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My First Impressions of Web3

• kbenson 5y ago
  > A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly. Wow. That's one of those things you kinda know, then someone puts it to words like this, and the next thing I know I'm floored by the realization that Twitter is just centralized finger.
• reducesuffering 5y ago
  I do not look forward to immense backlash against "techies" when normal people have been grifted out of what they thought were their "savings" in crypto and NFT's.
• danielovichdk 5y ago
  I want to run my own servers. Honestly. It has always been a somewhat easy task if you pick an OS that is secure and stable. And today with all the Foss/oss there are plenty of reasons why I would do it. More Decentralised Please.
  • CameronNemo 5y ago
    Same. I'd like to make this experience better rather than give up and give in to centralization. I know others have different priorities, but I don't need them to use my servers. I just need them to interoperate minimally.
    • dane-pgp 5y ago
      > rather than give up and give in to centralization As for why Marlinspike might have abandoned the goal of decentralization, I think Upton Sinclair might have some insight.
      • CameronNemo 5y ago
        I don't follow ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
        • dane-pgp 5y ago
          Marlinspike is the CEO of Signal Messenger LLC, and he also coincidentally believes that people shouldn't make clients which are compatible with the official Signal messenger (even though the protocol and code are freely available), and shouldn't even try to distribute Signal from app stores that he doesn't approve of.[0] I don't actually know if he receives a meaningful salary from his CEO role, but Upton Sinclair's adage still seems relevant for explaining Marlinspike's views on decentralization: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”[1] It's also worth pointing out that non-official Signal clients would be less likely to include support for MobileCoin, which "gained over 450% [in value] since" Signal announced support for it.[2] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/q1jnbb/why_isnt_signal_at_fdroid/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/q1jnbb/why_isnt_sig... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge... [2] https://rankacoin.com/encrypted-messenger-company-signal-faces-scrutiny-over-mobilecoin-integration/ https://rankacoin.com/encrypted-messenger-company-signal-fac...
• boramalper 5y ago
  I love the idea(ls) of cryptocurrencies and yet I hate "web3" because it's a misnomer that led to a series of misconstructions: Web3 is futile because it attempts to rebuild the Web (1) on an abysmally resource-constrained global computer which (2) uses a bunch of protocols that makes it impossible interact with using web browsers thus requiring a series of intermediary parties whom participants have to rely on. It is not even the fact that I need to trust those intermediaries, I trust a bunch of Web 2 corporations for some of the most critical services anyway, but the fact that we end up where we have started except it is now more expensive and much slower. It is easy to dismiss Web3 as such, but that would not be fruitful. Besides all financial incentives, I (would like to) believe that there is a group of people who are sincerely interested in a more decentralized web, or rather, a web that is decentralized in a fundamentally different way than Web 2 and Web 1 are and were. To make it more concrete, there is an interest in decoupling authoring and hosting of web services; Linux distributions have had mirrors all over the world for the efficient distribution of data years before BitTorrent, so the magic of BitTorrent was not just about its efficiency promises, but in bringing content-addressed data to masses and thus decoupling the authoring (torrent creating) and the hosting (seeding) of content. Instead of having to ask Debian's permission to set up a mirror, I could now simply seed its torrent. It thus mattered that this decoupling has been implemented not at a social level (mirrors) but at a protocol level (peers). You may be familiar with the concept of cardinality in databases: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many. Indeed, it can be just as useful to describe the access patterns to databases: (A) A one-for-one database is where a single writer is storing data for themselves. In the world of decentralized apps (not necessarily crypto-ridden web3), a good example is draw.io (and Zero Data Apps[0] in general) which allows you to "bring your own storage". On desktop, you have Joplin[1] for note-keeping that can synchronize to various cloud services. (B) A one-for-many database is where a single writer is distributing content to many. BitTorrent and IPFS are prime examples of this. (C) On the other hand, a many-for-many database is one that multiple writers store data for multiple readers. A centralized example of this is Hacker News, Twitter, reddit, and so on... This is what web3 attempts to be. There are a couple application-level attempts[2] at this, but not as much at a lower level that can enable arbitrary many-for-many use cases except blockchains. Sadly the critics of web3 do not acknowledge that there are legitimate use cases for decentralized many-to-many databases that would, for instance, allow members of Hacker News to be able to host it in the same way that they are able to seed an existing torrent, and there are currently no other application-agnostic solutions than blockchains. Sadly, again, the proponents of web3 do not realize that the consistency guarantees of a financial ledger are too unnecessarily strict for many use cases. I am working on a many-for-many database with much lesser consistency guarantees using SQLite and based on CRDTs designed to be used in browsers from day one (hence, as an example, using P-256[3] for public key cryptography rather than Bitcoin's and Ethereum's secp256k1 as the former is readily available in WebCrypto). This is something I do in my spare time and 100% for experimentation and fun without any financial motives or elements; let me know if you are interested in collaborating or following, email in the bio. ---- [0] https://0data.app/ https://0data.app/ [1] https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/ [2] https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/ [3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenParams https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenPar...
• davidgerard 5y ago
  > Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I would give this intro more credence if it hadn't been posted literally a day after he put his MobileCoin shitcoin into Signal. It's annoying, because the rest of the article is good and apposite - but then he did that.
  • phgn 5y ago
    I think Moxie's critique of web3 concerns the decentralised aspect (DAOs, token economies, smart contracts, NTFs etc). He probably sees MobileCoin (which is built on the Stellar blockchain) just as a solution to fast anonymous payments. It also looks like he's been involved with MobileCoin since 2017 [0], so this is not a quick cash-in on the web3 hype. Signal did not even publicise the payments integration normally. [0] https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/ https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/
• willfiveash 5y ago
  When I read "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will." I thought, what an elitist (and libertarian) idea to assume people would be able to afford and manage a server in their home but also afford/have access to the required Internet bandwidth. Yuck.
• dang 5y ago
  All: this is quite an interesting article. It deserves much better than the tedious flamewar that this topic has routinely been converging to, so let's give it a go. If you're going to comment, please focus on specific, interesting things in the article that you're curious about. Please don't post generic, shallow, obvious, indignant, and/or dismissive comments—those are repetitive and predictable, we've had more than enough of them, they're tedious, not what this site is for, and we don't need more. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• verdverm 5y ago
  This is not what I expected from Moxie. A writes very good account of his experience trying to do some dapp / NFT stuff. He eloquently draws attention to the problems that are based in human behavior. Definitely worth the read. Both sides of the debate could elevate their arguments if they ponder what Moxie has written.
  • olah_1 5y ago
    > Both sides of the debate could elevate their arguments if they ponder what Moxie has written. I appreciate that he fairly tried these different things out and reported his experience. But I don't think he has noticed anything particularly interesting or novel. It's common knowledge that the plentitude of blockchains out there now make compatibility between them almost impossible. This is how Bitcoin "maximalists" came to be in the first place. If reputation and trust is the game, it defeats the purpose to have a million different blockchains.
• durakot 5y ago
  I've known Moxie to often be right. And I think he happens to be right about this.
  • verdverm 5y ago
    I'm perplexed with him writing this piece and, at the same time, adding crypto based payments to Signal... Has he written anything on Signal and payments?
    • durakot 5y ago
      I don't think there's necessarily any contradiction. This is a critique of the Web3 paradigm (crypto all the things) and not cryptocurrency itself for say, payments.
      • jwblackwell 5y ago
        Yeah I read the article more as a list of valid suggestions for a nascent industry. Not an attempt to suggest that crypto is going to disappear entirely.
    • floren 5y ago
      > at the same time, adding crypto based payments to Signal... Damn, and just when I'd been thinking how much I like Signal. The goldrush when Keybase added crypto completely ruined what had been a pretty good tool.
• purplesnowflake 5y ago
  Moxie is no fan of decentralization. And he made why very clear with concise and incisive arguments.
  • slibhb 5y ago
    His argument here is that web3, as it exists today, isn't actually decentralized. Also: > These technologies immediately tended towards centralization through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the ecosystem, and that most participants don’t even know or care it’s happening. This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early. Per the post, he's in favor of decentralization that "uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust," he's just skeptical that web3 will head in this direction.
    • kristofferR 5y ago
      No, the issue is that he is against a decentralization generally. He opposes it for Signal.
  • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    And his arguments in favour of centralization are flawed. Sure, regular people do not want to run their own (email, chat, etc) servers. But they DO want to be able to chose from a handful of available servers the one they like best (or the one they trust most), without losing connectivity with their contacts. Tired of Google's shenanigans, move from Gmail to Protonmail, tell your contacts your new email, set up an autoresponder, all is fine. When you move away from a centralized silo like Signal, you'll have to move all your chat buddies with you to a new platform.
    • ianbicking 5y ago
• golf1052 5y ago
  This is a really interesting breakdown of web3 (or as he calls it later on web2x2). I haven't dove into the world of web3 yet but it does seem incredibly ironic that there's already seemingly a large amount of consolidation around platforms to make web3 more accessible to people. This is good for early adopters and artists who are generating wealth during the gold rush but I don't think it's good for "web3 the idea" as a distributed protocol.
  • ssss11 5y ago
    It feels like there’s alot of get rich quick types involved (is a gold rush as you say) but over time the decentralised principles will play out
• newfonewhodis 5y ago
  This > After a few days, without warning or explanation, the NFT I made was removed from OpenSea (an NFT marketplace) Then > What I found most interesting, though, is that after OpenSea removed my NFT, it also no longer appeared in any crypto wallet on my device. This is web3, though, how is that possible? How indeed: > You don’t own “web3.” > The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label. > Know what you’re getting into… > https://twitter.com/jack/status/1473139010197508098 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1473139010197508098
  • verdverm 5y ago
    If you read why indeed, it is because metamask calls the OpenSea API. All one has to do is call a different API for the same information. It's not like it was actually gone
  • dang 5y ago
    Please don't degenerate into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • newfonewhodis 5y ago
      How is that a flamewar? Literally talking about the content of the article.
      • dang 5y ago
        You started from the article and headed straight for a highly repetitive flamewar trope. That's just what we're trying to avoid. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site more to heart? You unfortunately have a history of violating it, and we're trying for at least a slightly better quality of discussion here.
        • dekhn 5y ago
• codeptualize 5y ago
  Really great article, it's so nice to read a nuanced article on such a flame war topic.
• intrasight 5y ago
  The first article on Web3 that I've read that drills into the details and was written by someone who's not only kicked the tires but taken the thing for a spin. And the conclusion: It's mostly the bad stuff of Web2 combined with the bad stuff of Crypto.
  • Guest42 5y ago
    Exactly,and it's also intentionally misnamed as web3 as if it's an inevitable extension of current internet practices, rather than a scifi buzzword fantasy of a small pocket of investors (or small to moderate hedge of larger investors).
  • joe_the_user 5y ago
    A deep dive into this stuff is certainly useful. The question is, of the people who were offended by shallowness of people saying "this is obviously garbage though I can't be bothered to investigate it", how many will say "ah, so here's a thorough, technical and soft-spoken explanation why this is all garbage, thanks".
  • serverholic 5y ago
    I find these articles to be a lot like criticizing tcp/ip because Facebook exists.
  • SubiculumCode 5y ago
    I think you are over-simplifying the conclusions of the article. The article presents a much more nuanced view, and while it points to certain limitations and deficiencies of Web 3.0 (and that only on the Eth part of it; we are in a multi-blockchain world now), it also points to several strengths of the growing ecosystems, and mostly comes across as humble; not knowing how its all going to turn out.
    • intrasight 5y ago
      Yes - a bit over-simplifying I admit. And Moxie said that it's "early days". However it turns out, it'll be fun to watch.
• nathanyz 5y ago
  Concise, well thought out analysis by a cryptographer on Web3. If you believe in Web3, then you shouldn't dismiss this out of hand as a hater. He truly tried to understand how it works by actually building dApps. And the holes seem glaringly obvious. What you should do if you believe in Web3, is take this as constructive criticism and improve so that they holes are no longer there.
• devadvance 5y ago
  This is a really well-thought-out, nuanced take. I really appreciate mixture of "but there are still servers", not being able to stop a gold rush, and (refreshingly) the technical take on the implementation details. It stands in such stark contrast to other content. For example, a web3 chat app announcement I saw yesterday [1]. I even joined the Discord to learn more and just found...hype. I found this parenthetical to be amusing: > (visualizing this financial structure would resemble something similar to a pyramid shape) Pyramid-shaped financial setups indeed :). [1] https://twitter.com/MessagePartyApp/status/1479151001181376514 https://twitter.com/MessagePartyApp/status/14791510011813765...
  • bko 5y ago
    The centralization of apis (infura, opensea and ethscan used by metamask) is the biggest problem. I could be wrong, but I don't think we've seen that fast consolidation in other early tech. I remember in the late 90s there were a number of search engines but no one really owned the space. Only 20 years later did Google emerge as the winner and is (IMO) by far the best in terms of relevant results. But that didn't happen overnight, and there wasn't a search engine dominating 90% of the market within a few years of the beginning of mainstream acceptance. How hard is it to create a competitor to infura? MetaMask should be incentivized to do this as they're core offering is controlled by one party. [edit] Never mind, metamask and infura are owned by the same company (ConsenSys). It's even worse than it appears...
    • mritchie712 5y ago
      It's really not that hard (or even expensive) to run your own. Here's[0] an example doing it on k8's. I had something similar running on GCP in a couple hours. It's been running for a month with no issues. 0 - https://messari.io/article/running-an-ethereum-node-on-kubernetes-is-easy https://messari.io/article/running-an-ethereum-node-on-kuber...
      • sv123 5y ago
        But one of the main points of article is that people don't want to run servers, developers included. Even being easy, letting someone else do it will always be easier.
• elliotbnvl 5y ago
  This article seems like it neatly encapsulates and explains why I've subconsciously held off from jumping into the Web3 space. It might be confirmation bias speaking, but I don't think I've seen anyone lampoon Web3 so thoroughly, and it's nice to have some well-reasoned explanations for why I feel the way I do. EDIT: A further thought: this article is the first I've read on Web3 that feels like it's actually important and I'm looking forward to the discussion. Are there any real counterpoints to be made against his reasoning?
  • SubiculumCode 5y ago
    I don't think this article "lampoons" web3 in any way. While the article is on the whole critical (but not completely), it did not do so using sarcasm, ridicule, or irony. lampoon: publicly criticize (someone or something) by using ridicule, irony, or sarcasm.
    • elliotbnvl 5y ago
      Hmm, you're quite right. Poor word choice. Perhaps 'skewers' would be more appropriate.
      • tasha0663 5y ago
        Eviscerates. This is a vivisection. We can see how it works, but this kills the frog.
  • bidder33 5y ago
    I guess as some counterpoints: I kind of agree in some ways but i think he underplays the critical point that you have an option for voice and exit from the forming centralising forces (which do get established because people like convenience/reliability/familiarity) without sacrificing your data or belongings, you can leave without losses. That is a critical difference. His nft is delisted from a platform and his wallet calls the api of that platform. That sucks, up till now we have "too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone". But that isn't the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls it. He can still get all the data, there are other wallets, you can run them in your terminal if you like, or you can set your metamask to use your own - or someone elses - node (instead of infura). There is a choice. There are things like TheGraph making distributed indexers/search engines and something like that will replace opensea as the main nft api (if they arent building it themselves). Add to this the more recent developments of light clients, which are coming along great and which allow us to run in-app/in-browser direct connections to the chain for calls/transactions without needing infura or a third party node. > Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going, and this won’t just be a blip. If that’s the case, it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency. Absolutely agree. there are a lot of people in this space who have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives pursuing their interests in it, and they will. It isn't going away and we should engage with making it as good as we can. Will it be a big thing in ten years? who knows, I can say that everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality. What will we see in the next 5? We can absolutely bring better privacy too. Layers like aztec are working on exactly that, and zero knowledge proofs and other forms of commitments (sismo) are exploring how to do that. I think a lot of people in the space follow the ideal of "privacy for the individual, transparency for the institutions". We will get there. > We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. i sort of agree with this, we can accept that full nodes will be ran be organisations, businesses, and nerdy individuals who also have their own funkwhale instances and homelabs. those commited to the ideals -> same as home email servers or mastodon communities. but we can also find ways to distribute infrastructure to bring resilience to those who dont think much about these things and just want to use an app. (again with things like light clients replacing api calls to third parties). so that we care for the non-committed users and make sure the points of fragility are lessened as much as we can. I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer "i'll be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn't helpful either. I'd be much more interested in his thoughts on Whisper/Waku and messaging protocols, tradeoffs in validity/volition/optimistic rollups, distributed indexers, etc. He is smart enough and involved in similar things to just take that extra step to the dev forums and discussions and maybe give meaningful, helpful critique. I'm not sure what response he is expecting tbh? The rest on gold rush and money i don't have much to say on, but mass speculation and desperation to make money is, imo, a symptom of the abusive system of work and finance that we are all forced into and everyone wants to escape. That didnt just appear with crypto/nfts. So sure, people are using something because they are making money and might not actually care about the details and the ethics - but we are also building a free(libre) opensource p2p programmable value network, and there are lots of people who also think that is amazing and worth indicating as different from the current stacks with the 'web3' tag.
• titzer 5y ago
  > We’d all have our own web server with our own web site, our own mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own status messages, our own chargen server for our own character generation. However – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – that is not what people want. People do not want to run their own servers. I must be stuck in the past. It's true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, insecure, wonky POS that needs constant patching. This is really a failure of software and shoving all that up a level into the cloud is not fixing anything. At least with your own hardware you can nuke it and start over from scratch. With your own hardware (and disks), you at least know where your data resides. We live in a time where you can get a 4 TB NAS for essentially nothing. You can drop a 8 core, 32GB RAM server on top of that for less than $1k. I don't know what other people's scaling needs are--who knows, maybe they need to serve 100 PB?--but it's a mind blowing amount of computation. Most people can probably serve their silly websites off that. If you can't handle your own email load on a server like that, I honestly have no idea what you're up to. I kind of do want to run my own ones of those things...but I know (with today's software) I'd hate it. Because even after all these years, it kind of terrifies me, the metric shitton of stuff I have had no clue how to do, and I know is way over complicated...because everything is way overcomplicated.
  • alx__ 5y ago
    His point is that a majority of people don't want to bother with the cognitive overload of running a server. Just like you could build your own car, very few want to. Often they don't even care what kind of car they have. As long as it can get them from home to work and back again without killing them.
    • titzer 5y ago
      I mean, I get that. I have a mailbox on my house. Letters come to it. I don't think about it too much. Bits come to my house all the time but somehow those trillions of computations keep flubbing this basic functionality.
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      Yeah and I think the point here is that the cognitive overload is unnecessary. Most people don't want to build their own car but most people would rather own their own car instead of rent one every time they need to go somewhere. In the server world, the options are to build or rent, there's no real option to just buy one that works already. Even having to set your rear view mirrors and seat position is worthwhile, even having to check tire pressure periodically is worthwhile, to continue the car analogy. If we could buy a box that we plug into the wall, and have simple minimal maintenance and setup UX, like a car, or even like a desktop or mobile device, is not impossible. But it doesn't really exist.
• murat124 5y ago
  I don't like that when an actually good successor to web2 comes along it won't be called web3 because of this bullshit that they call web3.
  • exdsq 5y ago
    • murat124 5y ago
      Well the flaw being they claim it is decentralized when it really isn't. How can a blockchain based web be more decentralized than what I run on my vps? In any case, all the things I read about this cryptoweb technology screams bullshit (and scam/moneygrab - possibly by investors).
  • recursive 5y ago
    Well, this is already the second web3, (the first being semantic and micro-formats) so maybe we can just use it yet again?
• stavros 5y ago
  As much as I hate cryptocurrency as-it-exists, I'm very much into its potential. Untraceable (eg Monero) digital cash that settles instantly? That has the potential to disrupt societies. The problem is that most societies don't have a particular need of being disrupted, so people are perfectly content paying with their credit cards, and why shouldn't they be? The UX is better and the banks are fine as long as they don't piss off a too-large portion of the population. Still, I would love it if I could use, say, Nano (as it has very limited PoW) to pay for things instantly and securely. I'm hoping a miracle happens, but I don't think it will, or it would already have happened.
  • wstrange 5y ago
    Untraceable digital cash facilitates crime, money laundering and tax evasion. None of these things are good for a stable democracy.
    • xboxnolifes 5y ago
      Pretty much any additional freedom facilitates crime.
    • stavros 5y ago
      And perfect law enforcement means a stagnating society. Think where we would be now if gay people were discovered and punished instantly as soon as they kissed a person of the same sex, or interracial couples were punished as soon as they started dating, etc.
    • drexlspivey 5y ago
      You mean like paper cash?
      • astrange 5y ago
        Cash isn't untraceable, it has serial numbers on it.
    • zekrioca 5y ago
• clarle 5y ago
  As an engineer, I feel like this single post helped me better understand Web3 and how it worked under the hood better than any of the heavily hyped Discord and Twitter announcements of new projects over the past year. It's interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the other big crypto / NFT marketplaces. Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.
  • codehalo 5y ago
    Seems like you (and a vast majority of HN including Moxie) is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask/OpenSea). I saw this back in the 90's when a lot of people thought the internet was "Internet Explorer".
    • pavlov 5y ago
      And that's one of Moxie's points: how exactly is web3 supposed to be avoiding the centralization that occurred on the web, when it's already at that point.
      • PretzelPirate 5y ago
        Ethereum light clients will make it trivial to verify the state of the blockchain and interact with it without also having to store the entire blockchain. The nice thing is that you can depend on Infura for now, but if they ever attempt to be dishonest, you can easily switch to hosting your own node or light client. The cost of moving away from these centralized services is pretty low.
        • gen220 5y ago
          I think this is “the point”. This is like saying you can switch away from GMail by running your own mail server. People don’t want to run their own mail server. Will the ethereum light client run in metamask with no configuration? I’m afraid anything short of that is too heavy.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• simias 5y ago
  >When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for purely digital goods might be a concept with a future. Having standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and query and update these goods might make sense (although I still think it goes opposite to the general trend of walled gardens vs. decentralized web, I don't see why the IP owners would play ball and accept the loss of control). The thing is that in most case those NFTs wouldn't be trustless. I see people putting forward that a use case would be an NFT that proves that your Rolex is real, or for Fortnite skins, or for the ownership of your house. But in all these situations, there's a very clear authority (Rolex, Epic Games and the municipal authorities, respectively). These authorities will be allowed to mint new NFTs at will (because who else?) and as such have to be trusted. That opens up interesting questions btw, like "who is Rolex exactly?" which creates a chain of custody of trusted authority involving trademark management among other things. But I digress. But then as soon as an authority is identified, why bother with the extreme overhead (it terms of resources and costs) of blockchain tech? Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? Like cryptocurrencies, the subset of problems that can only be solved using NFTs is incredibly tiny and speculators rush to make up use cases that, if you think about it for five minutes, clearly make no sense and could be better solved using good old centralized tech.
  • pshc 5y ago
    > Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact same security and trust profile without having to involve any "web3" feature? A serial number can be copied and engraved onto a forged watch, so not really. A more analogous scenario would be if Rolex embedded an NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that the chip’s cert was indeed signed by Rolex.
    • simias 5y ago
• Uptrenda 5y ago
  What he says about NFTs is embarrassing, lmao. I've personally never bought them myself but I am enthusiastic about blockchain tech. Is there really no commitment saved for an art work? You would think this was basic shit. Maybe there is more than one NFT protocol? He also has a good point about centralization in 'blockchain oracle' services. In major wallets I've often seen them just make calls to blockchain / TX lookup services -- no cryptographic proofs there (though in theory easy to add with 'spv proofs'?) I also like that he went as far as to make two dapps before critiquing it. This is one of the better criticisms of 'web3' out there. I don't think what he says about OpenSea being better as a 'centralized' service is valid. Most of his critiques for the downside of blockchain-tech seem to be Ethereum-specific. For example, Solana transactions are blazingly fast, low-cost, and there are nice stable coins on there. OpenSea seems like it would be 'better' if it were an actual cryptographic protocol. Maybe link it with IPFS + Filecoin.
• CameronNemo 5y ago
  I like Moxie's work and writings, and this article has some great points, but I can't get behind this: We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. I'm not ready to give in. I am happy to leave "normal" (tech illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals. I think instead of building centralized infrastructure that does not require trust, we can make it easier to host decentralized infrastructure. Including allowing a "server" to be offline for months at a time, come online for a minute or two, then disappear again. P2P networking is also an area we can improve on, IMO. Too much information is going across the internet instead of point to point. Bluetooth is a terrible protocol, but airdrop (and reverse engineered implementations) seems to be promising.
  • spenczar5 5y ago
    What does it mean to leave normal people behind? Surely you need to interact with them. For example, you can run your own mail server, but you will need to play by Google’s rules if you want anyone on Gmail to get your emails. So, it’s hard for me to picture what it means to personally decentralize without caring what the bulk of people do.
    • CameronNemo 5y ago
      Email is inherently centralized due to DNS being centralized. Furthermore there is no rule that says I have to federate with any particular entity. They will take the loss.
      • spenczar5 5y ago
        Hm, I think my point might not have been clear enough. I would find it hard to function without interacting with central system, like sending an email to someone on gmail. Just today, I emailed a plumber on gmail, but it could easily have been an old friend or a relative or whatever. How do you email the plumber, is my question?
• boulos 5y ago
  Some of this echoes Matt Levine's take on crypto and DeFi generally: you will repeatedly see the re-learning the lessons of hundreds/thousands of years of traditional finance. I'm not sure that the "mobile device can't act as a node" is fundamental (it's more a quirk of the current systems), but "nobody wants to run their own server" => "centralization" is a great reminder: > I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds: centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired in time.
• dthul 5y ago
  The views on centralized services such as Infura really resonate with me. A few months ago I looked into how Ethereum and smart contracts work and got excited that there is basically this shared "virtual machine" with persistent, public state that can only be altered by interacting with those smart contracts. But soon after it became clear that it is not really possible for me (or any regular "client" as the article calls it) to look at the state of the virtual machine and evaluate view functions myself. The block chain is so large already that we need to rely on big servers which are operated by other people to do this.
  • ssss11 5y ago
    But there are other L1 blockchains already that aren’t like that (eg. Mina) and who knows in future what will come..
    • dthul 5y ago
      Good to know! I don't know much about the blockchain space and have only looked more closely at Ethereum so far.
      • ssss11 5y ago
        Yeah that’s fair enough, and it’s changing so fast. I imagine alot of the current problems will be fixed over time… it’ll get there eventually. There are some good educational resources cropping up now e.g. Web3 University and rabbithole.gg
  • sva_ 5y ago
    I think you can use geth --syncmode snap to get a snapshot quickly with which you can interact with the Blockchain.
  • omeze 5y ago
    You can do this locally though, it just takes like 200 GB. I've run an Ethereum full node + eth2 beacon chain node on my Macbook Pro for local development, took like 10 hours to sync IIRC and just worked afterwards. I still use Infura for projects though bc I don't really see the value in running my own hosted client for pet projects. If I was doing a production app I'd likely use my own w/ a 3rd party service for backup/HA.
• spenczar5 5y ago
  This is the first enlightening article I have read about Web3. Maybe that says more about how little I have read than about how good the article is. Anyway, Moxie seems very focused on the decentralization aspect - that Web3 doesn’t decentralize as much as we would like. An alternative aspect is the “global ledger of ownership and transferrence” though. Yes, interacting with blockchains is hard so it is some through APIs… but there does still seem to be something important about the idea that my ownership of something on a blockchain is permanent, and exists outside of any corporate notion of ownership, in a deep mathematical way. That’s fundamentally appealing! But is it appealing enough to overcome market forces? I think Moxie is right to spend a lot of time on the “nobody wants to run servers” thing because it shows that most users are powerfully motivated by convenience; if the mathematically-beautiful blockchain ownership records remain inconvenient then they are likely to be a niche attraction (like running your own mail server).
• arcticbull 5y ago
  I'll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura, Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked. [edit] By "full node" I meant "archival node."
  • go_to_moon 5y ago
    only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes source?
    • arcticbull 5y ago
      I should have said archival nodes, the ones that keep state back to the genesis block. I don't know if that number is even tracked anywhere. I've read estimates ranging from 2 to 5. I'm trying to find where I read that, happy to be wrong - or right, if anyone has data. [edit] Here. [1] And here. [2] After examining every which way we could think of to add the Trie state to our Ethereum state, we asked Vitalik for assistance. His first comment to us was “oh you’re one of the few running one of those big, scary nodes.” We asked him if he knew of anyone else running a “big, scary node” to see if we could possibly sync with them. He knew of no one, not even the Ethereum Foundation keeps a full archival copy of the Ethereum chain. [2]. [1] https://librehash.org/ethereum-archival-node-review/ https://librehash.org/ethereum-archival-node-review/ [2] https://blog.blockcypher.com/ethereum-woes-d9b2af62da67 https://blog.blockcypher.com/ethereum-woes-d9b2af62da67
      • jwlake 5y ago
        I've run quite a bit of analytics on ethereum and have downloaded the entire chain multiple times for processing and it's freely available from multiple providers. All the major API providers (infura, etherscan, etc) have the all the raw blocks available readily.
      • dylkil 5y ago
        everyone running erigon nodes (like myself) are running full archival nodes, currently there are ~300, https://www.ethernodes.org/ https://www.ethernodes.org/. Many geth nodes are archival, but we cant see which ones are.
• NotyoBiz 5y ago
  With regard to the last paragraph: Take a look at what Agoric is doing. Basically making programming smart contracts less difficult with JavaScript. Very interesting, worth a look.
• superfrank 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will This kind of gets at the reason why I think a lot of tech articles/blogs about what the future will be like are just terrible. The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different from the general population. Like this author says, most people don't want to run their own web server, but I'd go even farther and say, most people don't really care about decentralization or even data privacy. Getting most people to care about privacy and decentralization is like getting a kid to eat vegetables. They know they should, but the alternative has more short term benefits. I think most people care about ease of use over almost everything else. People who write these articles need to be thinking about the middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a Nintendo". There will always be some users for technologies like web3, but until you can clearly demonstrate to that woman that this new technology has value and is easier to use than the status quo, you're never going to get mass adoption. Connecting this back to web3, we're clearly not there yet. Almost anything being done on web3 is slower, more expensive, and more complicated than its web2 alternative. We may or may not get there one day, but until we do, I don't see web3 being anything more than a niche product.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    It's refreshing to read an article that admits this: > > Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. I actually enjoy build and running servers, but only for hobby purposes. When it comes down to anything business related or critical, I have zero desire to run and maintain it on my own. And I especially don't want to have to handle security for large amounts of money that could disappear in an instant if I make one wrong misstep.
    • wpietri 5y ago
      For sure. I ran my own servers for many years. And I still enjoy playing with hardware at home. But a couple years back I shut down my last colocated physical server and I do not miss it. The background stress of knowing that at any point I might have to wake up, haul my ass down to a colo, and swap a motherboard just got to me. Now all my must-stay-up stuff is built via Terraform in a a public cloud. If there's a hardware failure, it's not my problem. It's such a relief!
• karaterobot 5y ago
  I wanted to say that I appreciate his approach to stating why he isn't sold on Web3: thoughtful, succinct, diplomatic, and based on the results of an open-minded experiment. This is so much more of an article I'm ready to engage with than the the "crypto is a pyramid scheme, don't you get it you morons!?" articles.
• lekevicius 5y ago
  While it's refreshing to hear critique from someone who actually built something on web3, there are a couple of points where I'd dare to disagree, somewhat. Particularly, regarding "early days". It really is, still, early days, because there is a lot of complexity in getting all the pieces built. It took years to get overall blockchain going. Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart contracts). Other pieces too: more efficient consensus mechanisms and clever ways to express commitments, decentralized storage, etc. And the space is so far from being done. Particulary, about servers being clients. This is true today, but it would be wrong to say that nobody cares about it. Ethereum developers spend considerable effort on pushing the idea of light clients, going as far as re-architecturing the way whole blockchain state is stored, so that browsers could actually become fully valid clients, and services such as Infura would become a lot less necessary. This requires cryptographic innovations (verkle trees), client implementations, consensus between participants, etc. It is likely to require 2+ years to get there. Early days. Another moment I would critique is the clever NFT, that displays different things. Yes, ERC-721 allows any URL as metadata file, so you can put traditional DNS-resolved URL there. But I would struggle to find any "respected" NFT collection that actually does that. Almost every high quality NFT project (Art Blocks, BAYC, so on) has IPFS as metadata URL, and goes as far as to freeze metadata, so it couldn't ever be changed. Lastly, his discussion about value of decentralization is very valid. Yes, Ethereum developers spend a lot of effort on light clients. Will anyone care to use them? Yes, best NFT collections freeze metadata pointed to IPFT... does anyone care? Success of OpenSea and Binance Smart Chain shows that for many, idealistic goals are irrelevant, as long as money can be made. That's fine. But there are some of us who actually care. Majority has uninteresting goals (money). There are still amazing gems to be found.
  • spenczar5 5y ago
    My understanding of IPFS is that there is some DNS-and-HTTP translation step that resolves content to IPFS locations. Is that correct, and is it immutable? How does that work?
    • lekevicius 5y ago
      There are many gateways that allow viewing IPFS content over HTTP (e.g. ipfs.io), but the "true" IPFS experience is not over HTTP, it's done via P2P and addressed using content hashes. For example, one of my NFTs has content hash of QmTqkpmbKmciQgqhUWpML7dsJ59MBEjgQd7wH853n4ASZM I keep a copy of it on my computer (+ backups). If for some reason it were to be unhosted by every IPFS participant, I could become one, and re-establish my NFT. Image content -> content hash, so everyone would agree about content re-establishing. Not sure if I fully answered your question.
• pseudosavant 5y ago
  If you only read one thing on "crypto", this should be it.
• dddw 5y ago
  I enjoyed reading this article. The closer you look towards cryptocurrencies and smart contract projects like nfts, the less likely without a significant (state) player supporting these experiments I doubt we'll talk let alone use these speculative industries in a quarter century. Anyone can make an currency, only a strong arm can force you to pay.
• justinator 5y ago
  Does it look like I know what an NFT is? All I want is a JPG of a gawd dang hot dog.
• ineptech 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. Not really much related to web3/crypto topics, but I think this is an indictment of servers, not people. If managing a server were easy and secure, lots of people would do it - for blogs, a minecraft server for the kids, to back up their pictures, and yes, to store their bitcoins or other digital secrets - they just don't want to manage a unix or windows server. It used to be hard to install a webcam, now it isn't. No reason server software can't do the same thing - all we need is for some gigantic corporation to sink 100k developer-hours into it (which sounds like a joke, until you remember that there are several gigantic corporations who have very profitable side-hustles hosting servers, and who would be creating a whole new class of customer if they did this).
  • ericd 5y ago
    Yeah, I think the success of Synology's NASes speaks to this - they're largely used as little home servers. And it could be even easier if someone built a box that functioned as a router and a server with dynamic DNS as an easy part of the setup. The UI would have to be really, really polished, but I think it could be done. Symmetric home ISP connections would make these more useful, too. Sadly, that's not the norm right now, but perhaps that's because most people don't demand it.
  • pjsg 5y ago
    What is the benefit to the average user of running their own server? Most people (maybe even on HN) just want things to work. We buy connectivity services for our phones and our homes. I certainly don't want to run my own Wireless ISP to connect up my neighbourhood even if it was marginally cheaper (until I account for my time). We buy storage services (for lots of reasons) from Amazon, Google, <your favorite backup provider>, etc. I don't want to run a large NAS and keep it running and backed up. We buy messaging services (voice, SMS, email, IM etc). I don't want to run my own Asterisk VOIP PBX, my own OpenBTS node, my own postfix instance, my own IRC server. I buy power services (electricity and oil). I don't want to run my own oil well, refinery, nuclear power plant etc. I do actually run some solar panels, but the amount of cognitive load that they cost me is very small. It is probably under 3 hours per year of having to fiddle with them. In short, the cost in terms of time and energy from me makes it far cheaper to outsource all of these services to someone else. This doesn't prevent you from running any/all of these services, but I would suggest that you are in a very small minority. Having said all of that, if I lived on an island with no services, I might be tempted to run some of them myself.
• smm11 5y ago
  As long as I can stream stuff moving forward, I don't care what Web version we're "on."
• justinator 5y ago
  I was under the impression that crypto currency was thought of as nothing but yet another pyramid scheme.
  • wyck 5y ago
    By definition something with a finite supply cannot be a pyramid scheme, in fact in most cases there are no parallels whatsoever to crypto and pyramid schemes. There are some pyramid schemes within the shitcoin scam and yield farmer communities, but to think that's represents the industry is highly ignorant.
    • justinator 5y ago
      So you're saying the SEC is, "highly ignorant"? https://www.sec.gov/files/ia_virtualcurrencies.pdf https://www.sec.gov/files/ia_virtualcurrencies.pdf
      • wyck 5y ago
        Ya, do you really think otherwise?
      • phire 5y ago
        Did you even read what you linked? The SEC are saying that some operators of proper Ponzi schemes are taking crypto as investment and using crypto hype to justify their insane profits. Not that crypto in general is a Pyramid or Ponzi scheme.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • wizzwizz4 5y ago
      By your definition, the original Ponzi scheme isn't a pyramid scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme That scheme was based on arbitrage of international reply coupons, of which there were a finite number in circulation.
• jdnordy 5y ago
  This is the best article I've found to help me understand what Web3 is and how it actually works. Thanks op!
• jagger27 5y ago
  > [...] NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image. How did we go from trapdoor functions being the foundation of everything in the space to forgetting to hash a link? Is the rational that these links should only ever be IPFS links? That's fine I guess, at least those are hashed. Why does the protocol allow for this to happen?
  • ptudan 5y ago
    There are plenty of use cases for NFTs with updating data. Many exist already. Most high quality NFT art project do use IPFS, yes. But that is not the only use case for NFTs
    • jagger27 5y ago
      I believe that it's possible for there to be a reasonable use case for a pointer to something that changes, though I'd appreciate an example because I can't come up with one. If it links to something that's not on some sort of blockchain, then what's the point? If an NFT contains a normal URL, how could that possibly be valuable? The domain could expire or be transferred, or the original server hosting it could go down. I can't imagine any NFT that holds "ownership" of a real world tangible asset having any meaning whatsoever.
      • ptudan 5y ago
        Imagine a logistics system that uses the existing capability of NFTs to give all interested parties a clear and transparent view of ownership transfers, eg factory to container ship to port etc. The data underneath can only be modified by the current owner of the NFT. The off-chain data could be encrypted and fit the particular companies standard. The blockchain need not contain 100% of the business logic for a use-case, but instead only the parts that are relevant to being trustless and public.
• endisneigh 5y ago
  If you care about the environment even a little bit (like turning off lights in rooms you're not occupying) then you will reject Web3. Even the most efficient blockchains use more energy than the status quo unnecessarily. This is also to say nothing of the fact that it's more expensive per USD/KB transferred, slower and more complicated. I think what Web3 should be is a way to use your laptop or any commodity computer as infrastructure for your data, and there should be APIs for websites such that it uses your computer as the source as opposed to their own servers. For example this comment could be saved on my computer, but accessible to everyone viewing even if my computer is off via caching, but ultimately I could invalidate and delete.
  • dqpb 5y ago
    Algorand is carbon-negative. The inventor is a Turing-award winning MIT professor.
    • NationalPark 5y ago
      Via carbon offsets, so they emit all the co2 up front and then hope the forests their partners plant are both real and will be properly managed for the next few decades.
      • dqpb 5y ago
        They emit very little co2 up front. So little that they trivially reach carbon-negative with a small amount of carbon offsets.
        • wizzwizz4 5y ago
          Very little compared to the entire planet, sure. But what's the actual amount?
          • dqpb 5y ago
            Sustainable Blockchain: Estimating the Carbon Footprint of Algorand’s Pure Proof-of-Stake https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/sustainable-blockchain-calculating-the-carbon-footprint https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/sustainable-blockcha...
• fabian2k 5y ago
  At the risk of displaying my ignorance and lack of knowledge about this area, one part I found very familiar in this article is that the action interactions in his apps didn't actually interact with the blockchain, but essentially with two centralized services. My very limited understanding is that for blockchains essentially the way to distribute them is that every node has a full copy. This sounds awfully expensive in the long run. My intuition would be that once running a node is expensive enough, this would not be truly decentralized. If I can't get the fundamental information out of a blockchain myself on hardware I can afford, the actual properties of the blockchain don't matter anymore as I cannot access them myself. The moment you need to rely on third parties, you lose any unique properties a blockchain might have. I don't know how this would work if blockchains inherently are inefficient enough that you always need a way around querying them directly. I find the idea of a distributed trust-less database interesting, but if it is so inefficient that I can't actually access it myself that idea doesn't seem that interesting anymore.
  • not2b 5y ago
    Except that as you say, it's too expensive for every node to have a full copy, so there will only be a few dominant players. If that's the case, web3 will be like what we have now, where instead of the dominant players being Google, Meta, and Amazon they will be the two or three dominant web3 companies, with a few smaller people trying to keep up. So I would agree with your last sentence.
    • wyck 5y ago
      That's not how decentralized blockchains work, you participate in staking or as a validator, there are no "companies", it's open source and decisions ar3 made from the ground up, meaning your are a participant. Also to say every node needs a full copy is about 5 years behind what's currently happening in the space.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • kyruzic 5y ago
      You are massively over estimating how much a copy of the entire history of ethereum costs. You can store the entire blockchain on a 1 tb harddrive. The cost prohibitive nature is only running an open rpc that you tell hundreds of thousands of people about. Then you will have to deal will letting all those people access that 1tb of data. Quicknode lets you have a private rpc with the full history of the chain for dollars a month.
• jfb 5y ago
  Could it be that people aren't really interested in undoing the mistakes of Web2, but rather just kicking off a new round of consolidation, where they could be the gatekeepers/platform owners?
  • threeseed 5y ago
    It's more that developers are bored and looking for something new and shiny. And VCs are flush with cash and have nowhere to deploy it.
  • sovietmudkipz 5y ago
    Chaos is a ladder... Hmm
• scotty79 5y ago
  People happily run their servers when it's valuable for them. A lot of people have torrent program running in the background.
• somishere 5y ago
  Great article. Would love to read an equally solid rebuttle. Can I suggest Web2^0?
• mrkramer 5y ago
  >A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted Traffic between email clients and servers is encrypted so can be emails themselves; PGP can be used for encryption of emails and authentication between email senders. But another story is majority of people do not use PGP because of its bad UX.
  • wepple 5y ago
    >A protocol Running email protocols over TLS isn’t an improvement to the protocol, it’s tunneling. PGP isn’t an improvement to the protocol, it’s encapsulating data in another protocol/format. Your comment proves he point; email has evolved so slow we’re running it through tunnels and embedding PGP encryption to overcome the weaknesses that the protocol has not been able to fix.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  > For example, whether it’s running on mobile or the web, a dApp like Autonomous Art or First Derivative needs to interact with the blockchain somehow – in order to modify or render state (the collectively produced work of art, the edit history for it, the NFT derivatives, etc). That’s not really possible to do from the client, though, since the blockchain can’t live on your mobile device (or in your desktop browser realistically). So the only alternative is to interact with the blockchain via a node that’s running remotely on a server somewhere. > As it happens, companies have emerged that sell API access to an ethereum node they run as a service, along with providing analytics, enhanced APIs they’ve built on top of the default ethereum APIs, and access to historical transactions. > Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to interact with the blockchain. In fact, even when you connect a wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to Infura! > Imagine if every time you interacted with a website in Chrome, your request first went to Google before being routed to the destination and back. That’s the situation with ethereum today. This is a very common complaint about anything that claims to be decentralized. It was also surprising to me years ago when I first read about Bitcoin and realized that it's not practical to maintain the whole blockchain on most clients. However, how do ISPs fit into this analogy with "web 1"? Since we're assuming that the original world wide web was worthy of being called "decentralized," doesn't this same criticism apply to ISPs? Even if you ran your own web server from your own facility, presumably the ISP was a third party that you had to (in some sense) trust.
• msgilligan 5y ago
  He's focused on Ethereum and NFTs, which is certainly the most popular/obvious place to research. I think his analysis is excellent and the article is worth reading. But he does say: > I have only dipped my toe in the waters of web3 Notably he doesn't even mention IPFS (which uses the pre-image of an JPG to form the URL.) Nor does he mention Bitcoin (which provides a shared state layer as well as a currency and makes it much easier to run a full node than Ethereum, which by most measures makes the network more decentralized.) I prefer to use the term "Decentralized Web" or "Decentralized Internet" and I agree with Moxie that it will take a long time. I think Ethereum is fascinating and an amazing innovation and (who knows) maybe eventually the off-chain pieces of its ecosystem will become more decentralized. Keep building, folks! (Slightly edited to fix/improve punctuation)
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    While I agree that he only touched on NFTs and not really anything beyond that, his core point, "decentralized architecture is slower to iterate on, therefore centralized tools will outpace decentralized ones, therefore the market will trend towards use of centralized services" is hard to disagree with. He is only using the NFT market as an example to demonstrate this point. Even if you don't consider it natural market forces, and you say "people are building their infrastructure on centralized services so as to place themselves in a rent seeking position", you now wind up having to explain how you intend to stop these "bad actors" from not doing the "right thing" and designing their infrastructure against their own interest. How do you align incentives to ensure a decentralized future in this way? Seems like a glaring hole in the entire plan that results in centralized services being in wider use, only bolting on top of a decentralized database that in the end doesn't really matter. I'm a big fan of cryptocurrency and these decentralized incentive networks. I'd love to see a future where everyone doesn't rely on these centralized services and the UX is low friction. I think it can be done. I like to know that I can use decentralized uncensorable money, and other asset types, and I like the fact that these options are available today, right now, to me and anyone else who values them. But the web3 concept as it's sold by the cryptocurrency enthusiasts doesn't appear to be going that direction, and at this point I think moxie is probably right.
• PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will That's one believably accurate summary. But here's another: rather than focus on trying to make it easy, cheap and simple for everyone to run their own servers, the tech world spent 1996-today instead focused on offering to take care of this for everybody else, for a price. Everybody concluded in the late 90s that the "nobody wants to run their own servers" claim was self-evidently true, and so all the tech development went into extending server capabilities, extending browser capabilities, building hosting services and infrastructure, and almost no effort went into making running a web server as easy as, oh, I don't know, running Excel. Imagine a version of things where the server was almost a toy-like appliance. Hard to do? Yeah, I know, it's hard. But then again, in 1996 browsers with Web USB, Web Workers, Web Assembly and the like would have seemed impossibly hard and yet here we are. We don't have it because we chose not to build it.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    The personal server space is littered with failed startups. Not because it's difficult to make turnkey personal servers. Embedded Linux hardware is unbelievably cheap. They fail because they don't bring any benefit against real-world threats, but they come with significant downside risks. If your house floods or your home server is burgled, your data is just gone. So your home server ends up backed up to the cloud anyway, and now you're maintaining a home server and a cloud server when you could have just used the cloud service for everything without the headache.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      > Not because it's difficult to make turnkey personal servers. It's crazy hard to make turnkey personal servers that will be usable by ordinary people. > They fail because they don't bring any benefit against real-world threats, For a vocal contingent online, real-world threats involve lack of control over hosting, over their data, over encryption. Your own servers would address (at least partially) all these problems, but of course, these are not problems that most people in the world using walled gardens even consider to be problems. > So your home server ends up backed up to the cloud anyway, and now you're maintaining a home server and a cloud server Utilizing an online/network backup service as part of running your own server is qualitatively different from running a server in the cloud.
• ericjang 5y ago
  I have immense respect for Moxie, who has spent time building experiments and tinkering with a new technology, and as a result has a take on it that highlights very different issues than what most of the predictable web3 flamewar centers around. It makes you really think about who is really qualified to discuss said technology.
• jwlake 5y ago
  Some of his points are out of date (given state of the art is old), like royalties and immutable data. See ipfs, eip-2981, etc. Other parts are very on point, specifically everyone using opensea as authoritative for NFTs, which is crazy town. Opensea has a dog in the fight, and they are very opinionated about what's allowed in the tent and not. Things like etherscan and infura are less scary. I can't imagine building a wallet and depending on opensea for anything though, because your users are not going to appreciate that choice.
• isItpossible8 5y ago
• Uptrenda 5y ago
  Thin clients that verify transactions are possible though. For something like Bitcoin you have SPV-proofs that prove chains of headers. You can prove that a transaction was included in the longest chain without having to run a node yourself just by checking proof-of-work merkle trees; Even if the vast majority of users end up running clients that don't verify the whole chain -- cryptographic trust would still be ensured by checking headers. This requires no centralization. Satoshi wrote about this architecture early on in scaling the blockchain. Ethereum also allows light clients and I think it even has checkpoints that make downloading headers faster. Cryptographic protocols that verify smart contract results could be included in Metamask. I feel like not mentioning this in the essay shows a lack of familiarity with the literature even if he was extremely opened minded (enough to create dapps himself.) He did make valid observations about third-party trust: OpenSeas and Infura. But in both cases: these protocols can be implemented without centralized architecture. A decentralized alternative to Infura (that provides reliable results to users and easy-to-check attestations) is possible to build. One should also note that in blockchain land the lack of incentives to run a full node is a problem people are working to address. It's actually a perfect illustration of how the blockchain can lead to emergent systems. Some ledgers already have rewards for running full nodes. So yes -- people do want to run full nodes -- they just want to be paid for it.
  • atweiden 5y ago
    If it’s only possible to run full nodes in datacenters, paying people to run them is fairly pointless.
  • viewfromafar 5y ago
    I understand the criticism to be targeted at the "web3" idea, which is assumed to be about the infrastructure for decentralized applications. What is possible to implement is less relevant than what is likely to get implemented: here the clients (read: the app on the mobile) and their means of accessing the decentralized goodness matters. The argument as I understand it is: if access/usage to whatever decentralized goods is always mediated by the old centralized approach (you have to ask the server whether the transaction is valid) then you trust the operators of the servers and those folks have the option of making "everything" (access to those services/goods) faster & better. It is like the "last mile" problem where a company may well operate a global network but have no setup to act as ISP for end consumers, which is left to mediator. This is compatible with "web2" (https vpns etc) but the "web3" answer seems to be missing. The problem is that benefits of well-thought out incentive systems evaporate when access is mediated. If every dapp comes with its own mobile client and app-specific servers to address this, there is nothing decentralized about it.
• milofeynman 5y ago
  > The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there. Great insight. I didn't realize for maybe 8 months that NFTs were not actually storing the art on the Blockchain. I appreciate Moxie pointing out the problems with this in an eloquent way.
• beckman466 5y ago
  > the funds a contributor pays to mint are distributed to all previous artists (visualizing this financial structure would resemble something similar to a pyramid shape)
• ManishR 5y ago
  > The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is. So the money draws people into OpenSea, they improve the experience by building a platform that iterates on the underlying web3 protocols in web2 space, they eventually offer the ability to “mint” NFTs through OpenSea itself instead of through your own smart contract, and eventually this all opens the door for Coinbase to offer access to the validated NFT market with their own platform via your debit card. This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an improvement? Historically, any widely adopted technological innovation has had the burden to offer and prove incremental value to society to justify paying the transition costs. But here, the incremental value is being pitched as literal "money" to be made by getting in early - which can be hard to resist for your average joe - notwithstanding their passion or stance on the underlying technology. Believe this will be an interesting race condition between dying out of the hype on one side, and technology reaching critical mass to be self sustaining on the other side. In either case however, don't see anything fundamentally changing or improving for society, except perhaps some new players displacing (or getting bought out by) old ones.
  • jwblackwell 5y ago
    There's a huge amount happening in the crypto space beyond NFTs. The article focuses on that area, which is fine, as they were the flavour of 2021, but it's worth keeping in mind that very few techies in the space saw the NFT hype train coming, Vitalik included: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1477404671606153218 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/147740467160615321... so it's probably to be expected that a lot of the hacky, centralized fixes pointed out relate to NFTs.
  • atweiden 5y ago
    > This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an improvement? Historically, any widely adopted technological innovation has had the burden to offer and prove incremental value to society to justify paying the transition costs. But here, the incremental value is being pitched as literal "money" to be made by getting in early - which can be hard to resist for your average joe - notwithstanding their passion or stance on the underlying technology. If the product is self-enrichment, not technology, then when the “technology customer” — who has, invariably, invested money — starts losing money during a bear market, the vendor has a de facto failed core product on their hands in addition to a ruinous reputation from their prior unscrupulous peddling of a technological dud.
• jwblackwell 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will If only 0.01% of the population ever run a node / mine, isn't that still infinitely better than what we have now? Especially so when money is involved. The current alternative is 100% centralized. In other words, it's 1 DB vs ~700,000 or 1 company vs 700k individuals etc.
• Extigy 5y ago
  > What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Wait, really?! Indeed, that seems insane to me — links change or die all the time! I had thought the whole point was to prove a kind of ownership of some specific piece of art/data and just assumed that a hash of that data would be involved in a significant way.
• 0xluminous 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. I just wrote an article about this — what's really new about web3 is the incentives not the tech. > People don’t want to run servers. It’s okay for markets to specialize and service providers to receive economies of scale. > Email is a decentralized protocol, and customer behavior shows people just want to click and have things work, like Gmail. > What’s important is ensuring protocols stay competitive. > Federated servers following a decentralized blockchain with layers of competitive protocols for storing data, with semi-interoperable apps built on top, seem like a pretty workable solution. > Forcing everything P2P will be painful; there’s a reason the Cloud exists. Offline apps are great, and P2P app architecture is great, but expecting users to run P2P nodes is a losing battle. Some power users and volunteers will run nodes, but most will use a 3rd party. It’s better to accept this reality, minimize trust and make it competitive as possible. It's the best thing I've ever written, if you're into this kind of thing I hope you check it out. Disintermediating Network Effects for Fun and Profit, How to prevent Web3 from ending up like Web2 https://medium.com/@0xluminous/disintermediating-network-effects-for-fun-and-profit-fd2a44835013 https://medium.com/@0xluminous/disintermediating-network-eff...
  • 0xluminous 5y ago
    thanks to whoever downvoted this without giving a reason, wasn’t trying to spam, just thought it was relevant
• rockbruno 5y ago
  I always had trouble understanding what web3 was all about because I just couldn't figure out why anyone would be excited for it. I found this article to be excellent at explaining what the platform is but I still can't figure out why people keep bringing up this topic when it's clearly a classic example of a "Solution in Search of a Problem".
  • aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
    >but I still can't figure out why people keep bringing up this topic when it's clearly a classic example of a "Solution in Search of a Problem". They hope they can make money.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• layer8 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will They would if it's an app on their phone. Currently that's not possible due to the constraints of battery life and, to a lesser degree, mobile coverage and data plan limits.
• PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > Even organizations building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this point. This is almost entirely an educational/labor force issue, combined with a slight preference for the nominal hardware flexibility of cloud setups. The tech community focus from the dawn of the web until today has been overwhelmingly on getting people and tools to be better at creating and managing website content, whereas the traditional sysadmin stuff required to run "your own servers" with contemporary server technology has been viewed with both a level of disdain and also utter intimidation. Finding someone who can do React or Angular for your project might not be trivial, but finding someone who could actually run your servers for you ... much harder.
• darawk 5y ago
  This is a truly excellent criticism of the state of "crypto" and "web3". As someone who thinks these technologies are interesting, i'm glad someone finally wrote a decent, sincere critique that covered a lot of the very real issues with it. I think i'd break this piece down into two categories: The first is critiques of current implementations, and the second is critiques of the structural incentives of the technology. I think it's important to separate those things somewhat. The privacy, security and centralization of Infura/Alchemy are real and important issues, and to a limited extent, derive from the fundamental incentives of the ecosystem. However, what I think critically differentiates "web3" from "web2" is that those platforms are commoditized. Infura and Alchemy are providers of a service that is fundamentally a commodity, they have very little market power. Contrast to comparable web2 platforms like Facebook or Google, who have tremendous market power over consumers who's data they've warehoused. I think this is a really important structural difference between the two. That in no way takes away from the seriousness of the critique of Infura/Alchemy and how they're used, but I think it does somewhat limit the importance of that failure. Anyone can build a new, better gateway platform, and users can switch to it without having to ask anyone's permission to export their data. That's a really big deal. The more structural critique I think relates to the issue of iteration speed, and the tendency that slow, bureaucratic development processes have to push the technological frontier outside their own scope. I think that's a real, structural problem that any decentralized system has, and its fitting that Moxie should point it out, given that he's famously (and correctly, in my view) resisted exactly these sorts of things for exactly these reasons in Signal (e.g. federation) since forever. I think this critique is the most important and serious critique of the crypto space in general, and if anything is going to bring it down, this is it. This problem remains largely unsolved at this point, but whether or not it can be solved is going to hinge on the quality of the group coordination mechanisms people are able to devise. I'm personally optimistic that these things can get figured out, but they are very hard problems. An important thing to note here though is that a lot of things actually work just fine with this kind of bureaucratic/slow iteration process. Consider core web protocols like HTTP, SMTP, or even something like x86. These things tend to be "low in the stack", but that is exactly what the underlying crypto infrastructure wants to be as well. The more general your platform, the less quick iteration you require. Whether or not crypto platform are able to deliver something like this remains to be seen, but it is a thing that does happen and works ok in many areas today. > “It’s early days still” is the most common refrain I see from people in the web3 space when discussing matters like these. In some ways, cryptocurrency’s failure to scale beyond relatively nascent engineering is what makes it possible to consider the days “early,” since objectively it has already been a decade or more. I'd also like to point out that most prior "generations" of the web took at least a decade to come to fruition. It's easy to forget how long things take to mature, but the fact that crypto doesn't have everything figured out after 10 years is not all that surprising: https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-web-20 https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-web-20 And this is only going back to the early 90s. Obviously various proto "webs" existed long before then. Very structurally different technologies can take quite a while to sort themselves out, and find their niche.
• nbzso 5y ago
  Sorry. My "specific" take: Edited and self-censored due to lack of "substance" on the topic.
  • sillysaurusx 5y ago
    If you’ve been a reader here for a long time, you should focus on being a better writer. The best HN commenters write for the community as much as for themselves. The fact of the matter is, web3 is a new phenomenon that isn’t going away. HN deserves good discussion on the topic. “Good” doesn’t mean “positive.” It means substantive — make a critique with substance. Say something that hasn’t been said countless times. The effort is worth it.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• dqpb 5y ago
  I think the important part of decentralization is not that “everyone must” own their own server, but rather that “anyone can” run their own server, that indexes the globally consistent blockchain database. But, I agree that the most troublesome parts are around the client/server relationship due to the need for indexing/caching, and the irony of having a man-in-the-middle between you and the trustless network.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• walterbell 5y ago
  > These client APIs are not using anything to verify blockchain state or the authenticity of responses. The results aren’t even signed. An app like Autonomous Art says “hey what’s the output of this view function on this smart contract,” Alchemy or Infura responds with a JSON blob that says “this is the output,” and the app renders it. Is there a technical debt story behind these practices? Have there been attacks which took advantage of this gap?
  • phgn 5y ago
    You mean the smart contract would sign the response? Signatures by Infura or the node client would not tell you anything, you're already trusting them by using them. Much of the infrastructure seems quite immature, with lots of hard problems to solve on the core blockchain first (but this is being addressed) [0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_impressions_of_web3/hrrz15r/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_i...
• contravariant 5y ago
  If people want a blockchain based decentralized web couldn't we cut out the middleman and just make hosting data the proof of work? Edit: After all of ~10 minutes of uninformed thought I'm leaning towards an unholy marriage of torrents, IPFS and banking with each server acting as IPFS node, torrent tracker/seed and bank, issuing letter of credits to seeds of the data.
• jarbus 5y ago
  This post taught me more about the current state of ethereum than nearly all other ethereum content online combined. Incredibly well researched and thought out.
• gojomo 5y ago
  As a web3 skeptic, Marlinspike has still been quick to outfit Signal with a privileged 'house cryptocurrency', MobileCoin, whose value-appreciation-with-usage will accrue to favored projects. That's web3, too! https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency-payments/ https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. This is sad to hear. People do run their own servers in their homes though, they are called routers, except they only serve one thing. Pity we don't have a lightweight self-updating system that sits in a router and does the basic job of keeping the user's data.
  • chubot 5y ago
    There are many projects to do that, such as this one started in 2010 by the founder of the Software Freedom Foundation (sibling rival of FSF?): https://freedombox.org/about/ https://freedombox.org/about/ My memory is that it's basically a wall plug like a router, but it can run apps for you locally. Unfortunately my sense is that there's no much incentive to donate or contribute to such projects :-( So people don't even know they exist.
• baash05 5y ago
  I found it interesting that the content of the NFT is held by a company that can remove it at will. To me this flies in the face of freedom and will land us in the Youtube paradigm. Where walking past a restaurant playing music gets your video ownership ripped from you.
  • bidder33 5y ago
    imo these nfts that are "host it on an endpoint on our apache server" will die away as their fragility fails them. its mostly quick-buck thinking. yes you can do a bad job with your nft contract and not think about metadata location etc. but you could also do a good job (ipfs/arweave). There are plenty that will last as long as the chain they are on with no problems. Opensea shooting themselves in the foot. But its ok Zora and Foundation and others are stepping up and leading the way.
• w_TF 5y ago
  It's refreshing to see someone actually roll up their sleeves and not immediately descend into reactionary takes. The criticism here is excellent; I think something people outside of this space never see is that despite all the boosterism there are web3/crypto proponents who have been airing these same exact grievances for some time now, particularly regarding metamask, infura, ipfs, & opensea, but there's alternatives to all of these. Decentralization is a spectrum, and while I think Moxie's probably right in that this all trends towards consolidation, at the same time there's founders trying to to change course and move in the opposite direction, Joe Lubin being among them.
• ggm 5y ago
  Off topic: site steerage did not work for me on chrome/tablet
• porcoda 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will It's worth distinguishing "running" a server from "having" a server. I lost interest in "running" my own services a couple decades ago - too much work, and I don't keep up on security patches, so it felt like a huge liability too. I am quite happy to "have" a server of my own though that requires minimal babysitting. We already have this today in some forms: I have a network attached printer that once configured to get online, removes the need for me to run my own print server. Similarly I have NAS devices that remove the need for me to run my own file server. You could argue that the little box that my HomeKit devices talks to is also a little server for coordinating all of my little HomeKit devices. Each of these are pretty popular, even amongst the general population. That popularity tells me that people are quite happy to "have" purpose-built servers, but only if they don't need to "run" them.
• pronik 5y ago
  > web1 was decentralized, web2 centralized everything into platforms Am I the only one who remembers Web 1.0 as "publisher-generated content" and Web 2.0 as "user-generated content"? (publisher being the one who hosts the server) The latter is dead for several years now, since we've found out content moderation is hard and even scale won't help you there.
  • phgn 5y ago
    Your distinction aligns with Moxie's point that most people do not want to run their own servers. Web 2 made user-generated content easier, so more people used it. > "user-generated content [...] is dead for several years now" I don't think that is true at all, see the rise of Youtube creators, Twitter influencers, TikTok etc. Regardless of web3, I believe we are moving more into the "creator economy" and away from centralised news media (a single-digit number of news sources everyone listens to).
• unemphysbro 5y ago
  I think moxie makes a good point about centralized services like alchemy, on-chain data from opensea, etc. The increase in development velocity using services like alchemy and pinata is astounding (I remember spending a month writing a stupid nft app in 2017 which now only takes a weekend.) I think these services are here to stay but they ultimately undermine decentralization. I'm optimistic for the future of web3. :)
• mhitza 5y ago
  If web3 revolves around crypto how can these be his first impressions? > In 2017, Marlinspike helped launch MobileCoin with that potential integration in mind, serving as a paid technical advisor for the cryptocurrency. https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency-payments/ https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...
• atweiden 5y ago
  Apparently, 10 years and half a trillion dollars isn’t enough time or money these days for people to ship a basic SPV wallet to end users. Even assuming the Ethereum people finally ship SPV support following moxie’s critique of their infrastructure, they still don’t have even so much as a rudimentary desktop wallet designed for air gapped spending which isn’t a literal web extension. There has well and truly never been a more deserving poster child for the phrase “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, than Ethereum. If there’s one societally valuable thing Ethereum can be credited for doing, it’s laying bare that cryptocurrency valuation really is just a Keynesian beauty contest with absolutely no fundamentals whatsoever. The entire cryptocurrency space consists of pure and simple confidence games, all of them claiming to be anything but.
  • hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
• chachra 5y ago
  Great read and explains the concepts and some of the web3 craziness so elegantly. Well done!
• grouphugs 5y ago
• dabeeeenster 5y ago
  Wait I assumed that NFT marketplaces like OpenSea stored a hash of the artwork in the layer 1 blockchain. Please someone tell me this is actually happening?!
  • phire 5y ago
    It's usually a URL of the artwork that is stored on the blockchain. That URL is sometimes an IPFS url, which is a hash of the content. But it could be anything, that's why you can create NFTs which change their image based on where they are viewed, or eventually 404. 3rd party wallets often don't bother looking up the blockchain to find the URL. They just query a centralised API like the one run by OpenSea. That's why OpenSea blocking an NFT can make it show up as blank in 3rd party wallets.
• oconnor663 5y ago
  > I think changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass. I don't think I'm disagreeing with Moxie here, but I do like to emphasize that it's less that creating software has gotten harder (which is true in some ways but false in other ways), and more that our standards and expectations for what software should do have gotten higher. If I wanted to make a chat app today, for example, it would obviously need to: 1. run on iOS, Android, and probably also Windows/macOS/Linux or at least desktop browsers 2. have some notion of persistent user identity and message history, including something like passwords and something like an account recovery flow 3. support group communication among these persistent users, hopefully allowing for multiple devices per user 4. be internationalized into many languages 5. with some sort of abuse reporting/detection/response mechanisms and some posture towards law enforcement requests It doesn't need all those things on day one, but it will need them if and when it gets popular. And of course this is without even beginning to think about discretionary features like 6. searching, sending, and displaying animated GIFs If my goal is to build an app that me and my friends can use for fun, of course I don't need to do most of this. But if my goal is to compete for market share with apps that do these things, I 100% have to do all this and more.
  • phgn 5y ago
    Chat apps are incredibly commoditised. It also seems natural that improvements to huge tech platforms today takes more time than anything previously. But for smaller applications that innovatively solve a new problem, feature parity shouldn't be as important. I actually think now is the best time ever to build something, with all the tooling available. You can use Electron, Firebase, Auth0, GetStream etc to solve many of your points.
• mediocregopher 5y ago
  I view the final two conclusions points, that people do not want to run their own servers and that we need to make software easier to build/run, to be one and the same. Is the reason people don't want to run a server because it's just so difficult and expensive to keep a computer online in your living room (remembering that a smaller deployment doesn't need 20 nines of uptime), or is it because the UX of running server software has always been terrible? Could an OS be made which makes running a server actually a friendly process? We managed to design OSs which made running apps on a _mobile device_ a friendly process, surely the same could be done here.
  • password1 5y ago
    This is a great point, makes me wonder if there is a market for such a service.
  • AlotOfReading 5y ago
    The internet as it exists today for the vast majority of people simply isn't well-equipped for everyone to have their own servers. Imagine a small server box that you could simply plug into the wall and give your wifi credentials. You still have the solve the NAT issue. You still have to secure the publicly routable box somehow and constantly apply updates, or backdate when (not if) something breaks. In parts of the bay, PG&E goes offline every time the wind blows. Does everything in your digital life go offline with it? There's a lot that goes into running a reasonably reliable server.
    • astrange 5y ago
      They're also noisy and you don't have a personal security team.
      • bsagdiyev 5y ago
        False to both. My home server is quiet and my OS keeps updated automatically.
        • 5y ago
• guelo 5y ago
  The biggest LOL in this article is how his "censorship resistant" NFT got censored.
• danans 5y ago
  > This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream This is exactly what I've heard from lay investors in crypto (vs the techno utopians pushing crypto as the world's decentralized medium of exchange). The lay investors welcome the centralization and the regulation of off ramps as they feel it will bring more traditional financial instruments trust and relative stability to crypto, thereby bringing in even more common investors. They see its value as a gold replacement and inflation hedge. Their agenda is quite at odds with the original anarcho-capitalist vision of cryptocurrency, as they aren't interested undermining existing institutional structures (which they are themselves reliant on).
• LaunchAway1 5y ago
  So several fundamental forces gave us the centralized internet, at least for the time being. Trusting a few players has never given resistance to these forces and so blockchain doesn't alter the equilibrium. What are the forces pushing for blockchain? Some will say greed, and of course at an individual level greed has something to do with it, but greed has always been there. Greed is part of humanity. What is specific to blockchain? Maybe just the desire for decentralization.
• slackfan 5y ago
  "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will" I think that this is where this premise is entirely incorrect.
  • MattPalmer1086 5y ago
    Evidence suggests otherwise...
    • slackfan 5y ago
      Other evidence suggests counter to your evidence.
• deleted 5y ago
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• da39a3ee 5y ago
  Can anyone explain clearly and objectively and succinctly what an NFT is, for an audience who knows how the internet works, what a hash function is and what properties they have, and how bitcoin works.
• deleted 5y ago
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• smoyer 5y ago
  Once again I was hoping for a discussion of IPFS, DAT and Hyper. I've written post of an implementation for HyperSwarm and am impressed by the possibilities for decentralization. Does anyone know of a similar article for web3 that excludes the blockchain?
  • unionpivo 5y ago
    > Does anyone know of a similar article for web3 that excludes the blockchain? Unfortunately in a lot of people minds web3 is "blockchain", just like crypto now just means blockchain, how hacker used to mean something else etc. Not sure if the battle is completely lost, but I' wouldn't mind alternate name for such technologies. As someone who used to spend some tile playing around with IPFS, and freenet, I find that unfortunate.
• deleted 5y ago
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• scyclow 5y ago
  This is a really good and well=researched article. I think it highlights a lot of current problems with the existing web3 ecosystem. A few thoughts after reading it: - For NFTs in particular, I agree that the ecosystem is way too centered around OpenSea. But things also seem to be generally moving in the right direction here too. I've seen a lot of new exchanges pop up recently, some of which put more of an emphasis on decentralization (such as zora [1]). There are also some new standards on the royalty front [2]. Exchanges may or may not pay attention to it, but it's at least a start. - The ecosystem's current centralization around Infura and Alchemy is also concerning. But as with the other issues, I think there's a definite path towards improvement. In the meantime, choosing an Ethereum node service feels kind of like choosing an ISP. But at least I'm not bound to a single service by physical architecture. - In the absence of any improvements to Ethereum's scalability, I don't think it has much of a future. Sure, you can do some interesting things on it today, but high gas prices and low tx throughput make it impractical for many applications and most internet users. That said, there seems to be a lot of resources being thrown at various scalability solutions. Whether or not we see them in the near future is one story, but there's at least a viable roadmap, which makes me optimistic. And I think a lot of the centralization issues are a direct result of the scalability issues. So as the latter improves, I'd expect the former to improve as well. - I disagree with the analysis that OpenSea would be much better as a centralized service. Part of what makes it valuable is that it can (fairly easily, but no seamlessly) integrate with other software (contracts) deployed to a global public network. I'd imagine it would be very difficult for OpenSea to get off the ground if they had to build their own general purpose contract VM that thousands of people would be willing to build on top of. On top of that, it would be a lot harder to tell a convincing story about what happens to peoples NFTs if they go out of business. However, if scalability doesn't improve, I agree that OpenSea and Coinbase will likely move in an increasingly centralized direction until most of the web3 components are stripped out. - I definitely agree that people (myself included) don't want to run their own servers, but I wonder if Ethereum's Proof of Stake will change things. Supposedly I can run a validator on a raspberry pi. So if there's enough of a financial incentive to keep one running, I may do so. [1] https://zora.co/ https://zora.co/ [2] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981
• tompccs 5y ago
  "With the shift to mobile, we now live firmly in a world of clients and servers – with the former completely unable to act as the latter – and those questions seem more important to me than ever. Meanwhile, ethereum actually refers to servers as “clients,” so there’s not even a word for an actual untrusted client/server interface that will have to exist somewhere, and no acknowledgement that if successful there will ultimately be billions (!) more clients than servers." Finally someone articulates the problem with crypto. People don't want to run their own servers, and they sure as shit don't want to run their own banks. So in theory you have a decentralised trustless web or financial system, but in practice, everyone is trusting someone to run a node for them. Which is exactly how the web and finance work now.
  • baby 5y ago
    This is not a problem with crypto, because there are solutions to this, it's a problem with how people use it. The real danger is that people get too comfortable with this way of doing things and we never switch to more secure solutions.
    • AlexandrB 5y ago
      The same thing can be said of the web in general. The linked article even makes this point! If in the early web users all wanted to run their own servers the centralization of web 2.0 would not have happened. Is there any reason to think that history won't repeat itself and users will choose to use web3 technologies the "right" way?
      • baby 5y ago
        Without Chrome and their push to force https I doubt that the web would have become so encrypted. But then CDN services did start centralizing https as well (because users don’t want to deal with certificates). Metamask and popular wallets, as well as layer 1 projects, have to decide to invest in these areas.
    • preseinger 5y ago
      If one person uses your tool incorrectly, it's a problem with that person. If nearly everyone uses your tool incorrectly, it's a problem with your tool.
• arendtio 5y ago
  > We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. My biggest issue with that concept is that cryptography isn't timeless. Most cryptography system just work, because they delay information retrieval to a point were its value has degraded. However, if I want to store information securely for the long term, I prefer having it protected by more than just encryption (e.g. locality). So even though I understand the argument, that most people don't want to run their own servers, I think the proposed alternative is even worse than the status quo :-/
• dbmikus 5y ago
  I would like it if Metamask connected to a distributed hash table of Ethereum node providers and sent transactions to random subsets of those nodes. Then if there was some way to track the reliability of these nodes to make some kind of ranking of quality. Perhaps the client (Metamask) and a given server could mutually sign the transaction so when it eventually makes it into the mempool it is clear who put the transaction there.
• synergy20 5y ago
  So basically web3.0 is just json-rpc calls to a cluster of peer servers that host distributed databases(e.g. blockchain that records your write-operations in stone) via a few portal servers, the portals are the gateway to the pool of blockchain-peer-servers and themselves are also part of the blockchain pool.
• hatchoo 5y ago
  This was a very interesting article. I started learning Solana recently to try and see what the fuss was all about. After getting beyond the basics I took a look at the technical concepts behind NFTs and my first reaction was literally - "this is creating something out of nothing". It was the equivalent of just inserting some rows into a database except that the operations were all logged in an immutable audit trail. While I appreciate the value that a decentralized system of record with immutable log entries that the blockchain offers, I struggle to see how NFTs have value. But who am I to argue when buyers put their money into it.
• mwattsun 5y ago
  I jotted down some thoughts I want to post before this very well written and interesting article by Moxie drops off the front page. I'm sure I got things wrong, but in the spirit of blue sky thinking: The Physical layer is centralized on the telcos, fiber providers and satellite providers. This doesn't change The internet is decentralized at the Application layer. Is it peer to peer. BitTorrent, IPFS The network become centralized at the services layer in Web 2.0. A decentralized search engine or global commerce store is impractical Centralized services like search and social are a solved problem and efficient. People expect to get them for free in their monthly internet bill Just like no one wants to run their own server, no one wants to run their own social network web3 says it will change decentralization at the services layer, but it probably won't "I don’t think it’s on a trajectory to deliver us from centralized platforms" - Moxie People want to spend money on it without really caring much about the technical details. They just want it to work. People (mostly young) use their interest and involvement in it as a social signifier web3, crypto and decentralization are buzz words like "the special properties of copper" or "energy balancing tea" When everything is free, nothing has value. NFT's create a value that can be bought, sold, traded and collected The buying and selling of digital objects has momentum and will continue. "I think these market forces will likely continue... If the money flowing through NFTs ends up channeled back into crypto space, it could continue to accelerate forever... I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going" Web3 is here to stay but it won't be what the techies want it to be, it will be what the market wants "I also understand why nerds like me are excited to build for it. It is, at the very least, something new on the nerd level – and that creates a space for creativity/exploration that is somewhat reminiscent of early internet days." - Moxie The market has spoken and people want this. Consumers don't understand it but think it's cool and are told it's the future, so they can flex at being in the know and forward thinking by getting involved. Web3 is here to stay, without the implementation details even mattering to anyone but a small set of highly technical people. It's a fun project to get involved in, it's not boring, and gives people something to get excited about. The best thing someone like me can do is try to steer it in a direction away from harming the environment by coming up with alternative to proof of work.
• JulianMorrison 5y ago
  (I deleted my previous comment, because I don't think I said what I meant. So let's try again.) Distributed, peer to peer, is worse. Everything that uses it, as a suite of technologies ranging from torrents to Freenet to bitcoin, only does so because a simpler, cheaper, central alternative is somehow seen as bad. In general, because it would be raided by The Man. Blockchain, is worse. You could do everything it does, cheaper and better, without it. Except the bit about lawlessness, but the whole NFT gold rush has no need for that. For any use that doesn't actually need to evade The Man, you can always make your system work better by pulling more and more of it into centralisation and out of the blockchain. Therefore, the final "victory" of the blockchain will look exactly like its obsolescence. Unless you want to buy contraband, of course.
  • atweiden 5y ago
    > Everything that uses it [...] only does so because a simpler, cheaper, central alternative is somehow seen as bad. Walled garden ecosystems have a fairly obvious downside — ultimately someone has to get disproportionately enriched and empowered. By using the word “somehow”, you insinuate it’s actually hard to see this.
    • JulianMorrison 5y ago
      No, that's just a problem that lives in a different layer of how we organise the world. Right now we haven't decided to operate these centralised things as services provided by society, to society. Right now, they are owned by people who build up heaps of money, which in our current system translates to unwarranted power. These are choices which can be changed. Trying to work around the current system via a blockchain is certainly an option. But it's going to be worse in every other way except those externalities. And so they will tend to creep back, and the blockchain will be pushed out.
      • atweiden 5y ago
        That’s a tad bit non-specific. Do you claim walled garden ecosystems are acceptable if a state government controls it? Save for possible science fiction AI administered states, this would disproportionately empower state executives, no?
• zrm 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. This depends on what you mean by servers. Nobody wants to pay money for dedicated hardware and experience service interruption if they fail to constantly provide it with power and internet. But a lot of the need for "servers" could be eliminated by running a Tor onion service on your phone and accepting connections from peers. You can get e.g. direct messaging from this without any "servers" of your own, but also without any Facebooks playing MITM between you and your peers. > A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. I could make two criticisms of this. One, sometimes stable is good. We all whinge about the decades-old protocols that were designed for mainframes the size of buildings with less memory than a toothbrush, but now try to think of something you want from current day Reddit that you didn't get from ten years ago Reddit. Maybe the problem is some things got frozen before they were cooked, not that stability is bad once you have something that works. Two, a lot of this is survivorship bias. If it's easy to push changes to all the clients you're either already centralized or you're susceptible to EEE. Protocols like that got absorbed into some centralized product already, so the ones that are left are the ones with more protocol implementations than there are tech companies. Then if there is any problem with the protocol at all it's impossible to make changes, but that's the very reason it's still in use. If the other protocols eventually get replaced by something centralized, that eventuality only comes after the defects become fatal. When they're so bad that the problems exceed the network effect. But that's also the same time when you can release a new protocol version and people will adopt it for all the same reasons. You just need the replacement to be another protocol instead of a platform. > Recreating this world This seems to be a problem. We know generally what we want, e.g. P2P to the extent possible and completely fungible untrusted commodity servers when it isn't. Then the people writing the code are also the people running the servers, so they're willing to write code that makes the servers stop being fungible and untrusted and we're right back where we started. > This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early. Nobody cares about decentralization until the centralized entity becomes adversarial or unreliable, but then it's too late. The time to start caring about fire safety is not when you are already on fire.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bsldld 5y ago
  > Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device... If I am not mistaken Hyperledger Iroha[0] has(had?) that as one of its goals. [0] https://github.com/hyperledger/iroha https://github.com/hyperledger/iroha
• tehnub 5y ago
  >Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers. [...] With the shift to mobile, we now live firmly in a world of clients and servers – with the former completely unable to act as the latter I've got a dumb question: Why can't the phone or browser act as a node? Are the computational requirements too expensive?
  • Haydos585x2 5y ago
    My understanding is that it's because the entire blockchain would need to be stored on the device which from even a data perspective is too much for a phone. The processing of data on the chain will also be too computationally difficult/expensive for the phone. You would either run out of battery immediately or the phone would crash.
  • phgn 5y ago
    Your phone is not always online, running a node on it would mean frequent synchronisation every time you want to do something.
• lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  So if the chain doesn't store the binary data of the file, does it at least store the hash??? How can it prove anything otherwise?
• NilsIRL 5y ago
  This ties in nicely with this talk moxie gave in 2019 about (de)centralization: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving
• Thorentis 5y ago
  > I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” Says the person that tried (and is trying) to shove a new crypto currency down our throats in Signal? This is incredible.
• tfang17 5y ago
  Fails to address that users on centralized Web3 platforms have ability to exit platform, which isn’t an option in Web2. I can transfer out an NFT from OpenSea ecosystem. I can transfer BTC out of Coinbase.
• pcmaffey 5y ago
  Nerds seek out constraints in order to unlock their private creativity is a really apropos observation.
• bern4444 5y ago
  I'm a large doubter of Web3 and crypto in general though there is one problem space I can it can do well in: Ownership and transfer of digital assets (though I would imagine this is better and more easily solved by web2 technologies as well by cooperation among platforms). This could take the form of lending a friend a purchased copy of a video game, Ebook, etc. The transfer would take place on the blockchain and could be performed regardless of platform - xbox vs playstation vs steam - Apple Books vs Kindle vs Android books etc. Though this would require agreement by these platforms who operate these services. But again, I don't see this really happening because these platforms have no incentive to enable sharing of digital assets over selling new copies.
  • techsin101 5y ago
    except those files/data has to be stored somewhere, and if server decides you don't own it, then regardless of how many NFTs you own for that data it is gone. Buying NFT is buying a referral to actual product, not even IOU.
    • bern4444 5y ago
      I agree but those files are already stored somewhere - your PC, kindle, cloud account etc. On top of which, purchasing a movie via the Google Play Store or a book via Kindle doesn't mean you actually own that digital asset, just that you have access to it (which can be revoked by the platform). What I imagine being possible here is to transfer ownership of the pointer to that digital asset from your account to a friend's account and commit that ownership transfer on the blockchain as proof to everyone. If you want your copy back, either you have to have your friend transfer it back, or purchase a new digital copy. If we move more in the direction of owning digital assets, this might be a big field for block chain to solve. Though this is certainly shrinking as we move to a subscription service economy for these goods - Spotify, Stadia, etc. TLDR I think blockchain can lead us back to full and complete ownership of digital assets outside of any platform equivalent to owning a physical copy that I can lend out and get back.
      • techsin101 5y ago
• nvr219 5y ago
  Moxie Marlinspike is my technology hero.
• baby 5y ago
  I completely agree with his take. What I always found interesting with greener BFT consensus protocols that a lot of modern cryptocurrencies implement is that you can actually fix the problem of untrusted services: you can provide a cryptographic proof to the light clients (the real clients) when they query the blockchain, which allows them to verify the response without synchronizing to the blockchain. This is what Celo is doing, I think Zcash had a proposal to do the same? But essentially any BFT consensus protocol should be able to do this. You don't get the same insurance that you get by verifying all of the blockchain of course, but recursive zero-knowledge proofs that attest to the state transitions might solve this (cf Mina). Another issue is key rotations, which increase the size of the proof (as you need to give proofs to all the key rotations before you can give a proof to the latest state of the chain), but I believe that zero-knowledge proofs can fix that as well. Bottom line: it's actually not that grim, solutions are there, but users have to care for people to implement them, apply them, and for the solutions to receive adoption.
• barmstrong 5y ago
  Really liked this post - brings up some great points, and I consider Moxie a friend. Here are a few notes that came to mind though... 1. For NFTs, some keep their data in IPFS (decentralized file storage) or in the smart contract itself for procedurally generated images. We (as a community) should probably move more to solutions like this over time, since it is indeed more decentralized to build them that way. 2. I agree with the overall point that clients don't behave like full nodes. However, there has been quite a bit of discussion about "light clients" in the crypto community even going back to the early days of Bitcoin/Ethereum, so i wouldn't say it hasn't been an area of focus. 3. I agree there is an overall move toward using platforms. But there is a big difference between using a platform that also owns all the data also (web2) and a platform that is merely a proxy to decentralized data (web3). In the latter, if a platform ever turns evil, people will switch. Not owning the data counts for a lot. 4. There are more options than Infura and Alchemy. Access to simple blockchain data will be relatively commoditized. Which is good for decentralization. As Moxie points out, it's still difficult to build things in a decentralized way (nascent tools), so you are seeing various apps/companies revert to using more centralized web2 techniques when they run into a hairy technical problem. As a result, there are a lot of "hybrid" web2/web3 apps during this phase of web3 development. That doesn't mean the overall trend is bad though. I think it's great that more and more web3/decentralized technologies are being developed. I do agree that all networks tend toward centralization over time. Great book on this https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993 https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire... I don't think crypto is anywhere near this end stage though. We are still seeing a lot of new technology and players enter the space. It's not "already centralized" as much as it is "still using some web2 components". These points aside, the post is great and I basically agree with the overall premise.
  • magicjosh 5y ago
    Getting Tim Wu to analyze cryptocurrencies with his lens of networks and centralization would be a real treat.
  • gaogao 5y ago
    1) The addressing side of IPFS could probably actually be standardized to be as ubiquitous as URLs or email addresses. DNS style stuff is honestly a reasonably good blockchain fit. The storage and server side of it still has a ton of gaps, where lessons learned from torrents are being somewhat inefficiently rediscovered. 4) It sounds like the data available already from those two isn't that simple and is likely to only become more complex over time. Heck, web2 is still using a ton of web1 components. What are the forces to push some dapp to be fully decentralized e2e?
• alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. This is all everyone needs to know about the current wave of NFTs
• dsagal 5y ago
  For someone who has only ever dipped one toe into "crypto", this is super informative. Especially good to read the constructive advice at the end (all the way until the bit about software-building burden, which felt rather random). Thank you!
• anderspitman 5y ago
  Literally while reading this I heard in the background an NBA commercial with Matt Damon telling people that "fortune favors the brave" when it comes to crypto. Whatever else is true, this thing probably isn't going to just quietly settle down.
• debt 5y ago
  Just quickly from a technical perspective: web3 is like a useful wrapper around json-rpc which etherereum nodes use as a comms protocol. You can just use whatever off the shell cli thing that supports json-rpc and talk directly to the mainnet. Web3 is more of a concept that involves wrapping those complicated and cumbersome raw json-rpc calls(deploy a contract, compile a contract etc) into simple libraries. There’s literally a bazillion web3 libraries in many different programming languages. It simplifies talking to the ethereum mainnet. I think they tackled it a little too high level in their post; missing the fact it’s really just a costly distributed state store you interact with via json-rpc with a shitty wrapper everyone basically calls web3.
• michaelsbradley 5y ago
  From the post: > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will... Fair enough, but there are active efforts to develop ultra-light clients for Ethereum together with the concept of "portal network": https://github.com/ethereum/portal-network-specs/ https://github.com/ethereum/portal-network-specs/ https://our.status.im/nimbus-fluffly/ https://our.status.im/nimbus-fluffly/ > there’s not even a word for an actual untrusted client/server interface that will have to exist somewhere, and no acknowledgement that if successful there will ultimately be billions (!) more clients than servers. I would not say there's "no acknowledgement" of this; depending on how deep you are in the space, it's pretty obvious that the goal is to have layered networks and mission specific networks (storage vs. messaging vs. consensus), all economically incentivized, that are p2p through and through, from the resource constrained devices of end consumers to the staking nodes that secure the networks. That's the hope, the goal, and the focus of ongoing efforts. The opposite of the missing word is "a node in a p2p network". The points made about the difficulty in evolving protocols quickly are not lost on me, but I guess I'm more optimistic than the author that it will happen relatively quickly in coming years, including this one. In the process, there will be opportunities seized where the protocols fall short and half-measures or worse (with respect to decentralization) will generate excitement for a time. That seems like "growing pains" to me.
• fumplethumb 5y ago
  > Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. I've been recently exploring the Solana[0] NFT ecosystem. The situation is similar there and I admit it took me by surprise at first. However upon further inspection, there's more to the story. As others here have mentioned, most serious ETH collections address this problem using IPFS. But on Solana, Arweave[1] is a popular solution. I had never heard of Arweave before and it's a seriously cool concept. In a nutshell, it's a system that allows you to pay for 200+ (potentially much more) years of storage _up front_. I won't pretend to understand it all, but it effectively pays the network of miners to host your assets indefinitely. The up front payment - which is steep when compared to traditional hosting - provides a "sustainable endowment" for these mining rewards. This allows you to guarantee that the asset will be available without counting on some random hosted storage system. It seems that NFTs are the main use case for such a system at the moment. However I can imagine other use cases could emerge for an answer to this question I never really thought to ask: "How can I ensure that an asset is hosted "forever?" Interesting problem and an interesting solution that a network like this - with its marriage of decentralized technology and economic incentives - is uniquely poised to address. [0] https://solana.com/ https://solana.com/ [1] https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/
• marcusbrown 5y ago
  I recently became a web3 developer and created Flovatar (flovatar.com) and I totally agree with all the issues outlined in this article, but I think they are mostly limited to the Ethereum ecosystem and because most projects are not thinking outside the box and using IPFS to store the images. In my case I decided to build it on the Flow blockchain (flow.com) and to use SVG illustrations and I couldn’t be happier about both choices. Flow provides a JS library to interact with the blockchain without the need to use browser plugins like Metamask and also allows to store data on-chain with really affordable costs. Having the SVG stored in the NFT guarantees that all the issues outlined in the article won’t apply in my case and will be guaranteed to exist as long as the blockchain will live (unlike IPFS where someone actually has to keep paying for the servers to store the images). I could go on by saying that I managed to build a Marketplace that handles 500k$/month transactions with a single and relatively simple smart contract. Doing that in a web2 way would have been much much harder to both implement and maintain. So from my perspective all the problems outlined in the article are super valid, but if you look a bit outside the current “standards” of the Ethereum world there is definitely hope and lots of solutions available.
• tarkin2 5y ago
  The "a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card" part simultaneously made me realise how ridiculous NFTs are and, nevertheless, how popular they are, and how that popularity fuels the value of bitcoin. Essentially paper money gets its value because you need it to pay taxes; that is, there is a demand. Bitcoin gets it value because you can do interesting and popular things with it; that is, there is a demand. As long as there are interesting and popular things to do with bitcoin, that attracts outside money, bitcoin will keep gaining in value. Obvious, I guess, but that helped it hit home.
  • Zetaphor 5y ago
    You're confusing Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum is the platform that supports smart contracts. Bitcoins intent is to be a simple ossified protocol used as a store of value, akin to digital gold.
    • gaogao 5y ago
      > A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. That's Bitcoin's intent as the first sentence of the original whitepaper. The intent is on transactions. In practice, it's an ossified store of value now.
      • astrange 5y ago
        Of course, it's not that because you can't actually store value. Saving money works as a temporary defection from everyone else trading it; the trading is what maintains the value.
• czhu12 5y ago
  This post really resonates with me, I've been building https://raremints.club https://raremints.club as a way for indie, non technical artists to create NFT's, and have really had to wrestle with all things "web3" that would've been trivial in "web2". I tried to document some of the challenges here: https://chriszhu12.medium.com/the-challenges-of-building-on-web3-a1c2095cb377 https://chriszhu12.medium.com/the-challenges-of-building-on-... But basically: I built an app that relied on mostly stable gas fees. A single app on polygon spiked the fees over 10x in the past few days, and so large swaths of it have to be rebuilt. The promise of web3 was software that was not controlled by any centralized company. But it seems like any new project sharing a chain can effectively DDoS what you've built. This is effectively an anti-network effect. Inevitably, you'd have to start centralizing part of your application to avoid gas fees altogether to hedge this risk.
  • sovietmudkipz 5y ago
    Wow. I was thinking about making a game and saving player state in a similar way to what caused the gas prices to spike for everyone. I'm floored by the ramifications. My stomach feels very queasy with OP's article, and now yours.
  • clippablematt 5y ago
    It requires a change in mindset from “efficiency first” to “robust first”. That’s a tough learning curve for trad web devs, the best web3 dev I know comes from aerospace engineering where resilience and redundancy are part of the process. But ultimately succeeding in making something that can live in the sometimes hostile environment on chain means you make something that can last and is reliable. There can be awkward UX issues with that though. Relying on stable gas fees won’t work because the network has to have a priority list when it’s busy, so those willing to pay more will be prioritised and you’ll be stuck. If you want to inherit the properties of the chain that are why you would build on it in the first place then you have to work to those constraints.
    • teatree 5y ago
      In conventional web wasn't the same war fought as 'net neutrality' ? All packets are equal. Pardon me if I am wrong, I don't understand web3 or crypto much but what you describe looks like a capitalist version of Internet where processing of every request depends on one's ability to pay. If this is the future, history has already taught us that it is bound to fail.
• arealaccount 5y ago
  Web2 was more about ajax than centralization. It was being able to interact with websites without needing a full server rerender on every interaction. Why is everyone trying to rewrite history.
• fcanesin 5y ago
  Great post, but IMHO it should have been called "My First Impressions of Ethereum". The web3 ideal and movement is much larger than Ethereum only, and many are focused on solving these issues. For example Mina allows for mobile clients to verify the blockchain using recurring ZK proofs.
• insaider 5y ago
  I think the best thing that can come out of this whole crypto/web3 space is a new sort of stock market. I've a startup that I want to open up for micro investors and the best way I can think of doing so is through NFTs/crypto that represent shares in the company. The barrier to entry to the traditional stock markets (turn over requirements etc) is far too high. Does anyone know of something like this?
  • astrange 5y ago
    Isn't the barrier to entry SEC regulations about being a public company? This is not avoidable through crypto. Private startups don't use "the traditional stock markets", they use a cap table, which is just an Excel spreadsheet or a service like Carta.
• brentis 5y ago
  Loved the perspective. It does feel like those technologies which get "wrapped" open sourced or otherwise by first movers feel this way. A few points which hope to not conflict with pinned rules: - Ethereum has outlived it's usefulness. Cost me several thousand dollars closing token positions last month. Swore off anything on this chain. People literally cannot move their $100 worth of alts because of the fees. (my kids, test coins, etc). - Your statement about centralization is what made me move most of my interest to mobile crypto. One coin does mining on phones and sends their to/from via mobile. See this as the way for true-er decentralization. Still have app issues associated from Apple & Google. Further think new $600 reporting reg for Cashapp/PayPal will increase mobile p2p interest - for some reason - I'm not a dev, but OP's points made me wonder about The Graph (GRT) and perhaps ATOM as ways to ensure data has an outlet in the case where something like Openseas gains too much power?
  • _1tan 5y ago
    Could you elaborate on "mobile crypto please"?
• newobj 5y ago
  Probably the best web3 article I’ve read. Brava
• justinator 5y ago
  Moxie's post reminds me that perhaps we need a Your post advocates a [crypto] approach to decentralization of the web. Your idea will not work adlibs akin to, https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
• auston 5y ago
  I think he makes legit points: 1. NFT spec is flimsy at best 2. We trust output from ETH nodes inherently 3. Most of the user facing clients for Web3 are decentralized 4. Power is easily rolled up into convenience providers like QuickNode but I think something that is (perhaps conveniently missed) is that there is A LOT of power in having decentralized / censorship-resistant state - this is the thing that makes DeFi a real threat to orgs like exchanges and banks. They can't force people to have a certain amount of capital to trade derivatives or have a certain credit profile to borrow, the system is permissionless and the API is open 24/7. That's pretty remarkable IMO and I think that sort of permissionless is likely to be used for very compelling things in the future, NFTs aside. Also one thing that he notes but doesn't quite provide a solution for but I'm betting will exist in the near future is a markup language to map UI components to smart contract functions/views.
• awwaiid 5y ago
  I thought web2 aka web-2.0 was AJAX+Unobtrusive JavaScript aka XHR+jquery aka SPAs. I guess we rolled The Cloud (rented server time) back into that at some point?
  • andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Two different topics entirely. web3 isn’t a successor concept to Web 2.0.
• stopat11 5y ago
  >People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. The older I get, the more I see that there is not much point in making arguments about topics. You can argue whatever you want, and it ultimately isn't about proving something is true or false, it is about feelings and what you want to happen based on your own desires. This whole section about running servers can be argued against. I never thought I would see normal people with "gaming computers", yet here we are. "People don't want to bother with the hassle of gaming computers". etc etc. Same arguments. Things change, and the past does not dictate the future. I mean, half the reason people didn't want to run servers was because the web wasn't centralised. So now that has changed. Other changes have occurred like the availability of the raspberry pi - a cheap, powerful, silent, relatively simple computer that can be used as a server. I remember back when Windows Home Server was a thing. It was packaged in these large noisey computers, running proprietary and expensive software. I didn't want to run a "home server" back then either. Whether people working at businesses want to run their own servers is irrelevant. I doubt they care about any of the things that would be relevant to home servers. They are often running lots of different servers with complex security rules and various applications. The managers see the cloud as a way not to hire expensive people they don't trust. The programmers don't care because it isn't their own product, and hate IT because they make you jump through a bunch of hoops to do anything. It is all a completely different environment to one person running one server at home. There are still impediments to running home servers that, if lifted, could make people more likely to run them. Static IP addresses are often expensive add-ons, for example. Upload speeds are sometimes too slow, and so on. Anyway, I don't even know what web3 is.
• noman-land 5y ago
  I guess my beef with the whole web3 discussion is that everyone is bashing all the centralized bandaids is indicative that web3 is fake without acknowledging that those things are bandaids "until it's really ready". These bandaids (infura and the like) are mostly only necessary for mobile users who can't run a full chain. And even then there are legit solutions like Status.im as well as lots of research into lite-clients. The "right" way to use something like Ethereum or IPFS is to download geth and go-ipfs and run the nodes yourself. You can do it on a modern laptop or a raspberry pi easily. Then you can point Metamask at `localhost` and be using your own pristine connection to the networks. Or you don't even need to use Metamask and can just issue commands directly in the console or you can download a local copy of of the static files for MyEtherWallet or whatever it's called these days and just double click on an HTML file and connect to your local node. Then once you've done that, stop wasting money on buying pointless centralized NFTs.
• nickysielicki 5y ago
  > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. What if the server is their phone and the service is an app that they install? The problem that I personally have with web3 is that nobody seems to be building the infrastructure to accommodate this sort of setup, which the article sort of touched on. But I disagree that people will never want this. I think that there’s a lot of will and understanding among the average non-technical internet user that they don’t host their own services and I think they’d like to be a part of a distributed system, if there was a platform that made it possible. But that’s not ethereum. IPFS and wireguard are closer to realizations of this.
• simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  > What I found most interesting, though, is that after OpenSea removed my NFT, it also no longer appeared in any crypto wallet on my device. This is web3, though, how is that possible? Key takeaway here.
• eyelidlessness 5y ago
  > Please don't post generic, shallow, obvious, indignant, and/or dismissive comments—those are repetitive and predictable, we've had more than enough of them, they're tedious, not what this site is for, and we don't need more. So the only “curious” comments are those which accept the premises of the post. Oh okay, little could make me less interested in finding out whether there’s actually something of value here than proscribing I give its contents merits before I even form my own opinion. I’ll see myself out again.
  • jagger27 5y ago
    Perhaps this sits better with you: > Please post unique, deep, interesting, humble, and/or inquisitive comments. Nothing about that disclaimer suggests you must accept the premises of the post, come on.
    • eyelidlessness 5y ago
      It says that dismissing anything therein can’t have any of those qualities. It presupposes accepting the topic or the discussion thereof.
• treelovinhippie 5y ago
• momentoftop 5y ago
  To disagree with the post: I have always wanted to run my own servers. But for most of my time on the internet, my upload speeds have been garbage, my IP addresses have been dynamic, and my computers have been behind NATs. The basic networking architecture during Web 1 wasn't suited to Web 1. Had it been, there might have been more people experimenting with running home servers, more work going into developing home server solutions, and thus more momentum to building that version of the web.
• nunez 5y ago
  This was the best read on web3 that I’ve seen yet. I’m definitely excited to play around with it, but I agree with many of Moxie’s points, especially around the promise of decentralization diverging from the hyper-centralized reality we see today. I’ve been stewing on a thought experiment. Diaspora was aiming to be a decentralized Facebook competitor. I can see this project (or similar ones) gaining a foothold in the web3 space. But if social events are on chain, some of which might contain PII, how would such a service securely store fragments of data like this on random computers?
• zaroth 5y ago
  I love so much of what moxie is saying here. I also feel differently on some important points. I believe all the issues discussed here are real. Some are even mildly terrifying to the point of being hysterical. Interestingly, I think all these issues are solvable and it’s made me immensely more interested in doing some research. I find it oddly inspiration so thanks for that as well! Really great read, just the kind of content I want to see!
• hda2 5y ago
  Moxie is missing a very important point: 0. People want control. People run servers because they don't want their operations to be affected by the arbitrary whims of some third party. When issues inevitably occur, they want to have as much control over the situation as possible so that they can remedy the issue as optimally as possible. This issue was wonderfully illustrated to you by OpenSea when they unilaterally removed your poop NFT and offered the generic "You violated our ToS, we wont tell you how, and no there is no appeal". This is the fundamental reason why cryptocurrencies took off. No more arbitrary rules from whimsical payment processors. I agree that Web3, as currently implemented, is a regression. Hopefully they manage to fix their flaws before the whole thing falls apart.
• kureikain 5y ago
  The server here is actually not a centralize server in a traditional world. It's a node that connect to the network and replica state. When running transaction, you send it to that node, that node then broadcast it to network. This node here is like a replica in a traditional database. You can run that node, and talk to it through http, websocket. The point about trusting server signature the author bring up is bad IMHO. Even with a database, if you install some malicious Postgres package that return fake data for example, it doesn't help you at all if you enable TLS or not. The point about verification is that read-only data isn't important because write always get verified. If you connect to a malicious node, that change the data it returns to you on purpose, then it's fine. But when you write data to the system, it always get verify so it isn't a problem at all. The point here is that you are the one that run that node, and you are responsible for it. Entire point of Ethereum is that anyone can run node that connect to the network to replicate its state. If you take out all the hype(OpenSea is a massive scam here no argue), I found web3 is really amazing. 1. It's a public dataset that anyone can read data and listen to event anyone know something like that in current web1/2? Example, when I bough a domain name on namecheap or google domain. Can anyone know that? When I change my DNS, do anyone know that? With Ethereum when you run a WRITE method on a smart contract, when you transfer event. Everything can be emitted. And you can listen to it. The code is almost always open source. 2. Build-in Authentication System Many website use wallet to sign in but didn't verified a signature. In fact, that signing is very cool in deed. That signature verifcation ensure that only you can sign that data, send it to server and server can verified it with your public key, which is part of your address 3. No one can stop you If you search hacker news, you will found many people got blocked/suspended randomly by Stripe, Paypal then what do you do? 4. Openness This is a system that anyone can read. Think about that for a second. Anyone can read its data. Without the need of any API. Everything follow a standard, which is smart contract. Anyone can write, if you're willing to pay. You're pretty much can see the code of any legitimate company. Pretty much all of them published their contract on ethscan, to make it convenience for you to run directly. If you don't like some webui, you can just write to its directly. Literally just a `curl`, without you to even register for an account. I know that many people like to dismiss web3, the term is broad and bad IMHO, but think about the thing that it gives us. I can think of some example how web3 is great. 1. ACL: any changes is published, if a malicious activity happen, pretty much anyone can monitor it 2. Charity Fund: we can see what happen with the fund, transfer to where, when, who made it
• samarama 5y ago
  The author’s argument is definitely not nuanced, but a a straw man and a false dichotomy. “Web3 is not 100% decentralised, so it’s not really legit.” Web3 or crypto never intended to be 100% decentralised and it is impossible to be so. There will also be dapps among the 100,000 dapps that have a centralized component. Every percent decentralisation is good, be it 1%, 5%, 50% or 90% and we are in the high double digits in very many areas. It’s 2022, 14 years after the invention of Bitcoin, and hacker news still doesn’t get crypto, one can only shake their head. But hacker news be like “Muh, I want to be a boomer and my brain is not able to learn new things, so it’s a scam.”
  • caymanjim 5y ago
    You can't quantify decentralization. What does it even mean to be 99% decentralized? Anything less than 100% is just...not.
    • samarama 5y ago
      So 100% centralized is the same as 1% centralized?
• aestetix 5y ago
  Perhaps Moxie could think more about decentralizing Signal before thinking about how to decentralize the web ;)
• chx 5y ago
  https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html > Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime. compare to > virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification. So why not just use, say, Firebase?
• y04nn 5y ago
  I can see why everything is centralized: moderation. How would you ban NFTs that would be considered illegal? Sure a solution would be to put the NFTs on a decentralized file system (IPFS?) or a P2P sharing network. And have kind of P2P/decentralized API that can easily be validated. But then, how would you ban illegal content? I'm sure Opensea would prefer to keep everything centralized and under control. But clearly, there is room for improvement.
  • c1sc0 5y ago
    You seem to readily assume there is such a thing as universally "illegal" content. Can you elaborate? Who decides what is "illegal"? Which jurisdiction? Who enforces it?
  • Acrobatic_Road 5y ago
    The uniswap people made a standard called tokenlists to help users filter out spam and junk tokens while still allowing anyone to list any token. I don't see why this couldn't work for sets of NFTs as well. https://tokenlists.org/ https://tokenlists.org/
• iskander 5y ago
  This is the most thoughtful critique I've seen of the web3 space because it engaged meaningfully with the stated intent of web3 as a movement (and found it somewhat lacking on its own terms).
• iskander 5y ago
  Are there any chains whose clients can run successfully on a cell phone, avoiding the need for intermediaries like Infura? Does a recursive zero-knowledge rollup like Mina create a sufficiently small state to remove the need for client/server distinction?
  • polyomino 5y ago
    bitcoin can run on a raspberry pi, so probably. It'll probably take a few days to sync though.
• jiggawatts 5y ago
  The author mentions that currently all NFTs are just URLs, but it is possible to store data directly in the blockchain, even if it would be prohibitively expensive. An issue with general-purpose immutable storage is that it can be permanently polluted with illegal data. Everything from child pornography, instructions for making drugs or explosives, doxing/attack information, private keys for copy protection systems, etc... It would be possible to make Ethereum or any similar blockchain illegal to the level of "penalty of death" in many countries by simply adding some horrendously blasphemous text content to it. Even if bulk image or video data is too expensive to store, an option would be to simply use torrent "magnet:" links. Bitcoin is just for financial transactions, so I doubt it would be vulnerable to this, but the more generic chains don't seem to have any way to protect themselves from this kind of attack. Seriously, what would happen if a bunch of paedophiles started minting NFTs of their favourite child pornography and trading it? They would be "protected" by the inertia of the block chain. Governments eventually would have to step in and make it totally illegal, and then.. that's it. The value would instantly go to zero! Alternatively, NFTs would have to be made revocable or erasable in some way, but that then totally defeats the purpose. That's the author's point -- his dynamically changing NFT was revoked in this manner. I just don't see a way around this. Either you allow indelible illegal content, or allow forced revocation. Either way, the value of NFTs must go to zero.
  • kirso 5y ago
    Without sounding negative, it basically says that sometimes its good to have centralisation because you have: - Moderation - Parties with skin in the game for protection - Support - Someone to reach-out to when things go wrong And the second argument is that country can still censor (to an extent)
  • ThreeToZero 5y ago
    Bitcoin is 'vulnerable' to this. The most common use is to put financial transactions on Bitcoin, but you can put whatever binary data you want. Famously the genesis block[1] includes a newspaper headline to prove it was created after a specific day. It's possible to place illegal content onto the Bitcoin blockchain. [1] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
• Xavdidtheshadow 5y ago
  I really love their example of an NFT that changes based on where you see it. I've been kicking around an idea of selling a bushel of NFT's and then later changing all the images to the text "I spent money on a monkey but all I got was this stupid text" and then abandoning the project.
• 5- 5y ago
  similar: the conveniently centralised hosting for the 'distributed' matrix im system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997898 could everyone run their own matrix server in theory? sure. do people want that? not really. so just like in tfa we get a centralised system with all the downsides of a heavily distributed one (reduced reliability, operational and transactional overhead, etc.)
• calewis 5y ago
  I come to hacker news for this kind of well written content. As a person who works in a non engineering role (although I started out there) this is brilliantly written and explained. Thank-you.
• dcposch 5y ago
  This is a good breakdown. Too much web3 thinkpiecing (both pro and anti) comes from people who've never looked under the hood. It's refreshing to see someone try actually try crypto as a developer, not just as a user, and go deep enough to figure out how things work in practice. Moxie's critiques are valid. All of these are well known problems to the researchers at the core of web3 and all are the subject of active R&D. - Point 1: people fundamentally don't want to run their own servers. Clearly true. Vitalik gave a vivid example of this in a recent interview on Bankless pod. He visited Argentina, where hyperinflation has forced many people to use crypto or physical USD. He observed people using stablecoins, but not primarily via Eth L1 or any L2. Instead many transacted via Binance. Not BSC--Binance the centralized exchange! Which provides a Paypal-like UX. Crypto researchers are fully aware. The plan is a couple thousand validators and millions, eventually billions of end users. Of course the end users will not run command-line geth, or run their own server in any capacity. The plan is for them to use some combination of light clients or trust-minimized hosted services. This requires bringing transaction fees way down, the core goal of L2 rollups + sharing. Also, today's popular clients are not particularly trust-minimized, which brings us to his second point. Paraphrasing: - Point 2: current "web3" is really mostly web2. Under the hood, Metamask, OpenSea, etc just use trusted servers. The fix here is trust-minimized services (= like Infura, but with every response bearing a proof of correctness) or light clients (= very similar, but using full nodes as interchangeable servers). This exists today as a proof-of-concept. It is about to become feasible in production. The reason current Infura does not provide proofs is because Merkle proofs are 10x+ the size of the data returned for a typical query. Verkle trees fix this. If you're curious: - https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html - https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/02/14/why-stateless.html https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/02/14/why-stateless.ht... Zooming out. Here is the Ethereum roadmap for the next two years, summarized: - The Merge. This removes proof-of-work. The Eth ecosystem will use >99% less energy after this point. - The Surge. This is about data sharding. Today a transaction might cost ~$50 on a bad day on Eth L1 and ~$0.50 on a Layer 2 rollup like ZKSync. After the Surge, L2 transactions will be nearly free. - The Verge. This is about Verkle proofs and statelessness. These allow the core user interfaces -- wallets and light clients -- to efficiently follow the blockchain without trusting central intermediaries. They enable efficient proofs of any portion of the chain or its state. --- I think these are fundamentally powerful primitives, the implications of which we've just barely begun to explore. I actually welcome the next bear market, since it shakes out the grifters. It is day 1.
• mjfl 5y ago
  > Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. Even organizations building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this point. If there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned about the world, it’s that people do not want to run their own servers. Why is this true? At this point it's never been easier to make your own static website, deploy nginx, and get online. Maybe not everyone wants to make a website, but you would think that everyone that does want to make a website would be able to and deploying a server would not be the bottleneck.
  • ece 5y ago
    It's the things that come with running a server that everyone dreads: software updates, downtime, potential attacks and misconfigurations. As an example, I think we would have more decentralized social networks if moderation was easier, so in a sense, these are human problems, but where the software hasn't caught up yet. So, hard agree that software should be easier to do. Servers are just one part of it IMO.
  • neysofu 5y ago
    Could you? Yes. Could you do it with 99.99% uptime and without spending any money and time for system maintaince? No.
• unhammer 5y ago
  What are examples of actually successful decentralised software? I can think of - syncthing - git (regardless of github, I still regularly clone/fetch between and within my own machines) - bittorrent None of these needed a cryptocurrency blockchains or stupid buzzwords in order to lure in users, they just solved real problems. I guess they are all fairly dependent on a stable protocol, making it hard to retrofit features, but some people do prefer that situation for at least some of their needs ;-)
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    email is the most successful decentralized tech we use. It's not that decentralized doesnt work, but people need an incentive to make it work. cryptocurrencies currently aim for maintaining a high price, not delivering a final product (which might tank the price)
• des1nderlase 5y ago
  "We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure." This resonated with me. If we want Web3 disruption to happen, perhaps we need better P2P networks. For example, with things like static IP per user, it would be trivial to standardize and build next gen chat apps.
• abaga129 5y ago
  I really like how this article is written. I'm a big time crypto fan, but the point the author makes about how something being decentralized makes it more difficult to change is so true. This is the reason Ethereum 2 has been in the works for numerous years and is still several years away from being completed.
• kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  It may be worth noting that all the crypto projects compete with each other and consider the others flawed, so it may be unfair to judge the whole sphere by some examples. There are people who would say everything besides Bitcoin is a shitcoin atm. I personally am leaning towards that stance, although I wish the energy issue could be resolved. I don't see why NFTs could not simply be "colored coins" on the Bitcoin blockchain? As for people running servers, I think what matters is the option to run a server if you want to. In EMail most use servers by the big players, but people can also run their own servers. It reminds me a bit of the counterargument to open source, that "nobody reads the code" - no, but some people can read the code, and if they would find something fishy, they would announce it to the world and hopefully even the nocoder users would be informed. It is still about trust, but people have a choice whom to trust.
• lngnmn2 5y ago
  This is cancer, right?
• pkcsecurity 5y ago
  Moxie makes so many good critiques (some are so subtle, it might be worth a second read). I got the sense he’s trying very hard to be even handed and constructive about a situation he feels pretty badly about, but his true feelings are bleeding through in some of the side points / parentheticals. One point that I disagree with is his almost axiomatic premise that decentralization is an inherent good and the implication that the Internet went wrong because it failed to stay decentralized. To hint at great cryptography as the solution, as he does im his conclusion, is baked deep in his bones as an amazing cryptographer, but I think he’s prescribing the wrong cure. The problems with the Internet are fundamentally not about decentralization - they’re about trust. It’s a people problem, not a technology problem. Because of this, cryptography (I do not mean crypto) simply cannot be the answer - even the best cryptography is, like a great legal system, only capable of dramatically reducing the overhead costs and risk of operating in a given environment. When it comes to what great cryptography can achieve, I think HTTPS and maybe some E2E stuff that’s happening with Signal is as good as it can get (interestingly, HTTPS is good in large part thanks to Moxie) - it cannot bring us back to some golden Internet age.
  • lordofmoria 5y ago
    This is insightful, but a bit depressing. How do you propose solving these problems if cryptography is not the answer? At least Moxie is suggesting that there is a viable path forward by focusing on solutions that decentralize the infrastructure.
    • walterbell 5y ago
      > a great legal system We have centuries of data and precedent from human legal systems. How could human and machine governance be improved with the aid of modern technology, including but not limited to, revision control of legislation and public caselaw, graph databases for threat analytics across time/space/network, automated identification of gaps in machine governance which require human intervention, and yes, all the tools of web3/crypt0.
      • biztos 5y ago
• Lucadg 5y ago
  Great article. About NFTs: we tend to think they somehow need an image to make sense, while the "own the NFT to own the image" is both wrong and just one specific use case out of many. I find it useful to think about NFTs as "internet native property titles" which do not embed "law enforcement". See it this way: if you own a house, you own a property title which proves it. In case someone squats your house and the law enforcement does not help you get it back (e.g. due to corruption or slow legal system), it's just a useless piece of paper. Same with NFTs. Some use cases have enforcement embedded (e.g. ENS domains) and bear no risk, some don't (OpenSea minted image NFTs) and carry some risk from centralized entities (the same risk we have in 100% of Web2 applications btw) Enforcement often happens at the app layer, even if the NFT image can be compromised. E.g. an NFT which gives you access to a walled web page will still work even if the image is compromised.
• leifg 5y ago
  > What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. I hear a lot that some of the smartest people work on web3/blockchain/crypto. It blows my mind that the NFT standard doesn’t enforce a content hash. I genuinely thought that was part of the standard. How did no one foresee that content at a URL can change?
• astoor 5y ago
  It is very refreshing to see this from a primarily technical angle. In common with many HN-ers, I actually did a lot of cryptocurrency and blockchain dev work 5+ years ago, and was actually very exited about it at first, before realising what was behind the curtains. It is a similar story with many early Bitcoin developers, including one famously describing it as an experiment that failed[0]. I also get the distinct impression that the vast majority of pro-cryptocurrency people on HN at the moment are relatively new[1]. I stopped looking at it primarily from a technical angle because I realised that, firstly, the technology isn't anywhere nearly as useful as some people make out and might never be able to do the things which are promised, but secondly and more importantly, the technology really isn't the important part - what matters is the belief that technology might work, and sustaining that belief for long enough to make money. Moxie hints at this when he says "you can’t stop a gold rush". There were an increasing number of people at the tech meetups etc. who knew nothing about the technology. Many were gamblers, refugees from the 2011 "Black Friday"[2], who knew full well that many of the schemes they were putting money into would never work or were even out-and-out scams, but they enjoyed the thrill of trying to get in and out and make money before the collapse. The was also a growing sense of people being involved just to be anti-establishment. The ironic thing is that, back in 2008, you could make a reasonable case that the established banks were the bad guys and the cypherpunks were the good guys, but the situation has now definitely reversed - the banks have cleaned up their acts considerably (anyone who has worked in one for a long time will say how completely different the cultures are now vs then) with new regulations (e.g. Dodd-Frank) and most have plans to become carbon neutral, etc., and it is all the cryptocurrency scammers and fraudsters and climate-destroyers who are the bad guys now. But there is more to it than that. There was also an increasing undercurrent of very non-technical people coming in and trying to exploit the technologists excited to work on the next new and shiny thing. I know that kind-of thing happens with everything, but this was much deeper and more malicious than in other contexts. So while the technology isn't the important part, it is useful to be reminded of the intractable problems with the technology. [0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi... [1] Yes I know there may be exceptions, but just for example compare all the newbie comments on the recent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29635907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29635907 with the highly technical ones on the related post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365663 from 8 years ago (including "I'm one of the thieves mentioned"). [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
• gorgoiler 5y ago
  “Protocols move slowly. After 30 years, email is still unencrypted.” OK, so I know what moxie means but in terms of sniffability: how much SMTP traffic is actually conducted in plaintext these days? Could someone put a ballpark value on the amount? For starters: 50% must be big-webmail-provider to either themselves or another big-webmail-provider. Do the long tail not have their LetsEncrypt certificates configured?
  • brewmarche 5y ago
    I can’t speak for him, but I think whenever moxie talks about encrypted mail/messengers he means E2EE. And the state of E2EE for email is not good. SMIME is hard to set up for regular users (dearth of free certificates [0], lack of SMIMEA support [1]), PGP support is lacking out of the box in most mail clients. And maintaining your contacts’ keys is quite a nuisance, using key servers requires trust (I have no control over who submits keys in my name, revoking can be hard). Regardless of whether you go for SMIME or PGP you will always have to sync your private keys when you use more than one mail client (web mail especially is a problem). [0] Only one I know is Actalis, supporting catch-all is impossible with it and you need to request a new certificate every year but cannot request before it is expired. [1] I can’t set a SMIMEA record on Namecheap’s name servers. And mail client support seems hard to check.
• TekMol 5y ago
  This is the tweet where he announced the NFT: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305 I can still see it on OpenSea: https://opensea.io/assets/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa578221305b12c307/1/ https://opensea.io/assets/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57822130... Maybe it was blocked and later unblocked? Anyhow, I think he is painting too black of an image of Web3. Even if OpenSea blocks his NFT, Ethereum scanners will still show it: https://etherscan.io/address/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa578221305b12c307 https://etherscan.io/address/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57822... It would take an Ethereum hard fork to tamper with it. That is a very big undertaking and rarely happens. So he can prove that he minted it. This is something we do not have on Web2. If FB deletes something, you do not have proof. And you cannot see it anymore. Neither in Chrome nor in Edge nor in Firefox. On Web3, if OpenSea blocks an NFT and MetaMask uses the OpenSea API to display it, you can use another browser and see it again.
  • wahnfrieden 5y ago
    The value of the nft drops to near zero if it’s not accepted on dominant popular marketplaces
• yawnxyz 5y ago
  My takeaway from this article: decentralization is usually bad UX (gas fees, slow to add features...), so people tend to aggregate to platforms w/ better UX that sit on top of decentralized services, which leads back to centralization I love the Gmail analogy, that even though email is decentralized, everyone just uses Gmail (probably because it's a better UX)
• mikewarot 5y ago
  >People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will People don't trust their computers on the open internet enough to run them as servers. No computer running Linux, Windows, or MacOS exposed to raw internet is safe. This is subject to disruption, should sufficiently well designed microkernel based OSs arrive on the scene before the war for general purpose computing is lost. Personally, once I get a capability based OS as a daily driver, the first thing I'm going to try out is running a few servers on it, and persistently checking for trouble.
• deepGem 5y ago
  " that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). " This is how I felt when I first created a NFT. Man, the contract is so secure and all that but the raw asset - forget about it. https://twitter.com/pbanavara/status/1457675453565599748?s=20 https://twitter.com/pbanavara/status/1457675453565599748?s=2... What I deduced was that the chain will somehow reject any other contract referencing the duplicate asset and only preserve the original contract. Something similar happened on OpenSea with Moxie but isn't this centralisation ? But doesn't this apply to all off chain assets ? Essentially any underlying data for a smart contract, because you know storing even a byte of data on chain costs a lot. So the smart contract - essentially a set of instructions is distributed, decentralised but prone to security lapses ( a whole another story ) yet somehow the data for these smart contracts is centralised ? I am so confused.
• bambax 5y ago
  This is a fascinating and absolutely brilliant article that explains so many things in very clever and intelligible ways. Here are two things I'd like further clarification on: 1/ The article explains that NFTs are just pointers to some url and that what resides at the url can change at any time, with no control from the NFT as the standard doesn't involve a hash which would at least help verify that the content hasn't been changed. (A hash would not prevent the content to be changed but it would show it has been). The article says "NFTs generally do not store that data on-chain. For most NFTs of most images, that would be much too expensive". Can someone elaborate on this? Why would it be too expensive to store the art on the blockchain instead of a pointer? What amounts are we talking about, and how do they correlate to the number of bytes stored? In the case of generative art that consists of a few lines of JavaScript for example, is it different? Could it then be stored directly on the blockchain? 2/ A very surprising fact is that centralized intermediaries can indeed decide and change what's on the blockchain, with no challenge from the users. Here's the key paragraph: > All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address! But why is that? Why can't we have independent servers that actually read the blockchain directly without using OpenSea's APIs? Is it just a matter of convenience? Is it because it would be too complex and expensive and therefore it's simpler to just use the APIs? Or is it technically infeasible, for some reason?*
  • detaro 5y ago
    > Why would it be too expensive to store the art on the blockchain instead of a pointer? Remember that "on the blockchain" means that everybody who keeps a copy of the chain needs to store it. Thus blockchains have a huge motivation to keep that small. A chain which includes lots of data would have many nodes exclude that data from storage - functionally pretty much the same then as storing hashes pointing elsewhere. (or if it forced nodes to keep it somehow, it would have fewer full nodes and/or higher costs to compensate) > But why is that? Because those particular implementations are badly done (and the success of Opensea shows that many people (or at least people wielding lots of money) participating don't care about this kind of detail, or at least don't consider it a dealbreaker). Using some kind of API is useful of course to implement, but going through the platform again is not very decentralized...
• tomputer 5y ago
  Fantastic article. Great read! > Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. This is an important line. People buying NFT's who are not aware of this may assume the NFT pictures itself are stored on-chain.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • sneak 5y ago
    This doesn't actually matter, though. When you buy an NFT, you're not buying the picture, the art, the URL, or the copyright - you're just buying the NFT.
• ypcx 5y ago
  1. When people are financially incentivized to run servers, they always will. 2. If a crypto protocol doesn't evolve at the pace of available innovation, that particular blockchain will be superseded by a new one. That said, a (truly democratic) evolutionary process is a core part of every blockchain specification. 3. You can get blockchain data via public (and federated/proxied) API, but you can always cryptographically verify its veracity, and your edge device (e.g. your smartphone) can do that. The same the other way around, you cryptographically sign the inputs you send to the networks, so that no federated API can tamper them, because the secret key stays on your device. This is referred to as the "trust-less model".
  • solarmist 5y ago
    I wouldn't unless it was a significant incentive (order of $100/month), and even then, I might not do it if it wasn't relevant to my life. And this is predicated on it being zero-maintenance/upkeep for me.
• hooande 5y ago
  So the idea of web3 is that the only thing stopping me from making my own twitter is that I don't have their past and future data. If I had real time READ access on their database of public tweets, I could make hooande-tweeter.com and it would be a viable competitor. This would mean that social media companies have less control over what we see and say due to market competition. This obviously isn't working in the real world. OpenSea can still delete moxie's NFT. Starting a competitor to them will be difficult even though their core data is completely public. Just like twitter, OpenSea's position is based on brand awareness and first mover advantage. At this point competing would require differentiating features that solve real problems. That's a lot of work just because they deleted an NFT. A better example might be twitter banning trump. If someone had access to all of twitter's data in real time and used it to start "twitter + trump", I could see a significant number of people using that. But then you'd kind of have half of people on regular twitter and the other half on trump twitter and it wouldn't be the same thing. In fact, it's fragmentation all the way down. I don't know if having a dozen different social media interfaces with slightly different rules and guidelines would solve anything. The general idea seems to be that data is more powerful than branding. I don't know if that's true. Google and Facebook have a place in the zeitgeist that is more valuable than a search index or a social graph. We'll see if blockchain based open data is the answer. I think it might be way more complicated and less technical than that.
• wb14123 5y ago
  End to end encryption and open protocol give user more control of their data and has the same decentralized feature as blockchain. It should be the future we should build.
• jakupovic 5y ago
  The article is written great and was enjoyable to read. I do have issues with how it is focused on NFT marketplace to the detriment of explaining what the real benefit of the blockchain/crypto is. Which I am going to try and explain to the best of my ability. Here goes. The article omits to mention that whatever is stored in the blockchain is immutable. This means that there is not google or Zuckerberg behind it all with ability to actually change what's on the chain as this is not possible at all. Instead the author focuses on the ability of OpenSea to remove things from their marketplace and also how it uses centralized apis to get the info. This, while true, is orthogonal to the immutable ledger use case which is still true.
• sriku 5y ago
  Very well raised points! Having a cryptographer taking up this topic has become a rarity, and that says something. I have not delved into the NFT world much, although I am quite familiar with blockchains and smart contracts. I've argued with more knowledgeable colleagues and friends that there is not much meaning in "owning" the hash of a piece of art for various reasons - a) you don't possess the art and are the mercy of systems which you need to do anything with it, b) someone can make an imperceptible modification to the art and invalidate the hash while retaining full artistic value except perhaps as a pedantic statement ... and then some. What baffled me is that the accepted protocol for NFTs currently just requires a URL, any URL! ... with no hash validation! How did the blockchain world get here? Well, perhaps a IPFS URL would be "best practice", but it is shocking that currently any URL with no content validation goes! It should be impossible to mint an NFT for a URL with no content validation.
• bambax 5y ago
  > When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much “better” in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. I really love this idea. Why doesn't a company with already established authority (say, Google) build this? An NFT-free NFT marketplace. That would be hilarious, as well as probably useful. Or maybe someone else than an established player, but then with some mechanism to compensate for the lack of intrinsic authority. For example, a database with a hash of the whole db stored on a blockchain. To keep costs low, the hash could be stored only every x inserts (or, for a fee, one could force a hash store after a given transaction).
• jstanley 5y ago
  > To be clear, there is nothing particularly “distributed” about the apps themselves: they’re just normal react websites. The “distributedness” refers to where the state and the logic/permissions for updating the state lives: on the blockchain instead of in a “centralized” database. This is one way to do it, but ideally you would host the site on IPFS so that you don't have a web server involved at all.
• adabaed 5y ago
  Do you think Cardano can aliviate some of the clear issues we are seeing with Ethereum? I've been reading a lot for the past two weeks and I must say I'm close to start developing stuff in Cardano.
• endorphine 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I don't have much knowledge around web3. I would probably consider my self a skeptic, if I had to. > People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. Just wanted to point out that the last part of this sentence is merely a prediction. > If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very quickly, and if you don’t keep up you will fail. By that logic, has email failed? I wouldn't say so. > Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there. I find it hard to imagine that NFTs will eventually not be backed by a blockchain, since this is what provides all the hype.
• losvedir 5y ago
  I am (or was?) a huge Moxie Marlinspike fan, and highly recommend this video[0] of his from Defcon several years ago. It was formative in my understanding of privacy and security. That said, something here really doesn't add up. Being a huge fan, I took note several years ago of MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency, which listed him on the home page as one of the team.[1] Or, see this Wired article about it[2]. The big selling point, as I remember it, of MobileCoin (per the name) was that it was actually feasible for small clients (i.e. phones) to meaningfully take part in the network. But he's since been scrubbed from the site, as far as I can tell. MobileCoin was added to Signal, much to the chagrin of HN. And Signal is intimately related to Moxie's work. I had thought that if MobileCoin becomes a thing, then the holders of the originally mined coin would become pretty rich, and I assume that would include Moxie. So I'm a little confused by how this post fits in. I infer from it that he's new to web3 and crypto in general, but it feels like this isn't the case. (Though "web3" is ambiguous, and I suppose he's referring generally to Ethereum and dApps.) But his main point seems to be that the dominant cryptocurrency isn't suitable for involving light clients, which was the main selling point of MobileCoin. I just wish it were clear his involvement with MobileCoin, since it feels to me like that could be a pretty significant conflict of interest with regard to Ethereum investigated here and could influence his perspective. For all I know, he answered some questions to the MobileCoin folks and they inflated his involvement. But then that wouldn't really explain how or why it was integrated into Signal. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171216012822/https://www.mobilecoin.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171216012822/https://www.mobil... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/ https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/
• irwt 5y ago
  As he's expressing several opinions, let's comment on each one separately: 1) His comment that "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will" is correct, but I think it's not the right way to think about the problem. All of us have gigabytes of cached shit on our devices. Ideally that locally stored information should be part of a decentralized web. By "decentralized web" I mean smth very different from today's web3 bs. 2) "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform" - again, he is correct, but I feel like he's not seeing the larger picture. The fact that a protocol "moves much more slowly" is actually a feature. Elaboration: He is looking only at the pace of change, not at the robustness of the system in question. Old software that was designed for use value, still works flawlessly, i.e. it doesn't break. The dependency graph of older protocols is mind blowingly small. Today's software, which most often gets designed for exchange value, breaks within a year if it doesn't get updates, because their dependency graph is enormous. It's correct that protocols rarely update, but they get forked way more. Most updates get introduced through new forks. 3) his section "Making some distributed apps" - spot on. As long as you need to have a local copy of a ledger (even if it's just the block headers) to be a validator, the majority of users will still have to trust a server. crypto fanatics will claim "yeah, but you can ask for a merklle proof of the state" miss that lying by omission is a thing (i.e. in the classic merkle tree, you can prove that smth is present, you cannot prove that smth is not present). As a result servers can still lie to you by omission. Crypto fanatics will say "yeah, but you can contact several nodes", but that assumes that there are several nodes. In reality the majority of projects will only call an Infura node. It's all insane. Nothing about today's crypto space is actually trustless & decentralized. 4) His section "Making an NFT" - Yup, the NFT space is ridiculous on several levels. His arguments against metamask are also legit, same reasoning as in the previous point. 5) Section "Recreating this world" - I think he's making the same logical mistake as in the earlier sections here. The cryptocurrency protocols did not converge to a client - server setup. They always were a client - server setup in disguise. The problems related to simplified payment verification (SPV) were never actually solved. I think it's wrong to think that things must converge to platforms. Things that are use value based often resist such dynamics, e.g. Torrents. 6) The "It’s early days" section - yup, it's not early days anymore. These problems are inherit in the architecture design of blockchain protocols. 7) "But you can’t stop a gold rush" - This whole section was spot on. It's all a gold rush. There's no use value to any of the crypto projects right now, except maybe enabling people who live under authoritarian regimes to take take their capital with them. 8) "Creativity might not be enough" - I don't agree with the first part of his conclusion, but the second part is legit. Personally I think current web3 is going down a very bad path. The old school p2p protocol designers were still driven mainly by a socialist / anarchist zeitgeist. They were designing for use value. Today's protocols have a neoliberal zeitgeist. Use value was thrown out of the window in exchange for speculative value.
• democracy 5y ago
  I appreciate the author's patience and effort not to put TLDR as "it's all BS" in the beginning of his post...
• pelasaco 5y ago
  the good news is that it's not the first shared database that we have to manage. Take DNS as example. We know the answer: Start a new blockchain using Ethereum technology, and let institutes around the world, host the "servers". Even better if every central bank in the world could run a node.
• tomxor 5y ago
  Can we stop calling it Web3 and just call it NFTs... Just call it what it is. If we are talking about NFTs say NFT, if we are talking about the general applicability of blockchains, say Blockchain. Every time someone attempts to describe Web3 they just end up trying to describe NFTs without actually talking about what NFTs tangibly do and are, which is why it sounds so ridiculously nebulous. This response and the original article are both 99% literally discussing NFTs.
• janandonly 5y ago
  On the one hand I am happy to read a, at first sight, well balanced and well thought out critique of "web3"... On the other hand: I can not escape the idea that he picked specific examples to make specific point: - People don't want to run a server... Do they not? Or are most APPs simply not build with server capabilities? In the early days of Spotify they had a limited server capacity and everyone who streamed a song simply downloaded it from a server and peers mix, and in the background uploaded it to others peers. People were feeling just fine about 'running a server', just because they didn't even knew they did. The app hid (or abstracted) away the whole client/server question. [1] - decentralisation doesn't work because "the blockchain" is hard to query and you need centralised APIs to do it for you. Again, a very weird and false dichotomy. Why take Ethereum as an example for "the blockchain". If I wanted to write a pro-blockain piece I would pick the Bitcoin blockchain as an example of how this CAN work. At this moment I run several apps on my iPhone which all query this blockchain for their functionality and it words just fine (and decentralised). To clarify I don't have the whole chain on my phone, it connects to random nodes (or my own if I so choose) and queries the chain via Bloom-filters [2]. - OpenSea as a example of a decentralised market place that doesn't seem to work. Again, why this example? Why not BISQ, a marketplace that is truly decentralised and has been running flawless for years? [3] So, one could write an article that is saying the exacte opposite only by picking different examples. [1] https://siliconangle.com/2014/04/22/spotify-abandoning-p2p-in-favor-of-a-more-traditional-dedicated-architecture/ https://siliconangle.com/2014/04/22/spotify-abandoning-p2p-i... [2] https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/transaction-bloom-filtering/ https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/transaction-bloom-filtering... [3] https://bisq.network https://bisq.network
  • tomxor 5y ago
    > - People don't want to run a server... Do they not? I think this is the most important point the article made. Most people really don't want to run a server, why? because they don't even know what a server is. However they do have some tangible sense of some program they download and run on their device. So the only way for the masses to have truly decentralised infra is to make sure those programs are nodes in the decentralised networks. > Or are most APPs simply not build as with server capabilities? This. I don't know why, maybe there just aren't enough interested developers to build clients for this stuff that works like e.g a bittorrent client. The irony seems to be that most people making these "decentralised" apps are only interested in making portals into centralised platforms connected to a blockchain. Or maybe the design of the protocols simply doesn't lend itself to independent clients directly connecting to each other. I think bittorrent is a really good example of how to do this stuff well. People will complain and say the masses don't use it, but it's been around for a couple of decades now and it "just works" and continues to "just work" and every client is a server, it is truly decentralised, with federated infra only to distribute metadata. I think the only reason it's not used by the masses is because 90% of what it's used to distribute is copyrighted material. If web3 (or lets just call it what it is - NFTs, or the next blockchain fad) are to work in a truly decentralised manner, then whoever is designing these protocols needs to keep the whole picture in mind, end to end, to ensure clients are equal - to design it in such a way to actively work against the trend to centralised platforms, make them irrelevant.
• egberts1 5y ago
  FTFA: “We should try to reduce the burden of building software.” (building, compiling, linking my own copy of a Signal-Desktop app: failed, upgrade, failed, upgrade, failed, upgrade, failed, package is too new, … FAIL!) - And Signal-Desktop app comprises of some 130,000 components/modules/archic/EOL packages, got it.
• _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
  Seems like the image is back up of OpenSea: https://opensea.io/assets/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa578221305b12c307/1/ https://opensea.io/assets/0x5c61afa47570ab2b562606fa57822130...
• petenick 5y ago
  I have been looking for an objective, skeptical evaluation of web3 and this delivers. Despite all of the discussion around decentralization, market forces like network effects, switching costs, and winner-take-all will likely occur and with it some degree of centralization.
• hakcermani 5y ago
  I don't this part. Oh the NFT is just the URL and the image served by the server can be changed .. can't the URL include the hash like ?h=HASH_OF_IMAGE .. a compromised server can send any image, but the end user can verify its fake as they have the hash ???
• amai 5y ago
  „Unfortunately, I think distributed systems have a tendency to exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more difficult, not less complicated and less difficult.“ His conclusion about distributed web3 is also true for microservices.
• mmcnl 5y ago
  This is the best article on web 3 I have read thus far. Probably because this guy actually bothered to create some dApps (as one of 7 in the world I think).
• magicjosh 5y ago
  Wow only a day later and 400+ ETH has been spent to mint additions to the art piece. The current cost to mint an addition is 1.4 ETH.
• dekhn 5y ago
  y'all look like a cult
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