3 ms·

The incentive structures enabled by web3 (in addition to distributed state) can solve the issues that led to the failure of the decentralized web. At least I s

The incentive structures enabled by web3 (in addition to distributed state) can solve the issues that led to the failure of the decentralized web. At least I see a path for this to be true.

acdha 5y ago
Can you explain in more detail? It won’t help with the technical issues I mentioned, spam is still a big challenge, and blockchains add new failure modes related to the inherent performance and reliability limits. There is an interesting argument about micro-transactions. The practical challenge there is getting the price to be enough below the cost of credit card transactions to spur adoption, especially since the processors have plenty of margin to cut since their overhead is so much lower. The bigger problem is one of market: beyond the questions about restricting sites to people affluent enough to pay for those micro transactions, it’s unclear how many people will actually pay as much as advertisers for most sites. This has been tried a number of times over the years but there have been relatively few successes.
- gonehome 5y ago
  Sure - I find this stuff super interesting and went from an open minded skeptic to cautiously optimistic (and have a positive long term view). I think urbit’s approach to spam makes sense. Non-zero cost IDs (cheap) in the form of NFTs that grant network access and a pseudonym. This makes spam no longer economical because spammers can be trivially blocked. Pseudonyms also accrue reputation. It basically moves auth and network complexity into the OS layer under an abstraction which makes application deployment way simpler. No distinction between a user and a server also fix a lot of the other broken things that cause federated systems to centralize or end up DOA to be avoided. In the ETH world, decentralized state and the ability to incentivize network nodes and development via tokens and programmatic money make it possible to push back against the things that advantage centralization. The issue is the protocols have to be good enough to solve a lot of this stuff, the old web didn’t do this well for the reasons you suggest and administering Linux servers is way too hard. I understand the dismissal of technical people because crypto is filled with know-nothing scammers and gamblers, but it’s worth taking a closer look. There’s lots of interesting stuff happening in the space. A lot of people dismissed the web in the 90s too. There can be a bubble and a crash, but still be underlying tech there that will have a big impact.
  - jv22222 5y ago
    > A lot of people dismissed the web in the 90s too. There can be a bubble and a crash, but still be underlying tech there that will have a big impact. Yes, I always think of Google in that way. They just powered through the dot com crash by being really useful. I'm sure there are examples of this in crypto.

The incentive structures enabled by web3 (in addition to distributed state) can solve the issues that led to the failure of the decentralized web. At least I see a path for this to be true.

acdha 5y ago

Can you explain in more detail? It won’t help with the technical issues I mentioned, spam is still a big challenge, and blockchains add new failure modes related to the inherent performance and reliability limits. There is an interesting argument about micro-transactions. The practical challenge there is getting the price to be enough below the cost of credit card transactions to spur adoption, especially since the processors have plenty of margin to cut since their overhead is so much lower. The bigger problem is one of market: beyond the questions about restricting sites to people affluent enough to pay for those micro transactions, it’s unclear how many people will actually pay as much as advertisers for most sites. This has been tried a number of times over the years but there have been relatively few successes.

gonehome 5y ago
Sure - I find this stuff super interesting and went from an open minded skeptic to cautiously optimistic (and have a positive long term view). I think urbit’s approach to spam makes sense. Non-zero cost IDs (cheap) in the form of NFTs that grant network access and a pseudonym. This makes spam no longer economical because spammers can be trivially blocked. Pseudonyms also accrue reputation. It basically moves auth and network complexity into the OS layer under an abstraction which makes application deployment way simpler. No distinction between a user and a server also fix a lot of the other broken things that cause federated systems to centralize or end up DOA to be avoided. In the ETH world, decentralized state and the ability to incentivize network nodes and development via tokens and programmatic money make it possible to push back against the things that advantage centralization. The issue is the protocols have to be good enough to solve a lot of this stuff, the old web didn’t do this well for the reasons you suggest and administering Linux servers is way too hard. I understand the dismissal of technical people because crypto is filled with know-nothing scammers and gamblers, but it’s worth taking a closer look. There’s lots of interesting stuff happening in the space. A lot of people dismissed the web in the 90s too. There can be a bubble and a crash, but still be underlying tech there that will have a big impact.
- jv22222 5y ago
  > A lot of people dismissed the web in the 90s too. There can be a bubble and a crash, but still be underlying tech there that will have a big impact. Yes, I always think of Google in that way. They just powered through the dot com crash by being really useful. I'm sure there are examples of this in crypto.