another issue is key rotations, which increase the size of the
| proof (as you need to give proofs to all the key rotations before
| you can give a proof to the latest state of the chain), but I
| believe that zero-knowledge proofs can fix that as well.
|
| Bottom line: it's actually not that grim, solutions are there,
| but users have to care for people to implement them, apply them,
| and for the solutions to receive adoption.
| Lucadg wrote:
| Great article.
|
| About NFTs: we tend to think they somehow need an image to make
| sense, while the "own the NFT to own the image" is both wrong and
| just one specific use case out of many. I find it useful to think
| about NFTs as "internet native property titles" which do not
| embed "law enforcement".
|
| See it this way: if you own a house, you own a property title
| which proves it. In case someone squats your house and the law
| enforcement does not help you get it back (e.g. due to corruption
| or slow legal system), it's just a useless piece of paper.
|
| Same with NFTs. Some use cases have enforcement embedded (e.g.
| ENS domains) and bear no risk, some don't (OpenSea minted image
| NFTs) and carry some risk from centralized entities (the same
| risk we have in 100% of Web2 applications btw)
|
| Enforcement often happens at the app layer, even if the NFT image
| can be compromised. E.g. an NFT which gives you access to a
| walled web page will still work even if the image is compromised.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I wanted to say that I appreciate his approach to stating why he
| isn't sold on Web3: thoughtful, succinct, diplomatic, and based
| on the results of an open-minded experiment. This is so much more
| of an article I'm ready to engage with than the the "crypto is a
| pyramid scheme, don't you get it you morons!?" articles.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will.
|
| This is sad to hear. People do run their own servers in their
| homes though, they are called routers, except they only serve one
| thing. Pity we don't have a lightweight self-updating system that
| sits in a router and does the basic job of keeping the user's
| data.
| chubot wrote:
| There are many projects to do that, such as this one started in
| 2010 by the founder of the Software Freedom Foundation (sibling
| rival of FSF?):
|
| https://freedombox.org/about/
|
| My memory is that it's basically a wall plug like a router, but
| it can run apps for you locally.
|
| Unfortunately my sense is that there's no much incentive to
| donate or contribute to such projects :-( So people don't even
| know they exist.
| mediocregopher wrote:
| I view the final two conclusions points, that people do not want
| to run their own servers and that we need to make software easier
| to build/run, to be one and the same. Is the reason people don't
| want to run a server because it's just so difficult and expensive
| to keep a computer online in your living room (remembering that a
| smaller deployment doesn't need 20 nines of uptime), or is it
| because the UX of running server software has always been
| terrible? Could an OS be made which makes running a server
| actually a friendly process? We managed to design OSs which made
| running apps on a _mobile device_ a friendly process, surely the
| same could be done here.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The internet as it exists today for the vast majority of people
| simply isn't well-equipped for everyone to have their own
| servers. Imagine a small server box that you could simply plug
| into the wall and give your wifi credentials. You still have
| the solve the NAT issue. You still have to secure the publicly
| routable box somehow and constantly apply updates, or backdate
| when (not if) something breaks. In parts of the bay, PG&E goes
| offline every time the wind blows. Does everything in your
| digital life go offline with it?
|
| There's a lot that goes into running a reasonably reliable
| server.
| astrange wrote:
| They're also noisy and you don't have a personal security
| team.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| False to both. My home server is quiet and my OS keeps
| updated automatically.
| password1 wrote:
| This is a great point, makes me wonder if there is a market for
| such a service.
| abaga129 wrote:
| I really like how this article is written. I'm a big time crypto
| fan, but the point the author makes about how something being
| decentralized makes it more difficult to change is so true. This
| is the reason Ethereum 2 has been in the works for numerous years
| and is still several years away from being completed.
| ypcx wrote:
| 1. When people are financially incentivized to run servers, they
| always will.
|
| 2. If a crypto protocol doesn't evolve at the pace of available
| innovation, that particular blockchain will be superseded by a
| new one. That said, a (truly democratic) evolutionary process is
| a core part of every blockchain specification.
|
| 3. You can get blockchain data via public (and federated/proxied)
| API, but you can always cryptographically verify its veracity,
| and your edge device (e.g. your smartphone) can do that. The same
| the other way around, you cryptographically sign the inputs you
| send to the networks, so that no federated API can tamper them,
| because the secret key stays on your device. This is referred to
| as the "trust-less model".
| solarmist wrote:
| I wouldn't unless it was a significant incentive (order of
| $100/month), and even then, I might not do it if it wasn't
| relevant to my life.
|
| And this is predicated on it being zero-maintenance/upkeep for
| me.
| slackfan wrote:
| "People don't want to run their own servers, and never will"
|
| I think that this is where this premise is entirely incorrect.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Evidence suggests otherwise...
| lekevicius wrote:
| While it's refreshing to hear critique from someone who actually
| built something on web3, there are a couple of points where I'd
| dare to disagree, somewhat.
|
| Particularly, regarding "early days". It really is, still, early
| days, because there is a lot of complexity in getting all the
| pieces built. It took years to get overall blockchain going.
| Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart
| contracts). Other pieces too: more efficient consensus mechanisms
| and clever ways to express commitments, decentralized storage,
| etc. And the space is so far from being done.
|
| Particulary, about servers being clients. This is true today, but
| it would be wrong to say that nobody cares about it. Ethereum
| developers spend considerable effort on pushing the idea of light
| clients, going as far as re-architecturing the way whole
| blockchain state is stored, so that browsers could actually
| become fully valid clients, and services such as Infura would
| become a lot less necessary. This requires cryptographic
| innovations (verkle trees), client implementations, consensus
| between participants, etc. It is likely to require 2+ years to
| get there. Early days.
|
| Another moment I would critique is the clever NFT, that displays
| different things. Yes, ERC-721 allows any URL as metadata file,
| so you can put traditional DNS-resolved URL there. But I would
| struggle to find any "respected" NFT collection that actually
| does that. Almost every high quality NFT project (Art Blocks,
| BAYC, so on) has IPFS as metadata URL, and goes as far as to
| freeze metadata, so it couldn't ever be changed.
|
| Lastly, his discussion about value of decentralization is very
| valid. Yes, Ethereum developers spend a lot of effort on light
| clients. Will anyone care to use them? Yes, best NFT collections
| freeze metadata pointed to IPFT... does anyone care? Success of
| OpenSea and Binance Smart Chain shows that for many, idealistic
| goals are irrelevant, as long as money can be made. That's fine.
| But there are some of us who actually care. Majority has
| uninteresting goals (money). There are still amazing gems to be
| found.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| My understanding of IPFS is that there is some DNS-and-HTTP
| translation step that resolves content to IPFS locations. Is
| that correct, and is it immutable? How does that work?
| lekevicius wrote:
| There are many gateways that allow viewing IPFS content over
| HTTP (e.g. ipfs.io), but the "true" IPFS experience is not
| over HTTP, it's done via P2P and addressed using content
| hashes. For example, one of my NFTs has content hash of
|
| QmTqkpmbKmciQgqhUWpML7dsJ59MBEjgQd7wH853n4ASZM
|
| I keep a copy of it on my computer (+ backups). If for some
| reason it were to be unhosted by every IPFS participant, I
| could become one, and re-establish my NFT. Image content ->
| content hash, so everyone would agree about content re-
| establishing.
|
| Not sure if I fully answered your question.
| mkl wrote:
| Specifically, that gateway (and some (all?) others) needs
| "/ipfs/" in the URL: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTqkpmbKmciQgqhU
| WpML7dsJ59MBEjgQd7wH85...
|
| Took me a while to figure it out, but the docs are here:
| https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/address-ipfs-on-web/
|
| I also ran into several apparently no-longer-functional
| gateways in lists from just a few months ago. So yes, not
| the true experience.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Thanks, that is indeed a good description. It does sound
| like this is basically the content hashing Moxie was hoping
| for.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Content on IPFS is keyed by hash values. The data is
| immutable at least to the extent that it's impractical to
| find a hash collision with sha256 (today). The content will
| also only remain up so long as _someone_ (either the initial
| submitter or others) has it pinned. Otherwise, the content
| will, eventually, disappear.
| yata69420 wrote:
| I think this is the right take.
|
| I'd add that having a globally readable ledger encourages
| interoperability in ways we can't yet appreciate.
|
| I believe that ERC-731 is valuable for the same reason that
| GIF89a is valuable.
|
| I don't think anyone in 1989 could have predicted meme culture
| and the importance of the gif, but it happened because an
| enabling technology (communicate with animations) arrived and
| people started experimenting.
|
| NFTs will probably become part of daily life in unexpected
| ways, because an enabling technology (cryptographic ownership
| of assets) has arrived and people are starting to experiment.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > I believe that ERC-731 is valuable for the same reason that
| GIF89a is valuable.
|
| GIFs can be created, parsed, read, played, copied, deleted on
| commodity hardware for free. GIFs became popular because they
| were so easy to exchange because video formats were so heavy
| and patent encumbered at the time (less so than GIF was,
| anyway). The cultural phenomenon of reaction GIFs arose
| because of its accessibility.
|
| Tell me how a child is supposed to safely do the following:
| easily create a wallet, somehow get some Ethereum, and starts
| minting and/or buying NFTs. None of that is even remotely
| comparable to ease of use of GIFs on the internet.
|
| If you want to argue that "cryptographic ownership of assets"
| is going to be commonplace, that's fine, but only for
| strictly digital onchain assets. It's never going to apply to
| any asset in meatspace because humans have sticks and stones
| to get what they want and renders your claims irrelevant.
|
| If you lose access to your wallet for whatever reason, be it
| fire, flood, social engineering, forgetting your password,
| death, solar flare, it's gone forever. If you depended on it
| for anything important, there's no recourse. Let's say there
| are cryptocoin insurance companies. How do you prove that you
| don't secretly still have access to your wallet?
|
| I am not buying it.
| endorphine wrote:
| > It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to
| understand the need of programmability (smart contracts)
|
| When was this need "understood"? When was it realized? How
| exactly?
|
| I find it a bit paradoxical to say that "we understood the need
| for smart contracts right after the blockchain was invented".
| What problem did smart contracts solve when they were invented?
| eezurr wrote:
| >Another moment I would critique is the clever NFT, that
| displays different things. Yes, ERC-721 allows any URL as
| metadata file, so you can put traditional DNS-resolved URL
| there. But I would struggle to find any "respected" NFT
| collection that actually does that. Almost every high quality
| NFT project (Art Blocks, BAYC, so on) has IPFS as metadata URL,
| and goes as far as to freeze metadata, so it couldn't ever be
| changed.
|
| The problem with digital art is that it is infinitely copyable
| (at no cost) and untraceable (with little effort, and a
| huge/impossible effort to trace backwards). There's nothing
| stopping an artist from selling a work of art as edition 1 of
| 1, and then a month later "minting" another copy or 10.
| Secondly, there's no way to prove the image uploaded is from
| the original owner. What happens if someone steals someone
| else's work, mints an NFT and sells it, and the buyer finds out
| the next day?
|
| Thus, I cant be convinced a "respected" NFT collection /
| distributor can exist.
| serverholic wrote:
| > There's nothing stopping an artist from selling a work of
| art as edition 1 of 1, and then a month later "minting"
| another copy or 10.
|
| There is a social cost to making a promise and breaking it.
|
| > What happens if someone steals someone else's work, mints
| an NFT and sells it, and the buyer finds out the next day?
|
| Don't buy from random sources. You have similar problems with
| Pokemon cards, for example. Lots of fakes and it's often hard
| to tell a fake. However, people have found ways around the
| issue.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| "social cost" sounds like another way of saying "real-world
| trust".
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Yes. The point of blockchains is to be able to trade
| value without middlemen. You still have to verify that
| what you're buying is legitimate.
| luhn wrote:
| Re "early days," servers as clients, etc: There are a lot of
| very real problems with crypto, and the solution always lies in
| new technologies. Slow settlement and high gas fees? L2
| networks. Limited global TPS? More L2 networks or alternative
| L1 chains. Wasteful energy use? Proof-of-stake. No connection
| to real world data? Oracles. Relying on centralized APIs? Light
| clients are in the works. Can't trust that you'll get an
| untampered version of the dapp? I don't even know the solution
| for this but I saw a very complicated flowchart about it, so I
| assume there is one.
|
| Every layer adding more complexity and more fingers in the pie.
|
| All the while, nothing ever _actually_ seems to get fixed.
| Like, high gas fees has been a conversation for years and
| clever people have made dozens of solutions, but everybody
| seems to still use vanilla Ethereum.
|
| And these problems don't seem to be the usual problems of new
| technologies dealing with limited feature sets and primitive
| tooling, these problems fundamentally undermine the whole point
| of blockchain. It's not like you can only make simple
| distributed apps and more advance stuff will arrive as the
| space matures, you literally can't make a practical, truly
| distributed app at the moment.
|
| The more I learn about web3 the more it seems like vaporware,
| and the end result will be a bunch of web3-in-name-only, VC
| cash-grab apps.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| "All the while, nothing ever actually seems to get fixed."
|
| Meanwhile, Bitcoin just works, and it is fairly easy to
| understand.
|
| Every once in a while I try to get excited about Ethereum.
| They really do seem to think about a lot of interesting
| things and try to address them. But at the end of the day, it
| all just seems way too complex.
|
| As for NFTs, I think they could just be colored coins on the
| Bitcoin Blockchain, which would also be easy to understand.
| pixel_tracing wrote:
| I'm sorry but to clarify a few points here, Bitcoin "works"
| technically, and it works as a speculation and black market
| vehicle. It has not replaced the US dollar. I don't see
| people having a need to use it when shopping groceries,
| paying for concert tickets, etc even when the option to do
| so is there.
|
| This is precisely the authors point.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| The comment I was replying to was about technical
| problems, like high gas fees.
|
| You can use fiat for speculation and black markets.
|
| It would be weird to define "crypto works" as "people
| have to use it for shopping". It would be nice to be able
| to use it with more shops, but that is another matter. I
| know people who keep their savings in crypto and pay with
| credit cards that are backed by crypto.
|
| Whether you "need" for example becomes an ideological
| question. If you agree with governments monetary
| politics, I guess you don't need it.
| lekevicius wrote:
| I'm sorry, it's difficult for me to find a truly charitable
| interpretation of this response. But I'll do my best.
|
| Blockchains started very simply. Famously, Bitcoin's
| whitepaper is just a couple of pages long. Simple systems are
| nice, but they can't solve every problem. As problems were
| discovered, solutions were proposed. Most solutions were
| themselves the simplest solutions to a given problem, so
| naturally, as new problems are found, new solutions almost
| always introduce complexity. This is not unique to crypto -
| see, for example, HTTP, or HDMI...
|
| I can't see a world where this wouldn't happen. Ideas usually
| start small and simple. Additional capabilities introduce
| complexity. That is not a bad thing.
|
| Also not a bad thing: people taking different approaches to
| identified problems. Ethereum saw congested L1 and didn't
| want to sacrifice decentralization, so they focused their
| effort on L2. Other developers thought differently, and
| adopted faster, less decentralized L1s. Great!
|
| > you literally can't make a practical, truly distributed app
| at the moment
|
| Another issue is that the goalpost is ever-shifting. We have
| truly distributed apps. Because they were successful, they
| got used, and on one particular L1 that meant expensive
| competition for block space. Does that make the achievement
| invalid? Or does the fact that most popular browsers
| currently don't have built-in integration with ENS and IPFS,
| allowing for decentralized frontends, also make the effort
| invalid?
|
| Again, I struggle with truly charitable interpretation of
| your argument.
| tome wrote:
| > it's difficult for me to find a truly charitable
| interpretation of this response
|
| > I struggle with truly charitable interpretation of your
| argument.
|
| It's the same for everyone when they come across a comment
| they don't like. No need to tell us, just make your reply
| and everyone else can determine for themselves whether the
| response was charitable.
| preseinger wrote:
| "Successful" is an ambiguous descriptor. What do you have
| in mind when you say that? From where I sit, ENS and IPFS
| are unambiguous failures. Do you disagree?
| serverholic wrote:
| Ok I'll bite. Why are ENS and IPFS failures?
| preseinger wrote:
| Because they don't work. They're too slow and unavailable
| to meaningfully address the goals they were meant to
| solve.
|
| That's my opinion. But you didn't give me yours.
| yed wrote:
| > This is not unique to crypto - see, for example, HTTP, or
| HDMI...
|
| HTTP and HDMI provided actually useful things to regular
| people despite their shortcomings. Crypto has been solving
| technical problem after technical problem for over a decade
| but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast.
|
| > Another issue is that the goalpost is ever-shifting. We
| have truly distributed apps.
|
| And the only thing they are useful for is moving crypto
| around between enthusiasts. "Make something useful for
| regular people" should not be difficult goalpost for
| something that claims to be world changing.
| nonima wrote:
| > Crypto has been solving technical problem after
| technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer
| anything useful to a non-enthusiast.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-
| produces-su...
|
| https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-venezuela-
| bit...
|
| https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/turkeys-inflation-is-an-
| exam...
|
| https://www.borgenmagazine.com/bitcoin-in-el-salvador/
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Crypto has been solving technical problem after
| technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer
| anything useful to a non-enthusiast._
|
| This is too dismissive of Crypto. I'm not a crypto bro
| but Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a
| completely digital decentralized immutable record. I
| hesitate to call it a currency, but it created something
| that was digitally scarce . The economic value it created
| can be seen in the Silk Road or in ransomware.
|
| At one point the internet was also a problem looking for
| a solution too so I don't think it's a fair criticism of
| the technology.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > At one point the internet was also a problem looking
| for a solution
|
| 1. The internet was a solution to a very specific
| problem. Go and educate yourself on what ARPA was doing,
| will you?
|
| 2. Crypto peddlers keep equating cryptocurrencies to the
| internet. And never ever equating it to Juicero or Enron
| even if all signs point to that.
| yed wrote:
| > Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely
| digital decentralized immutable record.
|
| That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a
| technical solution.
|
| > I hesitate to call it a currency, but it created
| something that was digitally scarce.
|
| My comment was about web3 really and the associated hype,
| not so much cryptocurrencies themselves. I agree there's
| something there, though not entirely convinced it won't
| always be illegal sales or scams.
|
| > At one point the internet was also a problem looking
| for a solution too so I don't think it's a fair criticism
| of the technology.
|
| I see this repeated a lot but it's just not accurate.
| E-mail was invented within like 2 years of the internet
| and immediately allowed universities to exchange messages
| with one another. It doesn't take a networking enthusiast
| to see the value in sending a textual message instantly
| across the globe. Meanwhile I've never seen even a
| _description_ of a web3 product that doesn 't rely on
| architecture or politics to explain why it's useful.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > I see this repeated a lot but it's just not accurate.
| E-mail was invented within like 2 years of the internet
| and immediately allowed universities to exchange messages
| with one another.
|
| This is untrue. Look at my answer here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29847559 .
| p1esk wrote:
| But it is true. It is pretty clear that "Internet" in
| this context means "ARPANET", built in 1969. First email
| was sent over ARPANET in 1971.
|
| ARPANET was built to solve a very real and clearly
| defined problem - connecting computers over a shared
| network. Here's the original problem statement:
|
| _For each of these three terminals, I had three
| different sets of user commands. So if I was talking
| online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to
| someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to
| get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the
| other terminal and get in touch with them.... I said, oh
| man, it 's obvious what to do: If you have these three
| terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes
| anywhere you want to go where you have interactive
| computing. That idea is the ARPAnet._
|
| Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Inte
| rnet#ARPANE...
|
| To me it seems like crypto still hasn't found its killer
| application, 13 years after its creation.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| But still, the point is that even ARPANET solved real
| problems: instant message exchange in text form, without
| the need for specialized telegraph operators, is a real
| problem with real value for anyone who can afford it -
| even at the scale of ARPANET.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| That was being done by teleprinters, from the late 1800s.
| The UNIX concept of the TTY comes from teleprinters and
| teletype.
| p1esk wrote:
| As a non-enthusiast I agree with your points. I've heard
| a lot about cryptocurrencies since 2010 and I've never
| had a need to use them. Paying for goods or services on a
| black market might be a valid use case, but I, like vast
| majority of people, have never needed to do that. Smart
| contracts sound like an interesting concept, but again, I
| don't really have anything in my life that could use them
| in the foreseeable future.
| grog454 wrote:
| > That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a
| technical solution.
|
| I'll present a problem that that solution solves. That
| cryptographically backed record establishes a closer
| approximation to the abstract idea of "ownership" than
| anything has before.
|
| I was a pretty naive first-time home owner in that I was
| surprised to learn about something called "property tax".
| "property rent" would be a better description, since its
| not a one time fee (like most taxes) but something you
| have to pay to a government entity in perpetuity. Don't
| feel like paying it? You get booted off "your"
| "property".
|
| Title theft and fraud are also a thing, and we even have
| "title insurance" to help mitigate falling victim to it.
|
| Neither of these things is possible on a cryptographic
| blockchain (eviction or theft). Ownership of the NFT
| cannot physically be altered without the owner's
| volition. Establishing a link between the NFT and the
| underlying asset is certainly a problem, but it's not one
| that blockchains are attempting to solve.
| shagie wrote:
| Property titles are interesting things.
|
| Consider the title to some property on the blockchain.
|
| What happens in the following scenarios to the title
| ownership when: * the owner passes away
| with heirs * the owner passes away without heirs
| * the house burns down and the hard drive holding the
| private key is lost
|
| How does the title on the blockchain get transfered to a
| new owner in any of these situations?
| grog454 wrote:
| Finally an interesting problem. Off the top of my head
| I'd guess you'd issue a new token to executor of the
| estate and establish that token as representative of the
| underlying asset rather than the original token.
| shagie wrote:
| If that can be done, can it be done through other
| processes? Like eminent domain? failure to pay property
| taxes? divorce settlements? property lien?
|
| If a title-token on the blockchain can be changed through
| external systems that don't involve the transfer the
| title-token itself - saying that the old token is no
| longer valid, this new one is the valid one, how does the
| blockchain protect against title theft or fraud?
|
| If there is the ability to mint a new title-token for a
| given property, what's the point of it and what
| advantages does it have over the existing records?
| grog454 wrote:
| I suppose it could work a little bit like freezing your
| credit report. There is a school of thought that a credit
| report should be frozen by default (to deter identity
| theft) and only unfrozen for certain major events.
|
| So with crypto, you could get benefits analogous to a
| default-frozen credit report, plus the ability to do
| _some_ transactions, and would only "unfreeze" (ie give
| up the protection of crypto) for these rare, ultra
| catastrophic events such as loss of life, loss or
| compromise of private key.
|
| > If that can be done, can it be done through other
| processes? Like eminent domain? failure to pay property
| taxes? divorce settlements? property lien?
|
| So no it wouldn't be done for any other processes. You
| can still attempt to induce transfer of assets (there is
| still a legal and punitive system). But "ownership" now
| has a stronger meaning.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| There absolutely could be rent/tax as well. Say you had
| to interact with a smart contract to do things with your
| title. That contract as well as having fees to execute at
| all can also take a cut. This is quite common already.
| grog454 wrote:
| I used the example of property tax to challenge the idea
| that I had (and assume a lot of people have) of
| "ownership".
|
| With blockchains, you own an NFT. Period.
|
| With literally every other form of ownership in this
| world: You own things _subject to your adherence to laws
| and rules, and your trust in the person or entity at the
| other end of your transactions, and various other people
| /entities involved in the transaction_.
|
| The difference is actually quite subtle, but still
| important.
| WA wrote:
| > Establishing a link between the NFT and the underlying
| asset is certainly a problem, but it's not one that
| blockchains are attempting to solve.
|
| Ownership that translates to the physical world is the
| only thing that matters. In the digital world, everything
| can be copied. There is no ownership.
|
| Ownership happens only, because in the real world, some
| authority/court/government (as a proxy for society)
| acknowledge your ownership.
|
| Now you're saying that blockchains don't even try to link
| the ownership part to the underlying asset. What is it
| good for then?
| grog454 wrote:
| >In the digital world, everything can be copied. There is
| no ownership.
|
| Actually I think you've got it backwards. In the physical
| world, molecules are fungible. I can take one carbon atom
| out of the Mona Lisa painting, replace it with some
| different carbon atom, and most people would call it the
| exact same Mona Lisa. Maybe one day an atom-level
| reproduction of the Mona Lisa will be possible. The whole
| point of the Non Fungible in NFTs is that they are
| mathematically not interchangeable.
|
| I'm getting philosophical now but I'd argue ownership in
| the physical world is inherently flawed, to the point
| that "ownership" is a meaningless ideal. You are
| extremely limited in your ability to affect various forms
| of matter in the universe. This includes affecting matter
| in a way that most people would think represents
| "ownership", for example transporting some good from one
| location to another location that we'd say puts it in
| your "possession". Some individual can come rob you. A
| government can seize your assets. A meteor can annihilate
| the planet. And there is next to nothing you can do about
| it.
|
| But you have supreme power to affect the data that is
| associated with your wallet on a cryptographic ledger
| (subject to another person/wallet that you are engaging
| in transactions with), as long as your private key is
| truly private, and as long as cryptography is
| mathematically sound. I think that's kind of cool.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Ownership of the NFT cannot physically be altered
| without the owner's volition.
|
| Until you own a house on the NFT and realize that NFTs
| has literally zero relationship between you and the
| object you "own".
| p1esk wrote:
| I'm sorry, I still don't get it. What is the problem with
| a house ownership that crypto would solve? Would it
| eliminate the property tax? Would it eliminate an
| eviction if I don't pay the property tax? Would it
| eliminate one type of ownership fraud without introducing
| a new type of ownership fraud?
| grog454 wrote:
| It would eliminate
|
| 1. forfeiture without volition (https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...)
|
| 2. title theft/fraud (https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvic
| e/comments/pyhjwv/home_fo...)
|
| 3. Many of the needs for title insurance (https://www.inv
| estopedia.com/terms/t/title_insurance.asp)
|
| It doesn't need to do much else to be obviously
| beneficial. Keep in mind that once upon a time the entire
| internet functioned without https. I have no doubt many
| of the same arguments against crypto(currency, tokens)
| were also made against cryto(graphy) not long ago. A vast
| majority of users of cryptography still subject
| themselves to side channel attacks (stupid passwords,
| phishing) and yet somehow still benefit from the
| existence of https without even realizing it.
|
| Since a lot of people still get hung up on the need for a
| link between an NFT and an underlying asset, consider
| that we somehow establish the exact same kind of link
| between a fancy piece of paper (a title) and a plot of
| land. If you forewent some of the (imo misled) notions
| that blockchains need to be 100% "trustless" and
| decentralized, and you JUST upgraded your county's title
| database with a blockchain, and you accepted that various
| forms of government are going to have to enforce a lot of
| it, hopefully it is evident how (1) (2) and (3) above now
| go away or at least change significantly.
| acdha wrote:
| > 1. forfeiture without volition (https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...)
|
| Only if the authorities ceded their power to the
| blockchain, in which case this situation is unlikely to
| arise. If the sovereign power in the area says you don't
| own it, a record on someone else's computer doesn't
| matter much.
|
| > 2. title theft/fraud (https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladv
| ice/comments/pyhjwv/home_fo...)
|
| By replacing it with electronic fraud, which is much
| easier to do at scale and harder to disprove. If a good
| phish / zero-day gets you a house's worth of money, even
| more people will try it.
|
| > 3. Many of the needs for title insurance
| (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/title_insura
|
| It only solves the question of transfers, possibly but
| currently not at lower expense than your local
| government. It doesn't solve the analog problems which
| are the most important reason to have title insurance,
| such as surveying errors, and you also have new problems
| like the possibility of someone claiming a malicious
| transaction years ago.
| grog454 wrote:
| > Only if the authorities ceded their power to the
| blockchain, in which case this situation is unlikely to
| arise.
|
| Great! Let's do it. It might take a few thousand years
| but this doesn't represent a problem with blockchain
| technology. The authority can and should still be around
| to enforce the blockchain, but they should still have to
| respect it.
|
| >By replacing it with electronic fraud, which is much
| easier to do at scale and harder to disprove. If a good
| phish / zero-day gets you a house's worth of money, even
| more people will try it.
|
| This is an argument against electronic records, not
| blockchain specifically. They are side channel attacks.
|
| > and you also have new problems like the possibility of
| someone claiming a malicious transaction years ago.
|
| What do you mean by this? Maybe an example would help.
| ben_w wrote:
| > The authority can and should still be around to enforce
| the blockchain, but they should still have to respect it.
|
| Why?
|
| I'm serious, by the way. This seems like the same sort of
| thinking I see in supporters of various anarcho-x-isms,
| where whichever x is substituted in, it is somehow
| retained despite the anarchy.
|
| You might like the shiny new thing, but anyone whose job
| it is to enforce the things shiny does, can do that at
| much lower cost by using the current mechanisms instead
| of the shiny.
| grog454 wrote:
| Because that cost is, at least theoretically, offset by
| additional benefits. I'm not arguing in favor of reduced
| authority. People seem to conflate decentralization with
| anarchy.
|
| I'd like to be able to not even have to think about this
| happening: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comme
| nts/pywwnp/how...
|
| I'd like to know that when I sell something on
| Craigslist, the currency I'm receiving for my good isn't
| counterfeit.
|
| I'd like to know that when I receive $50 on Venmo/Paypal
| out of the blue:(https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance
| /comments/q60vnv/ven...) I don't have to wonder whether
| that $50 is legitimate, or about to vanish when Venmo
| realizes _they_ got scammed. Better hope you didn 't send
| the $50 back to the scammer, because somehow your
| transaction is more "authentic" than the scammer's, and
| Venmo's still going to disappear $50 from your account.
|
| Oh and if someone writes me a fraudulent check and I cash
| it out, I'd better have some lawyers ready.
| ben_w wrote:
| > People seem to conflate decentralization with anarchy.
|
| Heh, I'm sorry I guess I phrased that badly. I'm saying
| there _is_ an authority in all anarcho-x-isms, one which
| proponents ignore.
|
| My intention was to suggest an analogy of that hidden
| authority in blockchains, in that everything blockchain
| can do, can also be done cheaper by having a trusted
| party do the conventional stuff, and in some cases --
| such as legal disputes, where you have to bring in a
| trusted mediator -- you end up with all the weaknesses of
| _both_ the conventional approach _and_ blockchain.
|
| > I'd like to be able to not even have to think about
| this happening: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/
| comments/pywwnp/how...
|
| We all would, but blockchains don't prevent that. If
| anything it makes the problem more likely, because the
| current status quo is reversible in a court when
| sufficient evidence is supplied, but in the blockchain,
| possession of the private key _is_ ownership.
|
| Private keys get lost and stolen all the time even for
| relatively trivial things; in the case of property
| ownership, even if the private key is permanently offline
| -- e.g. existing only in the form of a QR code on a sheet
| of paper in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck
| in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying
| "Beware of the Leopard" -- for something as valuable as
| property, you can bet it _would_ be stolen.
|
| > I'd like to know that when I receive $50 on
| Venmo/Paypal out of the blue:
|
| To which the direct counterpart is: what happens on a
| blockchain if _you_ get scammed and want your money back?
| Do you really want the authorities to do what the
| blockchain says, or do you want your money back?
| acdha wrote:
| > This is an argument against electronic records, not
| blockchain specifically. They are side channel attacks.
|
| What makes it a blockchain problem is removing the
| safeguards. If you are saying the blockchain is an
| immutable record controlled by individual private keys,
| you are saying that any mistake is permanent. If you
| allow corrections, you don't need the expense of a
| blockchain.
|
| > > and you also have new problems like the possibility
| of someone claiming a malicious transaction years ago. >
| What do you mean by this? Maybe an example would help.
|
| I go to buy your house. You show me the chain saying you
| own it. A month later, someone says you phished their
| grandfather who was in hospice (or that the transaction
| was made by a spouse without approval, etc.) and now
| there's a dispute about whether the transaction was
| authorized. Traditionally this is handled with third
| parties who can confirm that, say, they had everyone in
| the same room and checked ID. Moving to a model where
| access to a private key is all that matters requires
| similar solutions before you can say it removes the need
| for title insurance.
| grog454 wrote:
| > What makes it a blockchain problem is removing the
| safeguards. If you are saying the blockchain is an
| immutable record controlled by individual private keys,
| you are saying that any mistake is permanent. If you
| allow corrections, you don't need the expense of a
| blockchain.
|
| That makes sense. I think the need to correct mistakes,
| and mistakes I concede will definitely happen, is
| debatable. There are benefits to some for correcting
| mistakes and costs to some for it as well. Figuring out
| whether the benefit exceeds the cost is way out of my
| scope.
|
| This reminds me of another problem that I've I haven't
| seen mentioned yet.
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/half-a-
| billion... In a fixed supply cryptocurrency like bitcoin
| these kind of losses will inevitably lead to deflation.
|
| > Moving to a model where access to a private key is all
| that matters requires similar solutions before you can
| say it removes the need for title insurance.
|
| You're right, and I was careful not to say "all" of the
| needs for title insurance.
|
| I think its worth considering the possibility that not
| being able to correct even that emotionally charged dying
| grandfather case, and instead seeking recompense between
| the two parties most directly involved in the crime (the
| grandfather and me in your example) is OK. For example,
| I'm now required to purchase a newly minted and desirably
| worthless "restitution" NFT from the grandfather for the
| price I sold the house (or the market value, or w/e is
| fair), or I go to jail. If we try to backtrack the whole
| transaction, you are now probably being harmed as well.
| Is that really better? What if we figure this out 10
| years after the initial sale, and the property has
| changed hands 5 times already. Good luck rolling that
| back.
|
| Edit: I have just started reading the bitcoin whitepaper
| and at least half of the introduction is about the
| possible benefits of the irreversibility of transactions.
| https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
| p1esk wrote:
| Looking at this thread it's not clear if any one of the 3
| examples you provided (civil forfeiture, title fraud,
| need for title insurance) would benefit from crypto
| technology today, and it's not clear if they would ever
| benefit from it (3 thousand years from now is not a good
| argument).
|
| I hope you realize how unconvincing all this sounds to a
| non-enthusiast. Without a killer application (like email
| for the internet) I'm afraid crypto isn't very useful,
| and it's been 13 years without a killer application.
| grog454 wrote:
| What exactly isn't clear? How cryptography works /
| benefits people? How applying cryptography to ledgers and
| ownership databases works? Or how it's all going to be
| enforced?
|
| By the way I'm not pro crypto in that I'm not trying to
| convince people to put money into it. I think the energy
| costs of all crypto token systems are prohibitively high
| right now. That, and the deflation problem I personally
| think are the biggest unsolved problems in Bitcoin right
| now.. But somehow I can't even get past what a
| cryptographic ledger _is_ and how it 's _beneficial_ on
| this forum, of all forums. Yikes.
|
| I've been patiently explaining my understanding of the
| _ideas_ behind crypto. 3Blue1Brown seems to be favorably
| received on this forum, so maybe this will help educate
| you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 NFTs are
| a natural extension of a cryptographic ledger as it's
| explained in that video. It's just adding non fungible
| tokens to the otherwise fungible bitcoin tokens being
| exchanged on the blockchain, and we'd like those non
| fungible tokens to represent real world objects, rather
| than just USD.
|
| Aside: I feel like we're in the dark age of
| cryptocurrencies right now. People are just incredibly
| unimaginable. I imagine 7,000 years ago there was a guy
| named Bob who wanted to trade his apples for some
| oranges. A girl named Alice wanted some apples but didn't
| have any oranges so instead she offers a piece of gold
| jewelry. Most of the Bob's on this forum would tell her
| to ** off. But there was some Bob who accepted the gold
| jewelry realizing he could then exchange that jewelry for
| Tom's oranges. Suddenly we went from a barter society to
| one that uses a currency.
|
| Eventually we stopped using gold as a currency and
| started using slips of paper with lots of fancy
| counterfeit protection mechanisms like blue and red
| threads and fancy inks. Along comes cryptocurrency with
| mathematically provable counterfeit protection
| mechanisms, and no one sees the benefit. I just don't get
| it.
| p1esk wrote:
| It's very clear how _cryptography_ benefits people. We
| are not discussing that, we are discussing
| cryptocurrencies and blockchains and cryptographic
| ledgers. And we are not looking to explain how all that
| works, because first we need to identify real world
| problems which would be solved by those technologies, and
| yes, somehow you can 't get past how they are beneficial.
| You have provided three examples, but others have
| questioned whether crypto would solve them, and I don't
| believe you have provided adequate arguments to defend
| your position. It was fairly easy for me to understand
| the motivation behind cloud computing, or stock market,
| or credit cards. Blockchains originally sounded like it
| might be something as significant. Yet many years later
| nothing particular useful has materialized. And it's not
| even clear if it ever will.
| grog454 wrote:
| > and I don't believe you have provided adequate
| arguments to defend your position.
|
| We'll have to agree to disagree then. Maybe a more
| relatable and simpler problem would help, this one
| exclusively with cryptocurrency (no NFTs):
|
| I can print a piece of cotton/paper that looks like a US
| dollar bill, manipulate it and with enough effort make it
| look convincing enough to fool someone in to thinking its
| a real dollar, then go to the store and exchange it for
| some good. I simply cannot do that with a Bitcoin.
|
| If you want to debate whether or not fabricating a dollar
| bill out of something significantly less valuable than a
| dollar bill is a problem that needs solving, find someone
| else.
|
| If you want to debate whether or not you can fabricate a
| Bitcoin out of nothing, you're now entering the realm of
| theoretical mathematics. I am not an expert in that, but
| the crypotgraphy and cryptology classes I took as an
| undergrad ~15 years ago were good enough for me to trust
| it.
|
| If you want to debate whether that singular problem is
| worth a system like Bitcoin, you're probably on to
| something but it seems like we haven't gotten to that
| point yet.
| acdha wrote:
| > I can print a piece of cotton/paper that looks like a
| US dollar bill, manipulate it and with enough effort make
| it look convincing enough to fool someone in to thinking
| its a real dollar, then go to the store and exchange it
| for some good. I simply cannot do that with a Bitcoin.
|
| This is true but rare because it's harder to do than it
| might seem and the U.S. Secret Service is quite good at
| shutting down counterfeiters. This costs less as a
| fraction of the economy than operating the Bitcoin
| network does, and it still provides true anonymity.
| grog454 wrote:
| Thank you. All I was looking to do was convince someone
| that crypto does indeed provide a theoretical benefit, so
| that the conversation could evolve from "crypto SUCKS,
| and it doesn't do ANYTHING GOOD, and its a SCAM (read: I
| lost money speculating), and I DON'T LIKE IT", to: are
| the problems that crypto solves worth the costs.
|
| Other problems/solutions aside, there is probably some
| gas fee that would make crypto worth it just for anti-
| counterfeiting. Do you have any sources for a numeric
| estimate on what counterfeiting costs the US economy?
| p1esk wrote:
| Yes, counterfeiting is a problem. But just to clarify, to
| solve it - are you proposing we replace US dollar with
| bitcoin? If you are, have you thought this through? Has
| anyone? Do you think this will happen in the foreseeable
| future?
| grog454 wrote:
| Thinking this through is exactly what I want the
| conversation to be about. I'll help you out:
|
| [2006] "Counterfeiting of the currency of the United
| States is widely attempted. According to the United
| States Department of Treasury, an estimated $70 million
| in counterfeit bills are in circulation, or approximately
| 1 note in counterfeits for every 10,000 in genuine
| currency, with an upper bound of $200 million
| counterfeit, or 1 counterfeit per 4,000 genuine
| notes.[1][2] However, these numbers are based on annual
| seizure rates on counterfeiting, and the actual stock of
| counterfeit money is uncertain because some counterfeit
| notes successfully circulate for a few transactions."
| (source: https://www.treasury.gov/about/organizational-
| structure/offi...)
|
| I think Bitcoin representing the totality of USD is
| infeasible, but there may be some adjustments or
| optimizations to the transaction costs associated with it
| that make a new currency seem more reasonable (no less
| scary, certainly, but fright is an emotion and economics
| is mathematical).
|
| (edited quote to be more relevant to cryptocurrency
| specifically)
| p1esk wrote:
| I'm confused, is the problem counterfeit currency, or
| counterfeit goods? Because if latter, I don't see how
| crypto is relevant, and if former it does not seem like
| such a huge problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counte
| rfeit_United_States_curr...
| grog454 wrote:
| Fixed my quote. At this point I'm having a conversation
| with myself, so mistakes are bound to become more likely.
| I'll probably revisit this in a few days (or just take my
| thoughts elsewhere) but for now I'm out!
| ben_w wrote:
| Awesome! I find it really pleasantly surprising when
| people take time to sit and think about things rather
| than reacting quickly, so regardless of whether or not I
| find myself agreeing with whatever conclusions you reach,
| I appreciate you doing this :)
| acdha wrote:
| > That makes sense. I think the need to correct mistakes,
| and mistakes I concede will definitely happen, is
| debatable. There are benefits to some for correcting
| mistakes and costs to some for it as well. Figuring out
| whether the benefit exceeds the cost is way out of my
| scope.
|
| > This reminds me of another problem that I've I haven't
| seen mentioned yet.
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/half-a-
| billion... In a fixed supply cryptocurrency like bitcoin
| these kind of losses will inevitably lead to deflation.
|
| This to me is the big question: you could solve a lot of
| these by introducing trusted third parties but once
| you've done that it really raises the question of whether
| you need the full blockchain level of processing overhead
| or some kind of distributed ledger. Lots of people have
| been in situations where they were mugged, an elderly
| and/or impaired family member made a mistake or was taken
| advantage of, etc. and they were able to recover by
| proving this to a bank or similar institution. It can be
| painful but it's an important option to have for most
| people and I think that's going to be a key impediment to
| people trusting a system. I do this professionally and
| I'm not sure I'd want to commit to something where
| someone who gets my private key with a zero-day can do
| whatever they want.
| boopboopbadoop wrote:
| > Ownership of the NFT cannot physically be altered
| without the owner's volition.
|
| Yes it can, if something nefarious happens - phishing, an
| account hack, etc. As soon as the account changing the
| record is compromised (e.g. NFT owner account), the NFTs
| are gone with no central authority to get them back. E.g.
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb4nq/investor-says-
| bored-a...
|
| The real estate example is interesting, how does changing
| a record work? Does the home owner do it, or some central
| authority?
| meowkit wrote:
| >> Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a
| completely digital decentralized immutable record.
|
| > That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a
| technical solution.
|
| The problem is that we can't seem to form consensus in a
| world inundated with technology. Bitcoin and other chains
| have shown that you can create a state that reaches
| consensus under specified rules that are enforceable by
| computation and not violence.
|
| Yes it has many problems, and the consensus is limited to
| the blockchain "world", but I envision a future where
| block chains can be valuable "truth" layers to the
| computation stack that society operates on.
|
| Practically, I believe blockchains can be solution for
| creating online decentralized identity
| (https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/security/business/identity-a...), which will help
| solve our information consensus problems
| (https://consilienceproject.org/democracy-and-the-
| epistemic-c...).
|
| I also believe they have much to offer in modernizing the
| financial system, and providing better ways for
| governments to implement monetary policy.
| p1esk wrote:
| _The problem is that we can 't seem to form consensus in
| a world inundated with technology._
|
| I have no idea what you mean. What is the problem?
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Enough tooling has been built (IPFS, Polygon, etc) that
| we're starting to use these tools for computational
| biology, as part of @lab_dao
|
| This wasn't possible 2 years ago! So I think they have
| made strides; it's just hard to see
| doopy1 wrote:
| Art Blocks is completely on-chain :)
| iskander wrote:
| 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-chain operation.
| mattdesl wrote:
| 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.
| doopy1 wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't buy the early part. 3 years into the internet we
| already had emails and tcp. 13 years into blockchains we have
| nothing.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I don't buy the early part either, but "3 years into the
| internet we had emails and tcp" is the wrong way to critique
| it IMO. The "Internet" meaning IP was already the 3rd or 4th
| (or more) attempt at trying to create a computer networking
| standard. Predecessors to the internet include: ARPANET,
| Usenet, FidoNet, BBSes, and CYCLADES, if not more. By the
| way, Email existed on _all_ of these platforms before TCP or
| even IP. Usenet used UUCP to transfer Internet Messages (the
| format used by Email later on). FidoNet had EchoMail. BBSes
| had their own custom mail message like standards. The
| Internet also had a direct competitor in the form of France's
| MiniTel.
|
| In hindsight, it seems like "3 years into the internet we
| already had emails and TCP", but the seeds for these things
| had been in the works for a decade plus. It's a testament to
| the massive success of the internet that we _think_ in
| hindsight that "3 years into the internet we had emails and
| tcp".
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I used Minitel 5 or 6 years before I ever connected to the
| internet. That stuff was clunky and frustrating.
| bambax wrote:
| I used Minitel for many years. It worked well.
| p1esk wrote:
| _" 3 years into the internet we already had emails and
| TCP", but the seeds for these things had been in the works
| for a decade plus_
|
| I'm not sure what you mean. Nothing has been in the works
| for a decade plus in 1971 when the first email was sent -
| it just two years after the very first internet connection
| was made. In contrast, it's been 13 years since bitcoins
| appeared, and aside from a potentially easier way to pay
| for illegal goods, I don't see any useful applications of
| crypto technology.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| In your other post to my comment you mentioned that "the
| internet" was referring to ARPANET so I'll use that
| version of your argument. Electronic mail [1] was already
| being used on private networks to mainframes 1962. Before
| that, data messages were being sent over Teletext, so
| these private networks were just trying to do away with
| requiring a Teletext printer. Before Teletext, you had
| telegraphs being sent.
|
| ARPANET was built with the idea to allow remote access to
| expensive computing resources, mainframes, at
| universities and government research institutions. This
| is far from the idea that "the computers of the world
| should be connected", which is roughly the idea behind
| the internet. Electronic mail was reimplemented in
| parallel on multiple different networks. But for a long
| time, the internet was indeed a solution looking for a
| problem. Why do Joe and Anu's computers have to be
| connected together, who cares when they can call each
| other on the phone or meet in person? I mean, can Joe or
| Anu even afford a private computer?? Private networks for
| research or commercial purposes were already in regular
| use.
|
| > I don't see any useful applications of crypto
| technology.
|
| I think in your anti-crypto zeal, you're assuming a
| position I don't have. I don't actually think it's valid
| to say "cryptocurrency is early". The early computer
| networks were created at a time when huge monopolies,
| state-run or corporatist, owned most telecoms networks
| around the world. It was bound to take time when
| entrenched interests had interest in maintaining the
| status quo. I also think that comparing blockchains to
| the Internet is silly; the Internet is the Internet,
| blockchains are blockchains. My point here is simply that
| "we had emails and TCP in 3 years" is plain factually
| incorrect. The internet as we know it now (a system of
| networks connected via L2 links that are then bridged
| using IP/L3 on an IP virtual address space) actually took
| a long time to be developed. If you're looking for an
| analogy to show that 13 years is too long for usable
| innovation, then the Web would be a better one, as the
| Web legitimately was used within a mere couple years of
| its inception. I still think making analogy between the
| Web and blockchains is silly for the same reason I think
| making the analogy between the Internet and blockchains
| is silly.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email
| p1esk wrote:
| OK, you have a point, I agree that comparing blockchains
| to internet is not very useful. And I'm not actually
| anti-crypto, simply because I don't know enough about it
| or its potential. What do you think, where is this
| technology going? Clearly a lot of smart people are
| trying to build something. What are they building?
| yawnxyz wrote:
| 3 years into the emails, we didn't have something as user-
| friendly as Hotmail or Gmail
| beoberha wrote:
| It's extremely disingenuous to say we have "nothing". The EVM
| and smart contracts really are amazing technology that I hope
| any technical person could appreciate, even if they don't see
| a practical application.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology
| that I hope any technical person could appreciate
|
| I'm a technical person. Virtual machines and languages are
| a dime a dozen, and EVM is no different.
|
| Moreover, Solidity was such a laughable attempt at a
| programming language that even first version of Javascript
| was better.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > The EVM and smart contracts really are amazing technology
|
| Are they, though? What's amazing about them? The amount of
| overhead per unit of useful work is mind boggling. So much
| so that a single raspberry pi 4 is 5,000x more powerful
| than the entire EVM network. And the initial smart contract
| language Solidity is notoriously poorly designed for the
| job.
|
| Truly honestly what is the technology here that we're
| supposed to be appreciating?
| astrange wrote:
| There is nothing amazing about being able to run a computer
| program. That's what computers do. EVM is also not a
| distributed computing service since every node has to run
| the same thing. It is slightly interesting watching people
| try to reinvent high-assurance computing from scratch
| without doing any research first, but it's not technically
| interesting.
|
| Actually, the more "interesting" crypto projects are the
| more likely they are to be a scam using a "courtier's
| reply" defense.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| I think OP was implying something of real world value.
|
| I can see the hypothetical value in decentralized
| computing/public database.
|
| Certain types of data could in theory be stored publicly,
| and anybody could build APIs around them. In particular, it
| would be cool if there was some common protocol and storage
| format for something like tweets, such that anybody could
| build Twitter client. Common protocol would especially
| benefit social media IMO.
|
| We've long collaborated on open source code, but this would
| be more akin to open source data.
|
| But all that being said, why has nothing real world value
| oriented materialized yet?
|
| The decentralized experience is worse, and there are
| privacy concerns around storing certain data publicly, I
| would guess. Can those problems be solved?
| atweiden wrote:
| > But all that being said, why has nothing real world
| value oriented materialized yet?
|
| Because Ethereum was founded by early Bitcoiners to raise
| bitcoin for themselves, and the technology always came
| second to the pursuit of self-enrichment. Software
| projects can never lose their soul. If the soul was
| rotten from the very beginning, as the saying goes:
| "garbage in, garbage out".
|
| I sincerely doubt if any of the inventors of the
| marketing phrase "web 3" ever thought it would come to
| this: where their investors are so desperate for yield
| that they begin taking the term seriously. Not that it
| matters to the founders of Ethereum, many of whom have
| long since become secretive Bitcoin billionaires.
|
| The Ethereum project is best described as a series of
| cynical courtship displays designed purely to bootstrap
| the "network effect" for their newly created confidence
| game called ETH, which in 2014 they sold to -- to borrow
| their _own legal terminology_ -- "philanthropists" in
| exchange for "donations". A process they swore up and
| down bore no similarity at all to a securities offering.
|
| People not privy to the way cryptocurrency works are
| shocked to find the various buzzwords hatched by the
| Ethereum people for their own self-enrichment in the
| described legacy era of ICOs turn out to be a whole lot
| of nothing. They shouldn't be shocked, they should be
| embarassed for lowering themselves to investing in such a
| system, or angry if they did so in ignorance.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Well, I fully expect cryptos to implode akin to 2018 in
| the near future.
|
| There's no tie to real world value... Everything is self
| referential and only implies value within world of
| crypto.
|
| I do think there's potential behind the concept of
| standard protocols for "open source data", but
| blockchains have not delivered on the premise very well.
|
| It's just one pyramid/ponzi scheme after the other,
| designed with self enrichment in mind first, as you say.
| preseinger wrote:
| They are inefficient solutions to problems that nobody
| actually has (shrug)
| oblio wrote:
| We have something!
|
| We have a ton of money in unregulated markets sloshing around
| reinventing every financial scam known to man.
|
| That's got to be something!
| cblconfederate wrote:
| This but unironically. Let's put that money to use to build
| good things, not more pyramids.
|
| All money was tainted at some point in the past. The modern
| world used to be very corrupt and violent - everywhere.
| RoboTeddy wrote:
| When writing code for a blockchain today, even on an Ethereum
| L2, you're in a very resource-constrained environment where
| you end up using bitpacking tricks and the like. That's how
| it was for early computers, too, of course -- they may serve
| as a better analogy. Programmable computers have taken
| decades to develop, beginning in ~1950, and I expect that
| decentralized computation will follow a similar path.
|
| There simply are numerous hard problems to solve to make this
| all work at greater scale. In a healthy ecosystem like
| Ethereum's, there are frequent research discoveries
| (discovery of the concept of data availability, the
| application of BLS signature aggregation, proposer-builder
| separation, zkevm, data availability sampling, ...). The
| software engineering effort required to implement such
| research is colossal as well. Eventually we'll even see e.g.
| specialized hardware for efficiently producing or verifying
| zero-knowledge proofs.
|
| 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.
| canoebuilder wrote:
| _There simply are numerous hard problems to solve to make
| this all work at greater scale. In a healthy ecosystem like
| Ethereum 's, there are frequent research discoveries
| (discovery of the concept of data availability, the
| application of BLS signature aggregation, proposer-builder
| separation, zkevm, data availability sampling, ...). The
| software engineering effort required to implement such
| research is colossal as well. _
|
| Ok, so there is a massive amount of effort to be put forth
| to get something out of this, and even then it is still
| kind of up in the air what that "something" actually is.
|
| Would it not be prudent to have at least some sort of
| roughly sketched map of what all this effort is supposed to
| bring about? other than Lambos...
|
| Or maybe ask if we would be better served if all that
| effort was put forth in some other direction? Man hours are
| not a limitless resource.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| Liron wrote:
| Early computers augmented or replaced humans whose job
| title was "computer"
| RoboTeddy wrote:
| 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 people (e.g. heard of someone
| who was able to purchase a ticket to visit their family
| for Christmas thanks to crypto UBI),
|
| - Crypto has been used to send remittances to
| economically unstable places (Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela)
|
| - Gitcoin has provided public goods funding and advanced
| our conception of mechanism design,
|
| - Helium has created a new 5G network that people can
| actually roam onto,
|
| - NFTs have provided a new funding model for artists (who
| create public goods),
|
| - Zcash and Monero have allowed for fully private digital
| transfers,
|
| - Dark Forest (https://zkga.me/) has been an amusing
| game,
|
| - Snapshot has helped create a delegative voting system
| that governs a $3B treasury,
|
| These might not be problems that you face or believe are
| important, but all these are examples of intended
| problems being solved.
|
| P.S. the tone of your comment made me a little sad :(
| sudosysgen wrote:
| So, the thing is, all of these things fall into two
| categories.
|
| Either purely technical solutions, or previously solved
| problems.
|
| For example, IoT scale global 5G networks you can roan
| into? That's a solved issue already. Same for programming
| bounties, proof of humanity, UBI, transferrable assets
| (though Bitcoin is in some ways more transferable) etc...
|
| Others are fully technical problems, like fully private
| digital transfers.
|
| Others yet are pretty much just temporary workaround. The
| fact that you can send remittances to Lebanon or
| Venezuela was never inherently problematic because of the
| instability of their currency, rather, it's because the
| government (in some cases other governments) decided to
| make it more difficult.
|
| If a government wanted to, they could make sending
| remittances via crypto just as difficult as by any other
| way.
|
| NFTs as a funding model is not inherently different from
| the existing comission and copyright system. What NFTs
| brought was hype, which made people who wouldn't
| previously comission artwork to now do so. Attesting
| ownership or transfering ownership of a piece of art with
| a contemporary author is not more difficult without than
| with NFTs. Especially because you still need to trust
| whoever minted the NFT.
|
| There are few, actual, real world problems that have been
| solved by Web3 tech. I wish it wasn't the case, but it's
| true.
|
| The fundamental issue is that Web3 tech can't fully
| replace centralised institutions. So we need to build
| centralised institutions anyways. If those fail, it can
| provide some palliation, as long as they don't fail so
| hard the government tries to fight it. So in the end, it
| doesn't truly solve any problem in the real world, though
| it can in some situations act as a Bandaid.
| frabcus wrote:
| However, a useful bandaid does show that early blockchain
| is useful, just as "Early computers solved problems they
| were designed to solve".
|
| Lebanaon, Turkey and Venezuela are very much part of the
| real world!
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Sure, its useful, but that's temporary. There is no
| actual fundamental difference between sending crypto and
| sending fiat to Lebanon, Turkey or Venezuela, it's just a
| temporary workaround.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| astrange wrote:
| > - Crypto has been used to send remittances to
| economically unstable places (Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela)
|
| This would be cheaper if you didn't use the crypto part.
| The reason people use crypto is just that the governments
| have not yet noticed they're running an illegal money
| transmitter.
| mathnmusic wrote:
| Sure, S3 is also cheaper than torrents. And HTTP/Telnet
| is cheaper than HTTPS/SSH. But some people do see value
| in math-based guarantees over those given by governments
| and courts. And others don't. We need both approaches to
| keep each other in check.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _S3 is also cheaper than torrents_
|
| On what formula? Because if I have a 500 MB video file
| and I want to distribute to some tens of maybe even
| hundreds of people, I don't see S3 being cheaper. Just
| sending out 500 MB from S3 to the Internet 10 times costs
| between $0.25 and $0.45.
|
| There's a reason why I didn't touch S3 when I had to
| transfer up to 1 TB of video content per day to clients.
| devadvance wrote:
| 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 to be amusing:
|
| > (visualizing this financial structure would resemble something
| similar to a pyramid shape)
|
| Pyramid-shaped financial setups indeed :).
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/MessagePartyApp/status/14791510011813765...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| this_user wrote:
| 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, it is
| usually the opposite, because a centralised system can iterate
| more quickly.
|
| And that is also true for the crypto/web3 world: Outside of
| some niches, it does not add any value. Almost anything it can
| do, existing centralised technologies can do better. The only
| reason they haven't so far is that most of these things are not
| terribly useful to begin with.
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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 to chose
| immediate gratification which is why we see decentralization
| abandoned early, and why we see democratic freedoms being
| replaced by authoritarian control.
| gurupanguji wrote:
| 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.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| A thousand times no. A true democracy earns trust through
| the integrity of its institutions: executive, legislative
| and judicial, and the respectfully balanced and
| constitutionally limited powers they share.
|
| Never in a sovereign.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| democracies are highly centralized.
|
| delegation is not the same thing as decentralization.
|
| democracies and authoritarianism are both centralized, the
| difference is that one is a cooperative model, the other
| one is not.
| _heimdall wrote:
| My point wasn't to draw a direct line between democracy
| and a decentralized network. I just thought it was
| important to point out the risks and potentially short
| sidedness of giving up on decentralization because its
| slower and more difficult. That line of thought leads to
| more authoritarian control, and that's never worked out
| well for the average person in the long run.
| tim333 wrote:
| I don't recall that argument in practice. In Kazakhstan
| just now for the leader has recently used the argument
| "Those who don't surrender will be eliminated" which seem
| more common than "centralization is easier and often
| cheaper" as far as I can tell in such situations.
| unkulunkulu wrote:
| 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.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| This is what representative democracy with an executive
| function is for. The government / executive acts without
| the need of democratic micromanagement, but is subject to
| popular oversight through a number of mechanisms.
| mmcnl wrote:
| The fundamental problem is that problems with centralized
| platforms are attributed to centralization, and thus
| decentralization is seen as the answer. This is entirely
| false. Centralization and decentralization are just words
| that have an objective definition. Neither is inherently
| better than the other and choosing either as a solution to
| your problem is entirely context dependent. Anyone that has a
| stake in crypto / web 3 conveniently leaves this crucial
| piece of information. E.g. it's a different solution to the
| same problem, not a _better_ solution the same problem.
| Having options by itself can be a valuable use case, but I'm
| afraid the gold rush is not driven by the excitement for
| having options, but rather for the excitement of becoming
| rich quick.
| bko wrote:
| 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 happen overnight,
| and there wasn't a search engine dominating 90% of the market
| within a few years of the beginning of mainstream acceptance.
|
| How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? MetaMask
| should be incentivized to do this as they're core offering is
| controlled by one party.
|
| [edit] Never mind, metamask and infura are owned by the same
| company (ConsenSys). It's even worse than it appears...
| hanniabu wrote:
| Metamask lets you enter your own RPC endpoints
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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
| menzoic wrote:
| You don't need to code a full node. It's software than
| you run via a cli interface
| _heimdall wrote:
| If the goal is to remove trust in a third party you would
| either need to code or verify the software before running
| it. Short of that and you still have to trust whoever
| coded it and all the distribution infrastructure that let
| you download it.
| IanCal wrote:
| There's more than one codebase though, and having more is
| something commonly talked about.
| _heimdall wrote:
| More options is good for sure, but doesn't solve
| centralization or trust concerns
|
| The level of centralization is a spectrum and I don't
| mean to fall into the trap of describing it as all or
| nothing. The question is how close to decentralization
| web3 is or can be, and my concern with regards to picking
| your own API endpoint is just how similarly it is to the
| original point Moxie was making with regards to there
| only really being two API hosts in use
| IanCal wrote:
| 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
| _heimdall wrote:
| > 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
| IanCal wrote:
| Perhaps I'm mixing up terminology but by full node I mean
| an archive node as that has larger hardware requirements.
| digitcatphd wrote:
| I would argue consolidation and centralized elements are
| inevitable, the promise of true decentralization is like
| socialism: a promising theory but failed application.
| jaxrtech wrote:
| > 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
| happen overnight, and there wasn't a search engine dominating
| 90% of the market within a few years of the beginning of
| mainstream acceptance.
|
| > How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? MetaMask
| should be incentivized to do this as they're core offering is
| controlled by one party.
|
| > [edit] Never mind, metamask and infura are owned by the
| same company (ConsenSys). It's even worse than it appears...
|
| Currently working in the space (graduated from doing systems-
| level . My hot take is what is considered a "full node" can
| potentially use significantly less resources. The base word
| size is 256-bit (size of SHA256), most is either 1s or 0s,
| the entire raw Ethereum blockchain is roughly 350 GiB
| uncompressed, probably can be much better with zstd
| compression on multi-core. Let's just quietly ignore that
| most is not using an assembly-level optimized implentations
| of uint256 arithmetic operations. Also all the current
| clients (a) afaik run transactions single-threaded, and (b)
| no on-disk compression, (c) at best use mmap relying on OS
| level paging even though you're going to have 32- _byte_
| random reads invalidating entire 4K or 16K pages out of ~3TiB
| of read /write space. I'm more than certain execution can be
| ran speculatively using STM (software transaction memory). I
| seriously doubt that most Ethereum transactions within a
| single block have that much r/w contention if you were to
| execute them in arbitrary order in parallel. Basically
| application level speculative execution (except you know the
| ending hash ahead of time, so you know of the ending state is
| valid or not). Anyhow...
| brabel wrote:
| What is your point? Sounds to me you're just regurgitating
| technical mambo jambo that doesn't realy have any relation
| whatsoever to any of the points quoted!
|
| Are you trying to say that by optimizing a node's software,
| people will be able to run a full node on their devices??
| That's patently false currently, even more if the
| technology actually goes viral one day (small system-level
| optimisations simply won't scale to compensate for the fast
| increase in the blockchain size).
| twirlock wrote:
| Galanwe wrote:
| > 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
| even use the public free hosted nodes that most blockchain
| project provide. It's just a Metter of trade-off between
| cost, time and security.
|
| If you are using JSON RPC APIs (which most people do) there
| is nothing that locks you to Infura or any other provider.
| haasted wrote:
| Cloudflare is also in the business of offering access to
| Ethereum nodes:
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-
| web/ethereum-g...
| Tepix wrote:
| > 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?
| Galanwe wrote:
| As other comments mentioned, you can change your endpoint
| in metamask.
|
| Also, metamask is not the only wallet there is... Some
| dApps only accept Metamask buts it's becoming rare. Most
| dApps implement multiple alternatives, like
| WalletConnect, which is more of a dapp/wallet protocol,
| which allows you to use any wallet software.
| cft wrote:
| How many people switched default search in Google Chrome
| from Google ? Probably less than 1%, because the overall
| Google market share is 91%.
|
| Unless there's another equally popular extension, not
| made by Consensys the presence of that option is
| irrelevant.
| brian_cloutier wrote:
| When you open metamask there's a dropdown in the top
| right. It lets you choose which network you're using, and
| defaults to "Ethereum Mainnet". If you hit the "Add
| Network" button you can configure which server your
| metamask talks to.
| distrill wrote:
| > I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other
| early tech
|
| I actually struggled with this point throughout the article.
| I'm not sure I see this as a parallel trend toward
| centralization like we saw with web2 - but rather that this
| is how software is built today and this is what we're
| comfortable with. It doesn't seem unnatural or problematic to
| me that we will start with something that approximates the
| world around us today and move toward the decentralized end
| state that apologists are hoping for.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| 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, and many will make bad
| assumptions about the system architecture).
| baby wrote:
| decentralization in the blockchain world is really to
| provide security and interoperability by emulating
| centralized services. So essentially it looks like a
| centralized service, but it's more secure than a
| centralized service.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| From a cryptographic perspective, centralized and
| decentralised services are equally secure. From a user
| perspective, blockchains are less secure as there is no
| authority you can approach for chargebacks
|
| The point of blockchain was removing trust from a single
| person and spreading it around over a network
| _heimdall wrote:
| > From a user perspective, blockchains are less secure as
| there is no authority you can approach for chargebacks
|
| This actually proves the point that security is relative.
| There are instances when I would feel more secure when an
| outside party can refund my money, say when the seller
| never ships the product I ordered. There are also times
| when I would feel less secure with chargebacks, like when
| I sell something on eBay and the buyer files a complaint
| with PayPal after taking delivery of exactly what they
| ordered.
|
| Security wasn't an original goal of bitcoin. Privacy,
| anonymity, and immutability were, though the first to
| were lost a decade ago and immutibly is pretty well
| solved but also the primary cause for so much wasted
| resource consumption.
| yunohn wrote:
| > There are instances when I would feel more secure
|
| Your comparative examples make no sense - you like
| refunds as a customer and hate refunds as a vendor.
|
| Surprise, surprise...? I mean this is already the case in
| web2/fiat.
| _heimdall wrote:
| It sounds like you did understand my two examples, not
| sure how they could have made no sense. The two scenarios
| point to competing ideas of what "secure" would mean, and
| my point was that security can't be a goal because its
| relative
| shaklee3 wrote:
| can you explain how web3 solves your issue?
| baby wrote:
| > From a cryptographic perspective, centralized and
| decentralised services are equally secure
|
| That's just not true
| distrill wrote:
| > Why would we ever move toward decentralization?
|
| for all of the reasons that web3 apologists are excited
| about decentralization. I'm not really one of them, so
| I'm not going to advocate on their behalf, but lots of
| people are very excited about this.
|
| > It is almost always easier to have at least some
| central point of control
|
| I don't think anyone is going to argue that
| decentralization is the easiest solution.
|
| I agree that it's hard to remove this point of
| centralization once it's there. My guess would be that,
| if this goes the way many are hoping, new places emerge
| over time with increasing levels of independence from
| these central providers.
| scrubs wrote:
| This discussion would benefit from a Ramsey, graph,
| random matrix person to expound on "random" graphs as
| seen in nature. Nodes with n edges in, 1 out are around
| but not without some centralization. Surely not robust?
| spiddy wrote:
| 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 platforms.
| manmal wrote:
| I don't think making all data public is the best solution
| for preventing companies from selling my data, or
| withholding it from me.
| robbiep wrote:
| This is probably the best argument I have seen in favour
| of web3
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Distributed storage does not make any difference for
| lock-in with a centralized API. For example, imagine a
| system for storing photos on some distributed system and
| a popular, centralized web front-end for users. Now what
| I will do with the centralized front-end is to give users
| a "value-add" by encrypting their photos, thus protecting
| their privacy, and better still I will use my proprietary
| key management technology to relieve end users of the
| various problems with losing private keys. Lock-in
| achieved, and all you accomplished with distributed
| storage was to outsource the maintenance of the storage
| infrastructure.
|
| We already see this with blockchain payments. The vast
| majority of merchants who accept cryptocurrency payment
| do so through a service that manages their wallet and
| typically offers some kind of value-added features to
| lock them in. There is no reason to believe the same will
| not happen with Web3, if it is not happening already.
| acdha wrote:
| > 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > the moment someone can make a case for bad play they
| have the advantage to shift the market to a different
| platform.
|
| As we have clearly seen with OpenSea and rampant fakes,
| copies, plagiarism etc. Oh wait...
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >and move toward the decentralized end state that
| apologists are hoping for.
|
| Is there any evidence that this is actually _happening?_ It
| seems rather backwards! Is the maximalist argument here
| that these companies are going to build out all this
| infrastructure, move the global financial system onto it,
| and then rip it apart and rewrite it to be entirely
| distributed _afterwards?_ Why? If the point is to be
| distributed, wouldn 't they want it to be distributed
| _first?_
|
| Where are the blockchains with full-fat clients that can
| actually run on normal mobile devices? And if they actually
| exist, does anybody use them? Like, for normal, actual
| uses, not "shilling this app makes my portfolio go up 300%
| before I dump it on some clueless bagholder, to the moon
| rocket emoji rocket emoji".
| arbol wrote:
| Surely development of the full fat clients will lead to
| the required innovations to provide light, mobile clients
| for blockchains that are properly distributed.
|
| I agree there are many scams but we really are in more of
| a research period with regards to the tech. The research
| will continue through the hype cycles.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The crux of the article is that the front-ends are all
| routing calls through centralized APIs to get their
| message included on the blockchain. Infura and Alchemy
| don't do much. They just pass a JSON-RPC message to an
| Ethereum node running on their servers. There is some
| additional indexing services they provide, but there are
| many open, decentralized alternatives for that such as
| TheGraph Protocol. And it's not unfeasible for an
| application to run its own Postgres instance to index
| data from the ETH blockchain.
|
| As for full-fat clients on normal mobile devices, the
| main issue is the data requirements. Running a full node
| can take hundreds of gigabytes. It is possible on light
| hardware. People are running Beacon chain nodes on
| Raspberry Pis. But you do need the storage and that tends
| to be scarce on mobile.
|
| Meanwhile, the Ethereum core devs are aware of this issue
| and are actively working towards it. They shipped the
| Altair hard fork this year that has adds sync committees
| which make it possible to do without needing the whole
| chain history (using merkle trees):
| https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-
| spec/blob/master/altai...
|
| The light clients to follow from those improvements are
| forthcoming but here is one in progress:
| https://our.status.im/nimbus-fluffly/
| panarky wrote:
| It's almost as if there's only the bare minimum
| decentralization needed to avoid regulation and taxation
| and the rest is good old fashioned centralized web apps.
| saurik wrote:
| So "decentralized" doesn't necessarily mean "no servers"
| it means "the servers don't matter". If Infura went down
| tomorrow, nothing would be lost, because Infura was just
| hosting something anyone could have hosted. You want to
| be the next Infura? You just download the same code they
| did and run it: Infura isn't holding any _state_. If
| Facebook goes down tomorrow, everyone 's accounts and all
| of their data is destroyed.
| yunohn wrote:
| > If Facebook goes down tomorrow, everyone's accounts and
| all of their data is destroyed.
|
| Facebook stores data with replication. I'm not sure which
| scenario involves FB being wiped off the face of the
| earth, while retaining blockchains.
|
| Regardless, your comparison makes no sense. It's like
| comparing a recursive and authoritative DNS server.
| paulgb wrote:
| "Goes down" could be substituted for a lot of things, for
| example, "becomes evil", "disables API access",
| "arbitrarily bans you".
|
| Lots of developers including myself have had things break
| when Twitter decided to abandon its liberal approach to
| APIs. There was no alternative endpoint I could just
| point my app at.
| yunohn wrote:
| > "Goes down" could be substituted for a lot of things
|
| For clarity, you are now arguing a tangential point.
|
| > Twitter decided to abandon its liberal approach to APIs
|
| I just don't understand the comparison between Twitter/FB
| to a blockchain.
|
| Are crypto maximalists arguing that social networks are
| only about the database itself and access to it?
|
| > There was no alternative endpoint I could just point my
| app at.
|
| The article already has a great example about this not
| working as intended - opensea removing his NFT from their
| API despite it existing on-chain. And every NFT viewer
| using the opensea view of things than the chain's view.
| paulgb wrote:
| > For clarity, you are now arguing a tangential point.
|
| I don't think I am; all these fall under GP's first
| sentence; I took "goes down" in the next sentence as one
| example, WLOG.
|
| > Are crypto maximalists arguing that social networks are
| only about the database itself and access to it?
|
| I can't speak for crypto maximalists (I'm probably as
| skeptical of this stuff as you are), but I think the best
| argument is that the existence of a viable off-ramp
| forces the centralized player to be a good actor. Similar
| to how many open source projects are very centralized,
| but the possibility of a fork (like mariadb) is enough of
| an incentive that it's rare for a project to screw up so
| badly that a fork can gain steam.
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW, you aren't (arguing a tangential point to me): I
| didn't say "one of Facebook's servers goes down", I said
| "Facebook goes down". Companies go out of business or
| simply get tired of operating product lines constantly. I
| can sort of appreciate the idea "well maybe by goes down
| I just meant temporarily", but then I think one needs
| apply that to the entire sentence: if it goes down
| permanently, the accounts are no longer usable
| permanently (aka, "destroyed"); and, if it goes down
| temporarily, the accounts and data are no longer usable
| temporarily.
| distrill wrote:
| > Is the maximalist argument here that these companies
| are going to build out all this infrastructure, move the
| global financial system onto it, and then rip it apart
| and rewrite it to be entirely distributed afterwards
|
| I haven't heard anyone articulate this as their vision
| lol. I would think they distribute the systems somewhere
| between trading monkey JPEGs and actually moving the
| global financial system onto it.
|
| As to why start with it centralized, it's easier to get a
| POC working with the systems and conventions we have in
| place today than alongside rethinking all of the
| infrastructure at the same time. Work on the UI, trade
| some stupid goods that finance the development of these
| distributed systems, etc. I just don't understand the
| argument that this whole thing will or should be binary.
| Huge migrations like that fall over all the time. Gradual
| rollouts take longer but are generally safer and in this
| case probably the only option.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| "You should check out my new car company, ThreeWheel.
| We're completely revolutionizing the business of getting
| around. The key innovation is that our cars have _three_
| wheels. This reduces tire cost, improves aerodynamics,
| and reduces rolling friction. Our three wheeled cars are
| the future of all wheeled transport! "
|
| "Okay."
|
| "But our prototype has four wheels, as a temporary
| prototype to test out the technology."
|
| "That doesn't seem like it tests the technology very
| well."
|
| "I don't see why you're quibbling about the details.
| We've sold thousands of ThreeWheels to people who are
| very enthusiastic about living in a three wheeled
| future!"
|
| "You've sold four wheeled cars to people who want three
| wheeled cars?"
|
| "They then resell them for _tens_ of thousands of dollars
| more than they paid! They 're ecstatically happy! Nobody
| is bigger fans of the three wheel car future than our
| customers."
|
| "Even though _these cars,_ the cars they purchased, have
| four wheels. "
|
| "Well, they could remove one wheel later, if they
| wanted."
|
| "Would that work?"
|
| "Oh no, absolutely not. You couldn't drive it at all,
| then. It would be much worse than a regular car. A lot of
| work remains to be done to gradually transition current
| ThreeWheels to a three wheeled form. We plan to send
| robots to each customer's garage to cut sections from the
| frame and re-weld them together. Then we need to swap out
| the steering rack, re-route the driveshaft, change
| suspension components, brakes..."
|
| "That sounds hard."
|
| "Yes, we think it will take hundreds of changes over
| years to move current generation ThreeWheels to a three
| wheeled mode."
|
| "Instead of just building three wheeled cars today?"
|
| "Wow John Cena bought a ThreeWheel and posted it on his
| instragram! My collection of ThreeWheels is going to
| explode in value! I love my job!"
| distrill wrote:
| I'm sure this is funny but a much better example would be
| the Prius and electric vehicles.
| manmal wrote:
| Fun fact, Toyota is not a big fan of the transition to
| fully electric:
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22594235/toyota-
| lobbying-...
| ac29 wrote:
| Toyota is definitely behind, but they just held an event
| last month showing off 16 new BEVs:
| https://thedriven.io/2021/12/15/toyota-joins-electric-
| race-w...
| nappy wrote:
| The Prius had user benefits right away.
| scarier wrote:
| Was the Prius ever intended to be an evolutionary step
| toward widespread EV adoption?
| bckr wrote:
| Not GP but I have to say I love getting 50mpg in the city
| and having the same range as any gas powered car. So I
| don't quite see how Prius is a better example than the
| awesome analogy made above.
| spullara wrote:
| ^ for sure.
| kolanos wrote:
| Someone should have told Toyota.
| rambambram wrote:
| This is golden. Thanks!
| bertil wrote:
| I thought you were going after Aptera and Arcimoto for a
| second and I was wondering what they had done to deserve
| to be associated with that debate...
| menzoic wrote:
| This example is not good. Hardware has a much different
| release cycle than software. Once you sell a car, you
| can't simply release a hardware update.
|
| 99.999% of internet software is built iteratively. Even
| programming languages and operating systems have
| versions. This argument about needing everything to be
| decentralized from the beginning is exposing bias because
| it's not a logical conclusion unless you're bent on
| antagonizing web3.
|
| Even most DAOs start out centralized and slowly become
| decentralized. This is expected. You don't want to go
| full decentralized until everything is stable.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Even most DAOs start out centralized and slowly become
| decentralized
|
| This is also how democratic governance works. A core
| group of "trusted" leaders makes decisions that are
| ratified by elected representatives. It is then
| disseminated through the various layers of governance and
| implemented in a distributed fashion.
| grey-area wrote:
| Why would the global financial system move to a
| blockchain?
| bertil wrote:
| If key financial institutions had more trust in a
| blockchain than in the Federal Reserve, and the European
| Central Bank, and the Bank of England, and maybe the
| Central Bank of Japan to hold an account of their assets.
| acdha wrote:
| Do we have any reason to think that would be the case, or
| they'd enrich the early adopters of one of the existing
| blockchains by using it rather than creating their own?
| Central banking doesn't need to pay the overhead for
| trustless anonymity since all of the participants are
| known and have ongoing working relationships.
| Uehreka wrote:
| But why would it do that though? I'd like to hear a
| falsifiable theory of how that would happen, because as of
| right now it's not happening, and no one seems able to
| explain what big thing is going to change. If the biggest
| part of the change (using the blockchain) isn't causing the
| dynamic to shift, what future change will?
| hattmall wrote:
| To me the argument here is because it's easy. Even if the
| interaction layer is centralized the underlying tech is
| decentralized so everything can easily be validated and
| that's the key difference.
| willseth wrote:
| Kinda sounds like RSS and Google Reader, and how did that
| work out?
| Uehreka wrote:
| That feels like an argument that could be applied to web2
| too though, and it falls apart there too: It's never been
| easier to spin up some servers and whip up a basic social
| media site or search engine or online store, but it'd
| still be hard to displace Facebook, Google or Amazon. The
| problem isn't with the ease of starting a competitor,
| it's the psychological and social forces that cause
| people to prefer having one default place where they can
| go for a certain thing.
| grangerg wrote:
| I think he touched on that in the article. The masses are
| trusting the centralized API, not the blockchain. His NFT
| exists in the chain, but not the API, so it effectively
| doesn't exist in the eyes of the market.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| But as noted in the article, that's not the case. OpenSea
| stores data that then isn't on any blockchain, like
| royalties. That's done as just a regular web2 feature, a
| database on OpenSea's backend.
|
| So no, it can't be validated, and it can't be migrated.
| pshc wrote:
| Royalties is a funny example because a) they're being
| standardized, see eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981 and b)
| royalties are entirely opt-in. You can happily transfer
| NFTs without having to pay royalties if you forgo an
| exchange that respects them.
| oefrha wrote:
| That's literally one of the most salient points of TFA:
| protocols move dog slow and provide too little too late,
| platforms iterate fast and give people what they want
| right now.
| des1nderlase wrote:
| But there will be other features over time, that would
| not be standardized. As per article centralized platforms
| progress faster than decentralized standardization.
| Switching cost will grow.
| schrectacular wrote:
| There are voices within the space that have been talking
| about this issue for many years. There is at least one
| project which aims to use economic incentives within the
| design of the protocol to mitigate. Check out Saito.
| jonnydubowsky wrote:
| Tally is a community-owned, open-source fork of MetaMask.
| From first impressions it looks like it will also solve some
| of the issues brought up in Moxie's (excellent) blog post,
| i.e decentralizing the node-> NFT->wallet Metadata routes.
|
| Regarding the immutability of NFT image pointers:
|
| Some emerging solutions to this issue are:
|
| Use ERC2477 (DRAFT). This allows you to have some control
| over the metadata to ensure the name is as you want it. Note
| that this will require you to implement a zero-knowledge
| proof or a JSON parser on-chain which validates the new
| metadata.
|
| Use 0xcert Framework. The 0xcert framework is specifically
| designed to provide metadata integrity for ERC-721 tokens, it
| uses a different hashing technique (Merkle tree). But it
| requires you to use the same schema across metadata versions.
| Ceramic Network is doing some interesting work on schema
| coordination amongst other things.
|
| https://ceramic.network/
|
| https://tally.cash/community-edition/
| cmroanirgo wrote:
| The Firefox extension for tally seems to be absent...
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tally/
| mritchie712 wrote:
| It's really not that hard (or even expensive) to run your
| own.
|
| Here's[0] an example doing it on k8's. I had something
| similar running on GCP in a couple hours. It's been running
| for a month with no issues.
|
| 0 - https://messari.io/article/running-an-ethereum-node-on-
| kuber...
| sv123 wrote:
| But one of the main points of article is that people don't
| want to run servers, developers included. Even being easy,
| letting someone else do it will always be easier.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run their
| own email servers? If there's a strong enough need,
| people will run their own servers even if they'd rather
| not. "people don't want to run servers" arguably could be
| rephrased as "people don't have a reason (today) to run
| their own servers". I'd argue this is a key difference
| between web1 and cryto centralization and the web2
| centralization. If Google announced tomorrow that anyone
| can buy the gmail contents of any gmail address, you'd
| bet a lot more individuals would either switch to
| alternatives or start running their own severs.
| mattl wrote:
| Should be pretty easy to find the top 100/1000/10000
| companies and look at their MX records.
|
| I'd imagine it's a large number of Office 365, GSuite by
| Google and Barracuda/ProofPoint which may point to a SaaS
| thing or an internal server.
| threeseed wrote:
| > How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run
| their own email servers
|
| Every year a decreasing number as everything moves to
| SaaS and the cloud.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > How many (large) companies, governments, etc... run
| their own email servers?
|
| Office 365 financials alone suggest that the answer is
| "very few, and rapidly decreasing". I work for a ~30k
| employee technology company that doesn't run it's own
| email servers.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| But the question was how hard is it to run a competitor
| to Infura. And the answer is trivially easy. Infura is
| just an Ethereum node API that's publicly exposed.
| Building an Infura competitor literally is nothing more
| than $100/month it costs to run a Geth node on AWS.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Right, this was my point. People don't usually run
| Postgres themselves (e.g. set up Postgres in a docker
| container), but it's not very hard to do.
|
| The article makes it sound like Infura has a moat.
| There's no moat, it's as easy to switch as it is to
| switch Postgres clouds.
|
| To be clear, I agree with most of their findings, this on
| is just a bit off.
| biorach wrote:
| > People don't usually run Postgres themselves (e.g. set
| up Postgres in a docker container), but it's not very
| hard to do.
|
| It's easy to do a basic install.
|
| It's quite hard to do it right, at scale, with workload-
| appropriate configuration, replication, backup etc.
|
| My point... neither Postures nor Indira, or any other
| blockchain solution are easy to install and maintain in a
| fully scaled-up, fault-tolerant, multi-node deployment
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| This is true today. But the standard approach in this
| industry is to start by offering access to an open
| service and then quickly build in value-add services that
| aren't available in the open service. So for example, the
| smart move would be for Infura to offer a proprietary
| chain or rollup that gets widely used but isn't available
| outside of Infura. If they can pull that off, competition
| could get much harder.
| des1nderlase wrote:
| I second this. If history has thought us anything is that
| every web3 company will work toward increasing the
| competitive gap.
| wbl wrote:
| As someone who has run nodes, no it is hard and expensive.
| Every time a geth node dies it has to resync and no
| persistent volume mounts and stateful sets are not
| solutions. They are problems. If you need to scale
| horizontally you get strange consistency issues with the
| API. All of this makes for a very unpleasant experience.
| It's built for TLC on a beefy box not a herd.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| What version of geth were you using? How many CPUs? When
| one of my geth nodes dies, another spawn without issue.
| wbl wrote:
| And that's the rub. The new node doesn't have the same
| state as the old one. So clients making requests assuming
| that latest is the same start having problems. If you
| haven't seen them you just haven't been running a
| production quality service.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| In a discussion about people not wanting to run their own
| servers the fact that your first instinct was to use GCP is
| telling.
| [deleted]
| panarky wrote:
| Do you know of any financial structures or corporate structures
| that are _not_ pyramid shaped?
| _heimdall wrote:
| Only looming at financial and corporate systems is a
| seriously limited pool of data. There are non profits,
| collectives, employee owned businesses, etc that are not a
| hierarchical structure but I don't think they would fall into
| the pool of financial or corporate structures.
| clippablematt wrote:
| fwiw I follow a lot of crypto people on Twitter and 0 of them
| are following this message app, it has 700 followers and you
| decide to jump into the discord? To me that's like getting a
| random email about a product and saying "yes tell me more" I'm
| not sure what you are expecting.
| baash05 wrote:
| I found it interesting that the content of the NFT is held by a
| company that can remove it at will. To me this flies in the face
| of freedom and will land us in the Youtube paradigm. Where
| walking past a restaurant playing music gets your video ownership
| ripped from you.
| bidder33 wrote:
| imo these nfts that are "host it on an endpoint on our apache
| server" will die away as their fragility fails them. its mostly
| quick-buck thinking.
|
| yes you can do a bad job with your nft contract and not think
| about metadata location etc. but you could also do a good job
| (ipfs/arweave). There are plenty that will last as long as the
| chain they are on with no problems.
|
| Opensea shooting themselves in the foot. But its ok Zora and
| Foundation and others are stepping up and leading the way.
| barmstrong wrote:
| Really liked this post - brings up some great points, and I
| consider Moxie a friend.
|
| Here are a few notes that came to mind though...
|
| 1. For NFTs, some keep their data in IPFS (decentralized file
| storage) or in the smart contract itself for procedurally
| generated images. We (as a community) should probably move more
| to solutions like this over time, since it is indeed more
| decentralized to build them that way.
|
| 2. I agree with the overall point that clients don't behave like
| full nodes. However, there has been quite a bit of discussion
| about "light clients" in the crypto community even going back to
| the early days of Bitcoin/Ethereum, so i wouldn't say it hasn't
| been an area of focus.
|
| 3. I agree there is an overall move toward using platforms. But
| there is a big difference between using a platform that also owns
| all the data also (web2) and a platform that is merely a proxy to
| decentralized data (web3). In the latter, if a platform ever
| turns evil, people will switch. Not owning the data counts for a
| lot.
|
| 4. There are more options than Infura and Alchemy. Access to
| simple blockchain data will be relatively commoditized. Which is
| good for decentralization.
|
| As Moxie points out, it's still difficult to build things in a
| decentralized way (nascent tools), so you are seeing various
| apps/companies revert to using more centralized web2 techniques
| when they run into a hairy technical problem. As a result, there
| are a lot of "hybrid" web2/web3 apps during this phase of web3
| development. That doesn't mean the overall trend is bad though. I
| think it's great that more and more web3/decentralized
| technologies are being developed.
|
| I do agree that all networks tend toward centralization over
| time. Great book on this https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-
| Rise-Information-Empire...
|
| I don't think crypto is anywhere near this end stage though. We
| are still seeing a lot of new technology and players enter the
| space. It's not "already centralized" as much as it is "still
| using some web2 components".
|
| These points aside, the post is great and I basically agree with
| the overall premise.
| gaogao wrote:
| 1) The addressing side of IPFS could probably actually be
| standardized to be as ubiquitous as URLs or email addresses.
| DNS style stuff is honestly a reasonably good blockchain fit.
| The storage and server side of it still has a ton of gaps,
| where lessons learned from torrents are being somewhat
| inefficiently rediscovered.
|
| 4) It sounds like the data available already from those two
| isn't that simple and is likely to only become more complex
| over time.
|
| Heck, web2 is still using a ton of web1 components. What are
| the forces to push some dapp to be fully decentralized e2e?
| clippablematt wrote:
| I think it really is light client development that will make
| a big change to being decentralised e2e. Being able to talk
| with the chain directly from an app or webpage without
| needing to make api requests to a node (be it local or
| infura/alchemy). If we can get light clients for
| indexing/search networks too that would be the dream.
| magicjosh wrote:
| Getting Tim Wu to analyze cryptocurrencies with his lens of
| networks and centralization would be a real treat.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| This article seems like it neatly encapsulates and explains why
| I've subconsciously held off from jumping into the Web3 space.
|
| It might be confirmation bias speaking, but I don't think I've
| seen anyone lampoon Web3 so thoroughly, and it's nice to have
| some well-reasoned explanations for why I feel the way I do.
|
| EDIT: A further thought: this article is the first I've read on
| Web3 that feels like it's actually important and I'm looking
| forward to the discussion. Are there any real counterpoints to be
| made against his reasoning?
| bidder33 wrote:
| I guess as some counterpoints:
|
| I kind of agree in some ways but i think he underplays the
| critical point that you have an option for voice and exit from
| the forming centralising forces (which do get established
| because people like convenience/reliability/familiarity)
| without sacrificing your data or belongings, you can leave
| without losses. That is a critical difference.
|
| His nft is delisted from a platform and his wallet calls the
| api of that platform. That sucks, up till now we have "too bad
| you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone".
| But that isn't the case here, his contract is still on chain,
| and will work with anyone who calls it. He can still get all
| the data, there are other wallets, you can run them in your
| terminal if you like, or you can set your metamask to use your
| own - or someone elses - node (instead of infura). There is a
| choice. There are things like TheGraph making distributed
| indexers/search engines and something like that will replace
| opensea as the main nft api (if they arent building it
| themselves).
|
| Add to this the more recent developments of light clients,
| which are coming along great and which allow us to run in-
| app/in-browser direct connections to the chain for
| calls/transactions without needing infura or a third party
| node.
|
| > Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point
| that there are enough faucets to keep it going, and this won't
| just be a blip. If that's the case, it seems worth thinking
| about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less
| privacy) with some urgency.
|
| Absolutely agree. there are a lot of people in this space who
| have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives
| pursuing their interests in it, and they will. It isn't going
| away and we should engage with making it as good as we can.
| Will it be a big thing in ten years? who knows, I can say that
| everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4
| years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea,
| but now they are reality. What will we see in the next 5?
|
| We can absolutely bring better privacy too. Layers like aztec
| are working on exactly that, and zero knowledge proofs and
| other forms of commitments (sismo) are exploring how to do
| that. I think a lot of people in the space follow the ideal of
| "privacy for the individual, transparency for the
| institutions". We will get there.
|
| > We should accept the premise that people will not run their
| own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust
| without having to distribute infrastructure.
|
| i sort of agree with this, we can accept that full nodes will
| be ran be organisations, businesses, and nerdy individuals who
| also have their own funkwhale instances and homelabs. those
| commited to the ideals -> same as home email servers or
| mastodon communities.
|
| but we can also find ways to distribute infrastructure to bring
| resilience to those who dont think much about these things and
| just want to use an app. (again with things like light clients
| replacing api calls to third parties). so that we care for the
| non-committed users and make sure the points of fragility are
| lessened as much as we can.
|
| I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda
| falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer "i'll
| be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it reads
| like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then
| complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us
| in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being
| worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of
| smackdown, which isn't helpful either.
|
| I'd be much more interested in his thoughts on Whisper/Waku and
| messaging protocols, tradeoffs in validity/volition/optimistic
| rollups, distributed indexers, etc. He is smart enough and
| involved in similar things to just take that extra step to the
| dev forums and discussions and maybe give meaningful, helpful
| critique. I'm not sure what response he is expecting tbh?
|
| The rest on gold rush and money i don't have much to say on,
| but mass speculation and desperation to make money is, imo, a
| symptom of the abusive system of work and finance that we are
| all forced into and everyone wants to escape. That didnt just
| appear with crypto/nfts. So sure, people are using something
| because they are making money and might not actually care about
| the details and the ethics - but we are also building a
| free(libre) opensource p2p programmable value network, and
| there are lots of people who also think that is amazing and
| worth indicating as different from the current stacks with the
| 'web3' tag.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed and comprehensive writeup. I think
| you make some very valid points that help to understand some
| of the context that he elides.
|
| > everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos-
| 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible
| idea, but now they are reality.
|
| This is a pretty important point. He states that it's not
| really "early days", but if this is the kind of momentum
| we're talking about it feels like it is early days still. You
| don't see this kind of innovation in a stale field.
|
| > I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda
| falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer
| "i'll be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it
| reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python
| then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those
| of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is
| all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some
| kind of smackdown, which isn't helpful either.
|
| This is the money quote for me. Just because there are issues
| currently doesn't mean that they won't ever get fixed.
|
| My takeaway is that this subject is a lot more nuanced than
| his article is claiming, and although he's certainly right in
| a lot of his criticisms, that doesn't mean Web3 as a whole is
| doomed to failure.
|
| It also does make me reconsider the movement as a whole.
| Sure, there are bound to be golddiggers, but that doesn't
| immediately render the whole concept invalid.
| hinkley wrote:
| > Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this
| point. Even organizations building software full time do not
| want to run their own servers at this point.
|
| I want this to be wrong.
|
| Broadband providers make it very difficult to run your own
| server. Server construction is also in a very bad place as
| well, so this has spread from consumers to companies. There
| are just too many externalities from all of your vendors that
| are left to you to solve and that opens up space for a small
| number of companies who have people who work on those
| problems as a full time job, amortized out over X vendors and
| Y customers.
|
| Until or unless that changes, a bunch of things I'd like to
| have happen won't happen. I should be able to pull files from
| my home computer when I'm stuck in an airport in Paris. That
| was the original promise, but we ended up with something else
| that has a lot of rent-seeking involved.
|
| I think there are a few people working on the servers
| problem, probably nowhere near enough, but Broadband
| companies are also largely to blame for this. I'm not sure if
| Starlink or municipal broadband that is run like power and
| water, are ways out. But what we have isn't going to work,
| and consolidation is just going to get worse and worse until
| someone fixes it.
| clippablematt wrote:
| Groups like DappNode are doing good work here. You can buy
| a nuc from them with their os installed and then pick from
| a list of apps to install (owncloud/ eth nodes/ ipfs
| pinner/etc) and it handles the messyness of
| dyndns/openvpn/updates and all of that. Anyone can
| contribute docker packages with their markup for people to
| install new programs. I'm working on a funkwhale port so I
| can pull my music back locally and not digital ocean
| WA wrote:
| > That sucks, up till now we have "too bad you got delisted
| from this platform, all your content is gone". But that isn't
| the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work
| with anyone who calls it
|
| Well, it is still "content on a platform", which is Ethereum.
| If another blockchain comes into existence and most people
| say that this new blockchain is the source of truth for
| digital ownership, your old NFTs are worthless, because
| nobody cares about old Ethereum.
|
| The same is true for wallet apps. If 90 % of people use one
| specific thing (OpenSea) and think that only this thing is
| the source of truth, it simply doesn't matter that your NFT
| is technically on the chain.
|
| The sense of ownership and the value comes purely from where
| the attention is right now - and this being the internet,
| everything can change.
|
| Compare this to the physical world. Here, the attention and
| trust is in your local laws. If this changes, you can lose
| ownership (government seizing properties).
|
| The solution is actually to acknowledge that there is no
| ownership without society.
|
| With Ethereum, people want to build another society, again
| based on trust/attention. That society has not much overlap
| to the physical world.
|
| It is not much different than any group of people doing a
| thing together, like say, an open source project, a clan in
| EVE or whatever with the only difference that web3
| enthusiasts think their hobby has some link to the real
| world.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I don't think this article "lampoons" web3 in any way.
|
| While the article is on the whole critical (but not
| completely), it did not do so using sarcasm, ridicule, or
| irony.
|
| lampoon: publicly criticize (someone or something) by using
| ridicule, irony, or sarcasm.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| Hmm, you're quite right. Poor word choice. Perhaps 'skewers'
| would be more appropriate.
| tasha0663 wrote:
| Eviscerates. This is a vivisection. We can see how it
| works, but this kills the frog.
| hooande wrote:
| So the idea of web3 is that the only thing stopping me from
| making my own twitter is that I don't have their past and future
| data. If I had real time READ access on their database of public
| tweets, I could make hooande-tweeter.com and it would be a viable
| competitor. This would mean that social media companies have less
| control over what we see and say due to market competition.
|
| This obviously isn't working in the real world. OpenSea can still
| delete moxie's NFT. Starting a competitor to them will be
| difficult even though their core data is completely public. Just
| like twitter, OpenSea's position is based on brand awareness and
| first mover advantage. At this point competing would require
| differentiating features that solve real problems. That's a lot
| of work just because they deleted an NFT.
|
| A better example might be twitter banning trump. If someone had
| access to all of twitter's data in real time and used it to start
| "twitter + trump", I could see a significant number of people
| using that. But then you'd kind of have half of people on regular
| twitter and the other half on trump twitter and it wouldn't be
| the same thing. In fact, it's fragmentation all the way down. I
| don't know if having a dozen different social media interfaces
| with slightly different rules and guidelines would solve
| anything.
|
| The general idea seems to be that data is more powerful than
| branding. I don't know if that's true. Google and Facebook have a
| place in the zeitgeist that is more valuable than a search index
| or a social graph. We'll see if blockchain based open data is the
| answer. I think it might be way more complicated and less
| technical than that.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > the funds a contributor pays to mint are distributed to all
| previous artists (visualizing this financial structure would
| resemble something similar to a pyramid shape)
| insaider wrote:
| I think the best thing that can come out of this whole
| crypto/web3 space is a new sort of stock market. I've a startup
| that I want to open up for micro investors and the best way I can
| think of doing so is through NFTs/crypto that represent shares in
| the company.
|
| The barrier to entry to the traditional stock markets (turn over
| requirements etc) is far too high. Does anyone know of something
| like this?
| astrange wrote:
| Isn't the barrier to entry SEC regulations about being a public
| company? This is not avoidable through crypto.
|
| Private startups don't use "the traditional stock markets",
| they use a cap table, which is just an Excel spreadsheet or a
| service like Carta.
| brentis wrote:
| Loved the perspective. It does feel like those technologies which
| get "wrapped" open sourced or otherwise by first movers feel this
| way.
|
| A few points which hope to not conflict with pinned rules:
|
| - Ethereum has outlived it's usefulness. Cost me several thousand
| dollars closing token positions last month. Swore off anything on
| this chain. People literally cannot move their $100 worth of alts
| because of the fees. (my kids, test coins, etc).
|
| - Your statement about centralization is what made me move most
| of my interest to mobile crypto. One coin does mining on phones
| and sends their to/from via mobile. See this as the way for true-
| er decentralization. Still have app issues associated from Apple
| & Google. Further think new $600 reporting reg for Cashapp/PayPal
| will increase mobile p2p interest - for some reason
|
| - I'm not a dev, but OP's points made me wonder about The Graph
| (GRT) and perhaps ATOM as ways to ensure data has an outlet in
| the case where something like Openseas gains too much power?
| _1tan wrote:
| Could you elaborate on "mobile crypto please"?
| titzer wrote:
| > We'd all have our own web server with our own web site, our own
| mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own
| status messages, our own chargen server for our own character
| generation. However - and I don't think this can be emphasized
| enough - that is not what people want. People do not want to run
| their own servers.
|
| I must be stuck in the past.
|
| It's true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, insecure, wonky
| POS that needs constant patching. This is really a failure of
| software and shoving all that up a level into the cloud is not
| fixing anything. At least with your own hardware you can nuke it
| and start over from scratch. With your own hardware (and disks),
| you at least know where your data resides.
|
| We live in a time where you can get a 4 TB NAS for essentially
| nothing. You can drop a 8 core, 32GB RAM server on top of that
| for less than $1k. I don't know what other people's scaling needs
| are--who knows, maybe they need to serve 100 PB?--but it's a mind
| blowing amount of computation. Most people can probably serve
| their silly websites off that. If you can't handle your own email
| load on a server like that, I honestly have no idea what you're
| up to.
|
| I kind of _do_ want to run my own ones of those things...but I
| know (with today 's software) I'd hate it. Because even after all
| these years, it kind of terrifies me, the metric shitton of stuff
| I have had no clue how to do, and I know is way over
| complicated...because _everything_ is way overcomplicated.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I run a homelab, and also run a shared server for a few folks.
|
| The hardware is easy. The software can be easy (if you let it).
| The things that are tricky:
|
| 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users
| perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because most
| software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication!
|
| 2. The gap in average computer skills. Some of my users are
| engineers, most of them are not. My average user needs help
| with password resets, remembering URLs and very basic tasks.
| "Upload a file" is a _difficult_ task for the average user.
|
| 3. Feature requests and keeping maintenance reasonable. A lot
| of my technical users will ask me for feature after feature..
| but not put in any time or effort to set things up or maintain.
| I'm one person and I set a hard cap of how much maintenance
| I'll do in a week, and that is a big limiter of stuff.
|
| I have toyed with just charging my users a bit per month and
| hiring someone as a basic tech, and honestly more of my users
| would rather pay a monthly fee than actually work on the
| servers themselves.
| eatonphil wrote:
| > 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the
| users perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because
| most software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication!
|
| It sounds like you're referring to something specific here
| but I'm not understanding. What kind of software doesn't play
| well with SSO? And what is reverse proxy authentication? Do
| you mean give users SSO as in give them an account on an SSO
| system like Google/Okta/LDAP or do you mean use SSO as
| authentication for a web app you're running? Even if in the
| latter case I still don't understand what you mean by reverse
| proxy authentication or what that has to do with SSO. (I've
| set up SSO on my apps before and I've run SSO auth servers.)
| vorpalhex wrote:
| SSO is short for single sign on. It means users have only a
| single login across all the parts of the system. That can
| be something like "Login with Google" or it can be they
| just have a single local user account that works
| everywhere.
|
| A really efficient way to make SSO work is to allow a
| reverse proxy to do all the work. A reverse proxy is a
| webserver (such as nginx or traefik) which receives all
| incoming requests and then hands them off to the correct
| bit of software, such as Plex or Heimdall.
|
| Reverse proxies do lots of things but they help glue
| different pieces of software together. It allows you to
| have "http://plex.example.com" and
| "http://heimdall.example.com" on the same server as a for
| instance.
|
| You can also have the reverse proxy handle authentication.
| Users get redirected to sign in if they don't have the
| right cookie and when the proxy forwards their request it
| includes headers that give the username, email, etc to the
| underlying software.
|
| This way instead of both Plex and Heimdall having to
| support a bunch of different sign in options, user
| management, password resets, etc all that is done by the
| reverse proxy. Your software just has to trust the reverse
| proxy and get it's data from the headers.
| alx__ wrote:
| His point is that a majority of people don't want to bother
| with the cognitive overload of running a server. Just like you
| _could_ build your own car, very few want to. Often they don 't
| even care what kind of car they have. As long as it can get
| them from home to work and back again without killing them.
| titzer wrote:
| I mean, I get that. I have a mailbox on my house. Letters
| come to it. I don't think about it too much. Bits come to my
| house all the time but somehow those trillions of
| computations keep flubbing this basic functionality.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Yeah and I think the point here is that the cognitive
| overload is unnecessary.
|
| Most people don't want to _build_ their own car but most
| people would rather _own_ their own car instead of rent one
| every time they need to go somewhere. In the server world,
| the options are to build or rent, there 's no real option to
| just buy one that works already. Even having to set your rear
| view mirrors and seat position is worthwhile, even having to
| check tire pressure periodically is worthwhile, to continue
| the car analogy. If we could buy a box that we plug into the
| wall, and have simple minimal maintenance and setup UX, like
| a car, or even like a desktop or mobile device, is not
| impossible. But it doesn't really exist.
| bobobob420 wrote:
| Are you talking about physical On-prem systems or just buying a
| basic ec2 type server and renting some storage space? Because
| wouldn't the first one require a specific business line to an
| ISP for networking, which would require an office space and
| other associated costs? Or are you referring to renting a
| vanilla server and rolling everything yourself vs using some
| automated deployment and build pack system?
| chasd00 wrote:
| I just did a speed test and got 175mbs up. That is
| ridiculously fast and i don't have an out of the ordinary
| home internet connection. Entire data centers use to run on
| internet connections slower than that.
|
| A mac mini, ups, and that connection is plenty to run any
| kind of server for personal/family use.
| bobobob420 wrote:
| U didnt answer my question at all. Also running a public
| facing server for any commercial out of your house is not
| recommended and may not even be allowed by your ISP
| diegocg wrote:
| I don't want to maintain my own mail server, but I definitely
| want to run my own server.
|
| The irony is that modern internet infrastructure makes
| decentralisation _more_ feasible, but software lags behind. Why
| can't I buy some device for 200EUR or so where I store all my
| data and I receive email? (with the cloud being used only for
| optional encrypted backups). One can even imagine a
| decentralised social network running in these devices, with my
| friends getting updates by polling it periodically (or my
| device sending updates to their devices). The device would be
| powered 24h/365d, and if it breaks you just replace it. When
| I'm out of home, my phone apps would just query the device to
| get new mail and updates.
|
| We shouldn't really _need_ the cloud for many things yet we use
| it for everything.
| astrange wrote:
| You can't receive email this way because your spam filter
| wouldn't work; Gmail's works because they can see what's
| being sent to multiple people at once.
|
| You can't send email (reliably) locally because other email
| servers don't trust you like they do Gmail.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| This smells like the classic "you can build your own Dropbox
| easily" comment. Just because it's technologically feasible
| doesn't mean people want to do so.
| titzer wrote:
| Note, I didn't claim that. I'd love to put a box in my house
| next to the cable modem that did all that stuff in a
| manageable, understandable way, that wasn't some underhanded
| subscription service that is going to try to squeeze me in
| the future or whoops my data amongst its constant, silent
| upgrading itself. But alas, no such box exists, and the
| software components that would go in that box seem to need
| constant babysitting and arcane configuration. Worse, it
| seems like all those overcomplicated things keep having
| critically bad security vulnerabilities and I'm just
| wondering what the actual fuck is wrong with having a damn
| thing on my computer that receives my email and serves a
| webpage.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yes. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy.
|
| I'd love to see appliance-level servers become standard, but
| you'd need Google or Apple to throw their weight behind such
| a thing to make it usable, since decades of server
| software/hardware development has failed to produce things
| that require less-than-professional-level users.
|
| I'd love to buy an off-the-shelf box for my network, have it
| act as a back-end for all my Google cloud-based apps and
| email and serve my blog and my photos and automatically
| encrypt and back it all up to a cloud storage system. But
| none of the big players are interested in that kind of thing,
| and the small players can't create replacements for the
| entire Google or Apple or Microsoft server/client
| architecture.
| ssss11 wrote:
| I think they key is: despite regular people not wanting to RUN
| their own server, they do want to CONTROL their own server.
| Current incumbents treat your data like tier asset, not like
| custody.
|
| This is because you pay nothing. The beginning of regular
| people having empowerment begins by paying some fee to own the
| product.
| clpm4j wrote:
| None of the regular people I'm familiar care about their data
| _at all_. If you use any of the popular social media apps
| (Twitter, TikTok, FB /Instagram, Snapchat), then you can't
| really claim that you care about your data, and most of the
| people I know use those apps on a weekly if not daily basis.
| creata wrote:
| > If you use any of the popular social media apps (Twitter,
| TikTok, FB/Instagram, Snapchat), then you can't really
| claim that you care about your data
|
| That's not true. I don't use any of those, and I understand
| the huge toll it has on my ability to participate in stuff.
| Many conversations happen only on Twitter or Facebook, so
| it's perfectly possible to "care about your data" and
| still, as a necessary compromise, use those services.
| Uehreka wrote:
| You're going to run into a problem right off the bat: Your home
| network is likely behind a NAT and has an IP assigned by your
| ISP that can change at any time. You'll need to tunnel through
| a server in the cloud somewhere (or use a tool like ngrok that
| tunnels through a server in the cloud). And now that proxy
| server is "really" the server, because if the business
| providing the tunnel decides you're using too much of their
| bandwidth, they can throttle you, and if you don't want to get
| throttled you'll likely need to pay by the GB/month for a
| premium tunneling service. You could make your own tunneling
| service with an EC2 instance, but it's the same difference:
| You're paying AWS, and the EC2 server is now your "real"
| server.
|
| As far as I can tell (and I've looked pretty hard) there's no
| good way to run a website from your house without tunneling
| unless you have a very unusual house or a very unusual ISP.
| walterbell wrote:
| Take a look at Tailscale and open-source alternatives.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Just looked it up, this looks like a tool to let you and
| your friends create a "private internet" using a VPN. Which
| is cool (I could see a bunch of uses for this, like SSHing
| into my home computer while I'm on the go), but I'm talking
| about the ability to expose a device on your home network
| to the public internet.
| walterbell wrote:
| One approach is to use a public proxy + tailscale VPN,
| https://init8.lol/expose-web-services-at-home-via-
| tailscale-...
| Uehreka wrote:
| Yeah, but the public proxy is exactly the thing I'm
| trying to avoid. If we're talking about hosting a static
| site like your personal portfolio, then once you put a
| proxy in front of it, you might as well just host the
| site where you're hosting the proxy. My complaint is that
| there's no way to host a website from home without either
| paying for a cloud VM to proxy traffic or paying a
| company who uses a cloud VM to proxy traffic.
| fumplethumb wrote:
| > Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a
| URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the
| standards was that there's no hash commitment for the data
| located at the URL.
|
| I've been recently exploring the Solana[0] NFT ecosystem. The
| situation is similar there and I admit it took me by surprise at
| first. However upon further inspection, there's more to the
| story.
|
| As others here have mentioned, most serious ETH collections
| address this problem using IPFS. But on Solana, Arweave[1] is a
| popular solution. I had never heard of Arweave before and it's a
| seriously cool concept. In a nutshell, it's a system that allows
| you to pay for 200+ (potentially much more) years of storage _up
| front_. I won't pretend to understand it all, but it effectively
| pays the network of miners to host your assets indefinitely. The
| up front payment - which is steep when compared to traditional
| hosting - provides a "sustainable endowment" for these mining
| rewards. This allows you to guarantee that the asset will be
| available without counting on some random hosted storage system.
|
| It seems that NFTs are the main use case for such a system at the
| moment. However I can imagine other use cases could emerge for an
| answer to this question I never really thought to ask: "How can I
| ensure that an asset is hosted "forever?" Interesting problem and
| an interesting solution that a network like this - with its
| marriage of decentralized technology and economic incentives - is
| uniquely poised to address.
|
| [0] https://solana.com/
|
| [1] https://www.arweave.org/
| ManishR wrote:
| > The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not
| fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment
| mechanics, but they care about where the money is. So the money
| draws people into OpenSea, they improve the experience by
| building a platform that iterates on the underlying web3
| protocols in web2 space, they eventually offer the ability to
| "mint" NFTs through OpenSea itself instead of through your own
| smart contract, and eventually this all opens the door for
| Coinbase to offer access to the validated NFT market with their
| own platform via your debit card.
|
| This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride
| the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and
| benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in,
| even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of
| status quo and not necessarily an improvement? Historically, any
| widely adopted technological innovation has had the burden to
| offer and prove incremental value to society to justify paying
| the transition costs. But here, the incremental value is being
| pitched as literal "money" to be made by getting in early - which
| can be hard to resist for your average joe - notwithstanding
| their passion or stance on the underlying technology. Believe
| this will be an interesting race condition between dying out of
| the hype on one side, and technology reaching critical mass to be
| self sustaining on the other side. In either case however, don't
| see anything fundamentally changing or improving for society,
| except perhaps some new players displacing (or getting bought out
| by) old ones.
| jwblackwell wrote:
| There's a huge amount happening in the crypto space beyond
| NFTs.
|
| The article focuses on that area, which is fine, as they were
| the flavour of 2021, but it's worth keeping in mind that very
| few techies in the space saw the NFT hype train coming, Vitalik
| included:
| https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/147740467160615321...
| so it's probably to be expected that a lot of the hacky,
| centralized fixes pointed out relate to NFTs.
| atweiden wrote:
| > This raises an interesting question - can a new technology
| ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become
| mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem
| dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's
| only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an
| improvement? Historically, any widely adopted technological
| innovation has had the burden to offer and prove incremental
| value to society to justify paying the transition costs. But
| here, the incremental value is being pitched as literal "money"
| to be made by getting in early - which can be hard to resist
| for your average joe - notwithstanding their passion or stance
| on the underlying technology.
|
| If the product is self-enrichment, not technology, then when
| the "technology customer" -- who has, invariably, invested
| money -- starts losing money during a bear market, the vendor
| has a de facto failed core product on their hands _in addition
| to_ a ruinous reputation from their prior unscrupulous peddling
| of a technological dud.
| astrange wrote:
| > This raises an interesting question - can a new technology
| ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become
| mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem
| dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's
| only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an
| improvement?
|
| That's more or less how Uber works. They just ignored taxi
| medallion laws, and only ended up winning because everyone
| decided to abandon them.
| [deleted]
| jwblackwell wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will
|
| If only 0.01% of the population ever run a node / mine, isn't
| that still infinitely better than what we have now? Especially so
| when money is involved.
|
| The current alternative is 100% centralized. In other words, it's
| 1 DB vs ~700,000 or 1 company vs 700k individuals etc.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a
| URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the
| standards was that there's no hash commitment for the data
| located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular
| marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of
| dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache
| somewhere.
|
| This is all everyone needs to know about the current wave of NFTs
| chx wrote:
| https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html
|
| > Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be
| better done on a centralized database. Except crime.
|
| compare to
|
| > virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply
| trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further
| verification.
|
| So why not just use, say, Firebase?
| dang wrote:
| All: this is quite an interesting article. It deserves much
| better than the tedious flamewar that this topic has routinely
| been converging to, so let's give it a go.
|
| If you're going to comment, please focus on specific, interesting
| things in the article that you're curious about.
|
| Please _don 't_ post generic, shallow, obvious, indignant, and/or
| dismissive comments--those are repetitive and predictable, we've
| had more than enough of them, they're tedious, not what this site
| is for, and we don't need more.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| newobj wrote:
| Probably the best web3 article I've read. Brava
| hakcermani wrote:
| I don't this part. Oh the NFT is just the URL and the image
| served by the server can be changed .. can't the URL include the
| hash like ?h=HASH_OF_IMAGE .. a compromised server can send any
| image, but the end user can verify its fake as they have the hash
| ???
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| So if the chain doesn't store the binary data of the file, does
| it at least store the hash??? How can it prove _anything_
| otherwise?
| murat124 wrote:
| I don't like that when an actually good successor to web2 comes
| along it won't be called web3 because of this bullshit that they
| call web3.
| exdsq wrote:
| murat124 wrote:
| Well the flaw being they claim it is decentralized when it
| really isn't. How can a blockchain based web be more
| decentralized than what I run on my vps? In any case, all the
| things I read about this cryptoweb technology screams
| bullshit (and scam/moneygrab - possibly by investors).
| recursive wrote:
| Well, this is already the second web3, (the first being
| semantic and micro-formats) so maybe we can just use it yet
| again?
| pseudosavant wrote:
| If you only read one thing on "crypto", this should be it.
| losvedir wrote:
| I am (or was?) a huge Moxie Marlinspike fan, and highly recommend
| this video[0] of his from Defcon several years ago. It was
| formative in my understanding of privacy and security.
|
| That said, something here really doesn't add up. Being a huge
| fan, I took note several years ago of MobileCoin, a
| cryptocurrency, which listed him on the home page as one of the
| team.[1] Or, see this Wired article about it[2]. The big selling
| point, as I remember it, of MobileCoin (per the name) was that it
| was actually feasible for small clients (i.e. phones) to
| meaningfully take part in the network. But he's since been
| scrubbed from the site, as far as I can tell.
|
| MobileCoin was added to Signal, much to the chagrin of HN. And
| Signal is intimately related to Moxie's work. I had thought that
| if MobileCoin becomes a thing, then the holders of the originally
| mined coin would become pretty rich, and I assume that would
| include Moxie.
|
| So I'm a little confused by how this post fits in. I infer from
| it that he's new to web3 and crypto in general, but it feels like
| this isn't the case. (Though "web3" is ambiguous, and I suppose
| he's referring generally to Ethereum and dApps.) But his main
| point seems to be that the dominant cryptocurrency isn't suitable
| for involving light clients, which was the main selling point of
| MobileCoin.
|
| I just wish it were clear his involvement with MobileCoin, since
| it feels to me like that could be a pretty significant conflict
| of interest with regard to Ethereum investigated here and could
| influence his perspective. For all I know, he answered some
| questions to the MobileCoin folks and they inflated his
| involvement. But then that wouldn't really explain how or why it
| was integrated into Signal.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20171216012822/https://www.mobil...
| [2] https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/
| tomxor wrote:
| 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.
| guelo wrote:
| The biggest LOL in this article is how his "censorship resistant"
| NFT got censored.
| boramalper wrote:
| I love the idea(ls) of cryptocurrencies and yet I hate "web3"
| because it's a misnomer that led to a series of misconstructions:
|
| Web3 is futile because it attempts to rebuild the Web (1) on an
| abysmally resource-constrained global computer which (2) uses a
| bunch of protocols that makes it impossible interact with using
| web browsers thus requiring a series of intermediary parties whom
| participants have to rely on. It is not even the fact that I need
| to trust those intermediaries, I trust a bunch of Web 2
| corporations for some of the most critical services anyway, but
| the fact that we end up where we have started except it is now
| more expensive and much slower.
|
| It is easy to dismiss Web3 as such, but that would not be
| fruitful. Besides all financial incentives, I (would like to)
| believe that there is a group of people who are sincerely
| interested in a more decentralized web, or rather, a web that is
| decentralized in a fundamentally different way than Web 2 and Web
| 1 are and were. To make it more concrete, there is an interest in
| _decoupling_ authoring and hosting of web services; Linux
| distributions have had mirrors all over the world for the
| efficient distribution of data years before BitTorrent, so the
| magic of BitTorrent was not just about its efficiency promises,
| but in bringing content-addressed data to masses and thus
| decoupling the authoring (torrent creating) and the hosting
| (seeding) of content. Instead of having to ask Debian 's
| permission to set up a mirror, I could now simply seed its
| torrent. It thus mattered that this decoupling has been
| implemented not at a social level (mirrors) but at a protocol
| level (peers).
|
| You may be familiar with the concept of cardinality in databases:
| one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many. Indeed, it can be just as
| useful to describe the access patterns to databases:
|
| (A) A one- _for_ -one database is where a single writer is
| storing data for themselves. In the world of decentralized apps
| (not necessarily crypto-ridden web3), a good example is draw.io
| (and Zero Data Apps[0] in general) which allows you to "bring
| your own storage". On desktop, you have Joplin[1] for note-
| keeping that can synchronize to various cloud services.
|
| (B) A one- _for_ -many database is where a single writer is
| _distributing_ content to many. BitTorrent and IPFS are prime
| examples of this.
|
| (C) On the other hand, a many- _for_ -many database is one that
| multiple writers store data _for multiple readers_. A centralized
| example of this is Hacker News, Twitter, reddit, and so on...
| _This is what web3 attempts to be._ There are a couple
| application-level attempts[2] at this, but not as much at a lower
| level that can enable arbitrary many-for-many use cases except
| blockchains.
|
| Sadly the critics of web3 do not acknowledge that there are
| legitimate use cases for decentralized many-to-many databases
| that would, for instance, allow members of Hacker News to be able
| to host it in the same way that they are able to seed an existing
| torrent, and there are currently no other application-agnostic
| solutions than blockchains. Sadly, again, the proponents of web3
| do not realize that the consistency guarantees of a financial
| ledger are too unnecessarily strict for many use cases.
|
| I am working on a many-for-many database with much lesser
| consistency guarantees using SQLite and based on CRDTs designed
| to be used in browsers from day one (hence, as an example, using
| P-256[3] for public key cryptography rather than Bitcoin's and
| Ethereum's secp256k1 as the former is readily available in
| WebCrypto). This is something I do in my spare time and 100% for
| experimentation and fun without any financial motives or
| elements; let me know if you are interested in collaborating or
| following, email in the bio.
|
| ----
|
| [0] https://0data.app/
|
| [1] https://joplinapp.org/
|
| [2] https://getaether.net/
|
| [3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenPar...
| dsagal wrote:
| For someone who has only ever dipped one toe into "crypto", this
| is super informative. Especially good to read the constructive
| advice at the end (all the way until the bit about software-
| building burden, which felt rather random).
|
| Thank you!
| marcusbrown wrote:
| I recently became a web3 developer and created Flovatar
| (flovatar.com) and I totally agree with all the issues outlined
| in this article, but I think they are mostly limited to the
| Ethereum ecosystem and because most projects are not thinking
| outside the box and using IPFS to store the images.
|
| In my case I decided to build it on the Flow blockchain
| (flow.com) and to use SVG illustrations and I couldn't be happier
| about both choices.
|
| Flow provides a JS library to interact with the blockchain
| without the need to use browser plugins like Metamask and also
| allows to store data on-chain with really affordable costs.
|
| Having the SVG stored in the NFT guarantees that all the issues
| outlined in the article won't apply in my case and will be
| guaranteed to exist as long as the blockchain will live (unlike
| IPFS where someone actually has to keep paying for the servers to
| store the images).
|
| I could go on by saying that I managed to build a Marketplace
| that handles 500k$/month transactions with a single and
| relatively simple smart contract. Doing that in a web2 way would
| have been much much harder to both implement and maintain.
|
| So from my perspective all the problems outlined in the article
| are super valid, but if you look a bit outside the current
| "standards" of the Ethereum world there is definitely hope and
| lots of solutions available.
| Extigy wrote:
| > What surprised me about the standards was that there's no hash
| commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of
| the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds,
| or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS
| running Apache somewhere.
|
| Wait, really?! Indeed, that seems insane to me -- links change or
| die all the time!
|
| I had thought the whole point was to prove a kind of ownership of
| some specific piece of art/data and just assumed that a hash of
| that data would be involved in a significant way.
| momentoftop wrote:
| To disagree with the post: I have _always_ wanted to run my own
| servers. But for most of my time on the internet, my upload
| speeds have been garbage, my IP addresses have been dynamic, and
| my computers have been behind NATs.
|
| The basic networking architecture during Web 1 wasn't suited to
| Web 1. Had it been, there might have been more people
| experimenting with running home servers, more work going into
| developing home server solutions, and thus more momentum to
| building that version of the web.
| w_TF wrote:
| It's refreshing to see someone actually roll up their sleeves and
| not immediately descend into reactionary takes.
|
| The criticism here is excellent; I think something people outside
| of this space never see is that despite all the boosterism there
| are web3/crypto proponents who have been airing these same exact
| grievances for some time now, particularly regarding metamask,
| infura, ipfs, & opensea, but there's alternatives to all of
| these.
|
| Decentralization is a spectrum, and while I think Moxie's
| probably right in that this all trends towards consolidation, at
| the same time there's founders trying to to change course and
| move in the opposite direction, Joe Lubin being among them.
| synergy20 wrote:
| So basically web3.0 is just json-rpc calls to a cluster of peer
| servers that host distributed databases(e.g. blockchain that
| records your write-operations in stone) via a few portal servers,
| the portals are the gateway to the pool of blockchain-peer-
| servers and themselves are also part of the blockchain pool.
| ineptech wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will.
|
| Not really much related to web3/crypto topics, but I think this
| is an indictment of servers, not people. If managing a server
| were easy and secure, lots of people would do it - for blogs, a
| minecraft server for the kids, to back up their pictures, and
| yes, to store their bitcoins or other digital secrets - they just
| don't want to manage a unix or windows server.
|
| It used to be hard to install a webcam, now it isn't. No reason
| server software can't do the same thing - all we need is for some
| gigantic corporation to sink 100k developer-hours into it (which
| sounds like a joke, until you remember that there are several
| gigantic corporations who have very profitable side-hustles
| hosting servers, and who would be creating a whole new class of
| customer if they did this).
| ericd wrote:
| Yeah, I think the success of Synology's NASes speaks to this -
| they're largely used as little home servers. And it could be
| even easier if someone built a box that functioned as a router
| and a server with dynamic DNS as an easy part of the setup. The
| UI would have to be really, really polished, but I think it
| could be done.
|
| Symmetric home ISP connections would make these more useful,
| too. Sadly, that's not the norm right now, but perhaps that's
| because most people don't demand it.
| pjsg wrote:
| What is the _benefit_ to the average user of running their own
| server? Most people (maybe even on HN) just want things to
| work. We buy connectivity services for our phones and our
| homes. I certainly don 't want to run my own Wireless ISP to
| connect up my neighbourhood even if it was marginally cheaper
| (until I account for my time).
|
| We buy storage services (for lots of reasons) from Amazon,
| Google, <your favorite backup provider>, etc. I don't want to
| run a large NAS and keep it running and backed up.
|
| We buy messaging services (voice, SMS, email, IM etc). I don't
| want to run my own Asterisk VOIP PBX, my own OpenBTS node, my
| own postfix instance, my own IRC server.
|
| I buy power services (electricity and oil). I don't want to run
| my own oil well, refinery, nuclear power plant etc. I do
| actually run some solar panels, but the amount of cognitive
| load that they cost me is very small. It is probably under 3
| hours per year of having to fiddle with them.
|
| In short, the _cost_ in terms of time and energy from me makes
| it far cheaper to outsource all of these services to someone
| else. This doesn 't prevent you from running any/all of these
| services, but I would suggest that you are in a very small
| minority.
|
| Having said all of that, if I lived on an island with no
| services, I might be tempted to run some of them myself.
| wmf wrote:
| The value to the average user is the possibility of self-
| hosting under unusual circumstances. It's like insurance. In
| a walled garden, when you get canceled there's nothing you
| can do. In an open Internet when you get canceled you can
| self-host. 99% of people will never need it but the option is
| valuable.
| ineptech wrote:
| > What is the benefit to the average user of running their
| own server?
|
| All the server-side use cases you can't do with a client
| alone. I think you misunderstood my comment; I'm not saying
| that running your own email server is easy, nor that it's
| hard but still worth it; I'm saying that the fact that it's
| too hard to be worth doing is a statement about the software
| that exists today, not some sort of immutable feature of the
| universe.
|
| Anyway, that's the wrong question. The right one is: what new
| software would we make if everyone had their own server? The
| answer is, I dunno, but the hardware is good enough to find
| out; a cheap virtual server costs about as much as a
| streaming service, and quite a bit less than a mobile plan.
| It's well within reach for everyone in America to have their
| own VPS running their own email server. They don't, because
| Gmail is way easier, but that would cease to be true if we
| had better software. And, once there were a few server-side
| apps that were actually good, we'd probably make more (just
| as the advent of smartphones led to a lot of new use cases
| that would've been difficult to imagine before they were
| commonplace).
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _not some sort of immutable feature of the universe_
|
| Except it is. Running your own server will _always_ be more
| work than letting someone else do it, so unless there is a
| strong incentive people will let someone else run their
| server.
|
| This is basically the Law of Leaky Abstractions. At some
| point you will have to deal with a problem yourself because
| no abstraction is perfect.
| ineptech wrote:
| Why is there a graphical installer for the Minecraft
| client and not for the Minecraft server? Because of some
| fancy Law with Capital Letters, or because more work went
| in to the former than the latter?
| depingus wrote:
| > If managing a server were easy and secure, lots of people
| would do it - for blogs, a minecraft server for the kids, to
| back up their pictures
|
| Easy 1-click deploy exists right now. Lots of VPS providers
| offer service specific deploy for things like minecraft,
| seedboxes, plex, nextcloud, etc. Check out Scaleway's
| InstantApps section to get an idea.
| https://www.scaleway.com/en/imagehub/
| ineptech wrote:
| Yes, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about, but I think
| it also demonstrates that there's a ways to go yet. I suspect
| that one part of the solution will be abandoning linux and
| windows. They were built for performance and versatility,
| which just aren't that important in a server I use to host my
| blog and email, and come with a lot of baggage that isn't
| needed in a virtual-only OS.
| depingus wrote:
| Don't want to bother with OS updates? CoreOS exists. And
| containers abstract away the fiddly parts of running
| services. Firecracker/Ignite exists. I feel like all the
| parts are there to build what you want. Except there's no
| market for it. Even if it were free and easy to run your
| own Nextcloud instance, most users would never switch away
| from Google/Apple/Microsoft.
|
| Techie users can roll their own servers. Power users can
| buy a NAS with 1-click service installs. Normal users don't
| even want alternative services.
| ineptech wrote:
| I don't think that's true, people bitch about those
| services all the time. Everyone that uses FB has a gripe
| about it. Windows users have been complaining about
| Windows non-stop for thirty years.
|
| I'm not arguing that people will switch off of those to
| crappy self-hosted replacements out of sheer spite
| against megacorps, I'm arguing that they will switch when
| self-hosted replacements are better and easier to use.
| Building a self-hosted platform that does what Facebook
| does more easily and conveniently than Facebook is hard,
| but IMHO it's easier than building AWS or Salesforce, and
| it gets easier every year, due to bandwidth and cloud
| hardware getting cheaper and big tech getting more user-
| hostile.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I think this is an excellent point.
|
| People will run all sorts of things they don't directly
| interface with if the setup and functionality is low friction.
| People run routers for example. If you had to SSH into your
| router and troubleshoot it just to figure out why you're not
| getting connectivity people wouldn't do it. Unplug it for 5
| seconds and plug it back in? Still frustrating, but the UX has
| low friction.
|
| If you can buy a little square box that you plug into the wall
| and it Just Works(tm) people would do it. People used to leave
| their home PCs running all day to allow them to perform server
| type functions.
|
| When I build a home server, I generally shoot for low
| maintenance, but I do the setup myself. If I can do it once, I
| can do it once for a million people. Sane defaults, low
| friction UX, just the needed functionality, everything starts
| on boot and resets on reboot to a working state is all it
| really takes.
| ineptech wrote:
| I agree, except for the part about this being physical
| hardware rather than a cloud thing. I find it very difficult
| to imagine even 10% of America buying something like this; a
| likelier model is, imagine that your typical $50/mo wireless
| plan included a $5/mo virtual server, and an app to manage it
| that looks like an easier version of cpanel.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| If even 10% of america bought something like this the
| product is a wild success, and it would be enough pressure
| to ensure silos are unable to totally wall themselves off.
| I'm sure apple would love to drop support for SMS, but they
| can't, because some large percentage of Americans don't use
| apple devices, and so those that do wouldn't tolerate being
| unable to message their friends without apple devices.
|
| I know people that aren't tech savvy at all that would buy
| a box they just plug in, boot up, that for example synced
| their contacts, pictures, ran a social media server just
| for them (mastodon maybe) and an email server and IM server
| and all they had to do was run an app on their phone and
| enter a password. You could build something like that and
| offer it to people for under 100 bucks. People don't run
| those though, because it's not as simple as that. Most
| people would rather have a product than a service. But the
| product is less profitable than the service, so companies
| build services, and so people use services.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| while all true; its also true no one wants to run their own
| servers.
|
| the problems are practical. power and heat. noise. theft or
| disaster => backups; 3-2-1. updates, botnets, firewalls,
| static/external ips. ssh, vpn, or port forwarding. vlans?
| scaling? trust?
|
| each of these things is a rabbit hole of problems and issues to
| solve.
| ineptech wrote:
| I'm sure some people would want to run one in their basement,
| but I was referring to virtual cloud servers, and assumed the
| last sentence would've made that clear.
| baash05 wrote:
| I'd agree that running a server is easy. I built one for my
| company once. It ran on a standard PC (early 2000's). But for
| some reason it never worked from my house. (Rogers ISP in
| Canada) It took me hours and hours to find out my ISP didn't
| allow me to run a server. BellCanada ISP did, so the server
| worked on my co-workers system perfectly. To be allowed to run
| the server I would have had to pay an extra 200$ a month, and
| be classed a business address. It's not just that the tech is
| hard, the ISP's don't want it. So they gate keep.
| hatchoo wrote:
| This was a very interesting article.
|
| I started learning Solana recently to try and see what the fuss
| was all about. After getting beyond the basics I took a look at
| the technical concepts behind NFTs and my first reaction was
| literally - "this is creating something out of nothing". It was
| the equivalent of just inserting some rows into a database except
| that the operations were all logged in an immutable audit trail.
|
| While I appreciate the value that a decentralized system of
| record with immutable log entries that the blockchain offers, I
| struggle to see how NFTs have value. But who am I to argue when
| buyers put their money into it.
| 0xluminous wrote:
| > 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 important is ensuring protocols stay competitive.
|
| > Federated servers following a decentralized blockchain with
| layers of competitive protocols for storing data, with semi-
| interoperable apps built on top, seem like a pretty workable
| solution.
|
| > Forcing everything P2P will be painful; there's a reason the
| Cloud exists. Offline apps are great, and P2P app architecture is
| great, but expecting users to run P2P nodes is a losing battle.
| Some power users and volunteers will run nodes, but most will use
| a 3rd party. It's better to accept this reality, minimize trust
| and make it competitive as possible.
|
| It's the best thing I've ever written, if you're into this kind
| of thing I hope you check it out.
|
| Disintermediating Network Effects for Fun and Profit, How to
| prevent Web3 from ending up like Web2
|
| https://medium.com/@0xluminous/disintermediating-network-eff...
| 0xluminous wrote:
| thanks to whoever downvoted this without giving a reason,
| wasn't trying to spam, just thought it was relevant
| smm11 wrote:
| As long as I can stream stuff moving forward, I don't care what
| Web version we're "on."
| [deleted]
| dddw wrote:
| I enjoyed reading this article. The closer you look towards
| cryptocurrencies and smart contract projects like nfts, the less
| likely without a significant (state) player supporting these
| experiments I doubt we'll talk let alone use these speculative
| industries in a quarter century. Anyone can make an currency,
| only a strong arm can force you to pay.
| ggm wrote:
| Off topic: site steerage did not work for me on chrome/tablet
| justinator wrote:
| Does it look like I know what an NFT is? All I want is a JPG of a
| gawd dang hot dog.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Literally while reading this I heard in the background an NBA
| commercial with Matt Damon telling people that "fortune favors
| the brave" when it comes to crypto. Whatever else is true, this
| thing probably isn't going to just quietly settle down.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The author mentions that currently all NFTs are just URLs, but it
| is possible to store data directly in the blockchain, even if it
| would be prohibitively expensive.
|
| An issue with general-purpose immutable storage is that it can be
| permanently polluted with illegal data. Everything from child
| pornography, instructions for making drugs or explosives,
| doxing/attack information, private keys for copy protection
| systems, etc...
|
| It would be possible to make Ethereum or any similar blockchain
| illegal to the level of "penalty of death" in many countries by
| simply adding some horrendously blasphemous text content to it.
|
| Even if bulk image or video data is too expensive to store, an
| option would be to simply use torrent "magnet:" links.
|
| Bitcoin is just for financial transactions, so I doubt it would
| be vulnerable to this, but the more generic chains don't seem to
| have any way to protect themselves from this kind of attack.
|
| Seriously, what would happen if a bunch of paedophiles started
| minting NFTs of their favourite child pornography and trading it?
| They would be "protected" by the inertia of the block chain.
| Governments eventually would have to step in and make it totally
| illegal, and then.. that's it. The value would instantly go to
| zero!
|
| Alternatively, NFTs would have to be made _revocable_ or erasable
| in some way, but that then _totally defeats the purpose_. That 's
| the author's point -- his dynamically changing NFT was revoked in
| this manner.
|
| I just don't see a way around this. Either you allow indelible
| illegal content, or allow forced revocation. Either way, the
| value of NFTs must go to zero.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| If your only solution is clunky, then sure, maybe NFT's are
| worthless as a distributed asset, if you can even call most of
| them that at this point.
|
| But you're solution is bad, that's why no one does it. A much
| better solution is to use a decentralized file hosting protocol
| and store your base NFT file on it. These protocols are free to
| prune illegal data should their government force them to, but
| are economically motivated not to. With enough redundancy, (and
| if you're NFT is so valuable you'll keep a local copy) this
| isn't a problem.
| biztos wrote:
| > That's the author's point -- his dynamically changing NFT was
| revoked in this manner.
|
| For me the much scarier weaponization is to change the linked
| content to be something illegal _after_ you buy the NFT. How
| would you prove the illegal thing is not the thing you bought?
| (You will certainly not be treated as innocent until proven
| guilty if we 're talking child pornography in the USA or
| democracy advocacy in China, etc etc.)
|
| I don't think making them revocable defeats the purpose, it's
| having the registry of NFTs effectively being "OpenSea API" and
| not "blockchain" that's the problem. Having the NFT content
| itself be erasable is probably a good thing as long as there is
| some way of making a local copy. Sometimes we want the
| government to have the ability to stop the spread of
| information; but (subject to the risk of your possessing it)
| your "ownership" of content with a hashed URL is also going to
| apply to the download, assuming the hash is reproducible.
| shrimpx wrote:
| I wonder how this works out from a legal perspective. It seems
| like an NFT is a contract, that never expires, to host content
| at a URL. Can a buyer sue the seller if the seller shuts down
| the serving of that image? Otherwise an NFT is just a signed
| URL string.
| kirso wrote:
| Without sounding negative, it basically says that sometimes its
| good to have centralisation because you have: - Moderation -
| Parties with skin in the game for protection - Support -
| Someone to reach-out to when things go wrong
|
| And the second argument is that country can still censor (to an
| extent)
| ThreeToZero wrote:
| Bitcoin is 'vulnerable' to this. The most common use is to put
| financial transactions on Bitcoin, but you can put whatever
| binary data you want. Famously the genesis block[1] includes a
| newspaper headline to prove it was created after a specific
| day.
|
| It's possible to place illegal content onto the Bitcoin
| blockchain.
|
| [1] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
| shrimpx wrote:
| > It's possible to place illegal content onto the Bitcoin
| blockchain.
|
| I wonder if Bitcoin already has illegal content in it.
| lekevicius wrote:
| Yes, both Bitcoin and Ethereum have very illegal content.
| So far, nobody cared about this aspect.
| bspammer wrote:
| So anyone running a mining node could potentially be
| prosecuted for distributing illegal content? That
| definitely seems like it will be a massive issue in the
| future.
| leifg wrote:
| > What surprised me about the standards was that there's no hash
| commitment for the data located at the URL.
|
| I hear a lot that some of the smartest people work on
| web3/blockchain/crypto.
|
| It blows my mind that the NFT standard doesn't enforce a content
| hash. I genuinely thought that was part of the standard.
|
| How did no one foresee that content at a URL can change?
| y04nn wrote:
| I can see why everything is centralized: moderation. How would
| you ban NFTs that would be considered illegal?
|
| Sure a solution would be to put the NFTs on a decentralized file
| system (IPFS?) or a P2P sharing network. And have kind of
| P2P/decentralized API that can easily be validated. But then, how
| would you ban illegal content?
|
| I'm sure Opensea would prefer to keep everything centralized and
| under control. But clearly, there is room for improvement.
| c1sc0 wrote:
| You seem to readily assume there is such a thing as universally
| "illegal" content. Can you elaborate? Who decides what is
| "illegal"? Which jurisdiction? Who enforces it?
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| The uniswap people made a standard called tokenlists to help
| users filter out spam and junk tokens while still allowing
| anyone to list any token. I don't see why this couldn't work
| for sets of NFTs as well.
|
| https://tokenlists.org/
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| I really love their example of an NFT that changes based on where
| you see it.
|
| I've been kicking around an idea of selling a bushel of NFT's and
| then later changing all the images to the text "I spent money on
| a monkey but all I got was this stupid text" and then abandoning
| the project.
| mikewarot wrote:
| >People don't want to run their own servers, and never will
|
| People don't trust their computers on the open internet enough to
| run them as servers. No computer running Linux, Windows, or MacOS
| exposed to raw internet is safe.
|
| This is subject to disruption, should sufficiently well designed
| microkernel based OSs arrive on the scene before the war for
| general purpose computing is lost.
|
| Personally, once I get a capability based OS as a daily driver,
| the first thing I'm going to try out is running a few servers on
| it, and persistently checking for trouble.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Can anyone explain clearly and objectively and succinctly what an
| NFT is, for an audience who knows how the internet works, what a
| hash function is and what properties they have, and how bitcoin
| works.
| unhammer wrote:
| What are examples of actually successful decentralised software?
| I can think of - syncthing - git
| (regardless of github, I still regularly clone/fetch between and
| within my own machines) - bittorrent
|
| None of these needed a cryptocurrency blockchains or stupid
| buzzwords in order to lure in users, they just solved real
| problems. I guess they are all fairly dependent on a stable
| protocol, making it hard to retrofit features, but some people do
| prefer that situation for at least some of their needs ;-)
| cblconfederate wrote:
| email is the most successful decentralized tech we use.
|
| It's not that decentralized doesnt work, but people need an
| incentive to make it work. cryptocurrencies currently aim for
| maintaining a high price, not delivering a final product (which
| might tank the price)
| jdnordy wrote:
| This is the best article I've found to help me understand what
| Web3 is and how it actually works. Thanks op!
| rockbruno wrote:
| I always had trouble understanding what web3 was all about
| because I just couldn't figure out why anyone would be excited
| for it. I found this article to be excellent at explaining what
| the platform is but I still can't figure out why people keep
| bringing up this topic when it's clearly a classic example of a
| "Solution in Search of a Problem".
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >but I still can't figure out why people keep bringing up this
| topic when it's clearly a classic example of a "Solution in
| Search of a Problem".
|
| They hope they can make money.
| [deleted]
| stavros wrote:
| As much as I hate cryptocurrency as-it-exists, I'm very much into
| its potential. Untraceable (eg Monero) digital cash that settles
| instantly? That has the potential to disrupt societies.
|
| The problem is that most societies don't have a particular need
| of being disrupted, so people are perfectly content paying with
| their credit cards, and why shouldn't they be? The UX is better
| and the banks are fine as long as they don't piss off a too-large
| portion of the population.
|
| Still, I would love it if I could use, say, Nano (as it has very
| limited PoW) to pay for things instantly and securely. I'm hoping
| a miracle happens, but I don't think it will, or it would already
| have happened.
| wstrange wrote:
| Untraceable digital cash facilitates crime, money laundering
| and tax evasion.
|
| None of these things are good for a stable democracy.
| stavros wrote:
| And perfect law enforcement means a stagnating society. Think
| where we would be now if gay people were discovered and
| punished instantly as soon as they kissed a person of the
| same sex, or interracial couples were punished as soon as
| they started dating, etc.
| zekrioca wrote:
| What is the real problem underlying such crimes?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| You mean like paper cash?
| astrange wrote:
| Cash isn't untraceable, it has serial numbers on it.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Pretty much any additional freedom facilitates crime.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| > Untraceable (eg Monero) digital cash that settles instantly?
| That has the potential to disrupt societies
|
| With where the world is with Debit/Credit cards and all other
| trackable digital payments, the world going back to untraceable
| physical cash could have the potential to disrupt societies
| (people should make sure to put their phone/watch/entire car in
| a faraday cage so their cell phone providers don't have real
| time access to where they spent their untraceable physical
| cash)
| petenick wrote:
| 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.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| The "a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card"
| part simultaneously made me realise how ridiculous NFTs are and,
| nevertheless, how popular they are, and how that popularity fuels
| the value of bitcoin. Essentially paper money gets its value
| because you need it to pay taxes; that is, there is a demand.
| Bitcoin gets it value because you can do interesting and popular
| things with it; that is, there is a demand. As long as there are
| interesting and popular things to do with bitcoin, that attracts
| outside money, bitcoin will keep gaining in value. Obvious, I
| guess, but that helped it hit home.
| Zetaphor wrote:
| You're confusing Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum is the platform
| that supports smart contracts. Bitcoins intent is to be a
| simple ossified protocol used as a store of value, akin to
| digital gold.
| gaogao wrote:
| > A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would
| allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to
| another without going through a financial institution.
|
| That's Bitcoin's intent as the first sentence of the original
| whitepaper. The intent is on transactions. In practice, it's
| an ossified store of value now.
| astrange wrote:
| Of course, it's not that because you can't actually store
| value. Saving money works as a temporary defection from
| everyone else trading it; the trading is what maintains the
| value.
| auston wrote:
| I think he makes legit points:
|
| 1. NFT spec is flimsy at best
|
| 2. We trust output from ETH nodes inherently
|
| 3. Most of the user facing clients for Web3 are decentralized
|
| 4. Power is easily rolled up into convenience providers like
| QuickNode
|
| but I think something that is (perhaps conveniently missed) is
| that there is A LOT of power in having decentralized /
| censorship-resistant state - this is the thing that makes DeFi a
| real threat to orgs like exchanges and banks. They can't force
| people to have a certain amount of capital to trade derivatives
| or have a certain credit profile to borrow, the system is
| permissionless and the API is open 24/7.
|
| That's pretty remarkable IMO and I think that sort of
| permissionless is likely to be used for very compelling things in
| the future, NFTs aside.
|
| Also one thing that he notes but doesn't quite provide a solution
| for but I'm betting will exist in the near future is a markup
| language to map UI components to smart contract functions/views.
| layer8 wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will
|
| They would if it's an app on their phone. Currently that's not
| possible due to the constraints of battery life and, to a lesser
| degree, mobile coverage and data plan limits.
| janandonly wrote:
| 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
| tomxor wrote:
| > - 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.
| briancl wrote:
| 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.
| clarle wrote:
| As an engineer, I feel like this single post helped me better
| understand Web3 and how it worked under the hood better than any
| of the heavily hyped Discord and Twitter announcements of new
| projects over the past year.
|
| It's interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the
| other big crypto / NFT marketplaces. Feels like the "distributed
| web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.
| codehalo wrote:
| Seems like you (and a vast majority of HN including Moxie) is
| tying web3 to several centralized front ends
| (Metamask/OpenSea).
|
| I saw this back in the 90's when a lot of people thought the
| internet was "Internet Explorer".
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask
| /OpenSea)._
|
| You can't really lump both of those into the same bucket of
| "front-end". Metamask is a front-end, a user interface.
| OpenSea is more like middlewear that connects various front-
| end clients like Metamask to the backend database, and
| provides some additional functionality that's in any of the
| database's stored procedures or views. OpenSea also has its
| own front-end UI to its own service, but its core service is
| its API to the Ethereum database.
| pavlov wrote:
| And that's one of Moxie's points: how exactly is web3
| supposed to be avoiding the centralization that occurred on
| the web, when it's already at that point.
| pshc wrote:
| It's not the same as web2. These web3 frontends don't have
| moats or lock-in like Facebook or Google, because they
| don't actually control the data. The data they serve is all
| from public ledgers. You can switch off of Infura in a
| second by changing your RPC url.
| uncomputation wrote:
| You're still relying on one central server though because
| of the fundamental problem OP laid out: the blockchain is
| designed for servers, not clients. There is no API
| inherent to any chain and thus one must be grafted over
| it by a web server. Things will tend toward one or two
| companies because those will be the ones who can afford
| to run such services and then they will have funding to
| create more features and better documentation and do dev
| evangelism and you know the rest. Just look what happened
| already once OpenSea removed his NFT.
| Swizec wrote:
| The problem is that they control distribution - the only
| thing that matters. You don't need to own the data if you
| own the eyeballs/mindshare.
|
| For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights,
| yet they own 32% of the music streaming market. The
| second best is Apple at 16% ... which also doesn't own
| any of the music.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-
| streaming-s...
| pshc wrote:
| Yes, web2 incumbents control data and they control
| distribution. I agree with you there!
|
| aside; sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills
| because for the last decade or so on HN we've been
| talking about how Big Tech has monopoly control over
| everything, how they've destroyed privacy and monetized
| eyeballs and engagement to the fullest. And now that a
| potential decentralized competitor is emerging, the
| kneejerk reaction is "why not just keep using
| <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>"?
|
| (I understand why, cryptocurrency is the whipping boy of
| the week, and it's full of scammers, I get it! But I'm
| not going to pretend I'm happy with the existing crop of
| centralized services.)
| kirso wrote:
| The issue is that HN is a bubble.
|
| End consumers don't care and that will always dictate
| adoption.
|
| Also because people are complaining - doesn't mean that
| this specific implementation of decentralisation is the
| right one and that's why it gets so much pushback. A mere
| difference of opinion, but mostly because parties who
| claim to work in the name of decentralisation are there
| to grab the cash and push the narrative that it is
| actually to relief the society of evil organisations - so
| far its rather about wealth re-distribution as usual...
| Swizec wrote:
| > "why not just keep using <monopolistic centralized
| surveillance ad platform>"?
|
| The question, for me, is actually _" how is this any
| different than <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad
| platform>"_?
|
| Because I still remember high school and how every single
| one of these monopolistic centralized platforms sold
| itself to me as _" Come to us, we represent a new free
| and open society unencumbered by stodgy authorities!"_.
|
| You know, the exact same rhetoric these new web3/crypto
| companies are selling. Sounds like Animal Farm all over
| again to my skeptic ears.
|
| Remember when Twitter was the future of decentralized
| discourse free of government tyranny where you can
| organize political protests free of oversight and
| manipulation from your local govt? Hell it's a big part
| of why arab spring worked!
| pshc wrote:
| I hear you! And I remember.
|
| Every startup that goes big eventually becomes the thing
| they were supposed to obsolete, because all the
| incentives point that way. Moats!
|
| I hope that this time is different, because we can now
| deploy code that is ownerless and immutable. Kind of a
| cool property if it catches on.
| codehalo wrote:
| >> The question, for me, is actually "how is this any
| different than <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad
| platform>"?
|
| You can send a transaction from A -> B using Bitcoin (or
| another cryptocurrency) without it being censored by any
| government. Can they see your transaction? Yes. In that
| case, use Monero (or the upcoming Railgun). Comparing
| crypto to any of the above is quite a stretch.
|
| Twitter may have failed in it's promise, but right now,
| crypto/blockchains/web is a massive improvement. They may
| not be perfect, but they are trending in the correct
| direction. Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the
| 180 that HN has done in this regard.
| cwalv wrote:
| > Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the 180 that
| HN has done in this regard.
|
| Is it all of HN that's changed, or just this thread?
| There are probably a lot of ppl commenting on this
| article that don't bother to comment (or maybe even read)
| many other web3 related articles.
| cwalv wrote:
| > "Come to us, we represent a new free and open society
| unencumbered by stodgy authorities!".
|
| I don't pay a lot of attention to the complaints, so I
| could be wrong, but it seems like when ppl complain about
| Twitter they're just as likely to complain about them
| being too unencumbered as they are about them restricting
| too much.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Do you actually think blockchain tech is remotely
| competitive with the big platforms? Blockchain payment
| systems have had more than a decade to become popular and
| still are not even remotely competitive with the big
| payment processors. Most of the world will only read
| about "Web3" on some news site or blog, then ignore it
| because it does not even come close to meeting their
| needs.
|
| Consider how many people post something on Facebook in a
| single day, and now consider what it would take if each
| post had to be replicated across tens of thousands of
| independently operated systems. Big tech companies scale
| in large part because of their centralization, which
| allows them to coordinate large numbers of physical
| machines to efficiently provide service to their users.
| You may not like the ads-centric business model but on a
| purely technical level it is pretty clear that the big
| tech companies have a big advantage in terms of operating
| their infrastructure, and overcoming that advantage is
| not going to be easy for any distributed system.
|
| I personally prefer to focus on mitigating/preventing
| abuses by a central authority/component of a system,
| which almost always results in a far more efficient and
| reliable solution that trying to eliminating all
| centralization.
| pshc wrote:
| > Do you actually think blockchain tech is remotely
| competitive with the big platforms?
|
| Right now? Absolutely not, web3 is pure jank right now.
| I'm just trying to see where the puck is headed.
|
| > I personally prefer to focus on mitigating/preventing
| abuses by a central authority/component of a system,
| which almost always results in a far more efficient and
| reliable solution that trying to eliminating all
| centralization.
|
| How do you do this? How do you take Facebook to task? The
| only entity that comes anywhere close is France maybe and
| those fines are just a slap on the wrist.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| I was referring to technical solutions, not fines or
| regulatory measures. For example, before Bitcoin
| cryptographers published a mountain of research on
| designing secure and anonymous electronic payments, but
| relied on a central bank that issued and redeemed the
| money. The bank was constrained mathematically so that it
| could not link user transactions, unless some subset of
| users had cheated in some way (double spending). So there
| was a central party but certain forms of abuse were
| impossible, and those systems were overwhelmingly more
| efficient than Bitcoin or even a proof-of-stake approach
| ever could be (this is because transactions are "truly"
| peer-to-peer, meaning that only two parties do any work
| at all when a payment is made or when money is withdrawn
| from or deposited with the bank; moreover the work
| required to perform transactions amounts to verifying a
| few signatures/NIZKs). Another example is the use of
| oblivious RAM for secure cloud storage, which both
| protects user data and ensures that "most" of the access
| pattern (everything but the number blocks of data a user
| has accessed) remains private. There are also many
| examples of real-world deployments of secure multiparty
| computation that limit abuse by large/centralized parties
| in various ways while still allowing those parties to
| operate and even expand their business (without having to
| collect more user data than they already collect).
| derangedHorse wrote:
| The web3 providers mentioned are the most popular, but
| they do _not_ control distribution. That 's the whole
| point. _Anyone_ can distribute the data on the blockchain
| with no clear legal repercussions unlike with music where
| you will get sued for distributing music without
| permission.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Control of distribution is a problem, but control of data
| makes it much harder for users to switch away from them
| and use a different distributor.
|
| >>For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights
|
| It has licensing agreements with numerous record labels.
| Swizec wrote:
| Agree, owning data makes it harder to switch.
|
| A counter example here might be Twitter and Facebook. You
| can export all your data just fine, but it's useless
| anywhere else. Because the reason you're on
| Twitter/Facebook is that everyone else is there. They own
| the distribution of your connections making the data
| itself useless without them.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| True, you can export your Twitter data, but a competitor
| to Twitter cannot access the entire set of user data that
| Twitter has access to.
|
| The real differentiator is that with Web3, the data is
| open, so providing an alternative is as simple as
| providing an alternative front-end.
|
| What threatens the promise of Web3 are the issues that
| this article brings up, with decentralized projects not
| being able to iterate as quickly as centralized ones,
| leading to proprietary elements becoming the standard for
| some aspects of widely used Web3 technologies (like NFTs)
| and establishing a moat for the centralized platform that
| owns that element.
| uncomputation wrote:
| How does this handle data schemas? Perhaps I'm thinking
| too much of an RDBMS schema but for Twitter for example.
| If decentra-Twitter stores my data in some schema (say a
| hard-coded "pinned tweet" column that only supports one)
| then is everyone else stuck with that forever? Or could
| they extend that to include, say, multiple pinned tweets?
| cwalv wrote:
| > but a competitor to Twitter cannot access the entire
| set of user data that Twitter has access to.
|
| True, but they could make it very easy for users to
| transfer all their data, which makes it possible if they
| could convince everyone to do it mass. So the real
| problem is that it's not realistic to convince everyone
| to move; the network effect is too strong.
|
| AFAICT, OpenSea et al have the same first mover/network
| advantage. The record on the chain of a url "belonging"
| to someone has approximately zero utility without the
| edifice they've built on top
| jacoblambda wrote:
| It's a little different than Spotify. Spotify still
| controls the means of distribution while the data sources
| for "web3" are public/decentralised (in most but not all
| cases). Rather I'd compare it to Google Search and AMP.
| The data is still accessible and there are alternatives
| (manually routing to the sites themselves or using other
| search engines) however the main path to the data is
| gatekept by a centralised source (Google) which is
| routing all the requests through their servers (AMP)
| instead of using the underlying protocol.
|
| It's still a severe issue but it's a much simpler
| solution to simply build competitors for a tool accessing
| an open platform than it is to build a new platform
| entirely.
| dfee wrote:
| Actually, this was his point exactly. OpenSea must start
| on a decentralized block chain (due to market forces) and
| must move to a more centralized (faster moving) protocol
| in order to remain relevant.
|
| And the byproduct is lock-in.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Github relies on a distributed storage architecture
| (local git repositories on developers' machines) and in
| theory anyone can take a project from github and
| duplicate it on gitlab etc. In reality nobody bothers and
| a project hosted on github will remain exclusively hosted
| on github and nowhere else, and likewise with other git
| hosting services. For the most part nobody cares if the
| data is hosted on a distributed system or a centralized
| one, because the overwhelming majority of users will rely
| on the front end. Changing RPC urls is not as easy as you
| might think, especially for systems that are widely
| deployed and have heterogenous clients (which in theory
| would be the case if Web3 ever took off, which I
| personally doubt).
| pshc wrote:
| Few people bother because every git commit is
| cryptographically signed and every git repo is inherently
| replicated. It doesn't matter if you use a centralized
| service or not as long as you can rely on SHA1 (and
| sha256 is coming...) Git is almost the ur-blockchain in
| this respect, hardly an argument for centralization.
|
| Also, fuck Microsoft.
| anderspitman wrote:
| I keep my projects on GitHub for discoverability and the
| reputation provided by stars, whatever that's worth. So
| essentially network effects.
|
| The reality is if I'm looking for a library to solve a
| problem, I'm much more likely to use one from GH with
| 1000 stars than a random self-hosted GitLab with 50. I
| would like to not feel that way, but I suspect many
| others do as well. It would be nice if we at least had a
| decentralized reaction/reputation system.
|
| Is there an analog to this with the services Moxie talked
| about? Sincere question, I'm not familiar with the
| ecosystem at all.
| clippablematt wrote:
| The closest attempt I can think of is status wallets
| token ranking for dapps. You could burn your tokens to
| say if you liked something in their listings and that
| would rank it for others. The issue they hit is when the
| lists got popular (in like 2018-19) vc funded projects
| just bought up the supplies of tokens and burnt them to
| get their project rated higher. So basically Sybil attack
| and they became unreliable.
|
| It's the same problem across all decentralised protocols,
| if it's cheap to say something you get spam(see email)
| but introducing costs can just skew it to those who can
| afford to spam instead (essentially those with an
| advertising budget).
|
| So there's been a lot of research on proof of personhood
| (BrightID/ideas/proofofhumanity) to add Sybil resistance
| mechanisms so we can do 1p1v across the network. They're
| working ok, but the next big step is adding zkproofs so
| we can anonymise the voting (which is needed to prevent
| collusion) which clrfund and sismo are working on.
|
| Kleros have an interesting curated register protocol,
| which seems to work on small scales. Some groups are
| using it to token rank guy issues to prioritise work and
| get feedback.
|
| The status blog has some interesting writing around these
| ideas over the past few years https://status.im/research/
| strken wrote:
| People do bother. I don't have specific examples off the
| top of my head, but I've occasionally run into an read-
| only GitHub repo that's been moved to Gitea or GitLab, or
| even BitBucket.
|
| More broadly speaking, it's important that you _can_
| migrate, even if you don 't actually do it, because users
| who can easily churn give the developers an incentive to
| keep the UX solid. If you can just leave GitHub at any
| time, then they're less likely to add gigantic banner ads
| to every page, or bundle "third party offers" into
| installers - they know what happened to SourceForge,
| after all.
| spullara wrote:
| That is like saying that some people bother to host their
| own email.
| strken wrote:
| Not really.
|
| The barrier to hosting your own email is that you'll
| spend a day configuring everything, and a year later, the
| big providers will slightly change a spam detection
| algorithm, your mail won't be delivered, you won't know,
| and there will be bad consequences for you.
|
| The barrier to changing your git origin is spending five
| minutes setting up an account and repo somewhere else.
| Everything will work absolutely fine, you'll still have
| all your git history, you'll just be slightly less
| discoverable and some potential contributors might not
| want to create an account.
| sfblah wrote:
| And, as the article suggests, if there is some new
| feature that Github can enable (integration of git
| commits with an issue tracker or CI/CD integration come
| to mind), that will happen in a vendor-specific way on
| Github, not in the Git protocol. So, then you immediately
| move back to the world of platforms.
| lolinder wrote:
| The web3 frontends appear to be in the same place that
| Chrome is: yes, technically you can always switch to
| another browser, but if Chrome decides to boycott a new
| feature, it will never exist as a practical matter. If
| Chrome blocks a website, it will be as though it doesn't
| exist for most people. That in _theory_ it still does
| doesn 't change anything. What makes OpenSea different
| than Chrome in this respect?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| While in theory you could change your RPC URL, in
| practice what difference would it make? At least IPFS
| offers some form of integrity checking through its
| generated hash. But there's no way to say, for example,
| that I karrot_kream at time T fetched a URL pointed to by
| NFT N with contents C. As demonstrated by Moxie's
| changing NFT and eventual deletion by OpenSea, who
| _knows_ what will happen to it? It's possible to at least
| build cryptographic attestations of fetching a particular
| NFT (and even maybe placing this attestation on-chain, to
| have some NFT "provenance" going on) but there's really
| not that much work going into it right now. That's the
| critique.
| pshc wrote:
| Changing your RPC url will make no difference because
| you'll get the same result either way. Any service that
| lies about the state of the chain will quickly be
| jettisoned like so much carbon dioxide.
|
| The bare minimum for a reputable NFT is to publish the
| contract source code and use immutable storage. That's
| the first step of due diligence in the space.
|
| All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized
| because it's still super early and everyone's trying to
| figure out how it ought to work.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| OpenSea lied about the non-existence of the jpeg-swapping
| NFT he minted. They removed it from their API responses
| because they didn't like it. Do you think they're about
| to be jettisoned? Or will people largely not care because
| they actually like the centralised nature of OpenSea with
| its TOS and extra features and with no viable alternative
| that doesn't require running your own server?
| shagie wrote:
| Consider also "what's the point of an uncensorable block
| chain if the API servers can become untrustworthy and
| refuse to the serve the data?"
|
| If OpeanSea can blackhole / cancel / hide a NFT on a
| whim, what does that say about the viability of hosting
| other services that access the blockchain through similar
| gateways?
|
| Additionally, if such services can preform those actions,
| what does that suggest about the viability of financial
| instruments and company governance accessed through those
| or similar services?
|
| Yes, this is FUD. I believe it is quite reasonable FUD.
| pshc wrote:
| That's fair. I was talking about canonicalized chain
| state (hence RPC), not consensus about what constitutes
| spam.
|
| I agree that OpenSea should not have final say in this
| regard, as clearly that is not decentralized. I would be
| interested to hear if anyone is trying solve this at
| scale.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized
| because it's still super early and everyone's trying to
| figure out how it ought to work.
|
| I understand this and I'm certainly sympathetic to it.
| Folks are also trying to figure out how to actually stuff
| art on-chain which I'm a fan of. I'm very familiar with
| the NFT standards because I was involved in some of the
| discussions with it. The amount of money this space is
| seeing though given how fluid representation in the space
| though, leads to Moxie's other critique, that this is
| being fed with a gold rush trying to find liquidity for
| hoarded crypto. I know that builders can't control what
| these speculators do but it certainly adds pressure for
| builders to either take the money or operate at a
| disadvantage to builders who do.
| Loudness wrote:
| In regards to keeping the art on-chain, the immutability
| is a real problem. What happens when someone stuffs
| illegal data/images on the blockchain? Once a bad actor
| sneaks trade secrets, doxxing material, or CP onto the
| chain, it's there forever. By design, deleting data from
| the blockchain isn't possible.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I think it's good to remember that bitcoin and ethereum
| were the very first cryptocurrencies. They are flawed,
| bitcoin in particular failed at everything it was idealized
| to be and will probably never improve. Ethereum seems to be
| moving forward at least. Slowly, but still.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| Ethereum light clients will make it trivial to verify the
| state of the blockchain and interact with it without also
| having to store the entire blockchain.
|
| The nice thing is that you can depend on Infura for now,
| but if they ever attempt to be dishonest, you can easily
| switch to hosting your own node or light client. The cost
| of moving away from these centralized services is pretty
| low.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I don't think that's a reality yet though. ETH 2.0 hasn't
| happened yet.
| gen220 wrote:
| I think this is "the point". This is like saying you can
| switch away from GMail by running your own mail server.
| People don't want to run their own mail server.
|
| Will the ethereum light client run in metamask with no
| configuration? I'm afraid anything short of that is too
| heavy.
| clippablematt wrote:
| The idea of light clients is they will be bundled inside
| of apps/websites/extensions. So yes running a light
| client will be easy because it's just happening in the
| background of the app, replacing the api hopping we do
| now with direct call/response to the chain.
|
| So for metamask they would replace the calls to infura
| with a light client instead. Easy. They're probably a
| year away from adoption, this year will accelerate
| development as it's something lots of us want.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Yeah, you just change the RPC URL:
| https://docs.metamask.io/guide/rpc-api.html
| gen220 wrote:
| I don't think changing the RPC URL exec's an ethereum
| light client.
|
| Extending the mail server analogy, updating the MX record
| does not exec a mail server.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| He's saying that configuring MetaMask to work with a
| light client is as easy as changing the RPC URL. The
| light client still needs to be installed/configured
| separately.
|
| Ideally, as Moxie suggested, MetaMask itself integrates a
| light client into its wallet, so that it becomes the
| default configuration.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| The fact that a problem exists doesn't mean it can't be
| solved, but any solution which does not go deep enough to
| address why Ethereum nodes are centralized is simply hype.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| It's a step up from the "crypto isn't crypto" mantra that
| many used to repeat, refusing to even look at how it works.
| Not sure why it took something as silly as art NFTs, but it
| does seem that now even those who previously tried avoiding
| cryptocurrencies at all cost have at least started looking at
| them critically.
|
| He does point out some real problems. Yes, all this has been
| discussed in the Ethereum community already and many in the
| community have voiced the same criticisms as well. But a lot
| of the issues are still unsolved for regular mainstream
| users, who rely on a lot of centralized services and are
| often herded into solutions that may bring more convenience
| but are also less secure. It's good we're having discussions
| about this, and the more people that point out flaws the
| better. After all the entire point of a blockchain is to be
| public and robust. If this is our future money or notary
| service, the more probing the better.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| This is exactly the attitude that moves us forward. "Us"
| not being just those who happen to get in early on the
| solutions to the solvable problems, but hopefully including
| everyone who can get a benefit from using truly
| decentralized services.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| For a non-tech regular user who just want to get some work
| done Internet Explorer was indeed the internet.
|
| In India even to this day for a vast majority YouTube/FB/WA
| is all the internet is. It's not at all unusual for people to
| walk up to a mom-and-pop store to top-up their data plan
| asking them to "recharge my WhatsApp balance". Even carriers
| have specialised data packs that are tied to a specific
| product/service.
|
| And to be fair this is just how it'll be with any
| product/tech. As an example, in India Xerox literally stands
| for photocopy https://imgur.com/a/66TnCog
| wyck wrote:
| MetaMask is a wallet, its not ingrained into any blockchain,
| your free to use alternatives, and many protocols don't support
| it. The centralized aspect of a chrome app and marketplace like
| opensea is very well know issue and talked about a lot in
| crypto, the problem of course comes down to lack of education,
| which is apparent in this very post.
| Zerverus wrote:
| password1 wrote:
| Can you point me to where this insightful discussion happens?
| And where can I educate myself? 99,99% of content and forums
| I find online about crypto only care about promoting coins,
| nfts or services basing only on futuristic visionary
| promises, hyping up the users and attempts at FOMO. It's
| almost literal spam. This is the first time I read something
| that just explains how thing works from a technical
| standpoint and what challenges are there.
| pshc wrote:
| It is quite difficult because indeed everyone has a profit
| motive to shill. The only way I could get a good read on
| anything was by experimenting with the tech.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| This is the best place for deep, technical discussions free
| of shilling: https://ethresear.ch/
| darcys22 wrote:
| Its almost entirely done on crypto twitter. You follow the
| builders and they talk about this stuff. Tweet threads are
| terrible but that is where the good information is.
|
| Twitter is frustrating in that the good content is buried
| and if you follow the wrong people they just spam your
| feed.
|
| Its a constant battle to keep the signal to noise ratio of
| your feed high and the right people to follow constantly
| changes.
| landemva wrote:
| I agree about Twatter being difficult. And it is time
| consuming. Some projects have decent Discord channels. It
| depends on the devs and community there.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Who are some of these people in your experience?
| beoberha wrote:
| I got into web3/crypto (hate both those terms) Twitter a
| few months ago and it took a very significant amount of
| time to find the signal among the noise if you will.
| Twitter's algorithms heavily favor engagement which in
| turn favors "influencers" who lack a lot of technical
| knowledge and peddle hype. I can see why curious skeptics
| are so quickly turned off, but there really is a gold
| mine of good discussion out there.
|
| @das_connor is an awesome follow. He works for Avalanche
| (which I believe will be a massive player in enterprise
| blockchain adoption).
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Some of the most interesting tech focused people I've found
| on twitter:
|
| - @VitalikButerin
|
| - @Hasufl
|
| - @ePolynya
|
| - @gakonst
|
| Can see who they're following as a launchpad into the more
| interesting ecosystem
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| David Lancashire has given numerous interviews on the
| subject of Ethereum's issues around node operation.
| chucksmash wrote:
| The Daily Thread on https://old.reddit.com/r/ethfinance has
| a number of folks who are in it for the the tech and
| generally some pretty good takes on protocol/ecosystem
| tech. It is better than any other crypto subreddit I've
| come across.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| People are certainly free to use alternatives, but if they
| aren't spinning up their own nodes what will they be using,
| another centralized node service? Most people aren't going to
| run their own node and for good reason, its expensive and
| profitless. Sure a cryptographic/economic layer on top of
| Ethereum could incentivize people to run nodes and have users
| pay for decentralization, but at the end of the day people
| will use Infura or a competitor because it is cheaper, and
| when these companies control who gets transactions they also
| influence who can make blocks.
|
| Ethereum is fundamentally flawed in this sense - it only pays
| for mining (and in the future, staking). The work of routing
| and storing data is done by the most prolific miners and
| businesses reliant on Ethereum to keep it from collapsing;
| there is no sustainable model where a decentralized cohort of
| nodes can run Ethereum without fundamentally changing how
| Ethereum pays for infrastructure.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just
| been an over-exaggeration all along._
|
| It has, but only a small portion of people with the engineering
| skills to recognize knew it. Those profiting off it hyped it,
| and those not either called it a scam or stayed out of the
| fray.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| This somewhat reminds me of reading IPFS documentation (which
| is fucking excellent BTW) and realizing the same thing:
| nobody is going to run their own pinning service and Pinata
| is the only one they mention by name which means it'll be the
| platform everyone (to a first approximation) will use.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The lack of a a few "chains" though means an ephemeral node
| might actually not suck though.
|
| Put another way, even IPFS nodes that for all intents and
| purposes are "clients" can still speak the same protocal to
| talk to the pinning service.
|
| The single-ish central chain idea was always terrible.
| "Trustless" or not, that much synchronization is a
| misfeature! The real world really is partial-order
| time/causality, that is a feature not a bug.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I make content. I put it on IPFS. I pin it to Pinata
| because my laptop isn't on all the time. Pinata decides
| my content isn't acceptable and removes it. You can't
| access my content. Not a problem?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| With torrents people actually participate. Pinata should
| not be viewed as the "database of record", but as a
| something that complements the desktop at home.
|
| I understand that is still not satisfactory.
|
| I think the real goal is to find institutional users who
| are not interested in a profit. For example I am involved
| with https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/.
| Software Heritage would be not a high bandwidth pinner,
| but a pinner of last resort. Universities were very
| important to the original internet, and should also host
| public data sets, software artifact, and hopefully if Sci
| Hub prevails the journal articles themselves.
|
| None of that is a pinning service, but if it catches on
| the big cloud companies might feel compelled to get into
| the pinning service game, if only so they can get those
| university and government contracts! The current cloud
| computing business as a racket, but them offering support
| for a protocol that reduces switching costs might make
| for some real competition.
|
| Basically "web2" problems are Captialism problems, and
| the stuff needs to become a low-margin business or state-
| run not-for profit to be better. There is no secret magic
| short cut, it is a political problem. SV is of course
| completely uninterested in low-margin businesses. The
| regular web3 will have a hard time being anything but a
| Ponzi scheme per its design, but IPFS itself at least
| doesn't have those characteristics baked in, and so these
| alternative futures are possible.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I keep saying that there are exactly two kinds of people in
| the crypto space: scammers who know exactly what they are
| doing, and gullible fools
| solarmist wrote:
| Naw, there's also naive optimists which are similar but
| distinct from gullible fools. Kind of half and half. They
| know exactly what they're doing for half the equation.
| awwaiid wrote:
| I thought web2 aka web-2.0 was AJAX+Unobtrusive JavaScript aka
| XHR+jquery aka SPAs. I guess we rolled The Cloud (rented server
| time) back into that at some point?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Two different topics entirely. web3 isn't a successor concept
| to Web 2.0.
| justinator wrote:
| I was under the impression that crypto currency was thought of as
| nothing but yet another pyramid scheme.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't HN take threads on generic-indignant tangents.
| This one has been repeated so often, we definitely don't need
| it again, regardless of which side anyone's one.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845594.
| justinator wrote:
| > Please don't HN take threads on generic-indignant tangents
|
| It's an idea and topic that's _directly_ referenced in the
| actual article. I 'm having trouble thinking Moxie was
| referring to anything but cryptocurrency as pyramid scheme
| theory or why would they use such language?
| [deleted]
| input_sh wrote:
| I mean, yeah, nobody that buys cryptocurrencies expects to buy
| goods with it, only to sell it to someone else for more money
| down the road.
|
| A decade ago there was at least Silk Road and similar, offering
| something tangible in exchange for cryptocurrencies, now the
| best you can get is a half-assed El Salvador experiment with
| too many issues to list (but to give two examples, imagine not
| being able to pay for stuff because AWS's US-East-1 went down,
| or waking up as a "millionaire" because the app had an integer
| overflow).
| dazeandconfuse wrote:
| not sure if this is what you're talking about, but there are
| plenty of darknet markets that use cryptocurrency in very
| wide use
| wyck wrote:
| By definition something with a finite supply cannot be a
| pyramid scheme, in fact in most cases there are no parallels
| whatsoever to crypto and pyramid schemes. There are some
| pyramid schemes within the shitcoin scam and yield farmer
| communities, but to think that's represents the industry is
| highly ignorant.
| justinator wrote:
| So you're saying the SEC is, "highly ignorant"?
|
| https://www.sec.gov/files/ia_virtualcurrencies.pdf
| wyck wrote:
| Ya, do you really think otherwise?
| phire wrote:
| Did you even read what you linked?
|
| The SEC are saying that some operators of proper Ponzi
| schemes are taking crypto as investment and using crypto
| hype to justify their insane profits.
|
| Not that crypto in general is a Pyramid or Ponzi scheme.
| [deleted]
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| By your definition, the original Ponzi scheme isn't a pyramid
| scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
|
| That scheme was based on arbitrage of international reply
| coupons, of which there were a finite number in circulation.
| wyck wrote:
| Poorly worded on my part, I meant > as long as new
| investors contribute new funds, and as long as most of the
| investors do not demand full repayment and still believe in
| the non-existent assets they are purported to own.
|
| As mentioned this happens a lot with shitcoins and yield
| farmers, its rather easy to setup, but is not indicative of
| the industry, and the main source to blame for this
| misconception is the media, because you certainly cannot
| justify it if you understood the technology.
| justinator wrote:
| It just sounds like Bitcoin to me. The proponents tell me
| how much it's worth and you're stupid to not want to
| invest. A few get rich and the rest are left poorer than
| what they started with. Moxie used the phrase, "gold
| rush" in this essay, and it's fitting for cryptocurrency
| itself as far as I can tell.
|
| I'm poor, (but not stupid, thank you!), but I've only
| seen crypto being used as payment for prostitution.
| Which, hey if that works, good on 'em, I support the idea
| of safe, legal sex work.
| majormajor wrote:
| > Poorly worded on my part, I meant > as long as new
| investors contribute new funds, and as long as most of
| the investors do not demand full repayment and still
| believe in the non-existent assets they are purported to
| own.
|
| Isn't this just saying "something can't be a pyramid
| scheme unless it has already collapsed"?
|
| Whereas the argument being made is that looking like a
| pyramid scheme is something that tells you something
| about the future likelihood of collapse.
|
| (I think there's also an interesting dynamic that's not
| explored much here about "finite supply" - unless/until
| every coin except for one or a small handful collapse, it
| seems like "crypto" as a whole is subject to inflationary
| pressure from new coins. Would BTC be worth more in USD
| terms if ETH didn't exist?)
| zucker42 wrote:
| Are you claiming that nothing is a pyramid scheme until
| it crashes?
| justinator wrote:
| I think if you're invested in a pyramid scheme, it's not
| easy to admit such.
|
| I have to relate this to the whole Allison Mack/NXIVM
| pyramid scheme.
|
| Funny that we still don't know who the mythical "Satoshi
| Nakamoto" is. Seems pretty cultish to me, but believe
| what you wanna believe. To me that's a pretty big red
| flag. But I'm super into people calling me stupid so have
| at it.
| democracy wrote:
| I appreciate the author's patience and effort not to put TLDR as
| "it's all BS" in the beginning of his post...
| 5- wrote:
| similar: the conveniently centralised hosting for the
| 'distributed' matrix im system:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997898
|
| could everyone run their own matrix server in theory? sure. do
| people want that? not really. so just like in tfa we get a
| centralised system with all the downsides of a heavily
| distributed one (reduced reliability, operational and
| transactional overhead, etc.)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Even organizations building software full time do not want to
| run their own servers at this point.
|
| This is almost entirely an educational/labor force issue,
| combined with a slight preference for the nominal hardware
| flexibility of cloud setups. The tech community focus from the
| dawn of the web until today has been overwhelmingly on getting
| people and tools to be better at creating and managing website
| content, whereas the traditional sysadmin stuff required to run
| "your own servers" with contemporary server technology has been
| viewed with both a level of disdain and also utter intimidation.
| Finding someone who can do React or Angular for your project
| might not be trivial, but finding someone who could actually run
| your servers for you ... much harder.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > [...] NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What
| surprised me about the standards was that there's no hash
| commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of
| the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds,
| or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS
| running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine,
| anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who
| compromises that machine can change the image, title,
| description, etc for the NFT to whatever they'd like at any time
| (regardless of whether or not they "own" the token). There's
| nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image "should"
| be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the
| "correct" image.
|
| How did we go from trapdoor functions being the foundation of
| everything in the space to forgetting to hash a link? Is the
| rational that these links should only ever be IPFS links? That's
| fine I guess, at least those are hashed. Why does the protocol
| allow for this to happen?
| ptudan wrote:
| There are plenty of use cases for NFTs with updating data. Many
| exist already. Most high quality NFT art project do use IPFS,
| yes. But that is not the only use case for NFTs
| jagger27 wrote:
| I believe that it's possible for there to be a reasonable use
| case for a pointer to something that changes, though I'd
| appreciate an example because I can't come up with one. If it
| links to something that's not on some sort of blockchain,
| then what's the point?
|
| If an NFT contains a normal URL, how could that possibly be
| valuable? The domain could expire or be transferred, or the
| original server hosting it could go down. I can't imagine any
| NFT that holds "ownership" of a real world tangible asset
| having any meaning whatsoever.
| porcoda wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will
|
| It's worth distinguishing "running" a server from "having" a
| server. I lost interest in "running" my own services a couple
| decades ago - too much work, and I don't keep up on security
| patches, so it felt like a huge liability too. I am quite happy
| to "have" a server of my own though that requires minimal
| babysitting.
|
| We already have this today in some forms: I have a network
| attached printer that once configured to get online, removes the
| need for me to run my own print server. Similarly I have NAS
| devices that remove the need for me to run my own file server.
| You could argue that the little box that my HomeKit devices talks
| to is also a little server for coordinating all of my little
| HomeKit devices. Each of these are pretty popular, even amongst
| the general population. That popularity tells me that people are
| quite happy to "have" purpose-built servers, but only if they
| don't need to "run" them.
| justinator wrote:
| Moxie's post reminds me that perhaps we need a
|
| _Your post advocates a [crypto] approach to decentralization of
| the web. Your idea will not work_
|
| adlibs akin to,
|
| https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
| calewis wrote:
| I come to hacker news for this kind of well written content. As a
| person who works in a non engineering role (although I started
| out there) this is brilliantly written and explained. Thank-you.
| wb14123 wrote:
| End to end encryption and open protocol give user more control of
| their data and has the same decentralized feature as blockchain.
| It should be the future we should build.
| stopat11 wrote:
| >People don't want to run their own servers, and never will.
|
| The older I get, the more I see that there is not much point in
| making arguments about topics. You can argue whatever you want,
| and it ultimately isn't about proving something is true or false,
| it is about feelings and what you want to happen based on your
| own desires.
|
| This whole section about running servers can be argued against. I
| never thought I would see normal people with "gaming computers",
| yet here we are. "People don't want to bother with the hassle of
| gaming computers". etc etc. Same arguments. Things change, and
| the past does not dictate the future. I mean, half the reason
| people didn't want to run servers was because the web wasn't
| centralised. So now that has changed.
|
| Other changes have occurred like the availability of the
| raspberry pi - a cheap, powerful, silent, relatively simple
| computer that can be used as a server. I remember back when
| Windows Home Server was a thing. It was packaged in these large
| noisey computers, running proprietary and expensive software. I
| didn't want to run a "home server" back then either.
|
| Whether people working at businesses want to run their own
| servers is irrelevant. I doubt they care about any of the things
| that would be relevant to home servers. They are often running
| lots of different servers with complex security rules and various
| applications. The managers see the cloud as a way not to hire
| expensive people they don't trust. The programmers don't care
| because it isn't their own product, and hate IT because they make
| you jump through a bunch of hoops to do anything. It is all a
| completely different environment to one person running one server
| at home.
|
| There are still impediments to running home servers that, if
| lifted, could make people more likely to run them. Static IP
| addresses are often expensive add-ons, for example. Upload speeds
| are sometimes too slow, and so on.
|
| Anyway, I don't even know what web3 is.
| jakupovic wrote:
| The article is written great and was enjoyable to read. I do have
| issues with how it is focused on NFT marketplace to the detriment
| of explaining what the real benefit of the blockchain/crypto is.
| Which I am going to try and explain to the best of my ability.
| Here goes. The article omits to mention that whatever is stored
| in the blockchain is immutable. This means that there is not
| google or Zuckerberg behind it all with ability to actually
| change what's on the chain as this is not possible at all.
| Instead the author focuses on the ability of OpenSea to remove
| things from their marketplace and also how it uses centralized
| apis to get the info. This, while true, is orthogonal to the
| immutable ledger use case which is still true.
| endisneigh wrote:
| If you care about the environment even a little bit (like turning
| off lights in rooms you're not occupying) then you will reject
| Web3. Even the most efficient blockchains use more energy than
| the status quo unnecessarily.
|
| This is also to say nothing of the fact that it's more expensive
| per USD/KB transferred, slower and more complicated.
|
| I think what Web3 should be is a way to use your laptop or any
| commodity computer as infrastructure for your data, and there
| should be APIs for websites such that it uses your computer as
| the source as opposed to their own servers.
|
| For example this comment could be saved on my computer, but
| accessible to everyone viewing even if my computer is off via
| caching, but ultimately I could invalidate and delete.
| dqpb wrote:
| Algorand is carbon-negative. The inventor is a Turing-award
| winning MIT professor.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Nope. Still worse than status quo + planting trees via
| partners, which is exactly what alogrand does...
| [deleted]
| dqpb wrote:
| You can install an algorand server on a desktop and measure
| it yourself. Try doing that with Visa, or Venmo, or [choose
| your own black box].
| NationalPark wrote:
| Via carbon offsets, so they emit all the co2 up front and
| then hope the forests their partners plant are both real and
| will be properly managed for the next few decades.
| dqpb wrote:
| They emit very little co2 up front. So little that they
| trivially reach carbon-negative with a small amount of
| carbon offsets.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Very little compared to the entire planet, sure. But
| what's the actual amount?
| dqpb wrote:
| Sustainable Blockchain: Estimating the Carbon Footprint
| of Algorand's Pure Proof-of-Stake
|
| https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/sustainable-
| blockcha...
| dylkil wrote:
| What about proof of stake chains, do you reject those too? How
| many companies with huge carbon footprint do you reject? What
| about cows did you reject them?
| endisneigh wrote:
| > What about proof of stake chains, do you reject those too?
|
| Proof of stake still use more electricity per KB transferred
| than the status quo.
|
| > What about cows did you reject them?
|
| Not sure how this is relevant to internet? Can cows run
| websites?
| not2b wrote:
| In my view it is only proof-of-work systems that must be
| rejected. Alternatives that are less harmful are possible.
|
| Pretty much everything that has a large carbon footprint is
| going to have to be fixed to reduce that footprint, including
| web3.
| dylkil wrote:
| the public dismay at the carbon footprint of crypto is
| always fascinating to me. The network rewards are setup in
| such a way the the most profitable miners are the ones with
| the cheapest electricity as this is their biggest overhead.
| This pushes miners to the cheapest forms of electricity,
| i.e renewables
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _This pushes miners to the cheapest forms of
| electricity, i.e renewables_
|
| I would love for this to be true (and that's why I used
| to believe it). But there are two problems with this:
|
| * Renewables aren't the cheapest form of electricity;
| low-value (dirty-burning) or subsidised fossil fuels are
| cheaper in many places. You've heard of people buying and
| re-commissioning old coal power stations for crypto
| mining, I'm sure?
|
| * Using any grid electricity drives up the price of other
| electricity, by market forces. The effect is local, but
| when cryptomining is happening _globally_ , that's a
| global effect. That means that otherwise-infeasible
| inefficient (and polluting) electricity generation is now
| viable.
|
| Greenest [?] cheapest. If this were a universal truth, we
| wouldn't have a climate problem in the first place.
| threeseed wrote:
| Renewables aren't the cheapest form of electricity.
|
| It is when you get it (a) for free by stealing it or (b)
| from countries that have lax regulations.
|
| And in both cases this is the dirtiest fossil fuels not
| renewables.
| shagie wrote:
| > This pushes miners to the cheapest forms of
| electricity, i.e renewables
|
| If renewables are the cheapest forms of energy, why did
| the hash rate drop when Kazakhstan went off line?
|
| Based on https://www.iea.org/reports/kazakhstan-energy-
| profile
|
| > Coal represents around half of Kazakhstan's energy mix
| (50% in 2018), followed by oil and natural gas (both with
| 25% shares).
|
| This means that the cheapest energy to be found for is
| 100% carbon based and non-renewable.
|
| Likewise, another 5-10% ( https://www.yahoo.com/now/iran-
| temporarily-stops-authorized-... ) is from Iran - which
| again is using oil, and natural gas rather than renewable
| sources.
|
| From
| https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ -
| the countries with the cheapest energy prices (and show
| up in the hash rates) are those that are using fossil
| fuels (and likely trying to subsidize those prices from
| the government to avoid civil unrest).
| timeon wrote:
| > What about ...
|
| really?
| dylkil wrote:
| Yes really, if you don't have conviction you are just
| virtue signalling. I want to see which it is.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| > If you care about the environment even a little bit (like
| turning off lights in rooms you're not occupying) then you will
| reject Web3. Even the most efficient blockchains use more
| energy than the status quo unnecessarily.
|
| On an Intel NUC (Core i3, low power mode) I'm running a non-
| mining Ethereum 1 full node[1] plus a staking Ethereum 2
| node[2] (comprising two active validators) on mainnet. Measured
| with a Kill A Watt[3] since genesis of the beacon chain, it's
| using approximately USD 140 kWh of electricity per year (about
| USD $15/year where I live), and makes use of the Internet
| connection that I use for everything else personal and work
| related. The Ethereum 1 node also acts as my personal gateway
| to Ethereum vs. say my needing to connect through Infura.
|
| There are today 279235 active validators[4] on Ethereum's
| mainnet beacon chain. Now, I know that Ethereum hasn't made the
| switch over to Proof of Stake yet (that's what Eth 2 is all
| about) but it's coming this year. Let's ignore the kWh usage of
| my non-mining full Eth 1 node and assume the 140 kWh is split
| evenly by the validators (it's not even close, the Eth 1 node
| is a pig in comparison, but for sake of argument), then round
| each one up to 100 kWH per year and assume that's the average
| per validator going forward, and let's grow the beacon chain to
| 1 million active validators. So that's 100k MWh per year.
| Amazon reported[5] that they consumed 24 million MWh in 2020.
|
| I'm not sure how many combined MWh are consumed by the data
| centers for VISA, traditional banks, etc., but I'm guessing
| it's nothing to sneeze at. According to Statista[6], it costs
| about 150 kWh for VISA to process 100k transactions. According
| to VISA[7] they processed about 206 billion transactions over
| 12 months. So that's about 309k MWh.
|
| A couple of things to consider also. Ethereum devs are
| concerned about energy consumption, and there are active
| efforts to drive down the energy cost per validator by the
| various projects (nimbus, teku, etc.). Also, my Core i3 Intel
| NUC is pretty heavy-duty compared to lower-end hardware capable
| of running a validator node. So I expect the energy cost/year
| of Eth 2 to improve in coming years.
|
| [1] https://geth.ethereum.org/
|
| [2] https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2#readme
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_A_Watt
|
| [4] https://beaconscan.com/
|
| [5]
| https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/sustainab...
|
| [6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265891/ethereum-
| energy-...
|
| [7] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-
| visa/documents/ab...
| endisneigh wrote:
| Your comparison is meaningless because you're not comparing
| apples to apples.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| In terms of TPS, or what do you think is the orange?
| everfree wrote:
| > it uses your computer as the source as opposed to their own
| servers
|
| > this comment could be saved on my computer, but accessible to
| everyone viewing even if my computer is off via caching
|
| It sounds to me like you're just renaming datacenters from
| "origin" to "cache", without any meaningful difference in how
| the data is stored and retrieved in practice.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Yes, exactly. The origin should be those who create the data
| to begin with, ideally.
| verdverm wrote:
| This is not what I expected from Moxie. A writes very good
| account of his experience trying to do some dapp / NFT stuff. He
| eloquently draws attention to the problems that are based in
| human behavior.
|
| Definitely worth the read. Both sides of the debate could elevate
| their arguments if they ponder what Moxie has written.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > Both sides of the debate could elevate their arguments if
| they ponder what Moxie has written.
|
| I appreciate that he fairly tried these different things out
| and reported his experience. But I don't think he has noticed
| anything particularly interesting or novel.
|
| It's common knowledge that the plentitude of blockchains out
| there now make compatibility between them almost impossible.
| This is how Bitcoin "maximalists" came to be in the first
| place. If reputation and trust is the game, it defeats the
| purpose to have a million different blockchains.
| astoor wrote:
| It is very refreshing to see this from a primarily technical
| angle.
|
| In common with many HN-ers, I actually did a lot of
| cryptocurrency and blockchain dev work 5+ years ago, and was
| actually very exited about it at first, before realising what was
| behind the curtains. It is a similar story with many early
| Bitcoin developers, including one famously describing it as an
| experiment that failed[0]. I also get the distinct impression
| that the vast majority of pro-cryptocurrency people on HN at the
| moment are relatively new[1].
|
| I stopped looking at it primarily from a technical angle because
| I realised that, firstly, the technology isn't anywhere nearly as
| useful as some people make out and might never be able to do the
| things which are promised, but secondly and more importantly, the
| technology really isn't the important part - what matters is the
| _belief_ that technology might work, and sustaining that belief
| for long enough to make money. Moxie hints at this when he says
| "you can't stop a gold rush".
|
| There were an increasing number of people at the tech meetups
| etc. who knew nothing about the technology. Many were gamblers,
| refugees from the 2011 "Black Friday"[2], who knew full well that
| many of the schemes they were putting money into would never work
| or were even out-and-out scams, but they enjoyed the thrill of
| trying to get in and out and make money before the collapse.
|
| The was also a growing sense of people being involved just to be
| anti-establishment. The ironic thing is that, back in 2008, you
| could make a reasonable case that the established banks were the
| bad guys and the cypherpunks were the good guys, but the
| situation has now definitely reversed - the banks have cleaned up
| their acts considerably (anyone who has worked in one for a long
| time will say how completely different the cultures are now vs
| then) with new regulations (e.g. Dodd-Frank) and most have plans
| to become carbon neutral, etc., and it is all the cryptocurrency
| scammers and fraudsters and climate-destroyers who are the bad
| guys now.
|
| But there is more to it than that. There was also an increasing
| undercurrent of very non-technical people coming in and trying to
| exploit the technologists excited to work on the next new and
| shiny thing. I know that kind-of thing happens with everything,
| but this was much deeper and more malicious than in other
| contexts.
|
| So while the technology isn't the important part, it is useful to
| be reminded of the intractable problems with the technology.
|
| [0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-
| experi...
|
| [1] Yes I know there may be exceptions, but just for example
| compare all the newbie comments on the recent
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29635907 with the highly
| technical ones on the related post
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365663 from 8 years ago
| (including "I'm one of the thieves mentioned").
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
| nbzso wrote:
| Sorry. My "specific" take: Edited and self-censored due to lack
| of "substance" on the topic.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| If you've been a reader here for a long time, you should focus
| on being a better writer. The best HN commenters write for the
| community as much as for themselves.
|
| The fact of the matter is, web3 is a new phenomenon that isn't
| going away. HN deserves good discussion on the topic. "Good"
| doesn't mean "positive." It means _substantive_ -- make a
| critique with substance. Say something that hasn't been said
| countless times.
|
| The effort is worth it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pronik wrote:
| > web1 was decentralized, web2 centralized everything into
| platforms
|
| Am I the only one who remembers Web 1.0 as "publisher-generated
| content" and Web 2.0 as "user-generated content"? (publisher
| being the one who hosts the server) The latter is dead for
| several years now, since we've found out content moderation is
| hard and even scale won't help you there.
| TekMol wrote:
| This is the tweet where he announced the NFT:
|
| https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305
|
| I can still see it on OpenSea:
|
| https://opensea.io/assets/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57822130...
|
| Maybe it was blocked and later unblocked?
|
| Anyhow, I think he is painting too black of an image of Web3.
| Even if OpenSea blocks his NFT, Ethereum scanners will still show
| it:
|
| https://etherscan.io/address/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57822...
|
| It would take an Ethereum hard fork to tamper with it. That is a
| very big undertaking and rarely happens.
|
| So he can prove that he minted it.
|
| This is something we do not have on Web2. If FB deletes
| something, you do not have proof. And you cannot see it anymore.
| Neither in Chrome nor in Edge nor in Firefox.
|
| On Web3, if OpenSea blocks an NFT and MetaMask uses the OpenSea
| API to display it, you can use another browser and see it again.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| The value of the nft drops to near zero if it's not accepted on
| dominant popular marketplaces
| sriku wrote:
| Very well raised points!
|
| Having a cryptographer taking up this topic has become a rarity,
| and that says something. I have not delved into the NFT world
| much, although I am quite familiar with blockchains and smart
| contracts. I've argued with more knowledgeable colleagues and
| friends that there is not much meaning in "owning" the hash of a
| piece of art for various reasons - a) you don't possess the art
| and are the mercy of systems which you need to do anything with
| it, b) someone can make an imperceptible modification to the art
| and invalidate the hash while retaining full artistic value
| except perhaps as a pedantic statement ... and then some.
|
| What baffled me is that the accepted protocol for NFTs currently
| just requires a URL, _any_ URL! ... with _no_ hash validation!
| How did the blockchain world get here? Well, perhaps a IPFS URL
| would be "best practice", but it is shocking that currently any
| URL with no content validation goes! It should be impossible to
| mint an NFT for a URL with no content validation.
| smoyer wrote:
| Once again I was hoping for a discussion of IPFS, DAT and Hyper.
| I've written post of an implementation for HyperSwarm and am
| impressed by the possibilities for decentralization. Does anyone
| know of a similar article for web3 that excludes the blockchain?
| unionpivo wrote:
| > Does anyone know of a similar article for web3 that excludes
| the blockchain?
|
| Unfortunately in a lot of people minds web3 is "blockchain",
| just like crypto now just means blockchain, how hacker used to
| mean something else etc.
|
| Not sure if the battle is completely lost, but I' wouldn't mind
| alternate name for such technologies.
|
| As someone who used to spend some tile playing around with
| IPFS, and freenet, I find that unfortunate.
| NilsIRL wrote:
| This ties in nicely with this talk moxie gave in 2019 about
| (de)centralization:
|
| https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving
| bambax wrote:
| > _When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much
| "better" in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone.
| It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use._
|
| I really love this idea. Why doesn't a company with already
| established authority (say, Google) build this? An NFT-free NFT
| marketplace. That would be hilarious, as well as probably useful.
|
| Or maybe someone else than an established player, but then with
| some mechanism to compensate for the lack of intrinsic authority.
| For example, a database with a hash of the whole db stored on a
| blockchain. To keep costs low, the hash could be stored only
| every x inserts (or, for a fee, one could force a hash store
| after a given transaction).
| durakot wrote:
| I've known Moxie to often be right. And I think he happens to be
| right about this.
| verdverm wrote:
| I'm perplexed with him writing this piece and, at the same
| time, adding crypto based payments to Signal...
|
| Has he written anything on Signal and payments?
| durakot wrote:
| I don't think there's necessarily any contradiction. This is
| a critique of the Web3 paradigm (crypto all the things) and
| not cryptocurrency itself for say, payments.
| jwblackwell wrote:
| Yeah I read the article more as a list of valid suggestions
| for a nascent industry. Not an attempt to suggest that
| crypto is going to disappear entirely.
| floren wrote:
| > at the same time, adding crypto based payments to Signal...
|
| Damn, and just when I'd been thinking how much I like Signal.
|
| The goldrush when Keybase added crypto completely ruined what
| had been a pretty good tool.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| I want to run my own servers.
|
| Honestly.
|
| It has always been a somewhat easy task if you pick an OS that is
| secure and stable.
|
| And today with all the Foss/oss there are plenty of reasons why I
| would do it.
|
| More Decentralised Please.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Same. I'd like to make this experience better rather than give
| up and give in to centralization. I know others have different
| priorities, but I don't need them to use my servers. I just
| need them to interoperate minimally.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > rather than give up and give in to centralization
|
| As for why Marlinspike might have abandoned the goal of
| decentralization, I think Upton Sinclair might have some
| insight.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I don't follow -\\_ (tsu) _/-
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Marlinspike is the CEO of Signal Messenger LLC, and he
| also coincidentally believes that people shouldn't make
| clients which are compatible with the official Signal
| messenger (even though the protocol and code are freely
| available), and shouldn't even try to distribute Signal
| from app stores that he doesn't approve of.[0]
|
| I don't actually know if he receives a meaningful salary
| from his CEO role, but Upton Sinclair's adage still seems
| relevant for explaining Marlinspike's views on
| decentralization: "It is difficult to get a man to
| understand something, when his salary depends on his not
| understanding it."[1]
|
| It's also worth pointing out that non-official Signal
| clients would be less likely to include support for
| MobileCoin, which "gained over 450% [in value] since"
| Signal announced support for it.[2]
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/q1jnbb/why_i
| snt_sig...
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-
| difficult-to-ge...
|
| [2] https://rankacoin.com/encrypted-messenger-company-
| signal-fac...
| noman-land wrote:
| I guess my beef with the whole web3 discussion is that everyone
| is bashing all the centralized bandaids is indicative that web3
| is fake without acknowledging that those things are bandaids
| "until it's really ready". These bandaids (infura and the like)
| are mostly only necessary for mobile users who can't run a full
| chain. And even then there are legit solutions like Status.im as
| well as lots of research into lite-clients.
|
| The "right" way to use something like Ethereum or IPFS is to
| download geth and go-ipfs and run the nodes yourself. You can do
| it on a modern laptop or a raspberry pi easily.
|
| Then you can point Metamask at `localhost` and be using your own
| pristine connection to the networks.
|
| Or you don't even need to use Metamask and can just issue
| commands directly in the console or you can download a local copy
| of of the static files for MyEtherWallet or whatever it's called
| these days and just double click on an HTML file and connect to
| your local node.
|
| Then once you've done that, stop wasting money on buying
| pointless centralized NFTs.
| danans wrote:
| > This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually
| of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of
| people downstream
|
| This is exactly what I've heard from lay investors in crypto (vs
| the techno utopians pushing crypto as the world's decentralized
| medium of exchange).
|
| The lay investors welcome the centralization and the regulation
| of off ramps as they feel it will bring more traditional
| financial instruments trust and relative stability to crypto,
| thereby bringing in even more common investors. They see its
| value as a gold replacement and inflation hedge.
|
| Their agenda is quite at odds with the original anarcho-
| capitalist vision of cryptocurrency, as they aren't interested
| undermining existing institutional structures (which they are
| themselves reliant on).
| unemphysbro wrote:
| I think moxie makes a good point about centralized services like
| alchemy, on-chain data from opensea, etc.
|
| The increase in development velocity using services like alchemy
| and pinata is astounding (I remember spending a month writing a
| stupid nft app in 2017 which now only takes a weekend.) I think
| these services are here to stay but they ultimately undermine
| decentralization.
|
| I'm optimistic for the future of web3. :)
| czhu12 wrote:
| 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 app on polygon spiked the fees over 10x in the
| past few days, and so large swaths of it have to be rebuilt.
|
| The promise of web3 was software that was not controlled by any
| centralized company. But it seems like any new project sharing a
| chain can effectively DDoS what you've built.
|
| This is effectively an anti-network effect. Inevitably, you'd
| have to start centralizing part of your application to avoid gas
| fees altogether to hedge this risk.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Wow. I was thinking about making a game and saving player state
| in a similar way to what caused the gas prices to spike for
| everyone. I'm floored by the ramifications. My stomach feels
| very queasy with OP's article, and now yours.
| whenlambo wrote:
| I'm actively building multichain NFT marketplace
| https://RareGems.io -- your domain name resonates well :)
| clippablematt wrote:
| 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 awkward
| UX issues with that though.
|
| Relying on stable gas fees won't work because the network has
| to have a priority list when it's busy, so those willing to pay
| more will be prioritised and you'll be stuck. If you want to
| inherit the properties of the chain that are why you would
| build on it in the first place then you have to work to those
| constraints.
| teatree wrote:
| 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.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Strong claim and no evidence.
| fabian2k wrote:
| At the risk of displaying my ignorance and lack of knowledge
| about this area, one part I found very familiar in this article
| is that the action interactions in his apps didn't actually
| interact with the blockchain, but essentially with two
| centralized services.
|
| My very limited understanding is that for blockchains essentially
| the way to distribute them is that every node has a full copy.
| This sounds awfully expensive in the long run. My intuition would
| be that once running a node is expensive enough, this would not
| be truly decentralized. If I can't get the fundamental
| information out of a blockchain myself on hardware I can afford,
| the actual properties of the blockchain don't matter anymore as I
| cannot access them myself.
|
| The moment you need to rely on third parties, you lose any unique
| properties a blockchain might have. I don't know how this would
| work if blockchains inherently are inefficient enough that you
| always need a way around querying them directly. I find the idea
| of a distributed trust-less database interesting, but if it is so
| inefficient that I can't actually access it myself that idea
| doesn't seem that interesting anymore.
| not2b wrote:
| Except that as you say, it's too expensive for every node to
| have a full copy, so there will only be a few dominant players.
| If that's the case, web3 will be like what we have now, where
| instead of the dominant players being Google, Meta, and Amazon
| they will be the two or three dominant web3 companies, with a
| few smaller people trying to keep up.
|
| So I would agree with your last sentence.
| wyck wrote:
| That's not how decentralized blockchains work, you
| participate in staking or as a validator, there are no
| "companies", it's open source and decisions ar3 made from the
| ground up, meaning your are a participant. Also to say every
| node needs a full copy is about 5 years behind what's
| currently happening in the space.
| kyruzic wrote:
| You are massively over estimating how much a copy of the
| entire history of ethereum costs.
|
| You can store the entire blockchain on a 1 tb harddrive.
|
| The cost prohibitive nature is only running an open rpc that
| you tell hundreds of thousands of people about. Then you will
| have to deal will letting all those people access that 1tb of
| data.
|
| Quicknode lets you have a private rpc with the full history
| of the chain for dollars a month.
| [deleted]
| magicjosh wrote:
| This article also helps me appreciate how important the "small
| node" approach is. Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes can run on $200
| of hardware (a basic Raspberry Pi + 1 TB drive). And even that
| investment is inaccessible to most.
| hrhrhrhrhr wrote:
| [deleted]
| kristofferR wrote:
| > The moment you need to rely on third parties, you lose any
| unique properties a blockchain might have.
|
| Not really, since the blockchain data providers obviously need
| to provide the exact same data, from the decentralized
| blockchain.
|
| That's not the case with centralized providers.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| > blockchain data providers obviously need to provide the
| exact same data
|
| That's not obvious to me. I'd expect that companies could be
| asked to censor certain parts of the blockchain, and would
| then hide those parts in their API. I would also expect that
| transacting with certain addresses could be blocked, and
| companies could enforce that in their APIs.
| codehalo wrote:
| >> At the risk of displaying my ignorance and lack of knowledge
| about this area, one part I found very familiar in this article
| is that the action interactions in his apps didn't actually
| interact with the blockchain, but essentially with two
| centralized services.
|
| Absolutely correct. Extremely flawed reasoning regarding
| blockchains and web3 on Moxie's part. He actually created more
| confusion than enlightenment.
| Biganon wrote:
| What's flawed in his reasoning?
| codehalo wrote:
| He's creating confusion by treating front ends or clients
| like (Metamask, Opensea, and Infura) as servers when they
| are actually clients.
|
| So _dapp - > infura -> blockchain_ is really _client - >
| client -> blockchain_.
|
| When multichain interoperability becomes widely available
| (See polkadot, cosmos, etc) blockchains will also become
| clients as well. Clients at any level won't be bounded like
| they currently exist in centralized networks.
| mwattsun wrote:
| I jotted down some thoughts I want to post before this very well
| written and interesting article by Moxie drops off the front
| page. I'm sure I got things wrong, but in the spirit of blue sky
| thinking:
|
| The Physical layer is centralized on the telcos, fiber providers
| and satellite providers. This doesn't change
|
| The internet is decentralized at the Application layer. Is it
| peer to peer. BitTorrent, IPFS
|
| The network become centralized at the services layer in Web 2.0.
|
| A decentralized search engine or global commerce store is
| impractical
|
| Centralized services like search and social are a solved problem
| and efficient. People expect to get them for free in their
| monthly internet bill
|
| Just like no one wants to run their own server, no one wants to
| run their own social network
|
| web3 says it will change decentralization at the services layer,
| but it probably won't
|
| "I don't think it's on a trajectory to deliver us from
| centralized platforms" - Moxie
|
| People want to spend money on it without really caring much about
| the technical details. They just want it to work.
|
| People (mostly young) use their interest and involvement in it as
| a social signifier
|
| web3, crypto and decentralization are buzz words like "the
| special properties of copper" or "energy balancing tea"
|
| When everything is free, nothing has value. NFT's create a value
| that can be bought, sold, traded and collected
|
| The buying and selling of digital objects has momentum and will
| continue.
|
| "I think these market forces will likely continue... If the money
| flowing through NFTs ends up channeled back into crypto space, it
| could continue to accelerate forever... I think enough money has
| been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it
| going"
|
| Web3 is here to stay but it won't be what the techies want it to
| be, it will be what the market wants
|
| "I also understand why nerds like me are excited to build for it.
| It is, at the very least, something new on the nerd level - and
| that creates a space for creativity/exploration that is somewhat
| reminiscent of early internet days." - Moxie
|
| The market has spoken and people want this. Consumers don't
| understand it but think it's cool and are told it's the future,
| so they can flex at being in the know and forward thinking by
| getting involved. Web3 is here to stay, without the
| implementation details even mattering to anyone but a small set
| of highly technical people. It's a fun project to get involved
| in, it's not boring, and gives people something to get excited
| about. The best thing someone like me can do is try to steer it
| in a direction away from harming the environment by coming up
| with alternative to proof of work.
| dcposch wrote:
| This is a good breakdown.
|
| Too much web3 thinkpiecing (both pro and anti) comes from people
| who've never looked under the hood. It's refreshing to see
| someone try actually try crypto as a developer, not just as a
| user, and go deep enough to figure out how things work in
| practice.
|
| Moxie's critiques are valid. All of these are well known problems
| to the researchers at the core of web3 and all are the subject of
| active R&D.
|
| - Point 1: people fundamentally don't want to run their own
| servers.
|
| Clearly true. Vitalik gave a vivid example of this in a recent
| interview on Bankless pod. He visited Argentina, where
| hyperinflation has forced many people to use crypto or physical
| USD. He observed people using stablecoins, but not primarily via
| Eth L1 or any L2. Instead many transacted via Binance. Not BSC--
| Binance the centralized exchange! Which provides a Paypal-like
| UX.
|
| Crypto researchers are fully aware. The plan is a couple thousand
| validators and millions, eventually billions of end users. Of
| course the end users will not run command-line geth, or run their
| own server in any capacity.
|
| The plan is for them to use some combination of light clients or
| trust-minimized hosted services. This requires bringing
| transaction fees way down, the core goal of L2 rollups + sharing.
|
| Also, today's popular clients are not particularly trust-
| minimized, which brings us to his second point. Paraphrasing:
|
| - Point 2: current "web3" is really mostly web2. Under the hood,
| Metamask, OpenSea, etc just use trusted servers.
|
| The fix here is trust-minimized services (= like Infura, but with
| every response bearing a proof of correctness) or light clients
| (= very similar, but using full nodes as interchangeable
| servers).
|
| This exists today as a proof-of-concept. It is about to become
| feasible in production. The reason current Infura does not
| provide proofs is because Merkle proofs are 10x+ the size of the
| data returned for a typical query. Verkle trees fix this.
|
| If you're curious:
|
| - https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html
|
| - https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/02/14/why-stateless.ht...
|
| Zooming out. Here is the Ethereum roadmap for the next two years,
| summarized:
|
| - The Merge. This removes proof-of-work. The Eth ecosystem will
| use >99% less energy after this point.
|
| - The Surge. This is about data sharding. Today a transaction
| might cost ~$50 on a bad day on Eth L1 and ~$0.50 on a Layer 2
| rollup like ZKSync. After the Surge, L2 transactions will be
| nearly free.
|
| - The Verge. This is about Verkle proofs and statelessness. These
| allow the core user interfaces -- wallets and light clients -- to
| efficiently follow the blockchain without trusting central
| intermediaries. They enable efficient proofs of any portion of
| the chain or its state.
|
| ---
|
| I think these are fundamentally powerful primitives, the
| implications of which we've just barely begun to explore. I
| actually welcome the next bear market, since it shakes out the
| grifters. It is day 1.
| kbenson wrote:
| > A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90's protocol that
| was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.
|
| Wow. That's one of those things you kinda know, then someone puts
| it to words like this, and the next thing I know I'm floored by
| the realization that Twitter is just centralized finger.
| [deleted]
| nickysielicki wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will.
|
| What if the server is their phone and the service is an app that
| they install?
|
| The problem that I personally have with web3 is that nobody seems
| to be building the infrastructure to accommodate this sort of
| setup, which the article sort of touched on. But I disagree that
| people will never want this. I think that there's a lot of will
| and understanding among the average non-technical internet user
| that they don't host their own services and I think they'd like
| to be a part of a distributed system, if there was a platform
| that made it possible.
|
| But that's not ethereum. IPFS and wireguard are closer to
| realizations of this.
| simias wrote:
| >When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much "better"
| in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would
| be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use.
|
| That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for
| purely digital goods _might_ be a concept with a future. Having
| standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and
| query and update these goods _might_ make sense (although I still
| think it goes opposite to the general trend of walled gardens vs.
| decentralized web, I don 't see why the IP owners would play ball
| and accept the loss of control).
|
| The thing is that in most case those NFTs wouldn't be trustless.
| I see people putting forward that a use case would be an NFT that
| proves that your Rolex is real, or for Fortnite skins, or for the
| ownership of your house. But in all these situations, there's a
| very clear authority (Rolex, Epic Games and the municipal
| authorities, respectively). These authorities will be allowed to
| mint new NFTs at will (because who else?) and as such have to be
| trusted. That opens up interesting questions btw, like "who is
| Rolex exactly?" which creates a chain of custody of trusted
| authority involving trademark management among other things. But
| I digress.
|
| But then as soon as an authority is identified, why bother with
| the extreme overhead (it terms of resources and costs) of
| blockchain tech? Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all
| valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the
| exact same security and trust profile without having to involve
| any "web3" feature?
|
| Like cryptocurrencies, the subset of problems that can only be
| solved using NFTs is incredibly tiny and speculators rush to make
| up use cases that, if you think about it for five minutes,
| clearly make no sense and could be better solved using good old
| centralized tech.
| fnord77 wrote:
| > the subset of problems that can only be solved using NFTs is
| incredibly tiny
|
| What problems can only be solved by using NFTs?
| not2b wrote:
| As the article points out, many NFTs are implemented by storing
| a URL in the blockchain; the digital artwork sits on some
| server and is reachable by that link. Fine, you can prove that
| you own the URL. But what that URL points to can change out
| from under you, so there's no way to make that trustless. If
| you own the domain and the server that it points to, the
| registrar can take the domain away from you and give it to
| someone else.
|
| In a sense, NFTs are a lot like those schemes we used to see
| where some company will promise to name a star after you, even
| though no one recognizes their authority to do this. Fine, that
| URL is "yours". You just own a sequence of bytes, the ones in
| the URL, not the ones that the URL (temporarily) points to.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Well the image could also be embedded in the data of the
| blockchain and/or a irreversible (currently) hash made for
| the image sitting on the server. Now will a court enforce
| that digital contract as a legal contract if the person takes
| down the server or puts up a different image? _shrug_ I doubt
| it under current law.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Isn't storing the actual image data on-chain usually
| prohibitively expensive?
| bblb wrote:
| 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 the line while we get new storage (users).
|
| Sure, it would need some massive network effect to work at
| scale, but we have now, what, billions of devices connected
| to Internet? That ought to be enough.
|
| I never really understood this current "decentralized" tech.
| Decentralized hashes with centralized gate keepers, and mixed
| with "old school SPOF tech", e.x. the VPS's that store the
| actual content. wat.
|
| edit: 10GB per device/user and 1 billion devices. That's 10
| exabytes.
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10GB+*+1+billion
| foxfluff wrote:
| > 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 getting people to install apps today to donate their
| bandwidth and disk space for.. what cause? Let alone when
| they figure out that _gasp_ your storage may then be used
| for illegal material. Nah, it just doesn 't work.
| bblb wrote:
| >Nah, it just doesn't work.
|
| This is why we can't have nice things. :D
| bblb wrote:
| >your storage may then be used for illegal material
|
| 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. ;)
| acdha wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's not that simple: if you host anyone's content,
| you're taking on personal risk (do you want to have to
| convince law enforcement that the pirated Disney movie or
| child pornography served from your home IP was served
| entirely without your knowledge?), giving up your
| resources ("Netflix is slow, turn off the mirror and see
| if it gets better!"), and getting slower
| performance/reliability (e.g. why OpenSea uses GCP
| instead of IPFS) immediately in the hopes that it will at
| some point in the future become worthwhile.
|
| Note also that cloud storage is centralized
| administratively but distributed for reliability. I would
| give very long odds that you're more likely to lose data
| through random IPFS nodes disappearing / dropping your
| data than on S3, and if you have to run your own
| geographically replicated nodes it'll cost more in your
| time until you have a very large amount of data.
|
| Statistically nobody does that, and because P2P networks
| need to significantly over-provision to compensate for
| unreliable nodes it's hard to get anywhere close to
| competitive. The Linux world has the freedom ethos, no
| concerns about copyright/malware/etc., and still few
| people torrent ISOs because it's usually slower.
| nootropicat wrote:
| 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 that use ipfs.
| bblb wrote:
| >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.
| nootropicat wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| BitTorrent also guarantees that your content would always
| be available - if you're hosting it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| So, this has a really easy fix. The NFT points to a content
| hash, and the content is uploaded to the Internet Archive
| (and they're compensated for the storage) as part of the NFT
| minting process.
|
| Your ownership is now on a distributed ledger, with a
| cryptographic hash of the content, paired with long term
| storage of said digital artwork. The Internet Archive's costs
| are ~$2/GB to store content in perpetuity, which seems
| insanely cheap to carve off as part of a transaction (Eth gas
| fees aside).
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Yup. It works because there's a 1:1 and onto mapping
| between 64 bit hashes and pixel maps of arbitrary size ;-)
| /s
| dexter89_kp3 wrote:
| There are on chain NFTs like cryptopunks. The rest of
| articles details around API centralization stand true.
| bricemo wrote:
| But then it's just back to trust based web2, you're
| trusting internet archive. That's his point: this isn't
| leading to trust less decentralization in practice. To do
| that, you'd have to store the NFT data on chain, which is
| prohibitively expensive
| colordrops wrote:
| No you're not - it could be stored in multiple places.
| It's, a hash, not a URL, and if it's a properly
| constructed hash it would hard or impossible to fake. The
| content on server other than internet archive would have
| the same hash.
| searchableguy wrote:
| There is arweave which is trying to bring permanent
| storage. You could store the nft on arweave chain and
| mint the NFT on the same.
|
| https://www.arweave.org/
|
| Though, I'm not sure how this will "scale".
| acdha wrote:
| It'll scale like S3, et al.: replicated storage requires
| ongoing payments because sysadmins need to be paid,
| storage needs to be bought & replaced, network bandwidth
| is metered, etc.
|
| It could be cheaper if someone can finally make a P2P
| network which becomes and stays popular[1] but it'll
| always require more than a one-time payment. That could
| be donor funded (Internet Archive) but I'd be leery of
| assuming anything long-term unless you're paying for it.
|
| 1. Abuse is the hard problem here: if I host a node, when
| the police download something illicit my IP is the one
| they see and I have to prove that it was done without my
| knowledge. This is why nobody does this except for known
| sources.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Though, I'm not sure how this will "scale".
|
| It fundamentally can't - you need X amounts of storage *
| replication factor to store X amounts of data *
| replication factor.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > But then it's just back to trust based web2, you're
| trusting internet archive.
|
| Correct, because it's clear storing the content in web2
| Internet Archive is superior ("you'd have to store the
| NFT data on chain, which is prohibitively expensive").
| They will persist regardless of web3 shenanigans, and
| hash addressing ensures content integrity. You could even
| use a torrent to store and serve the content (again,
| which uses hashes to identify and preserve integrity of
| content).
|
| Why would one trust a distributed ledger over a
| centralized archive run by folks whose primary focus is
| on preservation of the bits they're storing? The economic
| benefit of running storage nodes of encrypted content is
| unlikely to ever be sufficient to provide the same
| economic incentives a corporation or non profit realizes
| by offering the durability a centralized service provides
| (due to scale).
|
| EDIT: @Ragnarork It seems like web3 is making some
| promises it can't keep?
| dlubarov wrote:
| I'm not sure it's even necessary to use Internet Archive
| or a torrent? If I own an NFT whose hash is stored on-
| chain, I can just ensure the availability of the preimage
| by storing it myself.
|
| Then when I want to interact with a centralized NFT
| marketplace, I can upload the preimage to their server.
| They'd verify the hash and store the image. I'd continue
| storing it myself though, so if that marketplace goes
| away, I can follow the same process with another one.
| Ragnarork wrote:
| > Why would one trust a distributed ledger over a
| centralized archive
|
| Isn't that the polar opposite of the promise of web3...?
| Thorrez wrote:
| You're not fully trusting them. They can't change the
| content.
| diab0lic wrote:
| They can change the content, you'll just know they did
| it. Much like if my watch gets stolen I'll know, but I
| still don't have a watch anymore.
| Thorrez wrote:
| They can delete the content. That's the only "change"
| they can do. It's like your watch analogy, except you can
| easily back up an image, but cannot back up a watch.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| If the NFT contained the content hash, your and the
| creators public keys, a signed timestamp, and the
| signature of those parts by the content creator, then the
| content could be stored elsewhere no?
|
| Obviously you'd want to keep a copy yourself, but at
| least you could then prove to others the file you have
| really is the one the creator sold, no?
|
| No expert at these crypto things, in either sense, am I
| missing something?
| _heimdall wrote:
| Say you add all that information to the transaction, to
| verify it in the future you still need to run the
| original file through the same hash function to prove
| they match.
|
| Its common for image files to be modified, many times
| even automatically by the hosting service. They might
| compress it, remove unnecessary metadata, or add metadata
| for themselves. Any of that would break the hash, so
| you'd need to make sure any host you use to store the
| original absolutely never changes the file.
|
| Then what? Well the image exists and you can verify it
| wasn't changed off-chain since the transaction finalized,
| so that's good. There's now an image publicly available
| online BUT a specific block chain says you own it, so
| that's also cool.
|
| But wait, that hash isn't guaranteed to be unique so
| really anyone could make another NFT pointing to the same
| URL and file hash, now they also own it? And anyone could
| just download the file, so they own it to? And there are
| no legal protections for NFTs, so what was the benefit of
| paying to have one block chain transaction say you own it
| in the first place?
| colordrops wrote:
| I thought we were talking about the problem of someone
| pulling the rug out from under you by changing the
| content at a URL. The hash solves the problem, but what
| you are talking about is an entirely different subject,
| and a problem which all NFTs suffer. Or not a problem,
| but just a general property of NFTs and crypto as well.
| The network effect is extremely important with
| blockchains. You could also fork BTC right now and claim
| you own everything on the chain. Doesn't mean people will
| honor it.
| _heimdall wrote:
| A hash doesn't really solve the core of the rug pull
| problem. If the hash doesn't match you know the file at
| that URL changed, but how was it changed? Was it just a
| metadata that didn't really change the artwork, or is it
| a totally different file?
|
| And what does it mean for the transaction on the block
| chain if both the URL and the hash no longer match? Is it
| worthless now and unsellable? Or do you sell it with a
| note that says ignore the URL, ignore the hash, or both?
|
| I did point out other issues and that may have been
| unnecessary, but a hash doesn't solve the rug pull
| problem if the art isn't part of the encrypted and
| (mostly) immutable transaction block.
| colordrops wrote:
| There doesn't have to be a URL.
| bambax wrote:
| > _The hash solves the problem_
|
| Not really. The hash would prevent someone to pull the
| rug unnoticed, but it wouldn't prevent rug pulling in the
| first place.
|
| With a hash, you would be able to prove that what's
| currently at that url isn't what you bought, but (since
| hashes are by definition non-reversible) you wouldn't be
| able to show or see what it was you bought (unless you
| stored it somewhere else yourself).
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > unless you stored it somewhere else yourself
|
| Which is usually trivial.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > so you'd need to make sure any host you use to store
| the original absolutely never changes the file
|
| Which is trivial, just download the file. The place where
| you bought the NFT would ideally have some facility where
| they guarantee you can download the correct file,
| otherwise why buy from them?
|
| > But wait, that hash isn't guaranteed to be unique so
| really anyone could make another NFT pointing to the same
| URL and file hash, now they also own it? And anyone could
| just download the file, so they own it to?
|
| Preimage attacks are quite hard to accomplish from what I
| understand against modern, secure hashes. If the hash
| used is later broken and a preimage attack is possible
| then yeah you're screwed. That's a risk you take.
|
| As for exclusive ownership, I forgot in my initial reply
| to add another aspect I thought about which was the
| license. That is, some well-defined licenses should be
| specified, similar to the Creative Commons stuff, and the
| NFS should specify one of them. Then you know if you get
| copyright or not etc.
|
| Enforcement of the license would of course be similar to
| other digital assets, ie hard to do unless you're big,
| that's just the nature of digital things.
|
| Now, just to be clear, please don't take this to mean I'm
| advocating NFTs. I just think the way they're currently
| used seems to make them completely worthless, while in
| theory it might be possible to make them not quite
| worthless.
| spyder wrote:
| Yes, but the problem is many of them don't even include
| the hash, and you also need a way to verify the creator
| and his/her public key.
| can16358p wrote:
| What if the URL points to a decentralized and immutable
| file storage system instead of a regular URL with a
| domain/IP?
| hk__2 wrote:
| This solves the problem while creating a new (big) one:
| make this decentralized and immutable file storage work.
| sildur wrote:
| They already exist, and work. IPFS, for example.
| acdha wrote:
| IPFS is famously slow/unreliable, not widely used, and
| you still need to pay for hosting of anything you don't
| want to lose because storage, bandwidth, and operator
| time aren't free and someone needs to get paid to deal
| with abuse.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| This is where it falls apart for me too, people are
| paying huge sums for artificially scarce links to someone
| else's server? I keep feeling like I'm missing something.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| No, they are paying huge sums for a digital certificate
| of ownership of the content on some else's server; the
| link is just the _description_ of what they are certified
| to own, like the address on a deed.
|
| (There's all kinds of problems with it, sure, but they
| aren't paying for the link.)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| ok so you own a certificate that describes the content of
| a link
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > ok so you own a certificate that describes the content
| of a link
|
| More precisely you have a certificate that says you own
| something (often ambiguous, though this _could be_
| precise; ambiguity is a choice in the minting of an NFT
| rather than a fundamental issue with the technology)
| relating to the content _described by means of_ a link
| (the NFT may or may not include additional description of
| the content via metadata.)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think it's worse than that since, as described in the
| article, NFTs don't include a hash of _what_ the link
| points to. So you own a certificate that describes the
| content of a link in the very literal sense of describing
| the characters in the link URL and not really anything
| more.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| As I understand, most NFTs don't confer any copyrights.
| So unlike a deed, it's not a certificate of ownership of
| the content at all. Some other entity still owns the
| content in the legal sense.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > As I understand, most NFTs don't confer any copyrights.
|
| Yes, one of the "all kinds of problems" I mentioned
| upthread (this one isn't an inherent problem with NFTs,
| but seems to be a practical one with many current NFTs)
| is that while NFTs certify ownership of _something_ with
| regard to the linked content, exactly what that is
| (beyond the certificate that is the NFT itself) is often
| not clear, even, AFAICT, to the purchasers.
| coffeecat wrote:
| The value of a deed is that it's recognized by a legal
| system, which is backed by a police force, who you can
| call if some guy shows up claiming that your house
| actually belongs to him.
|
| With an NFT, you don't get that. It's equivalent to your
| county clerk's deed registry, including the $100 filing
| fee, and excluding the legal machinery which gives the
| deed registry its value.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The value of a deed is that it's recognized by a legal
| system
|
| Sure, I'm not saying an NFT is substantively like a deed,
| I'm saying the link in an NFT serves a broadly similar
| purpose to the address in a deed.
|
| An NFT is perhaps more akin to a certificate from one of
| those star name registry outfits that were popular for a
| while, but with less specificity as to what you
| supposedly bought with respect to thing it describes.
| grog454 wrote:
| On the other hand that same legal system can decide you
| are no longer entitled to said property and that same
| police force can come and drag you out of it. That
| physically (as far as we know) can't happen on a
| cryptographic blockchain. They can some how convince you
| that giving up ownership of your NFT is a good idea, but
| it still has to be of your own volition.
| rank0 wrote:
| Not true. The legal authority can compel you with force
| to transfer your nft in exactly the same way they'd drag
| you out of the house.
| magicjosh wrote:
| There's a difference. You can drag someone out of their
| house without consent, but forcing a transfer requires
| consent. Does this difference matter?
| rank0 wrote:
| Forcing a transfer does not require consent. They'll
| seize the hardware that holds your private key.
|
| If you're worried about the government forcing you out of
| your home at gunpoint, what makes you think they can't
| seize a private key or force a few keystrokes?
| magicjosh wrote:
| Hardware wallets usually have a password enabled, in
| addition to other security mechanisms. Like I said, not
| sure the difference matters, but there is a difference.
| rank0 wrote:
| If they really want they can analyze the memory on your
| desktop or install a keylogger. There's so many ways to
| extract a private key barring a deadman switch and a
| cyanide tooth capsule.
|
| Again, you're seriously arguing that it's harder for the
| government to take your house rather than give up your
| password?
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Houses also have locks and yet presumably the police can
| and will bypass that security measure in this scenario.
| The point is that nothing will protect you in the face of
| overwhelming force.
| des1nderlase wrote:
| But what's the difference of just authority making your
| NFT URL invalid and moving the item under a different
| URL? That would be equivalent of forcing you out of your
| home, they cannot force you to give them keys, but they
| can change the lock.
| magicjosh wrote:
| This whole "files stored on Google Drive" is growing
| pains. NFTs must all be hosted on IPFS.
| nlehuen wrote:
| Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/538/
| sildur wrote:
| That probably would not happen in a first world country.
| acdha wrote:
| Depends on who you are -- Gitmo comes to mind - but at
| least in the United States you can substitute being
| beaten by agents of the government with being imprisoned
| where the other prisoners and possibly agents of the
| government will beat you until you give up the password.
| okasaki wrote:
| Why not? If NFT ownership ever became meaningful, the
| people with the guns can simply keep a list of ownership
| amendments separate from the blockchain.
| grog454 wrote:
| It kind of sounds like you're arguing that since the
| blockchain can just be ignored it's somehow less
| meaningful. But I'll bite:
|
| Then the people with guns now have to expend resources to
| maintain and enforce those amendments. If they are not
| somehow just discarding the entire blockchain subsequent
| to their amendment, they're maintaining an every
| increasingly complex set of merges. Furthermore their
| amendment (very probably) isn't a cryptographic
| blockchain, so it's subject to all the problems that the
| actual blockchain list are not (forgery for example).
|
| What makes blockchains unique is that they are the first
| example of these various records (ledgers, titles, etc)
| that physically cannot be manipulated in certain ways.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Furthermore their amendment (very probably) isn't a
| cryptographic blockchain, so it's subject to all the
| problems that the actual blockchain list are not (forgery
| for example).
|
| Their amendments are _theirs_. This is like saying that
| keeping your own accounting is worse for you than putting
| it on a blockchain, since someone might forge your own
| accounting books - it just makes no sense.
| grog454 wrote:
| I don't follow.
|
| "They" can do _just about_ anything they want. They can
| make their amendment. They can declare the blockchain
| null and void. They can hold a gun to your head and tell
| you to sell your NFT. They can even _pull the trigger_ ,
| in an attempt to make an example out of you for the next
| fool that tries to defy their authority. But the _one_
| thing they _cannot_ do is seize your NFT without your
| volition. Not without breaking some of the fundamental
| mathematical ideas behind encryption.
|
| Is there value in that in present day society? Maybe not.
| But there is undeniably something special about it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But the one thing they cannot do is seize your NFT
| without your volition
|
| That's not true.
|
| I mean, even if the access to the NFT relies solely on
| material in your head, there are pharmacological
| approaches, among others, that while not necessary
| _reliable_ , can cause you to give up information without
| meaningfully willing it.
| grog454 wrote:
| And private information will probably one day no longer
| exist. Imagine some kind of device that can scan the
| neurons in your brain along with the electrical/chemical
| state and somehow extract information from that (such as
| a memorized cryptographic private key). Let's just throw
| our hands up and give up on cryptography altogether.
|
| Even a pharmacological approach is a _side channel
| attack_ which no one seems to care to distinguish between
| attacks on or flaws with the underlying idea. When
| discussing the merits of blockchain technology we are
| allowed to take for granted its very obvious underlying
| assumptions. Namely that there exists private information
| held by a user of the system.
| bricemo wrote:
| His example of his NFT that gets shut down is showing
| that because of this layer of centralization, anything
| that can happen to normal assets can happen to
| blockchain. Governments can force OpenSea to take your
| NFTs, OpenSea can delete your ownership at their
| discretion, etc. All he is left with is a meaningless
| string of data on chain, while the NFT visual is gone.
| It's not immune and protected like people think
| grey-area wrote:
| No, the centralised url selling service decides who owns
| which monkey url and they have already used that power.
|
| https://blockzeit.com/opensea-nft-marketplace-stops-
| hacker-f...
|
| There is another example in the article - his nft was
| deleted from the marketplace, and nobody buying monkeys
| cares what is on the blockchain.
| spyder wrote:
| _" the link is just the description of what they are
| certified to own"_
|
| No a link isn't a description of its content, just like
| the article demonstrated the content can change to
| anything, anytime, in many ways. Even if the URL contains
| the hash of the content like with IPFS URLs it's not a
| description of the content but one step better because
| you can check if it's pointing to the content it supposed
| to be.
| astrange wrote:
| More importantly, they don't own the original item. An
| unofficial version of a deed registry says they own the
| link to the item. That's not the same as actually
| transferring the copyright or anything.
| grey-area wrote:
| They don't own anything in a meaningful sense except the
| url, and even that is controlled by someone else.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Do they even own the URL? Is no one else allowed to post
| the same URL (even disregarding how/by whom this would be
| enforced)?
| grey-area wrote:
| Well I imagine opensea at least prevents url collisions
| on their own service, but yes as the article demonstrates
| someone could sell the same url on several services while
| changing what that url points to whenever they like. I
| think most of the time the url points to the marketplace
| itself though?
|
| So I suppose it is more accurate to say they own that
| particular citation of the url embedded in the
| blockchain, for certain values of own.
| readams wrote:
| But they don't even get the ownership of the content. The
| original creator still owns the copyright, and as a the
| buyer you don't even get a license to use the work in the
| NFT. The copyright is the only meaningful way you can own
| digital art.
| ozim wrote:
| Yes you are missing incoming money transfers to your
| account.
|
| People that earn money on NFT don't have feeling that
| they miss something.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| as long as they're the ones not holding the bag
| m12k wrote:
| >I keep feeling like I'm missing something
|
| You are missing something - a huge position in crypto.
| Like the article points out, your existing investment
| would benefit from all the hype that a slew of crypto-
| oriented services and products could give. Irrespective
| of whether those same services could be implemented
| "better" using standard centralized tech. And - amusingly
| - irrespective of whether those services offer products
| that you would ever in a million years have paid for
| without the novelty of crypto sprinkled on top - e.g.
| paying big bucks for receipts for jpgs.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes, well, the fundamental reason is not what any
| individual owns, it's that (as the article brilliantly
| points out) these positions make it a gold rush.
| coffeecat wrote:
| > I keep feeling like I'm missing something.
|
| Nope, you're not missing anything. NFTs are the world's
| most convoluted and expensive way to store a bookmark.
| hoyd wrote:
| Thanks for that comment
| jboy55 wrote:
| Is there any market pressure that will demand a change to
| the cryptographic hash? Is any of the current speculation
| concerned in any way about the content hosted at the URL,
| or just the current value of the NFT and what you can sell
| it for.
| cableshaft wrote:
| There is. Not from the entire space, but there's a bit of
| street cred you get by being entirely 'on-chain', as they
| say.
|
| Within the smart contracts themselves is a read function
| for that content uri that provides all the data needed
| (from what I've seen, a hashed string) to generate an
| .svg file. But it obviously taxes the system and costs a
| lot more in gas fees (not to read it, that doesn't cost
| gas fees, but to deploy the contracts and mint),
| especially the more complex those are, which is why you
| mostly see it with 8-bit or very low-res artwork.
|
| Cryptopunks being the most well-known (and also the most
| valuable) NFT project is all on-chain, and Anonymice
| being the most open and forked project that does this.
| EtherOrcs does it a little differently but is also on-
| chain and has completely open contracts you can refer to
| as well.
|
| There's quite a few more besides this, but I don't know
| what percent it is, probably pretty small. Some people
| won't buy anything that's not entirely on-chain. But
| you're right that most people don't really care, they
| just care about the price or the image.
|
| I've been digging through the Anonymice and EtherOrcs
| contracts to get a better understanding of the different
| approaches they took (and I still wouldn't say I
| completely understand it yet). It's pretty interesting,
| though.
|
| [1]: https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2021-8-18-18-0/on-
| chain-crypt...
|
| [2]: https://anonymice.org/
|
| [3]: https://etherorcs.com/
|
| EDIT: Sorry, you only said cryptographic hash.
| Cryptopunks _started_ by providing that, but then moved
| to entirely on-chain (so above and beyond that), where
| you could query and get a full SVG file or stream of
| pixels for any given image directly from the contract.
| pmontra wrote:
| We can add the hash of the content but what happens if the
| URL goes 404 or the web server disappears? I'll be the
| owner of a useless pair of URL and hash.
|
| Or those NFT contents (and the URL domain!) are guaranteed
| not to disappear unless many web 1.0 and 2.0 services
| people was paying for and went out of business?
|
| An article about this:
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22349242/nft-metadata-
| exp...
| lmarcos wrote:
| Honest question: at this point why don't we skip the NFT
| part and just keep the URL and the content in the Internet
| Archive?
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| This gives me an idea: Internet Archive could sell
| Internet Tokens(tm) that function exactly like NFTs (but
| stored on the Archive instead of blockchain). Holders
| would be incentivised to make sure that the Archive
| continues to exist via donations. It's a win win for
| everyone
| astrange wrote:
| What does it mean to keep a URL in the Internet Archive?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think they mean you keep the URL and the content stays
| in the Internet Archive.
|
| But it could also mean that the Internet Archive creates
| a special page, say, "Owned URLs", where they list a
| username owner for each URL that someone has payed for.
| If you wanted to trade your URL, the IA would get a small
| cut to modify the contents of that page with the new
| owner.
|
| This is 1:1 equivalent to the proposed scheme, but cuts
| out the inefficient "mint NFT on Ethereum blockchain"
| step, replacing it with a simple database on the IA side.
| Duralias wrote:
| So why hasn't this been deployed yet then?
|
| And why are NFT links so common, because they just seem
| short sighted to me and borderline dumb considering how
| volatile everything in the crypto space is?
|
| Nothing about NFT's seems long term viable as they are now.
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| So long as "number go up", nobody cares. The moment
| number start going down, there'll be a magic new buzzword
| (ICO, token, smart contract, enterprise blockchain, DeFi)
| for people to speculate on and distract from the
| fundamental problems.
| Zerverus wrote:
| yed wrote:
| So the answer is centralized storage?
| mad182 wrote:
| If your solution is to trust the Internet Archive, why not
| just skip the blockchain part?
|
| Any hash can match virtually unlimited number of different
| turd images.
|
| And even if you trust the hash function to never be broken
| or brute forced with future technology, it can only verify
| the image, not prevent it from being deleted or altered,
| rendering the NFT broken and useless. Verifiably broken and
| useless, but still...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Or even _just_ include a content hash along with the URL in
| the NFT payload. Just a way to verify the referent of the
| URL hasn 't changed since the NFT was minted. Where you can
| find the content with that hash if not the URL can be left
| arbitrary or out-of-band, but it's at least capturing a
| fingerprint of the content, not just an address.
|
| It seems like this would be absolutely trivial to
| implement, right? Just... add a separator token (say `#`)
| and a content hash (say with `sha1:` prefix, urn-style) to
| the end of the URL that's already in NFTs.
|
| I don't really understand why NFT's don't already do this.
| I don't understand why they didn't do it from the start. It
| seems an obvious choice to me in designing such a thing.
| Like, it's so easy, and such a step up in making NFT's do
| something closer to what people think they do... it leaves
| me thinking that the design of NFT's just wasn't done
| seriously, and nobody using it really cares.
|
| What am I missing?
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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 before you now
| have a transaction with a bad URL but a good hash. You
| can't update the transaction to change the URL, so what
| would that mean for anyone wanting to buy the NFT from
| you?
|
| There's also the much bigger issue - say we solve the
| above problem as well. There are no legal protections for
| NFT ownership and there is nothing stopping people from
| just copying the artwork you own. 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?
| didibus wrote:
| > 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 ownership over original artwork.
|
| The Mona Lisa itself has many replicas, you can buy
| prints of it, and you could probably easily find
| paintings of it for much cheaper. Those are all copies as
| well, but their monetary value is much lower, because
| people know they are not the original.
|
| Now, think of photography, there are people collecting
| prints, sometimes of digital photography. Similarly, the
| 1st print is worth a lot more. Think of Vinyl records, or
| CD/cassette tapes for music, the worth of the 1st pressed
| record is a lot more, and collectors are willing to pay a
| lot for them.
|
| Now think of complete digital art, that which is not even
| printed. Which is the "original"? Unless you were to own
| the HDD or the RAM stick where it was first recorded, all
| instances are perfect copies of the same bits. So
| instead, the "original" is the first person the artist
| publicly acknowledged as the owner of the "original". It
| is like the artist signing the print. This is recorded in
| a public ledger, that people trust and believe to be very
| hard to manipulate or fake. That is what an NFT is.
|
| You might find it absurd, but is it anymore absurd than
| paying lots of money for the 1st print of a photo? Or the
| first pressed vinyl? Or the first book as signed by the
| artist?
|
| The value is in people's head and emotional attachment.
| Someone was given by the artist themselves recognition of
| the piece signed in a public ledger. That's now the
| "original" and people assign it value.
|
| You can think of it a bit how a lot of collectors offer
| public showing of their collection, the fact others can
| "see" the artwork for themselves isn't what make it
| valuable, it's the emotional knowledge around it, that of
| having it handed directly by the artist itself.
|
| This is what I've understood of it at least.
|
| Edit: Now the article still makes good point, that as it
| stands, some NFTs are ambiguous as to what artwork they
| even relate too or if they were truly created by the
| "artist".
| rambambram wrote:
| Thanks for these metaphors.
| discreteevent wrote:
| That's a good explanation and it looks like people do
| value NFTs for those reasons. But it still doesn't
| compare to _the_ Mona Lisa which if I possessed it I
| would know that only those physical brush strokes came
| from Leonardo 's hand. The vinyl example is better. But
| even then the vinyl is physically old and unique. I can
| take it out and know that it was pressed in 1972. The NFT
| is just pixels on my screen that are a copy of a copy
| of.. and will be destroyed when I close the viewer.
| kaashif wrote:
| > But it still doesn't compare to the Mona Lisa which if
| I possessed it I would know that only those physical
| brush strokes came from Leonardo's hand.
|
| I think the idea of NFTs is that you know that the
| original artist (Beeple or whoever) issued the NFT, they
| clicked the buttons and saw the same hash you see on your
| screen.
|
| Like if Leonardo da Vinci sent you a cryptographically
| signed email with something in it indicating that you
| specifically owned it, you'd probably find that valuable
| even though it's "just pixels" and the email can be
| copied - the ownership is embedded in the signed email
| (your name or public key, let's say) and can't be copied.
|
| I think that's the point, anyway, I still don't think I
| really get it...
| didibus wrote:
| > But it still doesn't compare to the Mona Lisa which if
| I possessed it I would know that only those physical
| brush strokes came from Leonardo's hand
|
| There's probably a whole industry around recognizing a
| true or a fake painting. I'd say if you possessed the
| Mona Lisa, you might still doubt its authenticity, or
| find yourself in a big debate with others who claim to
| also possess the "true" Mona Lisa. In a way, NFTs don't
| (or could be made not to) have this problem. I think this
| is actually something that people in the market of art
| collecting and trading actually value. I think especially
| in private collections, you can claim to have sold me the
| original bible of Pope Pius XII for 10 million and hand
| me a bible that is a fake, I believe to now have the real
| one. And then I can go and resell it to someone else for
| 11 million, while you also go and sell the real one you
| still have for 20 million to another person, and now
| three people believe to all have the real one. The NFTs
| being in a global ledger, it would be clear who owns it
| truly, even if three people have a copy of the same PDF.
|
| > But even then the vinyl is physically old and unique. I
| can take it out and know that it was pressed in 1972.
|
| That's because you value the artifact. But I'd say in
| this case the NFT IS the artifact. The NFT is what will
| live on, because in 2125 (assuming the chain still
| exists), someone will have this token tied to their own
| wallet. They can know that it was minted in 2021 with the
| same certainty (and possibly even more certain) that it
| was truly minted in 2021 by the artist himself (or at
| least the person whose key society believes was the true
| artist).
|
| Finally, if the NFT contains say an IPFS URL, or some
| other content describing attribute, its even more clear.
| You know you own the first "copy" if you want.
|
| Let me put it some other way. I create some JPEG drawing.
| I then hash it and have a hash of its content. I then
| register my art (the JPEG) on some chain by creating an
| NFT for it which contains said hash (maybe in the form of
| an IPFS URL). At this point, the world through the public
| blockchain ledger knows about my JPEG art, and as the
| first in the chain, I prove to be the creator, or it is
| known that I am the creator through some other means,
| like posting it to my blog.
|
| I own the NFT for my own JPEG art at this point. I can
| host it myself on IPFS, or maybe I just post it on my
| blog, or even keep it secret on my computer. Now you want
| to buy it from me. At that point you pay me money and I
| transfer the NFT to you, the ledger now says that the
| token started from me and was transferred to you. You now
| own the token that says that the IPFS hash URL or the
| hash of my JPEG art belongs to you and was given to you
| by me, the artist. I also give you a copy of the JPEG
| itself through whatever means, maybe you download it from
| my IPFS hosting, or I send it to you by email, or you
| download it from my blog, etc.
|
| In the digital world, it is all copies, but only you have
| the token.
|
| Ya, if the token doesn't include the content description
| like a hash, it's a bit fuzzy and a lot crappier, because
| while it would show you got some token from me the
| artist, its not clear which of my artwork would be the
| one you have, assuming in 100 years the URLs were to no
| longer exist for example, or to point to something else.
| But I think this will become the norm eventually to have
| the hash or use IPFS.
|
| I agree with you, I still would prefer a physical
| artifact, something that you can see the wear and tear,
| something from an old era, maybe it doesn't even look the
| same, maybe bits of it are gone and forgotten. But that's
| just me and what I'm willing to value. If people are
| willing to value a digital good the same, knowing the
| token traces back to the original artist, and they see
| the value in that, then it can be worth just as much.
| [deleted]
| spamizbad wrote:
| Despite the various claims about how the worlds smartest
| most talented developers are working on web3... that's
| not true. It was a significant oversight and I think
| technical leadership in the space is lacking. You have
| people who know lots and lots about crypto stuff but they
| are focused like a laser.
|
| It's like that crypto thought-leader on Twitter who
| didn't know his NFT'd pfp was being served to various web
| clients over http.
|
| It's also why web3 startups are throwing huge cash at
| engineers from "web2" companies because, while they may
| not be crypto experts, they know how to build scalable
| systems, how web tech works etc. That knowledge is sorely
| lacking in the crypto space.
| discreteevent wrote:
| They can't see the wood for the merkle trees.
| astrange wrote:
| There was an "interesting" thread yesterday by some
| people who were surprised that static analyzing a
| contract and a once-over code review weren't enough to
| prevent the author from instantly stealing all their
| money.
|
| https://twitter.com/cat5749/status/1476813266462539779
| toxicFork wrote:
| Some NFT platforms operate with IPFS whose URLs are hashes of
| content. This solves that problem.
| Kognito wrote:
| I'm not terribly up to date with IPFS (so feel free to
| correct me), but if I've understood it correctly, it's not
| dissimilar to Bittorent where files are seeded by
| interested parties and if no one happens to be seeding any
| longer, the file is essentially dead?
|
| It's almost like you want some centralised entity to
| preserve copies of the images these NFTs link to.
|
| I wonder how many IPFS-backed NFTs are only being seeded on
| nodes run by the big players like OpenSea?
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Filecoin that you pay to have any files you like mirrored
| by many people, in a decentralized way.
|
| Arweave is also a one off fee to have the file mirrored
| forever, the hosters are paid from the yield earned on
| that fee.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Arweave nodes can choose not to store data (and will
| likely drop data that's not profitable over time also),
| so I'm not sure that it's really a solution.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Individual nodes can choose not to store it, but your
| data is sharded amongst many nodes. Usually it's
| something like 64/96 redundancy - it's sharded across 96
| nodes and at least 64 must be online to retrieve the
| data. It gets re-distributed if some nodes are offline
| for a while (not sure on specific numbers)
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Sorry hacker news had an outage and somehow removed the
| first half of this comment and it's too late to edit now.
| Top was:
|
| You are correct about IPFS, it's just like torrents.
| There are services like Arweave, Sia and Filecoin where
| you can pay...
| cle wrote:
| Yes, not dissimilar from torrents. Instead of being name-
| addressed and requiring the name owner to provide the
| infrastructure to serve the data (as with HTTPS), data
| are content-addressed so that _anyone_ can serve the
| data.
|
| Many NFTs are hosted by NFT platforms, and also by
| services such as https://nft.storage/ (backed by IPFS &
| Filecoin). It's quite trivial though to take the IPFS CID
| and pin it somewhere else (local computer, a pinning
| service like Pinata, etc.), and anyone can do it at any
| time. If all you want to do is be able to prove ownership
| at some point in the future, you don't really need to
| host the content indefinitely on IPFS...just host it when
| you need to.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I guess at least if you keep a copy of your NFT you can
| start serving it over IPFS yourself if whoever is hosting
| it can't be bothered anymore, or pay a service to on your
| behalf. It's sort of the ideal use-case for content-based
| addressing, I would think, since you're trying to prove
| some sort of connection with/ownership of/patronage over
| a piece of content. And it should be more long term
| resilient than a centralized solution as long as the NFT
| owners themselves don't lose their own files. At least
| the incentives are aligned (if you own the NFT you will
| want to keep at least one copy, if only so you can show
| it to potential buyers!)
|
| It seems a substantially less silly idea than pointing a
| token at a url that you don't control. I guess I'm
| surprised that NFTs aren't all hosted on IPFS or
| something like it, if only as a backup. Like, have these
| people not heard of linkrot?
|
| But I guess as long as the buyers don't realize yet that
| their immutable ledger entry can become a dangling
| pointer in a puff of smoke, it doesn't matter.
| cwalv wrote:
| > But I guess as long as the buyers don't realize yet
| that their immutable ledger entry can become a dangling
| pointer in a puff of smoke, it doesn't matter.
|
| I was surprised too, but only for a moment. In the end
| it's basically just a record that you "own" a small
| amount of data (url, ipfs hash, 'coin'). Unless my
| ownership gets me some utility (like exclusive access to
| the jpeg, maybe? Ability to transfer the ownership to El
| Salvadorian govt to pay my taxes?), I don't see how it
| has value
| [deleted]
| medion wrote:
| This was insanely surprising to me - I actually always
| thought the jpeg/art was stored as a kind of 'blob' on the
| blockchain that it was authenticated against the owners
| wallet/private key.
| iskander wrote:
| Some NFTs are stored this way (e.g. Blitmaps, Terraforms,
| Corruption(*s), &c); it's a more restrictive artistic
| medium since storage costs are high and technical limits
| feel like a trip back to the 80s. If you can fit nice art
| into the constraints then it can become quite
| popular/valuable since fully on-chain NFTs are actually
| decentralized (rather than the more common practice of
| linking to an external image).
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| This is trivially solved by including a hash of the object in
| the ownership certificate.
| magicjosh wrote:
| Would that be effective for low-res images like
| cryptopunks? Or can I create other 24 x 24 px images that
| have the same hash?
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| You can't efficiently create hash collisions in a
| cryptographic hash
| hk__2 wrote:
| > This is trivially solved by including a hash of the
| object in the ownership certificate.
|
| This doesn't fix any issue. If the URL changes, your NFT is
| worth nothing and you have no way to get the object back.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Wrapped NFTs
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I was downvoted but it's literally happening, see https:/
| /twitter.com/asvanevik/status/1479569507739856897?s=2...
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> I don 't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept
| the loss of control)._
|
| The main reason would be if they could make more money on their
| digital goods by floating them in a large, open, heterogeneous
| market rather than in their smaller walled-garden. That's what
| traditional capital markets are good for, and the name of the
| game here is figuring out how to recreate those benefits in
| decentralized digital markets.
| angryasian wrote:
| ehh.. why sell the item once to a person in a large open
| market, when you can sell the item multiple times to the same
| person in multiple markets.
| dsanchez97 wrote:
| I definitely agree that most people/projects/etc gloss over
| that fact that there still needs be a 'start of authority' to
| be trusted with NFTS. I think a major upside of doing the
| digital transactions on a Blockchain (as opposed to the system
| you described) is that the start authority does not need to be
| present or keep track of any future transactions. In your Rolex
| example, I believe that there would be no way of person A
| selling their Rolex (and digital rights of the Rolex) without
| notifying Rolex and Rolex having to keep track of transaction.
| With a Blockchain, the people could agree that the 'start of
| authority' matches the public address that is associated with
| Rolex and then proceed with the transaction with no need for
| any middle party.
|
| I played a decent amount of Runescape growing up, so when I
| first heard of NFT's I naturally thought of that game. I would
| definitely find intrinsic value in truly owning an NFT of some
| of the rare in game items. And knowing that even if Jagex
| (parent company) disappears that I still have ownership over
| the items definitely adds a lot of value.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > In your Rolex example, I believe that there would be no way
| of person A selling their Rolex (and digital rights of the
| Rolex) without notifying Rolex and Rolex having to keep track
| of transaction.
|
| What does "digital rights of the Rolex" mean? Also, why is it
| harder to notify Rolex of this transaction than it is to
| notify some blockchain?
| simias wrote:
| But see, this is where I get lost in this concept.
|
| 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?
|
| I can sort of see the argument if other game developers allow
| for these items to be reused in other environments, and
| that's something pushed by NFT enthusiasts, but I don't see
| how that makes economical sense.
|
| For one thing that puts a lot of work on the table of other
| game developers. If every NFT of every game needs to be
| usable in other games, can you imagine the headache? It's a
| combinatorial nightmare.
|
| Besides devs want to make money selling their _own_ NFTs, not
| adding items made by others for free, so what incentive is
| there for adding support for your rare Runescape item in some
| other game? Seems like devs would rather sell you a special
| "Runescape retro item set pack, only $9.99!"
|
| And then we haven't even touched on IP issues. If you have an
| NFT of Lara Croft, can the devs of another game just clone
| the model in order to let you import her?
|
| I feel like all of these issues by far dwarf whatever
| convenience NFTs bring to the table. The problems I outline
| above are the ones that need solving, and if you find a way
| around those you could very easily achieve what you want
| without "web3" tech (see Steam trading cards and Nintendo's
| Amiibos for instance).
| root_axis wrote:
| Indeed. What's more, even if publishers wanted this, it's
| all possible without a blockchain. If game publishers
| decided to coordinate on respecting shared digital assets
| they could just agree on a common "digital item" spec where
| a connected client could prove item ownership using public
| key cryptography and digital signatures, similar to how
| JWTs let a client prove claims about another system. The
| same spec could allow users to trade digital assets in a
| peer to peer manner by signing a record of transfer to
| another user's public key - it'd then be up to the buyer
| (i.e. the software they use to verify the signing) to
| register the updated signature chain with the relevant game
| vendors.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| >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 a digital jpeg copy.
|
| >For one thing that puts a lot of work on the table of
| other game developers. If every NFT of every game needs to
| be usable in other games, can you imagine the headache?
| It's a combinatorial nightmare.
|
| Every NFT of every game doesn't have to be usable in other
| games, but the option to easily access the in-game
| ownership records of another game can allow for some asset
| sharing.
|
| >And then we haven't even touched on IP issues. If you have
| an NFT of Lara Croft, can the devs of another game just
| clone the model in order to let you import her?
|
| 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. It could also
| add some unrelated mechanic to a game in which case the NFT
| is just used as a marketing ploy to advertise to a certain
| demographic. Re-using NFTs could also be completely
| unrelated to 3rd parties and can allow developers to allow
| easy migration of old assets from old games to new ones
| without having to maintain teh records themselves.
|
| >I feel like all of these issues by far dwarf whatever
| convenience NFTs bring to the table. The problems I outline
| above are the ones that need solving, and if you find a way
| around those you could very easily achieve what you want
| without "web3" tech (see Steam trading cards and Nintendo's
| Amiibos for instance).
|
| Again, the idea is to have a digital asset that can be
| traded (in terms of ownership) like a physical asset would
| -- without the need for a centralized mediator. Just
| because certain applications typically act as centralized
| gateways doesn't mean the blockchain itself is centralized.
| The hope is for the blockchain to be used as a reliable
| source of information for decades to come with the ability
| for anyone to participate if given the very accessible
| minimum resource requirements.
| notahacker wrote:
| > 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 then... hope the NFT
| owner pays $34.99 for a retail copy of the game,
| otherwise the asset goes unused?
|
| That doesn't sound like a scalable marketing strategy.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| That doesn't really change the question, though: the Tomb
| Raider developers don't need an NFT to do that, and any
| other company isn't going to spend much of their money
| giving something for free to a handful of someone else's
| customers. Why spend time on that instead of, say,
| charging $10 for the homage DLC which gives them actual
| revenue and from a much larger number of people?
|
| For example, how many of those NFTs would have been lost
| or stolen -- and do you want to tell potential buyers
| "sorry, nothing we can do about it - blockchains mean no
| margin for error!"
| notahacker wrote:
| 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...
| uncomputation wrote:
| > 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 a digital jpeg copy.
|
| But with a Picasso the scarcity is inherent in its
| physicality: there is only one in existence. With digital
| data, it is infinitely reproducible and fungible. If I
| replaced a JPG with a bit-for-bit copy, no one would
| notice nor care. Not so with a Picasso. So, NFTs are
| supposed to come in a make a record of your purchase of
| this JPG, but unlike the Picasso, this JPG does not
| physically exist. It must be stored somewhere and, unlike
| the Picasso, this has an ongoing cost. You don't need to
| pay to store the Picasso (although most collectors
| certainly don't just keep it in their house, they could).
| But you do need to pay someone - whether a company or a
| decentralized network - to keep storing your JPG and once
| you stop, it's gone forever. It seems like it would be
| more future proof if Jagex just mailed you a physical
| print of the JPG and a certificate of authenticity.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| I think saying "an original Picasso vs a high quality
| knockoff" would better clarify my point. I would also
| like to add that scarcity is not inherent in physicality,
| especially when a physical copy of said physical item can
| be made. I would argue the recorded ownership and
| verifiable provenance of the item make an original
| Picasso valuable. People don't care about just having the
| art because the art can be easily replicated, physically
| or digitally.
|
| And yes there may be an ongoing cost associated with
| storing a digital image, but you could also download it
| on your computer, print out the image, or try one of the
| decentralized solutions. Ideally the metadata and image
| would be stored on something like Arweave (which only
| requires a one-time payment) since reliability through
| decentralization is one of the goals of the web3
| movement.
|
| >It seems like it would be more future proof if Jagex
| just mailed you a physical print of the JPG and a
| certificate of authenticity.
|
| If the hosting of the image goes down then you still have
| the attestation of owning the asset on the blockchain
| (signed by a private key that has been associated with
| Jagex on creation of the NFT). As for the physical print
| option, I'd say since physical things can be destroyed
| much easier than digital items, I'd prefer it if the
| certificate of authenticity was just an NFT (trying to
| enforce an NFT to belong to the same owner of a physical
| asset is a losing battle).
|
| All in all I'd say NFTs bring value to asset collection
| by providing stronger attestations of ownership, public
| provenance, and resilient record-keeping.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial
| numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same
| security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3"
| feature?
|
| This doesn't enable real-time transfers of NFTs.
|
| Ideally, the blockchain allows the NFTs to be traded without
| Rolex relying on another company acting as a trusted third
| party platform keeping track of ownership, or Rolex itself
| running its own transaction database. The blockchain is a
| common open platform for transactions, and that's useful.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The NFTs are useless. The watches - the thing people care
| about - can still be traded without relying on Rolex or any
| other company.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| That's a different topic. I was addressing why Rolex might
| prefer a blockchain ledger over their own internal one.
| Joeri wrote:
| The problem with traditional authority models is that the
| authority may disappear or be subverted. In regions with
| unstable governments you cannot rely on the government to keep
| saying that your house is your house.
|
| This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use
| case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can prove
| you are who you say, you've studied where you claim, you've
| worked at the places on your resume, and do this in ways that
| cannot be subverted or lost. This would be invaluable for
| refugees who often struggle for months or years with proving
| they are who they are.
|
| For people that live in stable countries with reliable
| governments and strong enforcement of contracts this does not
| provide much value however, and I think this is why this
| subdomain of web3 remains underserved.
| fy20 wrote:
| > In regions with unstable governments you cannot rely on the
| government to keep saying that your house is your house.
|
| You can say it's your house all you want, but if the new
| regime sends soldiers to evict you, no amount of evidence
| that it belongs to you is going to help you.
| schoen wrote:
| > This is why I think the really valuable and underserved use
| case of the blockchain is decentralized identity. You can
| prove you are who you say, you've studied where you claim,
| you've worked at the places on your resume, and do this in
| ways that cannot be subverted or lost. This would be
| invaluable for refugees who often struggle for months or
| years with proving they are who they are.
|
| That's a very interesting use case, but it's hard for me to
| see exactly how this can be made to work.
|
| Suppose you study at the National University of Unstabilia,
| which is located in a disaster-prone and conflict-riven
| environment. You complete your B.A. there, and you get the
| NUU to record this fact on a public blockchain.
|
| A few years later, things are really bad in Unstabilia, so
| you move to Belgium. After you arrive there, you tell someone
| (maybe a prospective employer?) "hey, I'm Joeri, I'm a
| refugee from Unstabilia, and I have a B.A. degree!". For some
| reason this person is skeptical, so you say "it's OK, just
| look up the blockchain record with the following hash!".
|
| Sure enough, the public blockchain contains an entry
| reflecting that someone named Joeri did, indeed, earn a B.A.
| at NUU a few years back. This is great, because maybe
|
| * Unstabilia City was mostly destroyed in an earthquake,
| making it hard to contact people there, and many of the
| people who would have known you during your studies have
| likely died or become refugees themselves; and
|
| * Lately, the new NUU administration really hates your ethnic
| group, so much so that it prefers to deny that people of your
| ethnicity were just recently widely represented among its
| student body; and
|
| * Many of NUU's records were previously lost in a fire; and
|
| * Before that, someone reputedly hacked NUU's computer
| systems and stole all of their records, and probably all of
| their cryptographic keys.
|
| But thanks to the blockchain records, your new Belgian
| friends can still confirm that you actually studied at NUU,
| right?
|
| But, how do they know that that record is really from NUU?
| How do they know that NUU really exists? How do they know
| what its signing keys were, and how long they remained under
| the university administration's control? How do they know
| whether it's a legitimate university? And, maybe most
| significantly, how do they know that you're the same Joeri
| who earned that degree back in the day, as opposed to some
| other Joeri? Are these records including some kind of
| digitally signed biometrics?
| neuronic wrote:
| I have an idea! Why not create a _second_ blockchain which
| verifies the identity of NUU? :)
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| > But, how do they know that that record is really from
| NUU? How do they know that NUU really exists? How do they
| know what its signing keys were, and how long they remained
| under the university administration's control? How do they
| know whether it's a legitimate university? And, maybe most
| significantly, how do they know that you're the same Joeri
| who earned that degree back in the day, as opposed to some
| other Joeri? Are these records including some kind of
| digitally signed biometrics?
|
| Asking blockchain to solve those problems is a bit
| ridiculous. Those are problems that need to be solved in
| any system, and are solved enough in many today. For
| starters, its not hard to archive your signing keys
| somewhere safe and public, especially on the blockchain -
| the group of Universities and employers who care about that
| validity will have some central organization in identifying
| that archive.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If they can verify that, how much does the blockchain add
| then?
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Well the example clearly stated an issue of redundancy.
| Things which can be done off chain which as little trust
| should be done off chain - that doesn't mean a
| distributed file storage protocol which runs off some
| chain and uses economic and cryptographic incentives
| isn't the solution.
| grey-area wrote:
| 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.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| 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
| institution which decide who gets rewarded - that's what
| it boils down to when you say "all the value" is in
| trusted authorities issuing things. For starters that's a
| ridiculous assumption that trust is still necessary for
| value, but more importantly stating that blockchains are
| useless because they cannot replace colleges is
| disingenuous.
| grey-area wrote:
| 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.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Yes I am straw-manning when you've built your original
| critique off a single niche use case (I believe the
| progenitor even used the phrase 'what if') and cite
| failing projects at least attempting to innovate as
| evidence of the uselessness of a technology which has
| achieved its original goal and continues on.
| grey-area wrote:
| Bitcoin is a dismal currency.
|
| It has thus failed at its original goal (a useful
| currency to rival state backed currencies).
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| None of that requires a blockchain. The same level of
| investment in digitization to get all of this info on to a
| blockchain could be used to publish it to the cloud, secured
| and authenticated by cryptography.
|
| The blockchain gets you exchange, with completely transparent
| meditation, in the form of the smart contract / script code.
| perlgeek wrote:
| I don't really see how that works.
|
| Do you propose that "all" authorities provide digital
| certificates, in preparation for the region becoming
| unstable? If yes, paper certificates already exist, and seem
| to go missing -- why would it be harder for digital
| certificates to go missing? Or for the thing that ties one
| person to their digital certificates?
|
| Or do you propose that authorities _in_ unstable regions
| provide digital certificates? If yes, how can you trust them,
| given the unstable nature?
|
| I value thinking about these things, but somehow I still
| struggle to see where the proposed extra value comes in.
| Maybe I'm thinking too much in extremes, and the value breaks
| down in extreme cases.
| pshc wrote:
| > Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex
| serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact
| same security and trust profile without having to involve any
| "web3" feature?
|
| A serial number can be copied and engraved onto a forged watch,
| so not really.
|
| A more analogous scenario would be if Rolex embedded an NFC
| hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that
| anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that
| the chip's cert was indeed signed by Rolex.
| baash05 wrote:
| This is sort of true. In the case of the watch, if you read
| the blockchain for the serial-number on the Rolex, you could
| engrave that too? The storage medium of the data wouldn't
| make a difference. The same could be said for the NFC chip.
| Those are copied all the time. Just purchase a blank and
| overwrite it with an original.
| voldacar wrote:
| > NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such
| that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and
| verify that the chip's cert was indeed signed by Rolex.
|
| This is an excellent idea and I am now wondering why luxury
| brands haven't started doing this. It would be super hot. One
| would do it and suddenly they would all be doing it. Watches,
| handbags, shoes, whatever
| threeseed wrote:
| Luxury watch brands prevent copycats by making the watches
| hard to copy using special alloys (Rolex), glass techniques
| (AP) etc.
|
| And fashion brands iterate quickly on their designs so when
| you see fake LV bags it already looks dated.
| nefitty wrote:
| This is one of the few usecases of crypto that kinda make
| sense. If those certs were on a blockchain, Rolex could fold
| and people in the future might still be able to check for
| authenticity.
|
| There's more steps involved that I'm not sure could be
| solved, like, who controls the authenticity Oracle? Is it an
| API that gets pinged? Do you have to pay a gas or network fee
| to check authenticity? Could a smart contract be made to
| automate the work? Maybe it could work like credit card
| chips, which give out a one-time code to the retailer, who
| then gets it checked by an online service... except somehow
| replace the web API with a smart contract.
|
| For larger scale operations, tagging individual items with
| NFC chips might be cost prohibitive.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Rolex could fold and people in the future might still be
| able to check for authenticity.
|
| Well, what if Rolex folds and sells their private keys, and
| an unscrupulous buyer then starts minting Rolex NFTs for
| fake watches? What if this happens surreptitiously, and not
| out in the open?
|
| Further, it's far more likely at the moment that Rolex will
| exist 50 years from now than that Ethereum or Bitcoin will.
| hooande wrote:
| So the idea would be to create a giant file of every Rolex
| transaction made in the future. And then search through
| that file for a given NFC tag to determine authenticity.
| Doing all of this in case Rolex goes out of business and
| can no longer maintain a hypothetical authenticity server?
|
| Gotta say, it sounds kind of crazy
| nefitty wrote:
| This is about as good as it gets with crypto.
| infotogivenm wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. Supply chain verification is
| inherently authority-based... if only at some point in
| the creation of the internet we had invented a system for
| verifying authoritative claims on things ;) Not to
| mention that with certificates... Rolex can totally
| disappear into the wind, yet you can still verify the
| certificate provided you know Rolex's root. And all this
| for <$300M year in mining fees!
| simias wrote:
| >Rolex could fold and people in the future might still be
| able to check for authenticity.
|
| That's why I mentioned distributing the file over IPFS so
| that it could be easily backuped by anybody forever. If
| eventually there's no longer any interest in this database
| it could be lost to bitrot of course, but this is also true
| of blockchains.
| simias wrote:
| Well sure but that's the "analog gap" problem. NFTs don't fix
| that, do they? In the end there'll have to be something that
| will tie a given NFT to a given watch, and one way or the
| other it'll be the same issue as tying my CSV to a given
| watch.
| pshc wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| But whatever you use would still be easier to implement
| using traditional tech than web3, because the problems
| they solve are orthogonal.
| pshc wrote:
| Yes. I regret not being more clear in my original
| comment, because the scheme I alluded to is an
| application of public key cryptography, such as
| Certificate Authorities, and is not about
| cryptocurrencies specifically.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Even with time stamped signatures you can clone the
| signature onto a fake watch.
| pshc wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bcherny wrote:
| > Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex
| serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact
| same security and trust profile without having to involve any
| "web3" feature?
|
| They totally could. But what's interesting about NFTs is they
| standardize this process across all kinds of assets and
| issuers. Instead of a CSV for Rolex, a Twitter history for an
| artist, a deed for a house, a rental agreement for an Airbnb,
| it's all just one format.
|
| In the past, there's been tremendous value that's come out of
| standardizing stuff, allowing infrastructure and new kinds of
| businesses to be built on top.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| It would be easy to create standards for Digital Asset and
| Identity so that producers could represent ownership on their
| servers and allow for trade. The only thing NFTs give you is
| hosting for this in a logically centralized network.
| Hypothetically, this allows for operations on different
| contracts to be composible, but I don't think this happens
| much in practice.
| bcherny wrote:
| It's two sides of the same thing, I think.
|
| Some things are standardized with protocols: IP, TCP, SQL,
| etc.
|
| Other things are standardized with storage formats: FAT,
| NTFS, etc.
|
| NFTs fall into the latter bucket, with some conventions for
| the former but nothing as mature as a protocol.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| I am only interested by money aspect of crypto and especially
| on ability to fund companies easily via labor (actually that
| worked well in Communism). Will see if central bank currencies
| will allow for the same. That could be big boost to economy and
| big hit to VCs so I expect this to come from EU.
|
| All those creator economy apps show that there's a need to
| democratise economy. I am again tempted to quote hustlers here.
| simsla wrote:
| > and especially on ability to fund companies easily via
| labor
|
| Not sure I'm following. How would that work, and how would
| crypto facilitate this?
| jfb wrote:
| Could it be that people aren't really interested in undoing the
| mistakes of Web2, but rather just kicking off a new round of
| consolidation, where they could be the gatekeepers/platform
| owners?
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Chaos is a ladder... Hmm
| threeseed wrote:
| It's more that developers are bored and looking for something
| new and shiny.
|
| And VCs are flush with cash and have nowhere to deploy it.
| scyclow wrote:
| This is a really good and well=researched article. I think it
| highlights a lot of current problems with the existing web3
| ecosystem. A few thoughts after reading it:
|
| - For NFTs in particular, I agree that the ecosystem is way too
| centered around OpenSea. But things also seem to be generally
| moving in the right direction here too. I've seen a lot of new
| exchanges pop up recently, some of which put more of an emphasis
| on decentralization (such as zora [1]). There are also some new
| standards on the royalty front [2]. Exchanges may or may not pay
| attention to it, but it's at least a start.
|
| - The ecosystem's current centralization around Infura and
| Alchemy is also concerning. But as with the other issues, I think
| there's a definite path towards improvement. In the meantime,
| choosing an Ethereum node service feels kind of like choosing an
| ISP. But at least I'm not bound to a single service by physical
| architecture.
|
| - In the absence of any improvements to Ethereum's scalability, I
| don't think it has much of a future. Sure, you can do some
| interesting things on it today, but high gas prices and low tx
| throughput make it impractical for many applications and most
| internet users. That said, there seems to be a lot of resources
| being thrown at various scalability solutions. Whether or not we
| see them in the near future is one story, but there's at least a
| viable roadmap, which makes me optimistic. And I think a lot of
| the centralization issues are a direct result of the scalability
| issues. So as the latter improves, I'd expect the former to
| improve as well.
|
| - I disagree with the analysis that OpenSea would be much better
| as a centralized service. Part of what makes it valuable is that
| it can (fairly easily, but no seamlessly) integrate with other
| software (contracts) deployed to a global public network. I'd
| imagine it would be very difficult for OpenSea to get off the
| ground if they had to build their own general purpose contract VM
| that thousands of people would be willing to build on top of. On
| top of that, it would be a lot harder to tell a convincing story
| about what happens to peoples NFTs if they go out of business.
| However, if scalability doesn't improve, I agree that OpenSea and
| Coinbase will likely move in an increasingly centralized
| direction until most of the web3 components are stripped out.
|
| - I definitely agree that people (myself included) don't want to
| run their own servers, but I wonder if Ethereum's Proof of Stake
| will change things. Supposedly I can run a validator on a
| raspberry pi. So if there's enough of a financial incentive to
| keep one running, I may do so.
|
| [1] https://zora.co/ [2] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981
| iskander wrote:
| This is the most thoughtful critique I've seen of the web3 space
| because it engaged meaningfully with the stated intent of web3 as
| a movement (and found it somewhat lacking on its own terms).
| jstanley wrote:
| > To be clear, there is nothing particularly "distributed" about
| the apps themselves: they're just normal react websites. The
| "distributedness" refers to where the state and the
| logic/permissions for updating the state lives: on the blockchain
| instead of in a "centralized" database.
|
| This is one way to do it, but ideally you would host the site on
| IPFS so that you don't have a web server involved at all.
| mmcnl wrote:
| This is the best article on web 3 I have read thus far. Probably
| because this guy actually bothered to create some dApps (as one
| of 7 in the world I think).
| deepGem wrote:
| " that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache
| somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys
| that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that
| machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT
| to whatever they'd like at any time (regardless of whether or not
| they "own" the token). "
|
| This is how I felt when I first created a NFT. Man, the contract
| is so secure and all that but the raw asset - forget about it.
|
| https://twitter.com/pbanavara/status/1457675453565599748?s=2...
|
| What I deduced was that the chain will somehow reject any other
| contract referencing the duplicate asset and only preserve the
| original contract. Something similar happened on OpenSea with
| Moxie but isn't this centralisation ?
|
| But doesn't this apply to all off chain assets ? Essentially any
| underlying data for a smart contract, because you know storing
| even a byte of data on chain costs a lot.
|
| So the smart contract - essentially a set of instructions is
| distributed, decentralised but prone to security lapses ( a whole
| another story ) yet somehow the data for these smart contracts is
| centralised ?
|
| I am so confused.
| scotty79 wrote:
| People happily run their servers when it's valuable for them. A
| lot of people have torrent program running in the background.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| (I deleted my previous comment, because I don't think I said what
| I meant. So let's try again.)
|
| Distributed, peer to peer, is worse. Everything that uses it, as
| a suite of technologies ranging from torrents to Freenet to
| bitcoin, only does so because a simpler, cheaper, central
| alternative is somehow seen as bad. In general, because it would
| be raided by The Man.
|
| Blockchain, is worse. You could do everything it does, cheaper
| and better, without it. Except the bit about lawlessness, but the
| whole NFT gold rush has no need for that.
|
| For any use that doesn't actually _need_ to evade The Man, you
| can always make your system work better by pulling more and more
| of it into centralisation and out of the blockchain. Therefore,
| the final "victory" of the blockchain will look exactly like its
| obsolescence.
|
| Unless you want to buy contraband, of course.
| atweiden wrote:
| > Everything that uses it [...] only does so because a simpler,
| cheaper, central alternative is somehow seen as bad.
|
| Walled garden ecosystems have a fairly obvious downside --
| ultimately _someone_ has to get disproportionately enriched and
| empowered. By using the word "somehow", you insinuate it's
| actually hard to see this.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| No, that's just a problem that lives in a different layer of
| how we organise the world. Right now we haven't decided to
| operate these centralised things as services provided by
| society, to society. Right now, they are owned by people who
| build up heaps of money, which in our current system
| translates to unwarranted power.
|
| These are choices which can be changed.
|
| Trying to work around the current system via a blockchain is
| certainly an option. But it's going to be worse in every
| other way except those externalities. And so they will tend
| to creep back, and the blockchain will be pushed out.
| atweiden wrote:
| That's a tad bit non-specific. Do you claim walled garden
| ecosystems are acceptable if a state government controls
| it? Save for possible science fiction AI administered
| states, this would disproportionately empower state
| executives, no?
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| It's non-specific because I'm not trying to write a
| manifesto right now. Nation state or sub-national state
| governments are not the only way to organise things that
| are done by society and for society.
| mjfl wrote:
| > Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point.
| Even organizations building software full time do not want to run
| their own servers at this point. If there's one thing I hope
| we've learned about the world, it's that people do not want to
| run their own servers.
|
| Why is this true? At this point it's never been easier to make
| your own static website, deploy nginx, and get online. Maybe not
| everyone wants to make a website, but you would think that
| everyone that _does_ want to make a website would be able to and
| deploying a server would not be the bottleneck.
| ece wrote:
| It's the things that come with running a server that everyone
| dreads: software updates, downtime, potential attacks and
| misconfigurations.
|
| As an example, I think we would have more decentralized social
| networks if moderation was easier, so in a sense, these are
| human problems, but where the software hasn't caught up yet.
| So, hard agree that software should be easier to do. Servers
| are just one part of it IMO.
| neysofu wrote:
| Could you? Yes. Could you do it with 99.99% uptime and without
| spending any money and time for system maintaince? No.
| nunez wrote:
| This was the best read on web3 that I've seen yet. I'm definitely
| excited to play around with it, but I agree with many of Moxie's
| points, especially around the promise of decentralization
| diverging from the hyper-centralized reality we see today.
|
| I've been stewing on a thought experiment. Diaspora was aiming to
| be a decentralized Facebook competitor. I can see this project
| (or similar ones) gaining a foothold in the web3 space. But if
| social events are on chain, some of which might contain PII, how
| would such a service securely store fragments of data like this
| on random computers?
| iskander wrote:
| Are there any chains whose clients can run successfully on a cell
| phone, avoiding the need for intermediaries like Infura?
|
| Does a recursive zero-knowledge rollup like Mina create a
| sufficiently small state to remove the need for client/server
| distinction?
| polyomino wrote:
| bitcoin can run on a raspberry pi, so probably. It'll probably
| take a few days to sync though.
| adabaed wrote:
| Do you think Cardano can aliviate some of the clear issues we are
| seeing with Ethereum? I've been reading a lot for the past two
| weeks and I must say I'm close to start developing stuff in
| Cardano.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| What he says about NFTs is embarrassing, lmao. I've personally
| never bought them myself but I am enthusiastic about blockchain
| tech. Is there really no commitment saved for an art work? You
| would think this was basic shit. Maybe there is more than one NFT
| protocol?
|
| He also has a good point about centralization in 'blockchain
| oracle' services. In major wallets I've often seen them just make
| calls to blockchain / TX lookup services -- no cryptographic
| proofs there (though in theory easy to add with 'spv proofs'?) I
| also like that he went as far as to make two dapps before
| critiquing it. This is one of the better criticisms of 'web3' out
| there.
|
| I don't think what he says about OpenSea being better as a
| 'centralized' service is valid. Most of his critiques for the
| downside of blockchain-tech seem to be Ethereum-specific. For
| example, Solana transactions are blazingly fast, low-cost, and
| there are nice stable coins on there. OpenSea seems like it would
| be 'better' if it were an actual cryptographic protocol. Maybe
| link it with IPFS + Filecoin.
| darawk wrote:
| This is a truly excellent criticism of the state of "crypto" and
| "web3". As someone who thinks these technologies are interesting,
| i'm glad someone finally wrote a decent, sincere critique that
| covered a lot of the very real issues with it.
|
| I think i'd break this piece down into two categories: The first
| is critiques of current implementations, and the second is
| critiques of the structural incentives of the technology. I think
| it's important to separate those things somewhat.
|
| The privacy, security and centralization of Infura/Alchemy are
| real and important issues, and to a limited extent, derive from
| the fundamental incentives of the ecosystem. However, what I
| think critically differentiates "web3" from "web2" is that those
| platforms are commoditized. Infura and Alchemy are providers of a
| service that is fundamentally a commodity, they have very little
| market power. Contrast to comparable web2 platforms like Facebook
| or Google, who have tremendous market power over consumers who's
| data they've warehoused. I think this is a really important
| structural difference between the two. That in no way takes away
| from the seriousness of the critique of Infura/Alchemy and how
| they're used, but I think it does _somewhat_ limit the importance
| of that failure. Anyone can build a new, better gateway platform,
| and users can switch to it without having to ask anyone 's
| permission to export their data. That's a really big deal.
|
| The more structural critique I think relates to the issue of
| iteration speed, and the tendency that slow, bureaucratic
| development processes have to push the technological frontier
| outside their own scope. I think that's a real, structural
| problem that any decentralized system has, and its fitting that
| Moxie should point it out, given that he's famously (and
| correctly, in my view) resisted exactly these sorts of things for
| exactly these reasons in Signal (e.g. federation) since forever.
| I think this critique is the most important and serious critique
| of the crypto space in general, and if anything is going to bring
| it down, this is it. This problem remains largely unsolved at
| this point, but whether or not it _can_ be solved is going to
| hinge on the quality of the group coordination mechanisms people
| are able to devise. I 'm personally optimistic that these things
| can get figured out, but they are very hard problems.
|
| An important thing to note here though is that a lot of things
| actually work just fine with this kind of bureaucratic/slow
| iteration process. Consider core web protocols like HTTP, SMTP,
| or even something like x86. These things tend to be "low in the
| stack", but that is exactly what the underlying crypto
| infrastructure wants to be as well. The more general your
| platform, the less quick iteration you require. Whether or not
| crypto platform are able to deliver something like this remains
| to be seen, but it is a thing that does happen and works ok in
| many areas today.
|
| > "It's early days still" is the most common refrain I see from
| people in the web3 space when discussing matters like these. In
| some ways, cryptocurrency's failure to scale beyond relatively
| nascent engineering is what makes it possible to consider the
| days "early," since objectively it has already been a decade or
| more.
|
| I'd also like to point out that most prior "generations" of the
| web took at least a decade to come to fruition. It's easy to
| forget how long things take to mature, but the fact that crypto
| doesn't have everything figured out after 10 years is not all
| that surprising:
|
| https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-web-20
|
| And this is only going back to the early 90s. Obviously various
| proto "webs" existed long before then. Very structurally
| different technologies can take quite a while to sort themselves
| out, and find their niche.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I like Moxie's work and writings, and this article has some great
| points, but I can't get behind this:
|
| _We should accept the premise that people will not run their own
| servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without
| having to distribute infrastructure._
|
| I'm not ready to give in. I am happy to leave "normal" (tech
| illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my
| decentralization goals.
|
| I think instead of building centralized infrastructure that does
| not require trust, we can make it easier to host decentralized
| infrastructure. Including allowing a "server" to be offline for
| months at a time, come online for a minute or two, then disappear
| again. P2P networking is also an area we can improve on, IMO. Too
| much information is going across the internet instead of point to
| point. Bluetooth is a terrible protocol, but airdrop (and reverse
| engineered implementations) seems to be promising.
| vasco wrote:
| > I am happy to leave "normal" (tech illiterate and politically
| apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals.
|
| You realize this approximates to roughly "everyone that isn't
| you"?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I doubt it. Definitely 2-3 standard deviations. But that
| leaves something like 0.05% of the population.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| What does it mean to leave normal people behind? Surely you
| need to interact with them.
|
| For example, you can run your own mail server, but you will
| need to play by Google's rules if you want anyone on Gmail to
| get your emails.
|
| So, it's hard for me to picture what it means to _personally_
| decentralize without caring what the bulk of people do.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Email is inherently centralized due to DNS being centralized.
| Furthermore there is no rule that says I have to federate
| with any particular entity.
|
| They will take the loss.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Hm, I think my point might not have been clear enough. I
| would find it hard to function without interacting with
| central system, like sending an email to someone on gmail.
| Just today, I emailed a plumber on gmail, but it could
| easily have been an old friend or a relative or whatever.
|
| How do you email the plumber, is my question?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Email doesn't require DNS. Modern spam solutions for DNS
| do. You can most definitely use something like `spiped` to
| create a mutually authenticated, secure channel over IP,
| and just send mail over that. Or build a VPN overlay
| network and send mail to raw IPs. If you're going to
| cloister yourself with your fellow monks^W nerds then this
| is simple.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Thanks for the info. Yeah a monastery would be nice.
| Definitely goals.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> Including allowing a "server" to be offline for months at a
| time, come online for a minute or two, then disappear again. _
|
| Neo-NNTP!
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| NNTP with enforced GPG authentication and PoW like spam
| prevention could work today (in the narrow technical sense,
| not in the wide product sense.) It wouldn't even be that
| large of a lift from current NNTP architecture. Create a
| moderated Usenet group that only accepts posts that complete
| a PoW challenge and that sign their messages.
| dama0 wrote:
| > I'm not ready to give in. I am happy to leave "normal" (tech
| illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my
| decentralization goals.
|
| Which should be already possible with with the current
| offerings around selfhosting applications and p2p technologies.
|
| But as the same time you need to accept that the "normal"
| people would probably be happy to, in turn leave you behind to
| reach their goal of being able to use all service available
| without needing to concern themself with running their own
| server.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I'm not ready to give in. I am happy to leave "normal" (tech
| illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my
| decentralization goals.
|
| I don't think we have to "leave "normal" [...] people behind".
| I don't like devices like Alexa, but FFS, look at what millions
| of people have installed and running 24/7 in their homes. Is
| someone seriously telling me that a dedicated engineering and
| marketing effort couldn't build a similar consumer-centric
| device that functioned as a server (purposes to include but not
| necessarily limited to http and smtp).
| danans wrote:
| > Is someone seriously telling me that a dedicated
| engineering and marketing effort couldn't build a similar
| consumer-centric device that functioned as a server
|
| They already have, and their name is Synology:
| https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS120j
| dqpb wrote:
| I think the important part of decentralization is not that
| "everyone must" own their own server, but rather that "anyone
| can" run their own server, that indexes the globally consistent
| blockchain database.
|
| But, I agree that the most troublesome parts are around the
| client/server relationship due to the need for indexing/caching,
| and the irony of having a man-in-the-middle between you and the
| trustless network.
| somishere wrote:
| Great article. Would love to read an equally solid rebuttle. Can
| I suggest Web2^0?
| pelasaco wrote:
| 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.
| boulos wrote:
| Some of this echoes Matt Levine's take on crypto and DeFi
| generally: you will repeatedly see the re-learning the lessons of
| hundreds/thousands of years of traditional finance.
|
| I'm not sure that the "mobile device can't act as a node" is
| fundamental (it's more a quirk of the _current_ systems), but
| "nobody wants to run their own server" => "centralization" is a
| great reminder:
|
| > I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can
| run my own mail server, but it doesn't functionally matter for
| privacy, censorship resistance, or control - because GMail is
| going to be on the other end of every email that I send or
| receive anyway. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a
| platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds:
| centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired
| in time.
| mhitza wrote:
| If web3 revolves around crypto how can these be his first
| impressions?
|
| > In 2017, Marlinspike helped launch MobileCoin with that
| potential integration in mind, serving as a paid technical
| advisor for the cryptocurrency.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...
| [deleted]
| purplesnowflake wrote:
| Moxie is no fan of decentralization. And he made why very clear
| with concise and incisive arguments.
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| At least wrt Signal, I think he prefers the trust be in the
| protocol and not the organization or business model.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| It seems that with Signal he actually prefers that people
| trust specifically the organization that he founded, and not
| compatible implementations of the protocol, or even self-
| built copies of the same binary.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/q1jnbb/why_isnt_sig.
| ..
| slibhb wrote:
| His argument here is that web3, as it exists today, isn't
| actually decentralized. Also:
|
| > These technologies immediately tended towards centralization
| through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this
| has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the
| ecosystem, and that most participants don't even know or care
| it's happening. This might suggest that decentralization itself
| is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance
| to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of
| decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for
| something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted
| for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer
| to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.
|
| Per the post, he's in favor of decentralization that "uses
| cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust,"
| he's just skeptical that web3 will head in this direction.
| kristofferR wrote:
| No, the issue is that he is against a decentralization
| generally.
|
| He opposes it for Signal.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| And his arguments in favour of centralization are flawed. Sure,
| regular people do not want to run their own (email, chat, etc)
| servers. But they DO want to be able to chose from a handful of
| available servers the one they like best (or the one they trust
| most), without losing connectivity with their contacts. Tired
| of Google's shenanigans, move from Gmail to Protonmail, tell
| your contacts your new email, set up an autoresponder, all is
| fine. When you move away from a centralized silo like Signal,
| you'll have to move all your chat buddies with you to a new
| platform.
| ianbicking wrote:
| If you read the section "Recreating this world" it addresses
| this pretty directly
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Directly, and not convincingly at all. He presents just one
| use case, which, coincidentally, is the only one that casts
| the service he runs in a really good light. There are other
| use cases, like several email users leaving Gmail
| altogether, escaping from what he calls "the worst of both
| worlds". And his alternative? Using the centralized service
| (preferrably, the one he runs), because, he promises, _this
| one will be totally different_ , aha.
| skybrian wrote:
| Some people say they want this, but in practice, why you
| should trust someone you've never heard of?
|
| Network effects aside, consider the difficulty of deciding
| that the people behind a fork of Chrome or Signal are
| trustworthy. The average person doesn't have the knowledge to
| do due diligence, and many of us who could (in theory) don't
| want to bother.
|
| How do you get to the point where people think your team of
| software developers is legitimate? Decisions like this are
| based on what everyone else is using.
|
| One reason that app stores serving sandboxed apps are popular
| is that you don't have to evaluate each software developer's
| organization just to play their games.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > consider the difficulty of deciding that the people
| behind a fork of Chrome or Signal are trustworthy.
|
| Yet web users did decide that the people behind Chrome were
| trustworthy, even when there were still sites claiming to
| "work best in Internet Explorer". You're arguing that
| something is unrealistic, and yet you give an example of
| that thing actually happening.
|
| > The average person doesn't have the knowledge to do due
| diligence
|
| The average person knows that Facebook is bad for society,
| and yet they are tied to the platform because of a lack of
| interoperability. A minority of users have accepted the
| switching cost and moved to Fediverse instances, but I
| think it's not controversial to suggest that more people
| would switch to Facebook competitors if they could stay in
| contact with their Facebook friends.
| zaik wrote:
| You might be interested in the refutation of some of those
| arguments by Daniel Gultsch: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
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