[HN Gopher] Web3 is expensive P2P
___________________________________________________________________
Web3 is expensive P2P
Author : mritzmann
Score : 460 points
Date : 2022-05-16 12:48 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (netfuture.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (netfuture.ch)
| api wrote:
| No because it's mostly not P2P. A lot of it is centralized. There
| are central servers behind things like MetaMask or hosting most
| NFT content.
| web4 wrote:
| you can point MetaMask to a different RPC endpoint or your own
| local node. it is like suggesting BitTorrent is centralized
| tech because many users download torrents on a centralized
| website.
|
| most NFTs (of value) are using IPFS or Arweave not a URL.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| You certainly can point to a local blockchain node but the
| question is - have you ever run your own?
|
| Running your own blockchain node is nothing like BitTorrent.
| The required storage, memory, cpu, and IOPS performance is
| already pushing the limits of readily available standard
| hardware.
|
| This applies mostly to Ethereum. When you go to higher
| throughput chains like Solana and Polygon the node
| requirements jump to hardware that's unobtainable/impractical
| for most people - top of the line NVMe drives with storage
| requirements beyond a single drive (typically need striping
| for IOPS anyway). Solana all but requires CUDA acceleration.
| Syncing the Solana devnet constantly uses at least 50% of my
| RTX 3090...
|
| IPFS is even worse - the CPU, memory, and bandwidth
| requirements to do anything beyond playing around are
| ridiculous.
|
| There's a reason virtually everyone uses various node
| providers. This is rapidly setting the stage for all real-
| world uses of blockchain to end up on Web3 AWS (Alchemy,
| Infura, Pinata, etc).
|
| The entire Arweave network currently hosts about 64 TB of
| data. In the scope of a worldwide network that's... Not a
| lot.
| po1nt wrote:
| I believe these issues will solve over time by moore's law.
| By the time Web3 will be mainstream viable we will all be
| able to run nodes on our mobile phones.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Phones have batteries and maintain the decent battery
| life they have with aggressive sleep, control of
| background processes, etc.
|
| Ethereum does a tiny number of transactions and I'm not
| sure Moore's law will keep up with any scale (see Solana
| and Polygon) as it applies to mobile devices. Then you
| still have the power and cell connectivity issues.
|
| No one is going to want to wait for their local node on
| mobile to take a half hour (or more) to sync after it's
| been disconnected/idle/etc for a few hours/days to make a
| transaction that should take seconds.
| web41 wrote:
| you can run an Ethereum node without running a full node.
| agree IPFS client is pretty janky but the idea of content
| addressable p2p hosting is not a bad thing.
|
| the goal of these base systems is not to be faster or
| easier to use than a centralized Amazon server. the goal is
| resistance to centralized control.
|
| mod note: my other account "web4" is rate limited after a
| couple comments?
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Yes you can but sync time is still a problem, even today
| with the minuscule transaction rates supported on most
| chains. There will likely be advancements there but this
| is obviously a hard problem as we're already over a
| decade in with this technology and it has yet to be
| solved with any kind of approach that can still claim
| being fully secure and decentralized.
|
| What I'm really trying to point out is that the vast
| majority of users do not care about centralized control.
| Even those that claim to pretty quickly realize that
| platforms with no ability whatsoever to filter content
| end up with universally objectionable content (such as
| CASM) and/or content otherwise illegal and/or regularly
| denounced (revenge porn, extreme violence/murder content,
| etc).
|
| With centralized platforms today this has shown to merely
| create platforms that better align with someone's
| particular worldview while still exercising just as much
| (if not more) moderation and control.
| web41 wrote:
| centralization is not a bad thing - a lot of NFT websites
| exist that are centralized and curate and moderate the
| data on the public ledger to give a better UX for users.
| there can be multiple of these websites that co-exist -
| like how you can visit different book shops that sell the
| same product.
|
| the core issue of web2 is that users are locking value
| into walled gardens run by singular corporations. if the
| corporation changes like Elon buying Twitter, the users
| have no power to escape. the same is not true in a web3
| app where users can (and probably already are) operate on
| the shared data across a variety of platforms.
| Karunamon wrote:
| IPFS only enables decentralization, it doesn't guarantee it.
| I'd be willing to bet most NFT content is only pinned by the
| exchange.
| web4 wrote:
| maybe but this is still better than a centralized server
| URL for something that is designed to be owned by the
| commons. if the marketplace goes down users can just re-pin
| the asset. even if the asset has been completely garbage
| collected, if it is truly valuable (like Punks) probably at
| least one computer in the world will have the asset on-
| disk, and can just re-pin it to revive the IPFS url.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Most NFT content is hosted with HTTP(s).
|
| Many NFTs that reference an IPFS url point to a specific
| IPFS gateway run by the creator as opposed to a "standard"
| IPFS url with ipfs://
|
| I know this because I have a product that indexes various
| blockchains and the referenced content.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Wow, the situation is even more dire than I thought. So
| by and large, the decentralization benefit is completely
| off the table for most NFTs.
|
| Would you be willing to share some numbers on what you're
| seeing? This is valuable information.
| [deleted]
| kkielhofner wrote:
| We'll be providing these kinds of stats in real time when
| we launch!
| web41 wrote:
| how many of those are minted with OpenSea? and how many
| are high value - not spam?
|
| OpenSea engineers should be shamed for their use of HTTPS
| URLs in contracts, but it is not the norm outside of
| their minting platform.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Many are minted with OpenSea (of course).
|
| In any case across the 70 million or so NFTs I have
| indexed HTTP is definitely the majority.
| web41 wrote:
| good to know!
|
| it would be worth taking a sample of higher value tokens
| that are not minted by OpenSea. probably the vast
| majority of those tokens are spam or bots trying to
| capitalize on existing web content like DeviantArt
| database.
|
| better platforms like Manifold, Foundation and Zora are
| already using IPFS or Arweave
| trainsarebetter wrote:
| i think that's the point.
|
| if effective storage proofs ever become a thing, then the
| later half (decentralized storage) will be standard
| cdiddy2 wrote:
| You can add your own or any node that is public to metamask in
| the settings. Infura has had outages a few times before so
| people know how to do this now.
| agentultra wrote:
| I'll just leave this here [0]
|
| I don't disagree that the concentration of web architecture into
| the hands of a small number of big corps is a bad thing. I just
| don't see the solution being a purely technical one. There are
| market forces and reasons for that consolidation: efficiency in
| terms of power; production, acquisition, and deployment of
| expensive equipment; high-availability of services, operations
| and staff, etc. I don't like that a third of the Internet goes
| down with aws-east-1 like anyone else but the factors that
| enabled this situation are no conspiracy.
|
| We need economic incentives to enable smaller players to build on
| widely deployed infrastructure, fair competition laws, etc.
|
| We could use more edge-computing power with low-power equipment.
| Make it easy to deploy small-time data-centres on low-power, off-
| the-shelf hardware. Incentives that align with the economic value
| they bring so that they're not fighting on the margins left by
| large monopolies.
|
| Instead we're supposed to switch over to a "P2P" system built on
| funny machines evaluating user code. As many chains have tried to
| formally verify their smart contracts it's becoming increasing
| clear that the proofs, when they can be achieved, are so complex
| that the underlying system probably has more errors in it than we
| can count. Probably great for departing folks from their money
| but the folks running this stuff often don't even understand
| programming let alone proofs and verification.
|
| And then the stuff that actually gets built with it... slow,
| terrible UX, that it is... is just garbage anyways. Axie? I don't
| think anyone in web3 actually plays the game. It looks boring as
| all hell. And it's incredibly expensive to get started in it.
| They literally pay people to play it for them and they just watch
| spreadsheets for number to go up.
|
| And none of this "distributed web" works without the Internet as
| it exists today anyway. I'm not interested in promises of
| potential. We don't drive on potential bridges.
|
| Maybe some part of the community is built by idealists but their
| dreams are poisoned. The world we live in right now is already
| pretty terrible in some parts. We could be fixing those instead
| of building another dystopia.
|
| [0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
| wmf wrote:
| _We need economic incentives..._
|
| That's the whole point of Web3. Unfortunately the incentives as
| currently designed are relatively simplistic and seem to go
| wrong more often than they go right, but the idea is there.
| agentultra wrote:
| Given the track record of the web3 community in regulating
| itself, preventing fraud and corruption, and even building a
| tech stack that can be trusted... I don't think we should
| place a single bit of faith in their ability to align
| incentives with the kinds I'm talking about.
|
| The kinds of economic incentives I'm talking about come from
| industry experts working with democratically elected
| officials with a system of government that is concerned with
| the rights and freedoms of a society to have access to
| technology and infrastructure for the benefit of everyone.
| The kind of Keynesian approach to economics rather than the
| Austrian school (which has shown itself to implode and fail
| and enrich the few at the cost of the freedoms of the many,
| less fortunate).
| nsjsuabNdi wrote:
| "industry experts" - capitalist sponsored charlatans
| "democratically elected officials" - corrupted by corporate
| greed "Government that is concerned with the rights and
| freedoms of a society to have access to technology and
| infrastructure for the benefit of everyone" - which planet
| do you live on?
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I hadn't seen Axie before, but I have seen a few other
| blockchain games. They seem to suffer the same pitfalls as the
| whole gamification trend that went around a few years ago, in
| that the game part feels tacked on, which of course completely
| misses the point.
|
| I have no doubt a good game could be built around the
| blockchain, as are my thoughts on gamification for fitness or
| whatever else, but the game has to come first.
| agentultra wrote:
| I don't share your optimism. Just as most smart
| contract/web3/crypto developers fail to understand political
| science, economics, physics, and software engineering; fewer
| seem to understand game development -- yet are happy to
| blithely repeat the same myth that game assets will somehow
| live on the block chain and be use-able in different games!
| Imagine owning Mario!
|
| There are a ton of great games being made today without any
| of this "ownership" stuff and users are not complaining about
| it. It's not a pain point for anyone who plays games.
|
| However it does present an opportunity for someone, somewhere
| to keep growing the herd of people at the bottom of the
| pyramid...
| exdsq wrote:
| FWIW I quite liked the trading card games on Blockchain
| because you could sell cards you didn't want, buy those you
| did, and packs became like 'real life' in that you could get
| a really cool legendary and make some money (just like
| Pokemon/YuGiOh, but that you lose in games like Hearthstone
| where you just convert them into some in game currency). I've
| commented on this before and people have said "Oh, why does
| everything require a financial incentive in Web3?" but let's
| be fair, it exists just the same in most IRL TCGs.
| epicide wrote:
| What does being on a blockchain get you in a digital TCG
| that a centralized server can't?
| exdsq wrote:
| Not much, just rare to find them because most TCG games
| don't want to manage a shop and txs etc which you get for
| free on say Ethereum.
| _glass wrote:
| site is down for me. would have been better hosted on ipfs :)
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| Some aggregators include archive links automatically; maybe an
| aggregator should mirror/pin content on an IPFS node, and users
| can help host front page content?
| paulmd wrote:
| > maybe an aggregator should mirror/pin content on an IPFS
| node, and users can help host front page content?
|
| I could do that... _for money!_
| can16358p wrote:
| And anyone hosting it, verifiable implicitly by the content
| hash, could be paid a small amount of some token.
|
| But oh wait, crypto is only for illegal things sorry. /s
| WaxedChewbacca wrote:
| shoulderfake wrote:
| danamit wrote:
| p2p cannot save a state that the whole network agree upon, that's
| the point of Web3, that's what it is solving. What a waste of
| articles?
|
| You CANNOT have distributed apps with old p2p file sharing.
| ericxtang wrote:
| The underlying technology of Web3 (distributed consensus
| building) is quite different from that of p2p (networking and
| information sharing).
|
| While some of the criticisms of web3 are true, most of them are
| situations caused by the early phase we are in. Moxie's post
| surfaces the need for better decentralized infrastructure. The
| hyper financialization (everything is monetized) is caused by
| lack of identity solution and limited blockspace in L1 chains.
| These things are being built now, and will come online in the
| next few years. Transaction fees will become cheaper,
| applications will be more decentralized.
|
| The core innovation is digital scarcity and crypto-enabled data
| ownership. For the first time in history, we can represent value
| without a middle-man. This completely changes the power dynamic
| of platforms vs. users, and makes value creation digital-native.
| Web3 has an opportunity to address some of the biggest problems
| with today's internet services like surveillance capitalism and
| censorship.
| alexnewman wrote:
| His hypthesis that p2p never paid off is not justified. P2P plays
| an important role in media, aka bittorent. The issue with p2p and
| open source in general not taking off more in the consumer space
| has to do with the lack of profit motives. In b2b oss is winning
| cause businesses care a lot about costs and control. in b2c, this
| isn't a concern and thus we need to figure out how to pay the p2p
| workers and developers for work. aka web3
| ychompinator wrote:
| web4 wrote:
| this article is lazy, and has no real substance.
|
| > The Web3 community approaches this from the opposite side:
| Instead of a lightweight communistic take, they follow a
| heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized.
|
| the web is already monetized - we pay for games and game skins,
| software and apps, access to news, media streaming. current web2
| payment and ownership model favors payment processors like VISA,
| and the distributors like Spotify, not the creators and consumers
| of this media.
|
| > So, unless the setup and maintenance trouble of the initial
| setup can be reduced (and there are community efforts out there),
| the best way to go is the centralized model: You pay someone
| specific to do this. Maybe set up a not-for-profit association to
| provide the necessary money.
|
| this already happens in web3. OpenSea charges 2.5% on trades for
| the UX and network effects they provide. other marketplaces offer
| 0% on trades but do not have the same reach and UX. despite this,
| users do have a choice to go with any service they desire, since
| the asset is not locked into any single walled garden.
| Animats wrote:
| Where is Web3 P2P? Decentraland is centralized. The Sandbox is
| centralized. OpenSea is centralized. Metamask is centralized.
| Bitcoin and Etherium mining depend on big server farms that are
| more centralized than Akamai.
| dropnerd wrote:
| transacting nfts can happen on multiple platforms, and do.
| looksrare, dxdy, nfttrader, etc.
|
| now try that with your steam game.
| leifg wrote:
| All of that is true.
|
| But even if web3 was 100% decentralized it still would be an
| expensive inefficient P2P.
| px43 wrote:
| Of course, it's P2P with cryptographic incentives for running
| nodes. That's the entire point.
| 3qz wrote:
| The only legitimate use for web3 that I've seen is a way to
| establish trust with strangers before you run arbitrary software
| on their computers. It's like a really expensive replacement for
| AWS. Are there any other cases similar to this and do you think
| it could ever be cost effective?
| empathy_m wrote:
| OK, so granted the boxes-and-arrows descriptions of these
| software systems are identical if you squint to things we built
| decades ago. But the social way that human reason about these
| systems -- that is different this time.
|
| Gentle readers, last night I dreamed I was seated in the nave of
| a tall cathedral, watching four bishops conduct a service at an
| altar. There were readings with the call-and-response ("The word
| of the Lord" - "Thanks be to God"). There was the sitting and the
| standing.
|
| And then, I swear to you I am not making this up, each of the
| parishioners gave some bitcoin to each of the four bishops, and
| the cryptocurrency was transubstantiated as it passed through
| each officeholder into the central coffers. In my dream that
| church service cleared some 30,000 units (BTC or USD, I do not
| know).
|
| I woke up abruptly with a profound sense of "what just
| happened?". How did I "see" people giving bitcoin to bishops? Did
| I have a dream about a metaverse church service?!? What is going
| on here?!? I think I have been reading too much Matt Levine. I
| would like off Mr. Bones's wild ride.
|
| But, friends, I would NEVER have had a dream like this about
| Beenz or Flooz. Something is very different about this one.
| uoaei wrote:
| Having a vision in a dream about Bitcoin last night really
| doesn't give it any more authority today than it had yesterday.
| k__ wrote:
| _" the P2P community established something like a tiny,
| lightweight communist bubble"_
|
| Yes, and that's the core of the problem. Things are pretty
| limited when the premise is "donating spare hardware and
| bandwidth."
|
| _" [Web3 follows] a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything
| should be monetized."_
|
| I don't know what these people think. Only traditional companies
| should be allowed to make money, and the rest of the world should
| donate their resources?
|
| The conclusion of this piece sounds a bit arbitrary too.
|
| P2P failed in the past because of the lack of monetization.
|
| Web3 tries to solve this by adding monetization at the protocol
| level.
|
| Adding something to a system to solve an issue that wasn't solved
| before can add complexity.
|
| The author doesn't like complexity, so it's a failed attempt.
|
| What?
| anonymousDan wrote:
| It's a bit of a strawman argument. I don't see it as being
| either/or. Sure for many/most use cases the existing web is
| likely to remain the better option. The real question is what new
| interesting use cases are facilitated.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Archived: https://archive.ph/wY5JW
| mouzogu wrote:
| What is the value proposition of web3 to the user?
|
| JS web apps offloaded the compute and memory onto the
| browser/client, web3 to offload storage costs onto the user.
|
| You will up pay for every click. web3 and metaverse feels so
| dystopian. but the young generations that were raised by tiktok
| will probably accept it.
| birracerveza wrote:
| That's not web3. Web3 should feel no different to the end user
| than web2, except for the fact they "sign in" via their wallet
| (Metamask) instead of legacy login mechanisms
| (Username+password or Google/FB sign ins).
|
| Users shouldn't even pay for gas. Look at orbis.club for an
| early example of proper web3.
|
| What we saw up until now is not "true" web3, but simply web2
| masquerading as such and using web3 as a marketing buzzword.
| Shish2k wrote:
| > Web3 should feel no different to the end user than web2,
| except for the fact they "sign in" via their wallet
|
| Ok but we've had this technology for decades and nobody
| cares. Why is doing this via the blockchain suddenly going to
| make it work?
| withinboredom wrote:
| When I see a product that is web3 but I don't even know
| it's web3, I'll take it seriously. It's like everyone
| talking about how MeteorJS is better than vanilla js, you
| just have to rewrite your app. It's all hype.
|
| React was "just better" than everything else, and flexible.
| There was hype, for sure. But you'd only discover React by
| investigating a company's stack.
| lolinder wrote:
| > That's not web3.
|
| This sentence is emblematic of the major problem with
| discussions of "web3" right now. There are dozens of
| different definitions of web3 that all conflict with each
| other in one way or another; the only thing people seem to
| agree on is that web3 involves blockchain somehow. With so
| many different versions, it's hard to have a conversation
| because any criticism invariably ends up with people jumping
| in with "well, that's not _really_ web3! "
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Web3 should feel no different to the end user than web2
|
| Yes, yes it would feel different. Because every action
| requires the user to pay.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| No
| birracerveza wrote:
| Please read my post. Take a look at orbis.club. Users are
| not required to pay gas for every interaction.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Storing content on the blockchain is prohibitively
| expensive. So "web3" is either using centralized non-
| blockchain solutions, or users will pay for it.
|
| Running "smart" "contracts" which underpin "web3" is not
| free.
|
| So yeah. If users only consume content, then web3 can be
| free for those users I guess.
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| > What is the value proposition of web3 to the user?
|
| The same value as most other P2P software: illegal activity.
|
| Web3 in particular is very useful for running online casinos
| and ponzi schemes.
|
| Note that there is huge potential there for a ton of profit.
| Casinos make a ton of money.
| przeor wrote:
| APock wrote:
| The ponzi schemes ran by governments are ultimately run as
| a benefit to your retirement, and most importantly, you can
| overthrow a government.
| achenet wrote:
| you make it sound so easy...
|
| why not just waltz into Russia, tell Putin and pals to
| leave and replace them with kind, competent, generous
| leaders?
| LordKeren wrote:
| yeah, if you cut out and overlook all the key defining
| aspects of a Ponzi scheme like the fraud, sure.
|
| Once the government privatizes social security (and similar
| mandatory retirement programs in other countries), converts
| it to a for-profit system, encourages speculative
| "investing", makes deceptive claims on returns-- you'll be
| exactly right, they would be the same.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| What about it? Everybody knows it's a Ponzi and at some
| point people agreed to it. It's not lying to you saying it
| will magically create money for you if you invest. You take
| the money from younger contributors, to give it to older
| contributors _by design_. And that kinda makes sense
| because the people at the top eventually die and it 's
| everybodys turn at some point.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _How about poniz schemes ran by governments ? You are ok
| with that kind of exploitation ?_
|
| I don't understand what kind of argument you were aiming
| at. Even if your "government ponzi scheme" non-sequitur is
| taken at face value, what's your point exactly? Do you
| expect that a type of fraud becomes acceptable if you
| manage to point out other types of fraud?
| przeor wrote:
| simple, if there are no more participants in a govt
| systems like social security or people dont want to use
| govt backed money, then it's value will collapse in a one
| way or another.
|
| It means that people who are left in the system are
| screwed like in any ponzi like systems.
|
| P.S. Thanks for downvotes HN on my orginal comment
| pessimizer wrote:
| Welcome to the internet.
|
| 1. Claim that X is the same as Y.
|
| 2. Assert that Y is Bad.
|
| 3. Therefore, X is Good. QED.
| Xorlev wrote:
| I don't think your parent comment mentioned social
| security. Kind of off-topic, don't you think?
| maccard wrote:
| p2p is great and has some excellent use cases. We used it on
| a previous project to download 100+GB patches onto dozens of
| PCs in a trusted environment using a 100(?)mbps external
| connection in a couple of minutes.
|
| Torrents are also an incredible piece of technology, allowing
| tamper resistant distribution of files from untrusted parties
| - imagine how much value Linux distros glean from being
| hosted by third parties who voluntarily do so without needing
| to "partner up"?
|
| I don't disagree that the _primary_ use case is piracy though
| (and I've yet to see any genuine use cases for web3 suggested
| either)
| mouzogu wrote:
| Good point
| _glass wrote:
| you could make social media where the ad revenue is shared with
| the users. you can already sell art where the platform can
| vanish (like hicetnunc did) but the artists and users can take
| their assets to just another platform (like objkt).
| belltaco wrote:
| That sounds like it'd make social media somehow even worse,
| by incentivitizing clickbait, flamebait, reposting, fake news
| and shock posts.
| rgbrgb wrote:
| incidentally this was the argument against streaming music.
| Superior UX won out over philosophical arguments of data
| portability and custody.
| thesausageking wrote:
| Tiktok is the opposite of web3. It's a centralized service, run
| by a Chinese company, that collects loads of data about users
| and which controls the network. If they decide they want to ban
| your account they can. If you want to take your username and
| data to another network, it's very hard to do.
|
| Networks should function more like domains and email. If you
| own "mouzugo.com", you can use Gmail for email. If you decide
| you'd rather switch to Fastmail, you can migrate without a
| problem. It's all enabled by open standards and
| interoperability.
|
| This is what web3 is trying to get back to.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > This is what web3 is trying to get back to.
|
| No, it's trying to extract money out of clients for every
| transaction they perform. Moreover it requires all users buy
| into the cryptocurrency Ponzi to participate in that rent
| extraction. So you trade real money for Geoffrey dollars in
| order to pay money to read a fucking tweet.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The value proposition is the ability to share content without
| restriction or censorship, and own your data rather than being
| locked in a walled garden.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Those conditions are perfect if you want a system to get
| overrun with spam and scams.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Sure, but if you have an individually managed social trust
| graph built into the distribution network that's pretty
| easy to combat. Have a friend that's spreading trust to
| scammers? Reduce their trust value (or just stop trusting
| them), problem solved.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I suspect Web3 will be a spectacular marketing fail and then
| eventually nerds will figure out a real Web 3.1 that is not
| nearly as easily hyped but actually brings us some nice
| advances
| douglaswlance wrote:
| Data portability is a huge value prop: Everywhere you sign-in,
| you already have all of your data.
|
| Is it bad to pay to click, if you earn more from the ads on the
| page? Along with micro-payments, you also micro-earn.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Data portability is a huge value prop: Everywhere you sign-
| in, you already have all of your data.
|
| No. No you don't.
|
| 1. Below you claim that "Only you (or anyone who has access
| to your private key) can access your data."
|
| So when you sign in somewhere, that "web3" app still has no
| access to your data
|
| 2. Just the fact that you have your data does not mean it's
| portable.
|
| A proprietary binary blob created by app1 will not be
| readable or accessible through app2.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| What data do I actually want to carry across websites? I
| actually don't understand the value here.
|
| Is it that I don't have to re-enter my personal information
| on each site? Signing in with Google already gets me that. Is
| it something else?
|
| Is it some kind of JSON blob that every service will know how
| to ingest properly?
| APock wrote:
| So, being FULLY tracked by every website ever, on every
| device at the same time, since all your data is whatever
| wallet you use across devices anyway, is now a good thing?
| douglaswlance wrote:
| Only you (or anyone who has access to your private key) can
| access your data.
| pshc wrote:
| You're not wrong. Privacy mechanisms still need to be
| designed and implemented. There is much research,
| particularly in the landscape of zero-knowledge proofs.
| simonw wrote:
| How does data portability actually work? I hear it talked
| about a lot, but I've never seen anything more than vague
| hand-waving as to the actual mechanics of it.
| vmception wrote:
| Its very developer friendly
|
| Now we don't have to pay for any costs (maaaaybe a smart
| contract deployment once) and the users can't help themselves
| from interacting
|
| Compared to web 2 marketing funnels, this is a one click funnel
| where every click is a payment. (Every click doesnt have to be
| a payment, users dont currently care)
|
| Thats a great value proposition
|
| Cheaper to operate, faster to accept payment, better path to
| getting payment. Pick all three.
| maccard wrote:
| Faster to accept payment? How is it easier for me to accept
| payment in eth and use it to pay my energy bill than it is to
| set up stripe?
|
| Also, you claim a better path to getting payment? What is
| better about it? As far as I can see either I trust a third
| party to act as an intermediate to save in gas tax, or I
| charge multiple dollars to verify payment "immediately" -
| i.e. anytime in the next few hours if imlucky, depending on
| the currency. Of course there are coins out there that don't
| have these problems (yet) but then I need to go find an
| exchange that supports the coin I have and the coin I want,
| transfer them (see above) and _then_ pay? I don't see how
| this as a consumer is easier than having my browser autofill
| my credit card, or as a developer is easier than implementing
| a handful of functions to accept currency my users already
| use.
| pshc wrote:
| OP might be living in the future a bit, because yeah, fees
| are still too high right now, and there's too much
| friction. For now.
|
| But in principle I agree. If you have a wallet set up and
| are used to using it, it's pretty quick and easy, and the
| money settles faster than ACH in the US which take at least
| a day if not 3-5? Although in Canada settlement with
| Interac is almost instant, maybe 3 minutes to an hour.
|
| Setting up Stripe is something you can only do with
| approval from the authorities, though, so e.g. sex workers
| can't use it.
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| >You will up pay for every click
|
| Much less dystopian to me to pay rather than indirectly pay by
| being a data mining product and selling my mental real estate.
| dgellow wrote:
| Cannot they do both, you pay per action AND your data are
| sold? What blocks companies from gathering user data in a
| web3 application and resell them?
| outside1234 wrote:
| The user can money launder their money via NFT wash sales.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > What is the value proposition of web3 to the user? ... You
| will up pay for every click.
|
| But people who come after you will pay even more to you to do
| the same thing that you did for cheap! You are an early adopter
| who can just do nothing but click early all the way to becoming
| a millionaire! Basically a shameless ponzi is implicit in the
| promise.
|
| I think in a perverse way, the pay per click dystopia is a
| feature and not a bug.
| vmception wrote:
| Depends more on transaction fees then the base currency used
|
| If people pay to use that network and that increases, means
| alot of people are
| woojoo666 wrote:
| If you're talking about visitors to a web3 website, ideally
| they shouldn't be able to tell if it's web3 or not.
|
| But I believe the value proposition is for people who have
| spare bandwidth/compute/storage and want to make money.
| Currently internet infrastructure (like AWS) is largely owned
| by a few corps. Web3 has the potential to let anybody join,
| distributing the infrastructure across individual providers
| like what Uber did to taxis.
|
| Another big one is web3 social platforms like Odysee and
| Peertube. These are more censorship resistant because they are
| decentralized.
| maccard wrote:
| Uber is the polar opposite of what web 3 purports - it's a
| closed garden of a standard that allows other members to play
| by their rules.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| That's fair, I was just using them as an example of a share
| economy
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| The theory is that people are incentivized to contribute to the
| p2p ecosystem. Unfortunately, the visionaries behind it
| probably didn't predict that the user base (and therefore the
| next generations of developers) would be dominated by scammers
| and charlatans. Most of those projects didn't even become
| decentralized, having a heavy UI on top of a thin blockchain.
|
| I think the original vision might be possible to pull off if
| redesigned to ward against that sort of thing. Successfully
| rebranding it would be one of the harder problems I would
| imagine.
| axg11 wrote:
| Some benefits that I think web3 can bring to the user:
|
| - Universal login: An alternative to "Sign in with
| Google/Apple/XYZ" that can't be denied by a corporation. There
| are countless examples of these companies deactivating accounts
| for questionable reasons.
|
| - Permissionless composability: I'm not sure how to word this
| one better. If a developer wants to build on top of blockchain
| data, they can. No need to apply for API access, rate limits,
| etc. Not all data should be open/on a blockchain, but in the
| cases where it's appropriate this is a fantastic benefit.
|
| - Ownership in communities: tokens (fungible or non-fungible)
| can represent ownership for communities. The next Reddit will
| reward its community and contributors. This isn't an unusual
| concept. YouTube and TikTok already reward their creator
| communities. The difference is that existing platforms don't
| let you build on those communities outside of their walled
| garden.
|
| For balance, here are two concepts/terms I see co-mentioned
| with web3 that I believe are bullshit:
|
| - Metaverse: I don't think this will come to anything. We're
| already living in the metaverse. We have online identities
| (yours is mouzogu!). I refuse to spend a significant portion of
| my life in VR or another 3D game.
|
| - Micropayments: Consumers don't want the mental overhead of
| figuring out value for money every time they consume content.
| crate_barre wrote:
| 8note wrote:
| All of those usecase are going to suck for handling fraud and
| abuse though, same as everything else crypto related.
|
| Permissionless composability means you have no control over
| which apps use your data, the universal login makes sure that
| spam is present and unbannable, and Reddit communities
| benefit heavily from being able to have top mods removed when
| they turn abusive
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Universal login: the third party services still need to
| accept your login and can still reject it. Service providers
| won't vanish or decentralize, look how we got google on the
| open web
|
| Composability: sounds really bad for privacy. The entire
| concept of a permanent public record of transactions scares
| me for this reason
|
| rewarding creator communities: we already have Patreon and
| advertising deals. Aren't crypto transactions relatively slow
| and expensive, or has that changed?
| Feriti wrote:
| And who else will then operate the web3 infrastructure?
|
| Instead of the Security team at Google, their ddos service
| and OnCall experts we have whom now?
|
| Some miners?
|
| Perfectly written Blockchain code?
|
| You sound like those things are just free.
| bsedlm wrote:
| have you considered how (not "why?") was google able to
| give away one gigabyte of email storage to anybody before
| 2010s?
|
| that was not free either... what I'm trying to get at (and
| not very eloquently) is that a lot of that work is done by
| the computers. also, something about how the code is
| written once and then used by everybody at the same time.
| sure, writting the code may be expensive at first.
|
| dunno, I doubt better written words will get you to agree
| with (or see) whatever it is I'm trying to get at.
| Feriti wrote:
| I follow plenty of things Google as a company just does
| due to the money they have.
|
| Undersee cables for example.
|
| Project Zero.
|
| Secure by default.
|
| 2FA.
|
| Google even gives you now the option of configuring your
| ads.
|
| Realistically speaking some entity with a monetary
| motivation is solving hard problems for us.
|
| Who will solve this issue in web3 and with what
| motivation?
|
| If it is monetary (as it will be) do I now should start
| trusting the etherium company instead of Google?
|
| Or should I start trusting 1000 small companies than
| Google?
|
| I'm quite happy what Google does and I don't know all of
| those other potential companies.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > the etherium company
|
| LOL
| Feriti wrote:
| Not sure what you think is funny but did you check the
| contributor list here
| https://github.com/orgs/ethereum/people ?
| blawson wrote:
| Speaking of which...
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages-on-ipfs/
| damon_c wrote:
| As a member of an open source community involved in one or
| more blockchain projects, I can attest that many of these
| things literally are indeed free.
| Feriti wrote:
| An open source community can do a lot and not everything.
|
| I'm not aware of any opensource community being happy at
| doing on call.
|
| Or end customer support.
|
| Or even marketing.
|
| And if we look at successful opensource projects, than we
| have companies behind them.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Internet Service Providers? Hosting Providers? Literally
| anyone from their closet?
|
| Google isn't the Internet, no matter how badly they want
| you to believe that.
| Feriti wrote:
| From their closet? What? They develop web3 software in
| the closet?
| kjsthree wrote:
| Not sure if you've heard but, over the last two years,
| some of the most polished and well-produced voices on NPR
| were literally coming from someone under a blanket in a
| closet. I'm not sure how much web3 is happening in
| closets but I wouldn't bet on zero.
| axg11 wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your question, genuinely. There
| are of course costs for the benefits that come with web3:
| protocols are slow to evolve, and infrastructure is less
| efficient when we require a distributed consensus. Anyone
| that thinks "Web 2" or centralized systems will disappear
| is silly, there will always be situations where the costs
| of web3 are greater than the benefits. On the other hand,
| it's equally silly to think that there are zero use cases
| where the benefits of web3 outweigh the costs. Both can and
| will coexist.
|
| Static HTML pages still exist today.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| The difference is there are relatively fewer static html
| pages. There wont be relatively fewer web2 deployments vs
| web3. Itll be mostly web2
| axg11 wrote:
| I agree - misguided attempts to make everything "web3"
| shouldn't take away from the huge amount of value that
| future web3 services can bring, even if they are vastly
| outnumbered by web2 services forever.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > that can't be denied by a corporation
|
| Every service that might use blockchain based authentication
| will implement allow lists. As everyone in the history of the
| Internet has learned trolls and spammers will ruin services.
| So some sort of unblockable universal login is an impractical
| fantasy.
| choppaface wrote:
| Universal Login: while some corporate login controls are
| anti-competitive, most blocks are due to spam and phishing.
| Web3 / crypto has yet to provide an effective sell against
| fakes and whitewashing. Sure blockchain is cool, but the
| actual product is the design of the collision to stop spam.
|
| Permissionless composability: Copyright ensures there will
| always be the need for permission if you wish to compose in a
| country that has copyright.
|
| There are some good ideas here but there are also some very
| critical flaws. The problem is not so much web3 itself but
| that web3's most vocal proponents--- particularly
| investors--- have refused to grapple with things like spam
| and copyright. It's probably because they want to be
| middlemen who collect all the profits and are left without
| liability when the pyramid collapses.
| moolcool wrote:
| > Universal login
|
| You can have universal login with MetaMask, sure, but that
| functionality isn't reliant on a blockchain. It's decades-old
| public key cryptography.
|
| > Ownership in communities.... The difference is that
| existing platforms don't let you build on those communities
| outside of their walled garden
|
| But successful internet communities do everything in their
| power to remain walled gardens. What could they possibly have
| to gain by doing this? Like what would Reddit gain by moving
| Reddit Gold to the blockchain?
| axg11 wrote:
| > But successful internet communities do everything in
| their power to remain walled gardens. What could they
| possibly have to gain by doing this? Like what would Reddit
| gain by moving Reddit Gold to the blockchain?
|
| We have to reimagine everything, I don't think a successful
| web3 platform will emerge from simply tacking on tokens to
| existing platforms. Successful internet communities become
| walled gardens to protect against competition, but they're
| limiting the growth of their community members and I
| believe the platforms themselves could capture more value.
| A creator on TikTok today can't easily give their most
| loyal followers discounts on their Shopify store, perks for
| moderating a Discord, early access to YouTube content, etc.
| trenchgun wrote:
| >A creator on TikTok today can't easily give their most
| loyal followers discounts on their Shopify store, perks
| for moderating a Discord, early access to YouTube
| content, etc.
|
| That could easily be done with plain old public key
| cryptography.
| Sargos wrote:
| Blockchains are really just a shared public key
| cryptography system. It solves the key distribution
| problem and makes using keys easy for developers and
| users.
| egypturnash wrote:
| "I'm running a sale on Shopify for my supporters, check
| the latest Patreon post for the discount code!"
|
| Patreon makes it pretty easy to give your subscribers
| early access to stuff, too. No blockchain involved. A lot
| of it happens over _email_.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >We have to reimagine everything, I don't think a
| successful web3 platform will emerge from simply tacking
| on tokens to existing platforms.
|
| Greenfield projects are easy because they wave away the
| real complexities of integrating with existing systems.
| But those existing platforms already provide a lot of
| tangible value. If you want users, you can't just ignore
| that.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > what would Reddit gain
|
| I think you nailed it. It's a victory for USERS - owning
| your own assets in a way that does not require you to trust
| the platform. It's not so great for centralized platforms.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _I think you nailed it. It's a victory for USERS -
| owning your own assets in a way that does not require you
| to trust the platform._
|
| What does "owning your own assets" really mean, with
| regards to services such as Reddit, and where exactly do
| you see any problem worth fixing?
| byhemechi wrote:
| it's not so great for centralised platforms, unless the
| centralised platform you are talking about is infura, in
| which case it's a huge win.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| But it's not like you can use assets/data from one
| website in another, unless it's something like a jpg...
| in which case it's not like you can't just upload that
| jpg
|
| You'd need everyone to agree to the same standard for
| stuff. Definitely more likely than game assets, but still
| incredibly unlikely
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even an
| anon one) between applications alone can be useful. How
| can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit and
| Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this is
| difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation in
| the market. Meanwhile, any digital content or rights can
| be represented by an NFT. Is it useful to own the
| commercial rights to use a pop song on a promotional
| video and then redistribute it among dozens of
| independent platforms? How about an open royalty standard
| for selling in-game music as part of an indie racing game
| (and by purchasing the in-game music, I get a portable
| copy that can be integrated in any application)? Just a
| couple of off-hand ideas, but the composability that
| blockchains offer for ownership enables some powerful use
| cases. NFTs are data structures.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even
| an anon one) between applications alone can be useful._
|
| You already have that without requiring any buzzword-
| driven marketingspeak.
|
| And if your goal is to stay anonymous, in the very least
| you'd be using independent dedicated identities in
| separate services.
| threeseed wrote:
| > How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit
| and Discord and Playstation Network
|
| Web3/NFT etc doesn't solve this though.
|
| Where is the list of followers going to be stored ? It
| isn't on chain.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| > Of course you could. Just carrying your identity (even
| an anon one) between applications alone can be useful.
| How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit
| and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this
| is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation
| in the market.
|
| An email address? Why do we need to complicate this with
| blockchain tomfoolery?
| hanniabu wrote:
| Not everyone wants their email public
| the_gastropod wrote:
| Oh, interesting! Wonder why? Maybe people exist who don't
| want the same people from Twitter to follow them on
| Reddit, Youtube, Steam, Spotify, etc. too, eh? Maybe
| independent isolated logins aren't such a bad thing?
| Maybe hand-waving about "BLOCKCHAIN" doesn't actually
| have any solutions to any of these problems that arise
| from the fact that: different people have different
| desires. There is no tech solution for reconciling the
| irreconcilable.
| jl6 wrote:
| > How about an open royalty standard for selling in-game
| music as part of an indie racing game (and by purchasing
| the in-game music, I get a portable copy that can be
| integrated in any application)?
|
| That's a cool idea but I've no idea why you would need a
| blockchain to achieve it.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _How can I follow the same people on Twitter and Reddit
| and Discord and Playstation Network? Currently all this
| is difficult, awkward, etc with the current fragmentation
| in the market. Meanwhile, any digital content or rights
| can be represented by an NFT._
|
| I fee like a lot of these "cross platform NFTs" don't
| take the platform into consideration. A platform like
| Twitter or Reddit will have to opt-in to this blockchain
| and have to deal with reproducing whatever asset or
| relationship into their own systems. This will likely
| involve an API call to some datastore to retrieve that
| information.
|
| 1. For these platforms this is no different than
| integrating with any other 3rd party system. It's unclear
| how this is any different from Gravatar?
|
| 2. It's unclear why these platforms are motivated to
| supply such a feature. Why would I spent time integrating
| a blockchain for ownership rights over some in-game
| music, when CD Baby already exists?
|
| A lot of these use cases are still solutions searching
| for a problem; they don't represent an actual material
| improvement for the platform (or worse, require economic
| investment that the platform cannot capture).
| scubbo wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. This ("how can you transfer assets
| between platforms/context without interoperable
| protocols?", and the corollary "if the content is simple
| enough to have interoperable protocols, it's probably
| something uninteresting like an image rather than
| something valuable like a game asset") is one of the key
| counter-arguments that deflate a lot of web3 hype (along
| with "you don't need a blockchain for what you described"
| and "you are hyping decentralization, but the situation
| you've described still relies on (or is actively better
| with) a central authority"). A lot more detail on it
| here: https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-
| do-a-lot-o...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > You can have universal login with MetaMask, sure, but
| that functionality isn't reliant on a blockchain. It's
| decades-old public key cryptography.
|
| For sure, you can do PGP, but if it's decades old, you have
| to ask yourself: Why hasn't public key cryptography taken
| off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or
| Google or Facebook have been?
|
| Mainly because it's always been a chicken and egg problem
| for consumers and application developers. If you implement
| PGP as your sign-in method, it's unlikely that any
| consumers will adopt it unless they're developers. And you
| increase the barrier to entry for anyone who does not
| understand it.
|
| In the case of MetaMask, this has already got significant
| traction at 21 million monthly active users (more if you
| count other EVM wallet solutions), because there's no other
| way to interact with a blockchain. It's also relatively
| user friendly. And there's an ecosystem now of applications
| that require it for interaction, so you're starting to see
| network effects grow for "Sign in With Ethereum/EVM".
|
| > But successful internet communities do everything in
| their power to remain walled gardens
|
| This will be proven to be false in the long run. This was
| the same argument against Linux back in the day vs.
| Windows. The bazaar will win against the cathedral in the
| end.
| pshc wrote:
| Exactly! AFAIK client certificates have been in browsers
| for decades and almost no one uses them. Whereas, like
| you said, millions of people now the ability and basic
| know-how to generate and sign with public-private key
| pairs, adopted via incentives that keep the wallet
| ecosystem thriving.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| > This will be proven to be false in the long run. This
| was the same argument against Linux back in the day vs.
| Windows. The bazaar will win against the cathedral in the
| end.
|
| Linux is still sitting at ~2% desktop market share
| compared to 90% for macOS+Windows. I'd hardly call that a
| win for the bazaar.
| phamilton wrote:
| > Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign
| in solution in the same way that email or Google or
| Facebook have been?
|
| Because people haven't been financially motivated to
| evangelize it.
|
| I believe that's the core of blockchain/web3 innovations.
| It's a worse way to do it, but the social hype (driven
| almost entirely by get rich FOMO) is enough to push it
| over the edge.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The most efficient way to do it would be to bootstrap the
| ecosystem with blockchain buzziness and then just
| deprecate the blockchain part eventually. MetaMask
| already relies on "Web2" apis to query blockchains, who
| says they have to actually hit a blockchain all the time?
| thawaya3113 wrote:
| This is exactly what's happening with crypto.
|
| A user's transaction on Coinbase rarely represents an
| actual transaction on the blockchain. A transaction
| actually represents a row in a Coinbase SQL database,
| which Coinbase will eventually batch and then convert
| into a blockchain operation.
| rvbissell wrote:
| So... a dark pool? Oy vey.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Okay, but the login bit for MetaMask is "just" using
| public key cryptography though, right? You could strip
| out the blockchain stuff from MetaMask and that part
| would still work.
| dwaite wrote:
| You could also do Web Authentication, which is based on
| Public Key cryptography and ships with every major
| browser and is integrated into many operating systems.
| dwaite wrote:
| > For sure, you can do PGP, but if it's decades old, you
| have to ask yourself: Why hasn't public key cryptography
| taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that
| email or Google or Facebook have been?
|
| For the same reason a Metamask extension to do so won't
| take off outside of specialized applications.
|
| Since users have not yet authenticated, this is part of a
| conversation process of potential users to registered,
| authenticated users. Only options which will increase
| that will be supported.
|
| People to some very high double-digit percentage
| understand what a "Sign in with Google" button does, what
| will happen if they hit it. Because of that, there is
| high likelyhood if someone hits that button that they
| will return successfully authenticated.
|
| PGP never had a website-based authentication option.
| Mutual TLS did, but other than a few certificate
| authorities I've never seen it out of the enterprise
| space - the compatibility and user experience were never
| even close to sufficient to offer as a broader option.
|
| As optimized as the sign in with Google experience is,
| there are still sites which will not support it because
| they want to make sure the user does not get 'lost' on
| another site if there are failures. They simply will not
| outsource their funnel.
| dropnerd wrote:
| chrome will never have a "login with pgp" function
|
| brave already supports "login with ethereum"
|
| adoption matters
| MrMan wrote:
| I like the distributed ID stuff and think its good or at
| least has potential.
|
| permissionless computing is also fine, but I think payments
| need to be somehow decoupled from this. endless ocean of
| tokens is stupid. we need some kind of distributed payment
| gateway built into the internet where you can use any
| currency on a list of supported currencies, and none should
| be supported that are "bad" ie planet killing POW.
|
| tokenization I think is a dead end
| kristjansson wrote:
| I get stuck at the point where I'm supposed to store the key
| material for my highly secure, persistent, web3-wide identity
| in ... a browser extension? To which I then allow every web3
| site I visit to access? I understand that it helps adoption,
| but there's an enormous impedance mismatch there. Why isn't
| there offline identify verification front and center?
| matt_s wrote:
| The way you've described it, sounds like a cross domain
| cookie. That isn't technically a thing unless you consider
| one domain/company selling the tracking of their cookie for
| you to another domain/company or a data broker/aggregator.
|
| So it sounds like it could make tracking of activity much
| easier and that doesn't sound right.
| anonymous0 wrote:
| Honest question: Is there something specific about TikTok
| technology/usage pattern paving the way for distopy acceptance
| or it's just the same concept of facebook/instagram/Twitter but
| with a younger audience?
| rvz wrote:
| You will hear testimonials of most TikTok users addicted to
| and sniffing the digital crack / cocaine on the platform
| praising the super dystopian algorithm that operates on their
| viewing activity and collects minute data-points to keep them
| glued and addicted to the platform and screen time.
|
| Then you will get something like this [0], and folks [1] on
| the kool-aid with nonsensical claims like _' TikTok is the
| best thing to have happened to the Internet'_ at the height
| of the euphoria.
|
| In reality, it is both the same concepts of the other social
| networks but much worse and [0] has shown that its algorithm
| was more dystopian than previously thought.
|
| Therefore, it is the nadir of social media.
|
| [0] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-
| the-wa...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484
| sergiomattei wrote:
| It's just a low-tier generalization about newer generation.
| Nothing to analyze here.
|
| There is nothing about TikTok that makes my generation
| mindless Web3 drones.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| OK Zoomer. OF COURSE you're going to deny the
| generalization and blame the accuser. That's generational
| warfare 101.
|
| Doesn't make their thoughts any less valid.
|
| There are clear differences between the Facebook demo and
| the Tiktok demo. I am not smart enough to be able to
| articulate them but they are there.
| danieldevries wrote:
| Agreed. Just lazy analytics by using buzzwords. The TikTok
| generation... I'm clearly late to the party as a
| Millennial.
| axg11 wrote:
| It's strange that people lump these four together. There's a
| marked difference between Facebook/Instagram (friends first,
| sharing encouraged by all users) vs. Twitter/TikTok (mainly
| acting as a broadcast medium with a long tail).
| ewzimm wrote:
| I have noticed a cultural difference between different
| generations of social networks. With Facebook, people usually
| sought out people and groups that they wanted to connect with
| and complained about being algorithmically profiled for ads
| but accepted it as part of the business model.
|
| With TikTok, people usually express how much they love the
| algorithm that finds things that they like.
| dwaite wrote:
| > With Facebook, people usually sought out people and
| groups that they wanted to connect with and complained
| about being algorithmically profiled for ads but accepted
| it as part of the business model.
|
| Google's success with ads is that they were able to trigger
| them as part of user action. Paid search results are
| hypothetically helpful to some people. Contextual ads on a
| site may actually provide value if they are on-topic.
|
| Facebook ads mostly target people. They don't really
| provide any in-context value, they are pure commercials -
| spooky commercials that know what is going on in your life,
| although the ability to utilize this information is often
| laughably bad.
|
| Twitter often has the same problems. Ads interspersed
| within conversations just aren't helpful or desired.
| 10x-dev wrote:
| Story time. About 20 years ago, when dialup was introduced
| where I grew up, my uncle called me to show him what this new
| internet thing is.
|
| As soon as I opened "yahoo.com", he asked "how am I paying to
| view Yahoo?". I said you're not paying anybody, you're just
| paying for the Internet connection. He nodded.
|
| I then showed him Hotmail. He kept asking "ok so now, how did
| they charge me to view this page?". I kept telling him, "that's
| the beauty of the internet, you don't pay for each site you
| visit, you just have access to this enormous body of
| knowledge".
|
| He was thinking of sites in terms of making long distance
| calls, since he knew the Internet used the phone line, so to
| him it was normal to pay for each "site call" (if that makes
| sense), because that's how phone calls worked.
|
| This interaction stayed with me for a long time, because it was
| natural for him to think about paying for each website visit,
| but to me it was all 'free'. As social media and user data
| became more monetizable in the years after, we found out pretty
| fast that there was no such thing as free.
|
| At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked
| like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could
| support their existence without ads, since each customer would
| be a paying customer. Ads would still be around, but perhaps
| people would have demanded a nicer experience once they know
| they are paying for the visit.
|
| In many ways, that's the lense through which I look at web3. It
| might be too late to switch to a pay as you go system. It might
| be too late to educate people about the importance of staying
| anonymous and preserving their user data. Nothing about this
| payment system requires a blockchain, but internet-money is a
| good enough excuse to introduce an alternative pay-per-click
| approach to the Internet, because, to be honest, I think the
| Internet ended up being a cesspool of abnoxious ads, paid
| content, ads disguised as content, dark patterns, etc, like the
| world's dirtiest third world country bazaar.
|
| Maybe if we paid for each click, the experience of using the
| Internet could be more like a supermarket.
|
| It would certainly be different.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Pre-web services like Compuserve were pay-per-hour IIRC.
| Nowadays there is a very distant chance that Brave fixes
| this. I've always felt that micropayments are the best
| application for cryptocurrency, but because they aren't
| lucrative they're mostly ignored in the space. It seems
| Stellar is humming along, and I remain a (somewhat bitter)
| Nano holder, but otherwise everything is about "trustless
| protocols" and "decentralized platforms" and other hogwash
| that ignores the scaling issues inherent to digital ledgers.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _In many ways, that 's the lense through which I look at
| web3. It might be too late to switch to a pay as you go
| system._
|
| In that regard, web3 is a solution looking for a problem.
|
| Companies like Medium, Udemy, Spotify, Netflix, LinkedIn, etc
| already offer users pay-as-you-go services for higher-value
| content, and none of them required so many buzzword-driven
| technologies to pull it off.
|
| Heck, even Amazon offers pay-as-you-go access to books.
|
| Exactly what does web3 bring to the table?
|
| > _It might be too late to educate people about the
| importance of staying anonymous and preserving their user
| data._
|
| Again, exactly what does web3 bring to the table with regards
| to privacy and "preserving user data"? Those examples seem
| too vague to have any meaning beyond scaremongering.
| onebot wrote:
| I don't see why there can't be a decentralized ad platform
| that monetizes other decentralized web3 apps.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked
| like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could
| support their existence without ads, since each customer
| would be a paying customer.
|
| No one would bother with the web if they had to pay for every
| visit to every website, especially if they had to pay before
| any content got delivered. It's a certainty that as soon as
| the client is paying per byte or per transaction that pages
| will do everything they can to nickel and dime clients by
| bloating even more than they do today. For clients that's
| fees on top of what their ISP is charging for the privilege
| to be charged more money.
| thfuran wrote:
| Yeah, I think everything being ad driven and free to use will
| be incredibly hard to move away from because it's damn hard
| to compete with free but it causes incentives to be
| profoundly misaligned.
| exo762 wrote:
| > What is the value proposition of web3 to the user?
|
| Potential of paying for services and being able to require
| privacy in return? It is not a choice one can make with many
| web2 services (e.g. google).
|
| As for "blockchains are transparent and can't offer no privacy"
| - just a question of time. Tech is already here (zkps, mpc,
| etc).
| dwaite wrote:
| Most tech calling itself web3 has less privacy - rather than
| 'just' Google knowing who I am across the internet, I'm
| spreading correlating information and pointers to publicly
| accessible records everywhere.
|
| Privacy isn't some technology you can add to the stack.
| Rather than adding ZKP sprinkles on top, every technical
| choice will ultimately need to be reevaluated if privacy is a
| goal. Basically, you're talking about web4/5.
| web4 wrote:
| web3 is not "pay for every click." value prop is
| disintermediation and decentralization. like purchasing a game
| asset, and not having it tied only to your iOS or Steam
| account.
| the_other wrote:
| Game devs could offer transferable content without stores if
| they stopped using the stores (ok, admittedly, iOS makes this
| harder). Web3 has nothing to do with this.
| web4 wrote:
| it has everything to do with it:
|
| 1. you purchase digital items with centralized payment
| processors like VISA
|
| 2. the asset is transferred to your centralized iOS/Steam
| account. you do not "own" it, the company owns it. if you
| are banned from Steam, you lose _all_ your games and game
| purchases.
|
| web3 is asking how these two things can be changed to
| remove the intermediary.
|
| the best frame for this is not "web3 ideals are not worth
| pursuing" but "how can we make web3 ideals feasibly work"
| maccard wrote:
| Is it? I've heard a lot of people claim this, but I've
| never seen any indication of platforms or standards that
| are attempting to do it, instead I'm seeing dozens of
| "centralised platform but on a blockchain".
| [deleted]
| freeone3000 wrote:
| You could charge customers money, then give them a game.
| That could work.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| In practice it effectively is.
|
| Without the Google, Facebook, and Twitters of the world
| pouring substantial resources into hosting and powering those
| platforms a decentralized approach needs to cover costs
| somehow.
|
| Of course they monetize the users and their content and make
| a pretty penny while doing so (except for Twitter).
|
| The centralization of these big tech companies also brings
| efficiency, optimization, and economies of scale to this
| infrastructure that decentralized blockchains inherently
| don't have. There's also the issue of much of the Web3
| infrastructure being hosted on $BIGCLOUD because lots of data
| and usage at scale is really hard. Pinata just uses S3 and
| charges a hefty markup on top of it (as one example). S3 is
| $0.03/GB at the lowest usage. Pinata is always $0.15.
|
| I'm not saying the decentralized promise of Web3 is
| impossible. It's just a bigger question of the vast majority
| of users who have already demonstrated they're fine with
| being monetized by the big tech companies as long as their
| use is free/extremely low cost paying at least 5X of the
| fundamental underlying costs. That's not even getting to
| content creators that have utilizes these free platforms to
| already generate significant income for themselves.
|
| The HN crowd has a much better understanding and resistance
| to big tech and what they do to offer free products that
| monetize the user. The vast majority of the billions of users
| on these platforms have demonstrated that they do not care.
| web41 wrote:
| agree that media storage is not going to be easily
| decentralized, and most web3 products will depend on big
| cloud tech companies for storage and services.
|
| almost all NFT platforms will extract some % commission
| from trades as a form of monetization. they could take 0%
| but then will have to cover their costs some other way;
| maybe monthly subscription or regular advertising.
|
| but in the end it doesn't matter how the platform decides
| to offset its costs, if the data and assets are removed
| from centralized control. good example of this is NFT art
| marketplaces - one can go offline, and users can just move
| to another, or build a new one on the public data
| (blockchain tokens + IPFS media).
| [deleted]
| bpeebles wrote:
| It's just as easy for a game developer to say "eh we're no
| longer using that blockchain for game assets" or otherwise
| make your "purchase" (which isn't really a purchase) unusable
| with a blockchain based solution as it is with current
| Steam/iOS-based systems. (Probably easier, really.)
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Absolutely easier:
|
| Steam and Apple stores have policies that merchants are
| legally liable for, including refund and availability
| policies.
|
| Who enforces it when the creator no longer honors your
| token?
| rglullis wrote:
| It's not about "game assets". It's a about having
| disintermediated access to the state of the "world".
|
| Think of all the stories of startups that offer a product
| that locks their users and then go to be acquired/shut down
| by some other bigger company. If the services and the data
| live on the blockchain, it's guaranteed _by design_ that
| the users are in control of their own data (no lock in) and
| that if the company just drops out of the market, others
| can continue using the services however they want.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Great! I have 132GB of photos, and would like to store
| them on the blockchain to ensure I always have access to
| them. How much will that cost me? Show your work, and
| round your answer to the nearest million.
|
| Maybe too much snark, but there's a real tension there.
| "Store it on the blockchain" means "store a copy on every
| single node, forever". It's understandable that incurs
| some costs, and that one has to store only the most
| essential information. Maybe, there are some paths
| forward, like sharded chains?
| rglullis wrote:
| No. The blockchain is not a data store. The blockchain is
| needed only when you need:
|
| - global view of the _state_ that is taken as truth by
| all participants ( _consensus_ )
|
| - where _anyone_ is allowed to make operations to
| _change_ the state ( _permissionless_ )
|
| - and all operations that change the state are agreed by
| all participants ( _trustless_ )
|
| You don't need the blockchain to store your music
| collection. Any content-addressable filesystem can do
| that for you. But you _do_ need a blockchain if you want
| to make a decentralized "top-40" list.
| kristjansson wrote:
| I actually agree with all of that. I don't agree that
| storing that sort of data on the blockchain supports
| statements like "the users are in control of their own
| data". You're make a distinction between
| assets/content/etc. and 'data' that I don't think most
| users would recognize as a difference. If I make a
| playlist on decentralized-Spotify, and then that service
| goes bust, it's weak comfort that I'm able to move a list
| of song-hashes unless I (or another service I can move
| to) have access to the corresponding content. I can only
| exert as much control over my data as I over the off-
| chain content store[1].
|
| What categories of data do you see that (a) average users
| care about and (b) would want to control beyond the life
| of a service provider but (c) doesn't depend on the
| availability of assets/contents/etc. cannot be viably
| stored on-chain?
|
| [1]: Sure, FileCoin and dependent services offer some
| control and guarantees over off-chain data I guess.
| rglullis wrote:
| > What categories of data do you see
|
| Again, it's not about the data. Data is cheap. It's the
| meta-data and what you can do with it that is
| interesting. It's about the new classes of applications
| that might come up when the underlying data is not stored
| by any middleman.
|
| To illustrate: the "Pirate Bay catalog" is many times
| larger than anything offered by any of the streaming
| services, but the majority of people still prefer to pay
| for the services. Github is the destination of almost
| every open source project, and companies are paying a
| good amount of money not for the storage of data, but for
| what it can be done with it.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I don't think blockchain is the answer for this. The
| answer is self-hosting and requiring SaaS companies to
| offer a self-hosted version.
| DanHulton wrote:
| All of these games run on centralized servers, though.
| You can "own" whatever assets you want on the blockchain,
| when that server goes down, they stop having any use at
| all.
| damon_c wrote:
| Games run in many different contexts. The difference is
| that instead of your game state/achievements/assets being
| controlled by a balkanized industry of competitors
| seeking to lock you into their platforms, it could be
| stored publicly on a blockchain and available to you
| regardless of platform.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| But in the real world, companies have to build and test
| assets. Blockchains are ledgers, and NFTs are receipts:
| they're far too expensive to hold a lot of data. They're
| never going to hold game assets.
|
| If you want to say that Activision or Square-Enix come up
| with a tokenized platform for their own assets, which you
| can then use in other future games, that's marginally
| interesting. But Activision isn't going to care one bit
| about creating tokenized assets that players from Square
| bought on Square's platform. There's no money there.
|
| Furthermore, players play for assets all the time in
| order to show off. When you start flooding the market
| with items so that players have cool stuff from day 1,
| you create a disincentive for them to push through and
| acquire these other items.
| rglullis wrote:
| Who cares about Activision or Square-Enix? It's not going
| to be Activision that is going to build the blockchain-
| powered generation of gaming platforms. It's going to be
| one of the many small dev teams that wants to find a way
| to disrupt the market.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Well, for one, they're the prime use-case for this sort
| of thing because they have the resources. None of these
| podunk little developers is going to "disrupt" the market
| with blockchain assets, because of ALL the developers and
| studios, they're the LEAST capable of designing and
| testing assets that did not come from their studio.
|
| "Hey Jim, we have a hotfix we need you to work on."
|
| "No time for that, Bob, XYZ Gamecorp just created a pair
| of shoes on the blockchain, and even though it's only
| going to net us a nickel, we're going to spend the next
| week working on getting it into the game."
|
| Might as well just light their studios on fire and try to
| recoup the insurance money, because it'd ultimately be
| more profitable.
| rglullis wrote:
| They will not disrupt with the assets. They will disrupt
| it with the new _game engines_ , and they are already
| backed by billions from VCs and the money from NFT
| speculators.
|
| There is a reason that Valve is not too fond of crypto,
| and it is not "climate change".
| adbachman wrote:
| > There is a reason that Valve is not too fond of crypto
|
| Because, like with third party Counter-Strike knife skin
| sites, it always devolves into money laundering and
| illegal gambling.
|
| Only in an ecosystem like cryptocurrency that exists for
| those purposes does it make sense.
| rglullis wrote:
| Right, the fact that they would lose control over the
| distribution channel has nothing to do with it. It is
| only because they are oh-so concerned with "money
| laundering".
| creeble wrote:
| But then... what's the incentive to build a platform?
|
| This is the part I don't get. Use web3 to build your
| game, but you own no users. I get the value prop for
| users (in theory), but what is the value prop for
| developers?
| rglullis wrote:
| > you own no users.
|
| There used to be a time where people made money by
| providing actual products and services, not by locking
| users into a platform and exploiting them.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| _Many_ apps offer you your data if you want it. For
| example, Facebook. I think people overestimate how useful
| data is outside of the application that was tailor-made
| to handle the data in the precise format it 's in.
|
| I guess "Web3" (it pains me to even use that term) would
| allow another developer to reverse-engineer an
| application to digest the data as it exists on the
| blockchain, but... that seems like a pretty negligible
| improvement over the status quo with many very
| significant drawbacks. For starters, a Raspberry Pi has
| orders of magnitude better performance than the "Ethereum
| World Computer". To make that concession, I'd hope for a
| much better benefit.
| web41 wrote:
| > Many apps offer you your data if you want it.
|
| but it is still locked into the walled garden. if 5% of
| Twitter users want to escape the platform when a
| billionaire buys it and reinstates Trump, their only
| option is to use an entirely new protocol (Mastodon).
|
| if 5% of OpenSea users want to escape the platform, they
| can and already are doing so because OpenSea never owned
| the tokens and media on its platform to begin with. see:
| LooksRare, Zora, Rarible.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense to me. The blockchain just
| says you own a thing, it might even have some data about
| the thing. But what are you going to do with it? If the
| game company decides to shut down their game, what do you
| actually do with a digital hat you bought on the
| blockchain?
|
| Oh, yeah, maybe someone else will make another game and
| do the work to support a digital hat you bought from
| someone else. Maybe it'll happen in a bid to try to scoop
| up users of a dead game. Or maybe, they'll just make
| their own digital hats and sell you a new one.
| rglullis wrote:
| Substitute "digital hats" for "exclusive contract with
| the star player on FIFA Football Manager", or "a mine
| that produces unobtanium on a blockchain version of
| minecraft"
|
| And yes, I am not much of a gamer so these examples might
| sound super silly today. But 25 years ago the idea of
| people making a living by collecting and selling items on
| WoW would also be met with general skepticism, so we
| never know what the future holds.
| adbachman wrote:
| You named two examples that only make sense in a
| centralized platform world.
|
| FIFA licensing will always be a thing and collecting and
| selling WoW gear / accounts only worked because other
| people wanted to play WoW that badly. Both work _because_
| they 're tied to a platform, not in spite of being tied
| to a platform.
| rglullis wrote:
| It's amazing how unimaginative people are when they are
| biased against the innovation. The examples I gave were
| only to bring an analogy. _Of course_ the next version of
| FIFA FM won 't be licensed by FIFA. We are talking about
| a world _without intermediaries_. Star players would
| _themselves_ be creating blockchain avatars that could be
| tied to their real-world performance. Fantasy Sports
| already exist, web3 just removes middlemen and make
| existing mechanics possible.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| ...What? Why wouldn't the next version of FIFA be
| licensed by FIFA?
|
| I guess I don't really know what you're suggesting. As it
| is, people gotta get a new Madden game every year just to
| update stats. This isn't because of some kind of
| technical limitation afaik. EA just wants to sell a new
| game every year. In fact, I think they might have to buy
| the data and the right to use it from the league.
| rglullis wrote:
| FIFA has a primary _institutional_ function: to
| coordinate the activities of all professional sport clubs
| in a way that is in the best interest of every one
| participating.
|
| So, all types of decision making power were given to FIFA
| because the clubs thought it would be better to negotiate
| as a group for broadcast rights or game licensing fees.
|
| The thing is, this type of coordination does not
| _require_ an all-encompassing central entity anymore. You
| can see that in Europe already with the top teams from
| different countries trying to create the "Superleague",
| _completely_ aside from the FIFA /UEFA-backed leagues.
|
| In Brazil, there has been some years already that the
| most popular clubs decided to break away from the
| national association and went on to negotiate
| broadcasting rights individually. Lo and behold, they are
| making more money than if they went the "unionized"
| route.
|
| When people want to play a football game, they don't care
| about it being FIFA. They care about seeing their
| favorite clubs and their favorite players. If we have the
| technology that allows clubs and players to negotiate
| their image rights _directly_ with game publishers, who
| needs FIFA?
| [deleted]
| mpeg wrote:
| You're missing the point, the game developer obviously has
| to buy into the ecosystem, but the difference is with the
| current status quo in-app purchases are not really owned by
| the customers, so even if another game developer wanted to
| honour their purchases there is no way to interop.
|
| Web3 is a pretty good use case for this, and the
| transaction costs barely add anything if you compare to the
| cut the platform takes (Apple takes 30%) so the game
| publisher could easily swallow this extra cost too (which
| could be tiny)
| Nursie wrote:
| They'll never be owned by the customers. They're owned by
| the companies that design them. Other developers do not
| have the right to include your purchase in their games
| due to law, not technical problems.
|
| Further, you're now talking about having a way to bring
| your level 28 sword of whacking into a completely
| different game world. And somehow you think this is just
| a matter of an in-app purchase.
|
| It's a weird fever dream.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| > the difference is with the current status quo in-app
| purchases are not really owned by the customers, so even
| if another game developer wanted to honour their
| purchases there is no way to interop.
|
| Roblox already does this. Your in-game purchases are
| yours and you can carry them from one game to another.
|
| Platforms outcompete protocols - this is why web2 became
| centralized.
| web41 wrote:
| > Your in-game purchases are yours and you can carry them
| from one game to another.
|
| this is close to what web3 is trying to achieve but with
| all digital assets like domain names as well.
|
| not familiar with roblox but it sounds close to this,
| except built on a private centralized ledger instead of
| public and decentralized. so the assets are attached to
| roblox as a company.
| bentcorner wrote:
| This feels like a tiny tiny edge case. How many
| developers simultaneously have the rights to an IP and
| have the game asset data and code, but also lack the
| ability to retrieve purchase data on that other game?
| somezero wrote:
| Sure! It's P2P, but doesn't need centralized certificate
| authorities (= Has some Sybil resistance)
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > doesn't need centralized certificate authorities (= Has some
| Sybil resistance)
|
| What link do you make between Sybil attacks and centralized
| authorities? And btw the only decentralized sybil resistance
| component to blockchain things was proof of work, which is
| being deprecated by most people who believe Web3 is a thing
| (which afaik Bitcoiners don't).
| somezero wrote:
| The only way to provably prevent Sybil attacks are CAs
| (https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/sybil.pdf) This is
| why almost all P2P and DHT papers assumed existence of a CA
| in their system model eg. Castro's secure routing etc.
|
| P.S. PoS protocols are also Sybil resistance mechanisms. Look
| into Tendermint and compare it with, say, PBFT.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Not true.
|
| > This paper shows that the situation with BFT CRDTs is
| very different from BFT consensus: it is possible to
| guarantee the standard CRDT consistency properties even in
| systems in which arbitrarily many nodes are Byzantine, e.g.
| where the Byzantine nodes outnumber the correct nodes. This
| makes the algorithms immune to Sybil attacks, allowing them
| to be deployed in open P2P systems that anybody can join,
| without requiring proof-of-work or proof of any other
| resource.
|
| [0]: https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/bft-crdt-
| papoc22.pdf
| somezero wrote:
| I'm not saying his paper is wrong or not up to the
| workshop quality. But he's saying something against an
| easy-to-prove impossibility theorem in a seriously
| sloppy/hand-wavy way. I trust Doceur and the entire early
| 2000s literature more than his paper. But who knows, I
| might be wrong.
|
| P.S. Also commented about the paper here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561786
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| His more recent paper on the move operation[0] goes into
| some of the details further and while I don't fully
| understand it myself, the claims he makes along with the
| proof assistant nature he uses to work through them are
| fairly compelling.
|
| The simple intuition is that because his CRDT's are
| associative and everyone else is not using associative
| data types, he simplifies the space and the impossible
| becomes possible.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811072
| somezero wrote:
| Thanks! I'll definitely take a look. These works are
| valuable but my problem is just with that particular
| claim about CAs.
|
| 1. This impossibility theorem is proved in a really broad
| setting (assuming a "broadcast communication cloud" and a
| P2P channel). If he wants to circumvent the impossibility
| theorem he should clearly specify the system model and
| say how it differs from Doceur's. There are other
| instances where by playing with the model you go around
| an impossibility theorem, but you have to specify the
| differences. Especially since this theorem is so well
| known/cited.
|
| 2. Some claims in the old paper are just plain wrong.
| Like, you can't say it's Sybil resistant just because it
| tolerates arbitrary number of Byzantine nodes. Dolev-
| Strong also needs just one honest party, but it requires
| a CA.
| boredumb wrote:
| Sort of agree. My initial understanding was that web3 was
| essentially a P2P solution with IPFS, Federated social graphs,
| decentralized p2p messaging and RTC stuff, and awaiting
| decentralized DNS. My current understanding or impression is that
| it's a coin wallet in my ~browser and I have to mine shit coins
| via storing and computing stuff on what will certainly be FAANGs
| behalf.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Web3 has always been an attempt to rebrand blockchain stuff,
| and make it appear like the next step in internet technology.
| Some other technologies (like IPFS) have been added to the Web3
| umbrella, but blockchain an cryptocurrency has always been the
| core of "Web3".
| dwaite wrote:
| IPFS was added because blockchain data storage is
| astronomically expensive. The problem is IPFS is a layer of
| abstraction to hide the problem away like some shell game.
| People treat it like it provides storage, while what it
| actually does is find parties who are hosting the data - if
| any are left.
|
| So while your data might be independent of any single service
| provider in concept, it might actually be provided by a
| single vendor's servers, even potentially pinning it with no
| data backups.
| [deleted]
| lekevicius wrote:
| P2P is a big component of blockchains. The "expensive" part is
| competition for the limited capacity in global consensus (block
| space), which is necessary if you want to interact with global
| systems that deal with high value objects.
|
| Blockchains can't exist without P2P, but P2P is not sufficient.
| There are plenty of use cases that require global consensus, and
| that part is expensive.
| cowtools wrote:
| Sure, but you would think that P2P is mostly sufficient for a
| social media replacement (e.g. PeerTube, Mastodon, etc.).
|
| Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like
| payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin)
| lekevicius wrote:
| For sure! Until we can figure out how to make global
| consensus ridiculously scalable, I don't see "web3 social"
| being successful at all. It's using a very expensive resource
| for a frivolous need.
| paulmd wrote:
| "web3 social" will never be successful because censorship
| is a desirable feature of a social-media platform. If there
| is no way to censor a group of people, there is no way to
| censor spammers either. You will be able to filter at the
| client level of course, or set up maintained filter-lists
| (which will be trivial to game with a "sybil" approach),
| but this is going to be "running an email server" times a
| million in terms of how abusable that "censorship-
| resistance" is going to end up being. You will need "spam
| assassin for social media" immediately and it will be a
| continuous battle.
|
| Spammers are perfectly happy to pay-per-impression if
| that's what it takes to get ads (or botnet droppers, etc)
| in front of victims. They are more willing to pay than an
| actual user is, really.
| qabqabaca wrote:
| I think the main reason it won't be successful is because
| people simply don't care about decentralization/privacy.
| Historically, there have only been a handful of
| successful social media companies. Starting a new one
| with the key differentiator being decentralization, while
| also adding the onboarding friction of crypto wallet
| management, is essentially a guarantee of failure.
| Mastodon tried this, without the unnecessary wallet
| friction, and is still an extremely niche platform.
| exdsq wrote:
| Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a
| spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they
| lose the stake. Or maybe it's just paid out on a long
| delay. Now spamming costs quite a bit. Add to that a
| blacklist feature and a shared consensus on spamming
| addresses and it starts to work a little better.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a
| spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they
| lose the stake.
|
| Oh, so, if I have $1m I can register a bunch of accounts
| and kick people I don't like off the platform? You said
| this thing was supposed to be censorship-resistant,
| right?
|
| Hell people will do it for free if they disagree with
| someone, you don't need $1m of accounts, you just need to
| say something that angers 100k people who report you and
| get you banned... isn't that something that people
| _specifically complain about_ with regards to
| "censorship" with current platforms? Like I'm not saying
| they have to _read_ it, but if others have the ability to
| stop me from _publishing_ than that 's not really
| censorship-resistant, it's just mob-controlled
| censorship. Censorship-resistance is something like IPFS
| - you have no control over what I put on IPFS. You don't
| have to access it, but you can't stop me either.
|
| Also, if I register enough accounts so that 100k people
| never complain about _any one account_ do they gradually
| go back to being healthy accounts? Or if not, then when I
| spam a bunch of people then I can get them kicked off
| they will be banned _permanently_ (or have to pay another
| $10 to restore access), right? How long will this service
| last when I 'm kicking every single user off every single
| day?
|
| "Consensus" will always take into account the consensus
| of attackers too... sure you can always have a trusted
| party who oversees censorship and you can depend on to
| make unbiased and fair decisions that 100% of individuals
| will agree with (lol) - but in that case, why do we need
| crypto at all? Why not just let that guy run the
| server/why not let him build blocklists for the mastodon
| server?
|
| it's the SMTP copypasta except the thing you have chosen
| to ignore is sybil attacks, and the massively complex
| thing you are handwaving as being trivial is building a
| reputation system, and that would solve all the problems
| for the non-crypto space too.
|
| https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
|
| (really, it's the exact same _problem_ , it doesn't
| matter whether the format is facebook posts or emails.
| Email is actually an extremely decentralized and
| censorship-resistant protocol - there is no central
| authority who can stop me from putting my message into
| your mail server, or even see what I'm sending you (if we
| connect directly). We can have completely private
| conversations that no central authority can stop! And
| what's what makes it terrible, because it turns into
| utter white noise with vague "reputational" signals like
| "dirty IPs" - those are your "blacklisted commenters" on
| facebook, and spam emails are _still_ a problem. Or at
| least they were, until a centralized authority (Google)
| effectively came to take over the market and solved the
| problem for us... but then there 's censorship again. And
| if you are winding up about "PGP message signing" or
| anything else, you need to go back to the "spam
| solutions" copypasta and find the bits that apply to you,
| because people thought of that 40 years ago before crypto
| was a gleam in satoshi's eye. Is spam solved? No, because
| your idea doesn't work.)
|
| Spammers have been willing to "pay per account" forever,
| _and that 's the problem_, they are more willing to pay
| than the actual users are. So any model needs to survive
| in the face of an asymmetric foe that has more resources
| than you... and almost all of the "asymmetric" strategies
| will require either a huge amount of cooperation between
| "honest" participants, or a few "super participants" who
| have actual power (ie censorship) over the system.
|
| And remember - the original idea behind bitcoin literally
| came from HashCash - which was an attempt to reduce
| spamming by requiring a unique proof-of-work for each
| message.
| rvz wrote:
| > Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems
| like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin)
|
| Those are the only credible use-case(s) that the
| cryptocurrency folks should be looking at. I can see a few
| projects surviving like Stellar [0], Ripple (XRP) [1],
| Algorand [2] and Nano [3], ENS [4], Handshake [5] and Skiff
| [6].
|
| Unlike the other projects that are slapping blockchain,
| crypto on to anything they can find and are filled with scams
| being reported, daily on web3isgoinggreat, there are a few
| that are not silly meme coins / tokens, or vaporware but
| stuck to their goals / whitepaper(s) and seem to be still
| useful and have a use-case.
|
| This is what these skeptics won't tell you and will ignore
| and filter out.
|
| [0] https://stellar.org
|
| [1] https://xrpl.org
|
| [2] https://algorand.com
|
| [3] https://nano.org
|
| [4] https://ens.domains
|
| [5] https://handshake.org
|
| [6] https://skiff.com
| exdsq wrote:
| Algorand was the first blockchain I ever used without
| knowing it - to hold the results of games on the official
| FIDE chess online tournaments - and I found that pretty
| cool. No costs etc, just a log on the chain with my matches
| and scores. This is coming from someone who spent 18 months
| working on Cardano, too.
| nont wrote:
| I think the main issue I have is with the name.
|
| 3 is implied to be better and replacing 2. I'm not sure if the
| future we are heading to is actually that way but the name kinda
| led people to believe it is.
| prohobo wrote:
| It's essentially supposed to mean the full maturation of P2P
| solutions that can rival the centralized web. A modern
| decentralized web, with finance included.
|
| There are plenty of things still missing which make it not
| mature enough to do so, which are too numerous and esoteric to
| name. But one example would be "account abstraction"
| (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337) which I believe would
| enable communities to trustlessly share a single wallet (pooled
| funds/coins/gas) for various operations related to the service
| they're using. Doesn't sound like much, but would open up the
| possibility of some wacky services.
|
| From my perspective, the end goal is to make digital networked
| vending machines that can't be tampered with. That's pretty
| cool, and there are already _some_ interesting ones out there
| like PoolTogether (https://pooltogether.com/). What would
| normally be considered an obvious scam can actually be built
| legitimately with web3 tech.
|
| Eventually some very very interesting EIPs will be deployed,
| and that will drastically change what's possible with "web3" -
| making it possibly live up to the name.
| status200 wrote:
| So many people miss the point of blockchains that they forget
| that there is an actual utility for immutable ledgers, that is,
| to make sure funds (e.g. taxes) go to the places that they are
| claimed to be going to. Right now we pay our taxes and that's
| that - we don't even have a way to confirm that it is going to
| the extremely bloated military-industrial complex in the way the
| budget is written.
|
| Will the government ever allow something like that? Most likely
| not, but it doesn't mean that having complete traceability for
| funds is a bad idea at its core.
| Bajeezus wrote:
| "Will the government ever allow something like that?"
|
| It's not that they won't allow it, its that its largely
| useless. The dollar is fungible. Who cares if a dollar spent on
| a new M1 Abrams was "your dollar", its identical to everyone
| else's dollar, so everyone else's dollar could have substituted
| yours. What benefit would knowing that possibly provide?
| jyturley wrote:
| OP is not talking about fungibility, but accountability. Web3
| technology can provide transparency to see and verify that
| money is allocated in all the ways the entity said it would.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| that transparency at best tells you what wallet received
| what funds, whoever owns or trades that wallet or what
| happens with resources in the real world using those funds
| is outside of the scope of web3 technology or for that
| matter any technology safe for surveillance.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Transparency of the blockchain is only a temporary flaw.
| Better solutions exist (Monero, Zcash) or are being
| actively developed (Zk Rollups).
| [deleted]
| diego_moita wrote:
| Moxie Marlinspike on Web3 [1]:
|
| * "People don't want to run their own servers, and never will"
|
| * "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform"
|
| [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| the_other wrote:
| I admit, I've not read Moxie's post.
|
| IMO "people" would run many of their own servers if it were
| easy. At the moment, it's not easy because it's not easy to
| safely open up to the public a server running on your
| computer/phone, or home network. ISPs benefit from making this
| hard, and (as best I understand it) the IP4 address space isn't
| wide enough anyway.
|
| If "people" could run servers on their phones, safely, with
| minimal effort, they would. They would, because it would be so
| minimal effort that no-one needed to think "I'm running a
| server". They should only need to think "I'm available now" and
| that be it.
| notriddle wrote:
| Read it. It's not long.
|
| It's not just that running servers is hard. It's that
| decentralized control can cause ossification. A bunch of
| functionality that people want became implemented in OpenSea
| because they couldn't roll it into Ethereum itself.
| px43 wrote:
| I've been a massive fan of Moxie's work for maybe 15 years or
| so now, and have had the pleasure of chatting with him in
| person a few times, and most of what he says is solid gold. I
| even agree with _most_ of the points he 's making in his Web3
| post, but ..
|
| .. that line _" People don't want to run their own servers, and
| never will"_ kills me. That's exactly the problem with P2P that
| Web3 is trying to solve. By strapping a financial layer onto a
| P2P network, you can build cryptographic incentives for people
| to run nodes and participate constructively in running and
| maintaining the network. It's certainly not the intention for
| everyone to run their own node, but anyone _CAN_ , and even if
| you don't, you can be confident that the people who _are_
| running the network are acting in your best interests.
|
| This, of course, does assume that the incentives are well
| thought out and properly aligned, which is very commonly not
| the case, but these networks are an amazing sandbox for people
| to try to build incentive systems that work, and there are many
| systems that are working quite well, many of which can run
| without any central authority over the protocol at all.
| dgb23 wrote:
| > "People don't want to run their own servers, and never will"
|
| Most people. And there's still a ton of "non-technical"
| (minimal programming/operations skills) but technically
| literate people who will not run their own servers but prefer
| to pay for applications and services that are built on
| protocols like RSS, ActivityPub etc.
|
| Also hosting providers make it much more easy today than ever
| before. It's not "running your own server" but you get
| definitely quite a bit of control and ownership if you rent a
| VPS that runs stuff you created and/or installed.
|
| > "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform"
|
| That's a good thing.
|
| ---
|
| However, I think overall these are very good points. Personally
| I think there is just too much crap that goes under Web3 to the
| extend that it is repulsive. I'd rather help people to use
| computers, even if it is someone else's (AKA the cloud).
| web41 wrote:
| not every user needs to run their own blockchain node in order
| to benefit from its decentralization. and having the _option_
| to do so is a good thing.
| rvz wrote:
| Says the same co-creator of Signal shoving a private crypto-
| currency and wallet into the Signal app by not only pumping and
| dumping their own coins on an exchange once listed [0], but
| with the nature of an encrypted blockchain being a road to hell
| allowing the likes of terrorists, extremists, scammers and
| criminals to easily hide their funds used for illicit
| activities.
|
| At this point, Moxie's fans and minions are not even aware of
| this involvement of the darker sides of that cryptocurrency
| project which have even (allegedly) plagiarised some of their
| privacy features from Monero. [1]
|
| To Downvoters: So this is not true? Care to explain your
| reasons why as now I have added sources backing up these
| claims? [0][1][2]
|
| [0] https://amycastor.com/2021/04/07/signal-adopts-
| mobilecoin-a-...
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/1379559273504641025
|
| [2]
| https://twitter.com/sethforprivacy/status/137979120155827814...
| paulmd wrote:
| > At this point, Moxie's fans and minions are not even aware
| of this involvement of the darker sides of that
| cryptocurrency project which have even (allegedly)
| plagiarised some of their privacy features from Monero. [1]
|
| The idea of crypto backers getting mad about "plagarizing
| features" is ridiculous in the extreme. Maybe what you want
| here is... a statist patent system that gives you a legal
| monopoly on particular kinds of math? Am I getting that
| right?
|
| But then, this is a world where crypto people get mad about
| other people using the JPGs they "own" a link to... which is
| basically describing the need for copyright, isn't it?
|
| If you believe in crypto I don't see how your position here
| should be anything other than "let crypto systems compete in
| the marketplace of ideas". And it is fundamentally ridiculous
| how crypto bros are slowly re-creating every aspect of a
| state except slower, more expensive, more energy intensive,
| less accountable, and worse for users in every way. Truly
| Libertarians do yearn for a feudal society, but one where
| they're the one on top...
| ricochet11 wrote:
| Most people wont run their own servers sure, but a large number
| of people and organisations will (and do). The more meaningful
| questions are around "how many people do we need to make this
| work?", there is a limit where the amount of security is good
| enough (and this is found through adjusting difficulty mining /
| or reducing block rewards).
|
| There is also a lot of work being done on light clients and
| faster proofs, so we can bundle them into browsers/apps and not
| rely on third party nodes for messaging/transacting. This would
| solve quite a few of moxies concerns right away. Alongside this
| the work being done on rollups shows us ways of facilitating
| services for others, without them being dependant on it or
| locked into it.
|
| For comparison, signal is great example of cryptography
| protecting users, but users being dependant on signal. there is
| no exit- so in critical situations what happens? Thats the kind
| of power-dynamic people working in crypto are grappling with.
| This is a hard problem but it is something worth attempting to
| solve.
|
| How can we provide services to users but have them be able to
| leave with all their assets when then need to (not when its
| convenient to us who run the servers). I hear a lot from non-
| crypto people about how they agree with these ideas but you
| dont need blockchains to do them, but it seems most of the work
| to do with this is being done in the crypto/blockchain
| community (look at who is funding/doing the research on zk-
| proofs/snarks/starks, which can have a much wider impact
| outside of the crypto space too! => https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-
| mnist )
| mlok wrote:
| When Matrix will be p2p, people will be running their own
| server without even thinking about it. I think this is the way
| to go.
|
| But it is not there yet : https://arewep2pyet.com/
| freeone3000 wrote:
| People were fine "running their own servers" back when Skype
| was peer-to-peer. Or when Team Fortress 2 let you play with
| your friends.
| mpeg wrote:
| People are also fine running their own Discord servers, just
| like they did IRC channels/networks back in the day.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| You're not running discord servers on your own hardware,
| though. You don't have any of the data locally and it all
| goes through Discord's server. Actual decentralized
| services are fine as long as users can run it as easily as
| they can run a centralized application.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Wait, Skype ain't p2p anymore?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Here is a series of headlines that give the best
| explanation of this architectural change that I've ever
| seen:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779
| fami-com wrote:
| Hasn't been for almost a decade at this point. The p2p
| protocol was deprecated in mid-2014.
| px43 wrote:
| Microsoft bought it, removed the encryption and
| decentralization, and started piping conversations directly
| to the NSA.
| pshc wrote:
| Yup, honestly this is a good argument for web3 as a
| substrate on which to build an encrypted chat app that's
| permanently decentralized and owned/funded by the
| community. (Once someone figures out the encrypted
| privacy aspect...)
| mlok wrote:
| This is coming to Matrix : https://arewep2pyet.com/
| Barrin92 wrote:
| because there weren't many alternatives. Dropped calls or
| latency issues were simply the norm and accepted as a trade
| off for being able to play. The reason companies used to
| favor p2p was because it was cheaper for them to not run
| servers.
|
| But with people demanding more quality, richer content and
| consistent and stable connections p2p makes not much sense.
| Look at some Netflix blogs and how complex their
| infrastructure is geographically as well as in terms of
| hardware and software to deliver content at the cost to the
| user that they do.
|
| Division of labor has made sense for hundreds of years and it
| will continue to do so for many more, the economics of p2p
| when resources matter doesn't check out.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it's simply overkill. Skype
| started out as a p2p thing. But ultimately, video calls became a
| commodity where orchestrating them centrally proved to be good
| enough. I can make video calls with meets, facebook, whatsapp,
| signal, slack, etc. Not a big deal. I even still have Skype
| somewhere and it still works even though they ripped out the p2p
| bits ages ago.
|
| I'm not sure what web3 is other than a label that people started
| slapping on the collective efforts of people vaguely doing
| anything with or depending on some kind of block chain thingy.
| IMHO it has very little to do with the web and little or no
| relevance to end users.
|
| From a technical point of view, I don't see anything wrong with
| having a distributed store of ownership of stuff. There are all
| sorts of useful and valid uses for that. The problem is all the
| hyena's with dollar signs in their eyes floating around any
| companies active in this space. It's hard to see the forest for
| the trees because of this. Doing anything with a blockchain
| almost automatically buckets you with the fraudsters, utopians,
| and other people plaguing this space.
|
| Most of the companies in this space are a combination of naive,
| fraudulent, or misguided. With a few notable exceptions where you
| might squint and see some potential of some actual economic
| value. But most of them are obvious duds. I actually briefly used
| Stellar for some actual applications. Great tech. Mostly works as
| advertised. Not that expensive to use. Etc.
| thawaya3113 wrote:
| Skype's quality, and subsequently popularity, dropped
| significantly after they removed the P2P bits.
|
| There's still nothing that comes close to the call quality
| Skype provided for long distance calls, especially when the
| network may not be as good on 1 end.
| xg15 wrote:
| I think this conflates a bit p2p as a technical means and p2p
| as a means to organise control.
|
| Like, there are all kinds of products which use p2p
| architectures internally to solve some technical problem - bit
| torrent is sometimes used inside updaters, elasticsearch
| organizes its nodes as a p2p network for greater robustness and
| scalability, WebRTC let's you make direct connections between
| browsers to save roundtrips, etc etc. But those are just
| technical details - the products themselves are still
| controlled and administered by a central entity.
|
| In contrast, crypto, file sharing and federated systems use p2p
| as a technical means but they are also administered in a
| decentralised fashion, where no person or entity has ultimate
| control (or should have at least).
|
| I think Skype was falling squarely in the first category here:
| They were experimenting with decentralised network protocols,
| but the nodes were all pretty clearly belonging to a singular
| and centrally controlled product. That's why p2p really just
| was an implementation detail that could be replaced by a
| different technical architecture by a simple update.
|
| (Weird thought as an aside: I think most companies or
| organisations follow a sort of similar pattern: They are
| communist with respect to coworkers of equal status ("
| _everyone_ should chip in for Carol 's birthday present"),
| authoritarian with respect to management and owners - and
| libertarian/anarchist with respect to the outside world
| ("freedom! ...from annoying rules and regulations..."). But
| that doesn't mean leadership necessarily follows communist,
| authoritarian or anarchist principles when deciding strategy)
| mempko wrote:
| Skype became centralized about the time Microsoft joined the
| PRISM spying program. I don't think it becoming centralized had
| anything to do with p2p being a problem...
| masklinn wrote:
| > Nothing wrong with p2p.
|
| The article doesn't imply (let alone say) that there's anything
| wrong with p2p?
|
| To the extent that it says anything positive about p2p, it's
| rather positive. Unless you're one of those americans for whom
| "communist" reflexively aliases to "bad" I guess?
| remram wrote:
| >> Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it's simply overkill.
|
| > you're one of those americans for whom "communist" ...
|
| The GP is making some comment about the technical merits of
| P2P which segues naturally from the article. You can agree,
| you can disagree, but I really don't know what just did.
| [deleted]
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| >Unless you're one of those americans for whom "communist"
| reflexively aliases to "bad"
|
| it's usually people who had actually lived under communism
| who have that reaction
| oblak wrote:
| Not even remotely in the same canned way that feels like
| mindless parroting myths about "communism". Seen it so many
| times.
|
| Yeah, I have lived under communist rule. That's not the
| reason I can easily spot such nonsense but it certainly
| helps a bit.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Collectivism as a means of ordering a society necessarily
| tramples individual liberty, which yes, generally speaking,
| is bad. Communism is a subset of collectivism, just one of
| the flavors we've seen, so it is a collection of ideas that
| may be judged by their outcomes as bad.
|
| Has zero to do with tech, however.
| Animats wrote:
| _Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it 's simply overkill._
|
| P2P may have a comeback, because home connections are becoming
| more symmetrical. DSL usually had relatively low uplink rates,
| and COMCAST cable was worse. But fiber is usually symmetrical,
| and 5G wireless typically has an uplink bandwidth of half the
| downlink rate. This makes P2P more feasible.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Technically, it might be more feasible. But is it really
| necessary? What actual benefits to users could more P2P
| bring?
| username923409 wrote:
| Reliability could be improved if all required functionality
| is P2P, as the program would not need to rely on a third
| party server. Of course, this assumes that the
| party/parties on the other end of the P2P connection are
| online, which is the downside of all P2P services.
|
| Another underrated benefit of P2P (if implemented in good
| faith) is that the users will have peace of mind with
| regards to the ownership of their data.
| threeseed wrote:
| Except that it is rarely a single third party server.
| Every semi-popular website will be highly available.
|
| And with the popularity of the cloud it has made it
| available across data centres and even regions.
|
| So it is debatable whether P2P is more reliable than
| centralised.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > if implemented in good faith ... users will have peace
| of mind with regards to the ownership of their data
|
| Famous last words! Not sure how users will establish the
| trustworthiness of P2P protocols (and there will be many
| competing versions), when now they cannot determine the
| trustworthiness of one service.
| threeseed wrote:
| You still need to solve the Wifi router issue.
|
| Automatically exposing ports is very flaky and doing so
| manually is way beyond the understanding of almost anyone.
| Micoloth wrote:
| Honest question. Why did this happen?
|
| I mean how could it happen that such a basic utility as the
| router was developed with such fundamental design flaws
| that hosting a webserver at home is above the skills of 99%
| of people?
|
| There's a router in every home anywhere now, so this is a
| fact we'll have to deal with for decades.
|
| I'm pretty young so i was not around at the time. How did
| it come about?
| Gigachad wrote:
| It was NAT. We ran out of v4 addresses and self hosting /
| p2p became much harder. And now many iot devices depend
| on Nat existing as some kind of security measure.
|
| But largely no one cares because you wouldn't want to
| host any real website at home anyway. It's extremely
| cheap and reliable to just rent a VPS.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Notably, GPON is not symmetrical.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| i do think this trend is happening and will unlock some use
| cases. Not sure about P2P though. One reason I switched to
| home 5G is because i can get 40 mbps up for $25, where I
| needed to pay $100 to comcast for similar up speed. My main
| use case is streaming my playstation 4 remotely so I can play
| on the go.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Are you in the US? If so, who is your provider?
| anamax wrote:
| > Skype started out as a p2p thing. But ultimately, video calls
| became a commodity where orchestrating them centrally proved to
| be good enough.
|
| It's my understanding that "phone" without the ability to tap
| is illegal in the US.
|
| IIRC, the "must be able to let the govt listen" requirement
| occurred at the same time as Skpye switched models and the
| requirement was given as the reason for said switch.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| It might be some sort of opaque incentive where gov goons
| tell you they'll make life difficult for you if you don't
| comply, but I certainly have not ever seen this being an open
| requirement. Signal still exists, for example.
| marricks wrote:
| I mean, look what happened to Qwest. It's totally
| believable.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| As far as I know Signal voice calls are not illegal, and do
| not provide an ability to tap, and are p2p in network
| architecture.
|
| So I'm not sure that's accurate that there were any such
| legal limits on Skype, I'd like to see a citation to more
| info.
| ohthehugemanate wrote:
| > It's my understanding that "phone" without the ability to
| tap is illegal in the US.
|
| This is not true. Else you couldn't have whatsapp or signal
| calls (e2e encrypted). In 2009, Skype made the argument with
| the ACLU that they are not a telecoms carrier, and are
| therefore exempt from CALEA and similar regulations.
| Additionally, Skype's original CSEO refused to promise that
| they did not support wiretaps in the original architecture.
| We know from Edward Snowden that "old Skype" was included in
| NSA data sources.
|
| Skype changed architecture because routing calls through
| neighboring, always-on nodes is not practical in a mobile
| world where 50%+ of users pay for their data by the MB, and
| have spotty connections with high latency. For several years
| before the rearchitecture, Microsoft propped up the network
| by running all the supernodes itself.
| salawat wrote:
| That applies only for Common Carriers.
|
| Skype is not Common Carrier. It's an Internet Service which
| ISP's have been deadset on avoiding getting classified as
| covered under Common Carrier obligations because it would
| entail, according to them, enormous harm to the profitability
| of the sector due to the cost of increased regulatory
| compliance".
|
| Telco's/Telephony must provide pen register/tap capability.
| Internet services as of yet need not. Until you become big
| enough for Federal LE to start harassing.
|
| The relevant regulation in question is CALEA.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| As a vocal critic of "web3" and in particular NFTs and other
| crypto grifting,
|
| I will speak up in defense of its point of origin (as next-
| generation P2P), the concept of the "decentralized internet,"
|
| which prior to and if stripped of its monetization schemes back
| to its original precepts,
|
| is as current and urgent as it ever was;
|
| even more so in light of its potential complex interactions with
| the concepts of free speech and the like, much in the news.
|
| An interesting critique offered ITT his that P2P "externalizes"
| the cost of e.g. storage to the user...
|
| ...my counter-critique to this is that TANSTAAFL, we are all
| already paying for storage (most of it for surveillance analytics
| and its products), c.f. industry chatter about revenue per user
| e.g. at Twitter.
|
| One of the interesting precepts of building a decentralized web
| is how it changes the premises of "teh algorithm" and the avenues
| for weaponized (amplified, precisely-targeted, bad faith) speech.
| Those with the money to game the system to pervert it to their
| ends (selling you things being the most benevolent end of a
| spectrum that goes very far into worse uses) will of course
| always have the most elaborate and pervasive tooling; but its
| efficacy and that of defenses against it in a decentralized
| concept are much more murky. Which is what we want; indeed it's
| kind of the point.
|
| Many things benefit from the efficiencies of centralization.
| Democracy and its constituent discourse do not seem to be among
| them.
| treyhuffine wrote:
| P2P isn't bad thing though right? Or many would argue it's a
| great thing.
|
| Web3 is systematized, open, and properly incentivized P2P. That
| sounds like a great value prop. This has allowed an ecosystem to
| be built to push it into the mainstream which is his primary
| challenge with P2P
| douglaswlance wrote:
| The internet didn't replace centralized services. It was a new
| platform that extended the capabilities.
|
| Web3 is the same thing. It offers new platforms for extending
| capabilities using blockchain tech.
|
| The platform is decentralized. Centralized services are built
| using the platform. Services themselves do not need to
| decentralized. But they can benefit from it.
|
| You can also build decentralized services. In some sense,
| decentralized services _become_ the platform.
| intrasight wrote:
| What Web3 should be is a) identity, and b) digital payment.
|
| I am of the opinion that the state should provide digital
| identity service. Estonia is a good example, from what I've
| heard, of a state that is doing this effectively.
|
| As for digital payment, Brazil seems to be in the lead now with
| Pix.
|
| I see no valid role for private companies nor blockchains in
| providing digital ID and currency services.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > I am of the opinion that the state should provide digital
| identity service
|
| No thanks. Privacy is a human right.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I agree, and I would go further: _Identity_ is a human right,
| and it is not to be seen as a privilege granted by
| governments, nor should we ever give governments the power to
| revoke people 's identities, or require people to "earn"
| them.
| intrasight wrote:
| If the options are a) government or b) private company, then
| I will choose government. I guess the issue is does one trust
| one's government.
| bogwog wrote:
| > The Web3 community approaches this from the opposite side:
| Instead of a lightweight communistic take, they follow a
| heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized.
|
| This is how you get people to stop reading your article, and to
| instantly agree or disagree with you (regardless of what you're
| saying) based only on the political language you used.
|
| I'm not a politician, and I make an active effort to avoid
| politics on the internet. However, even I know that this is tone
| deaf. If this article was written only for people with above
| average reading comprehension skills (which is not this site's
| demographic), then that's fine. But if this was written for the
| masses, i.e. the typical victims of crypto scams, then it's just
| completely tone deaf and ineffective. "Communist" and
| "libertarian" are trigger words for a significant portion of
| Americans.
|
| For example, I know that if my father was reading through this
| article, he wouldn't understand any of the technical stuff, but
| he'd associate the word "communist" with "things that aren't
| Web3", and then enthusiastically start going down
| Tiktok/Youtube/Facebook Web3 rabbit holes, _just to stick it to
| those damned commies._
| evan_ wrote:
| If your father will knee jerk turn against something just
| because some random article called it communist- that's not
| really a problem with the article.
| pshc wrote:
| What I find amusing in the Twitter bubble I inhabit, people
| tend to talk about Ethereum blockspace and layers as a public
| good, a collectivized shared resource, y'know, left wing commie
| stuff. (Cynically, as a cover for profiteering?)
|
| Whereas the Bitcoin's vibe seems more about scarcity and
| tribalism, "bitcoin is all you need" maximalism, and so on.
| doubtfuluser wrote:
| As an EU citizen, I'm wondering how things like the "right to be
| forgotten" would work on this? How can we remove personal
| information in web3?
|
| I'm still new to the topic so I guess there are some easy
| solutions already...
| hawksprite wrote:
| My guess is that the "processing" of the data is still
| controlled by a centralized authority (source code is owned by
| the company) and that it would have to be compliant to the law,
| in that it's underlying infrastructure needs to cary out the
| delete action no matter the design.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| I disagree with the article strongly, but still find the
| comparison very thought-provoking and useful. There _are_ odd
| parallels there, right down to the early adopters of the former
| being the regulars of the latter.
|
| What the author identifies as the weaknesses of web3, though, are
| actually just the weaknesses of Ethereum. They're very _good_
| reasons why Ethereum will not be the future of the internet - but
| chains that are being developed to replace it[0] solve all of
| those problems and then some.
|
| [0]: https://smartcontracts.org
| can16358p wrote:
| Ironically I can't access the site, that probably defends against
| web3 (checking out the title and the comments), which is on a
| centralized web host, is probably hugged to death because of HN
| exposure and I can't access it.
|
| I can't stop thinking how things could be different if we
| embraced web3 and used a decentralized storage/hosting that
| incentivizes sharing by some form of token, solving the scaling
| problem while also awarding the content creators/hosters.
|
| I know this is not the only solution, but given the particular
| context, I can't stop thinking this.
| exyi wrote:
| This use case would be better served by old-school P2P,
| something like bittorrent or ipfs
| hammon wrote:
| adrianthedev wrote:
| Good way of putting things!
| andsoitis wrote:
| > P2P never made it to the mainstream; instead, centralized
| systems still (or, again? even more?) dominate the landscape. So,
| because it failed, should we try Web3? I doubt it, as it is more
| likely to fail, due to higher complexity and more dependencies.
|
| One major reason decentralized has a hard time is because
| standards, public protocols cannot be innovated on rapidly. Or at
| least, new iterations cannot be deployed universally very
| quickly. So centralized / proprietary channels rise to the top
| because new ideas can find expression in them more rapidly.
| VGltZUNvbnN1 wrote:
| I still believe the P2P version of Skype was better.
| Centralized Skype may have more features, but the P2P version
| of Skype was better at the core functionality of video and
| audio calling. It was also more private and secure, since your
| calls were not routed through a central server.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| The change to centralized servers was done because more and
| more Skype users (P2P nodes) were/are running on bandwidth
| and processor constrained mobile devices.
|
| It also just so happened to align with the acquisition by
| Microsoft and resulting support for "lawful intercept".
| mdale wrote:
| It depends what decentralization layer your talking about.
| Technically all these centralized / proprietary channels rose
| from the underlining net neutral decentralized Web.
|
| I think higher layer "decentralized" protocols may allow a lot
| of people / organizations to compete but a similar winner takes
| all network effect will likely take hold relative to the
| fundamentals of network centric bell curve.
|
| The marginally better content / service wins out exponentially
| as it gains value as more people in the network consume or
| interact with it. It's why small percent of YouTubers, twitch
| streamers and blogger, app store apps take home hugely
| disperportional percent of revenue on these services. The same
| would be true for "decentralized" platforms. Maybe more so as
| there would be no organization to build, invest and support the
| farm league.
| Asooka wrote:
| I wouldn't say that P2P never became mainstream. BitTorrent is
| still huge and a great way to share media with each other. The
| reason it's not mainstream is because without centralisation,
| you can't enforce copyright and DRM. If sharing movies with
| friends was legal, P2P platforms would sprout like mushrooms
| after rain.
|
| I personally think, perhaps foolishly, that if we decriminalise
| nonprofit filesharing and at the same time make supporting
| creators easy and not tied to buying the media, we would have a
| better system in place. I would love to see some of the smaller
| creators on Patreon experiment with giving every Patron a
| transferrable license to reproduce their work, as long as
| attribution is given.
|
| I base my assumption on the fact that piracy has been a
| constant presence for the last 20 years and the entertainment
| industry doesn't seem to have suffered one bit. In fact every
| time they try to kill piracy all they end up getting is
| negative PR.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Most bittorrent traffic is bootstrapped by centralized
| trackers.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| Bootstrapping doesn't make them not P2P though. It's an
| unfortunately necessary piece of infrastructure for peer
| discovery.
| cowtools wrote:
| Those "open standards" are often dictated by the whims of
| giants like Google. That's fine when the interests of
| buisnesses align with their clients, but a recent one that
| comes to mind is FLoC
|
| Edit: I think this is why we have seen the emergence of
| standards like WebRTC, WebGL, etc. that enable "web apps", for
| better or for worse.
| moolcool wrote:
| I don't think that's right. Using decentralized protocols
| doesn't necessarily imply decentralized authority or use of
| those protocols. Skype used to be P2P, and the mothership would
| still push updates to end users to ensure everyone was using
| the correct protocol. Decentralized protocols do create some
| technical challenges, but they also alleviate others (scaling,
| for example).
|
| Even when that's not the case, like with bittorrent, there's
| tons of innovation. DHT Protocol, for example, was a game
| changer.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| You're missing the forest for the trees... Skype is a
| corporate product run and owned by a single entity that is
| free to change their tech however they please. Something like
| email, a federated and distributed communication protocol, is
| incredibly slow to change because the stakeholders are
| numerous and the protocol is entrenched.
|
| You point to DHT as a game changer, and yet that protocol was
| invented in 2005 and took over a decade to hit mainstream
| success and hasn't changed much in the past decade. New
| protocols can be invented at any time but getting them
| adopted is a Herculean task with little monetary profit and
| updating said protocol in any innovative way is nigh
| impossible.
| moolcool wrote:
| > You're missing the forest for the trees
|
| No, I'm saying that trees do not exist exclusively in
| forests. A protocol does not have to be federated in order
| to be decentralized.
| cnity wrote:
| It is my (largely uninformed) opinion that the greatest barrier
| to an open web is the difficulty in securing a static address
| for a device that remains consistent regardless of the
| currently connected gateway address. So much of what third
| party web services actually do is simply offering a static
| address for routing traffic.
| can16358p wrote:
| If IPv6 adoption goes at this pace, crypto adoption for
| addressing will probably pass it anyway.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| Yes. For more thoughts on this, I'd recommend reading Moxie's
| expansion on these ideas here.
|
| https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-16 23:01 UTC)