10 ms·

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

by 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.
      - kristofferR 5y ago
        Yeah, you just change the RPC URL: https://docs.metamask.io/guide/rpc-api.html https://docs.metamask.io/guide/rpc-api.html
        gen220 5y ago
        I don’t think changing the RPC URL exec’s an ethereum light client. Extending the mail server analogy, updating the MX record does not exec a mail server.
        CryptoPunk 5y ago
        He's saying that configuring MetaMask to work with a light client is as easy as changing the RPC URL. The light client still needs to be installed/configured separately. Ideally, as Moxie suggested, MetaMask itself integrates a light client into its wallet, so that it becomes the default configuration.
      - clippablematt 5y ago
        The idea of light clients is they will be bundled inside of apps/websites/extensions. So yes running a light client will be easy because it’s just happening in the background of the app, replacing the api hopping we do now with direct call/response to the chain. So for metamask they would replace the calls to infura with a light client instead. Easy. They’re probably a year away from adoption, this year will accelerate development as it’s something lots of us want.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      I don't think that's a reality yet though. ETH 2.0 hasn't happened yet.
  - pshc 5y ago
    It’s not the same as web2. These web3 frontends don’t have moats or lock-in like Facebook or Google, because they don’t actually control the data. The data they serve is all from public ledgers. You can switch off of Infura in a second by changing your RPC url.
    - Swizec 5y ago
      The problem is that they control distribution – the only thing that matters. You don't need to own the data if you own the eyeballs/mindshare. For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights, yet they own 32% of the music streaming market. The second best is Apple at 16% ... which also doesn't own any of the music. https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-service-subscriber-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-s...
      - CuriousCosmic 5y ago
        It's a little different than Spotify. Spotify still controls the means of distribution while the data sources for "web3" are public/decentralised (in most but not all cases). Rather I'd compare it to Google Search and AMP. The data is still accessible and there are alternatives (manually routing to the sites themselves or using other search engines) however the main path to the data is gatekept by a centralised source (Google) which is routing all the requests through their servers (AMP) instead of using the underlying protocol. It's still a severe issue but it's a much simpler solution to simply build competitors for a tool accessing an open platform than it is to build a new platform entirely.
      - pshc 5y ago
        Yes, web2 incumbents control data and they control distribution. I agree with you there! aside; sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because for the last decade or so on HN we’ve been talking about how Big Tech has monopoly control over everything, how they’ve destroyed privacy and monetized eyeballs and engagement to the fullest. And now that a potential decentralized competitor is emerging, the kneejerk reaction is “why not just keep using <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”? (I understand why, cryptocurrency is the whipping boy of the week, and it’s full of scammers, I get it! But I’m not going to pretend I’m happy with the existing crop of centralized services.)
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I think it's good to remember that bitcoin and ethereum were the very first cryptocurrencies. They are flawed, bitcoin in particular failed at everything it was idealized to be and will probably never improve. Ethereum seems to be moving forward at least. Slowly, but still.
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    The fact that a problem exists doesn't mean it can't be solved, but any solution which does not go deep enough to address why Ethereum nodes are centralized is simply hype.
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  It's a step up from the "crypto isn't crypto" mantra that many used to repeat, refusing to even look at how it works. Not sure why it took something as silly as art NFTs, but it does seem that now even those who previously tried avoiding cryptocurrencies at all cost have at least started looking at them critically. He does point out some real problems. Yes, all this has been discussed in the Ethereum community already and many in the community have voiced the same criticisms as well. But a lot of the issues are still unsolved for regular mainstream users, who rely on a lot of centralized services and are often herded into solutions that may bring more convenience but are also less secure. It's good we're having discussions about this, and the more people that point out flaws the better. After all the entire point of a blockchain is to be public and robust. If this is our future money or notary service, the more probing the better.
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    This is exactly the attitude that moves us forward. "Us" not being just those who happen to get in early on the solutions to the solvable problems, but hopefully including everyone who can get a benefit from using truly decentralized services.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  > is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask/OpenSea). You can't really lump both of those into the same bucket of "front-end". Metamask is a front-end, a user interface. OpenSea is more like middlewear that connects various front-end clients like Metamask to the backend database, and provides some additional functionality that's in any of the database's stored procedures or views. OpenSea also has its own front-end UI to its own service, but its core service is its API to the Ethereum database.
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  For a non-tech regular user who just want to get some work done Internet Explorer was indeed the internet. In India even to this day for a vast majority YouTube/FB/WA is all the internet is. It's not at all unusual for people to walk up to a mom-and-pop store to top-up their data plan asking them to "recharge my WhatsApp balance". Even carriers have specialised data packs that are tied to a specific product/service. And to be fair this is just how it'll be with any product/tech. As an example, in India Xerox literally stands for photocopy https://imgur.com/a/66TnCog https://imgur.com/a/66TnCog
  - GreenWatermelon 5y ago
    The Xerox-copy thing is pretty interesting. Here in Egypt, Pampers is the word used for diapers, and for a while, IPad meant any kind of tablet. I wonder what type of cultural memes exist for other cultures, similar to these examples.
wyck 5y ago
MetaMask is a wallet, its not ingrained into any blockchain, your free to use alternatives, and many protocols don't support it. The centralized aspect of a chrome app and marketplace like opensea is very well know issue and talked about a lot in crypto, the problem of course comes down to lack of education, which is apparent in this very post.
- password1 5y ago
  Can you point me to where this insightful discussion happens? And where can I educate myself? 99,99% of content and forums I find online about crypto only care about promoting coins, nfts or services basing only on futuristic visionary promises, hyping up the users and attempts at FOMO. It's almost literal spam. This is the first time I read something that just explains how thing works from a technical standpoint and what challenges are there.
  - PretzelPirate 5y ago
    This is the best place for deep, technical discussions free of shilling: https://ethresear.ch/ https://ethresear.ch/
  - darcys22 5y ago
    Its almost entirely done on crypto twitter. You follow the builders and they talk about this stuff. Tweet threads are terrible but that is where the good information is. Twitter is frustrating in that the good content is buried and if you follow the wrong people they just spam your feed. Its a constant battle to keep the signal to noise ratio of your feed high and the right people to follow constantly changes.
    - beoberha 5y ago
      I got into web3/crypto (hate both those terms) Twitter a few months ago and it took a very significant amount of time to find the signal among the noise if you will. Twitter’s algorithms heavily favor engagement which in turn favors “influencers” who lack a lot of technical knowledge and peddle hype. I can see why curious skeptics are so quickly turned off, but there really is a gold mine of good discussion out there. @das_connor is an awesome follow. He works for Avalanche (which I believe will be a massive player in enterprise blockchain adoption).
SkyMarshal 5y ago
> Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along. It has, but only a small portion of people with the engineering skills to recognize knew it. Those profiting off it hyped it, and those not either called it a scam or stayed out of the fray.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  This somewhat reminds me of reading IPFS documentation (which is fucking excellent BTW) and realizing the same thing: nobody is going to run their own pinning service and Piñata is the only one they mention by name which means it’ll be the platform everyone (to a first approximation) will use.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    The lack of a a few "chains" though means an ephemeral node might actually not suck though. Put another way, even IPFS nodes that for all intents and purposes are "clients" can still speak the same protocal to talk to the pinning service. The single-ish central chain idea was always terrible. "Trustless" or not, that much synchronization is a misfeature! The real world really is partial-order time/causality, that is a feature not a bug.
    - IgorPartola 5y ago
      I make content. I put it on IPFS. I pin it to Piñata because my laptop isn’t on all the time. Piñata decides my content isn’t acceptable and removes it. You can’t access my content. Not a problem?
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        With torrents people actually participate. Piñata should not be viewed as the "database of record", but as a something that complements the desktop at home. I understand that is still not satisfactory. I think the real goal is to find institutional users who are not interested in a profit. For example I am involved with https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/ https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/. Software Heritage would be not a high bandwidth pinner, but a pinner of last resort. Universities were very important to the original internet, and should also host public data sets, software artifact, and hopefully if Sci Hub prevails the journal articles themselves. None of that is a pinning service, but if it catches on the big cloud companies might feel compelled to get into the pinning service game, if only so they can get those university and government contracts! The current cloud computing business as a racket, but them offering support for a protocol that reduces switching costs might make for some real competition. Basically "web2" problems are Captialism problems, and the stuff needs to become a low-margin business or state-run not-for profit to be better. There is no secret magic short cut, it is a political problem. SV is of course completely uninterested in low-margin businesses. The regular web3 will have a hard time being anything but a Ponzi scheme per its design, but IPFS itself at least doesn't have those characteristics baked in, and so these alternative futures are possible.

by clarle 5y ago

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.
    - kristofferR 5y ago
      Yeah, you just change the RPC URL: https://docs.metamask.io/guide/rpc-api.html https://docs.metamask.io/guide/rpc-api.html
      - gen220 5y ago
        I don’t think changing the RPC URL exec’s an ethereum light client. Extending the mail server analogy, updating the MX record does not exec a mail server.
        CryptoPunk 5y ago
        He's saying that configuring MetaMask to work with a light client is as easy as changing the RPC URL. The light client still needs to be installed/configured separately. Ideally, as Moxie suggested, MetaMask itself integrates a light client into its wallet, so that it becomes the default configuration.
    - clippablematt 5y ago
      The idea of light clients is they will be bundled inside of apps/websites/extensions. So yes running a light client will be easy because it’s just happening in the background of the app, replacing the api hopping we do now with direct call/response to the chain. So for metamask they would replace the calls to infura with a light client instead. Easy. They’re probably a year away from adoption, this year will accelerate development as it’s something lots of us want.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I don't think that's a reality yet though. ETH 2.0 hasn't happened yet.
- pshc 5y ago
  It’s not the same as web2. These web3 frontends don’t have moats or lock-in like Facebook or Google, because they don’t actually control the data. The data they serve is all from public ledgers. You can switch off of Infura in a second by changing your RPC url.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    The problem is that they control distribution – the only thing that matters. You don't need to own the data if you own the eyeballs/mindshare. For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights, yet they own 32% of the music streaming market. The second best is Apple at 16% ... which also doesn't own any of the music. https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-service-subscriber-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-s...
    - CuriousCosmic 5y ago
      It's a little different than Spotify. Spotify still controls the means of distribution while the data sources for "web3" are public/decentralised (in most but not all cases). Rather I'd compare it to Google Search and AMP. The data is still accessible and there are alternatives (manually routing to the sites themselves or using other search engines) however the main path to the data is gatekept by a centralised source (Google) which is routing all the requests through their servers (AMP) instead of using the underlying protocol. It's still a severe issue but it's a much simpler solution to simply build competitors for a tool accessing an open platform than it is to build a new platform entirely.
    - pshc 5y ago
      Yes, web2 incumbents control data and they control distribution. I agree with you there! aside; sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because for the last decade or so on HN we’ve been talking about how Big Tech has monopoly control over everything, how they’ve destroyed privacy and monetized eyeballs and engagement to the fullest. And now that a potential decentralized competitor is emerging, the kneejerk reaction is “why not just keep using <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”? (I understand why, cryptocurrency is the whipping boy of the week, and it’s full of scammers, I get it! But I’m not going to pretend I’m happy with the existing crop of centralized services.)
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I think it's good to remember that bitcoin and ethereum were the very first cryptocurrencies. They are flawed, bitcoin in particular failed at everything it was idealized to be and will probably never improve. Ethereum seems to be moving forward at least. Slowly, but still.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  The fact that a problem exists doesn't mean it can't be solved, but any solution which does not go deep enough to address why Ethereum nodes are centralized is simply hype.
trompetenaccoun 5y ago
It's a step up from the "crypto isn't crypto" mantra that many used to repeat, refusing to even look at how it works. Not sure why it took something as silly as art NFTs, but it does seem that now even those who previously tried avoiding cryptocurrencies at all cost have at least started looking at them critically. He does point out some real problems. Yes, all this has been discussed in the Ethereum community already and many in the community have voiced the same criticisms as well. But a lot of the issues are still unsolved for regular mainstream users, who rely on a lot of centralized services and are often herded into solutions that may bring more convenience but are also less secure. It's good we're having discussions about this, and the more people that point out flaws the better. After all the entire point of a blockchain is to be public and robust. If this is our future money or notary service, the more probing the better.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  This is exactly the attitude that moves us forward. "Us" not being just those who happen to get in early on the solutions to the solvable problems, but hopefully including everyone who can get a benefit from using truly decentralized services.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
> is tying web3 to several centralized front ends (Metamask/OpenSea). You can't really lump both of those into the same bucket of "front-end". Metamask is a front-end, a user interface. OpenSea is more like middlewear that connects various front-end clients like Metamask to the backend database, and provides some additional functionality that's in any of the database's stored procedures or views. OpenSea also has its own front-end UI to its own service, but its core service is its API to the Ethereum database.
vishnugupta 5y ago
For a non-tech regular user who just want to get some work done Internet Explorer was indeed the internet. In India even to this day for a vast majority YouTube/FB/WA is all the internet is. It's not at all unusual for people to walk up to a mom-and-pop store to top-up their data plan asking them to "recharge my WhatsApp balance". Even carriers have specialised data packs that are tied to a specific product/service. And to be fair this is just how it'll be with any product/tech. As an example, in India Xerox literally stands for photocopy https://imgur.com/a/66TnCog https://imgur.com/a/66TnCog
- GreenWatermelon 5y ago
  The Xerox-copy thing is pretty interesting. Here in Egypt, Pampers is the word used for diapers, and for a while, IPad meant any kind of tablet. I wonder what type of cultural memes exist for other cultures, similar to these examples.

wyck 5y ago

MetaMask is a wallet, its not ingrained into any blockchain, your free to use alternatives, and many protocols don't support it. The centralized aspect of a chrome app and marketplace like opensea is very well know issue and talked about a lot in crypto, the problem of course comes down to lack of education, which is apparent in this very post.

password1 5y ago
Can you point me to where this insightful discussion happens? And where can I educate myself? 99,99% of content and forums I find online about crypto only care about promoting coins, nfts or services basing only on futuristic visionary promises, hyping up the users and attempts at FOMO. It's almost literal spam. This is the first time I read something that just explains how thing works from a technical standpoint and what challenges are there.
- PretzelPirate 5y ago
  This is the best place for deep, technical discussions free of shilling: https://ethresear.ch/ https://ethresear.ch/
- darcys22 5y ago
  Its almost entirely done on crypto twitter. You follow the builders and they talk about this stuff. Tweet threads are terrible but that is where the good information is. Twitter is frustrating in that the good content is buried and if you follow the wrong people they just spam your feed. Its a constant battle to keep the signal to noise ratio of your feed high and the right people to follow constantly changes.
  - beoberha 5y ago
    I got into web3/crypto (hate both those terms) Twitter a few months ago and it took a very significant amount of time to find the signal among the noise if you will. Twitter’s algorithms heavily favor engagement which in turn favors “influencers” who lack a lot of technical knowledge and peddle hype. I can see why curious skeptics are so quickly turned off, but there really is a gold mine of good discussion out there. @das_connor is an awesome follow. He works for Avalanche (which I believe will be a massive player in enterprise blockchain adoption).

SkyMarshal 5y ago

> Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along. It has, but only a small portion of people with the engineering skills to recognize knew it. Those profiting off it hyped it, and those not either called it a scam or stayed out of the fray.

IgorPartola 5y ago
This somewhat reminds me of reading IPFS documentation (which is fucking excellent BTW) and realizing the same thing: nobody is going to run their own pinning service and Piñata is the only one they mention by name which means it’ll be the platform everyone (to a first approximation) will use.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  The lack of a a few "chains" though means an ephemeral node might actually not suck though. Put another way, even IPFS nodes that for all intents and purposes are "clients" can still speak the same protocal to talk to the pinning service. The single-ish central chain idea was always terrible. "Trustless" or not, that much synchronization is a misfeature! The real world really is partial-order time/causality, that is a feature not a bug.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    I make content. I put it on IPFS. I pin it to Piñata because my laptop isn’t on all the time. Piñata decides my content isn’t acceptable and removes it. You can’t access my content. Not a problem?
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      With torrents people actually participate. Piñata should not be viewed as the "database of record", but as a something that complements the desktop at home. I understand that is still not satisfactory. I think the real goal is to find institutional users who are not interested in a profit. For example I am involved with https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/ https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/. Software Heritage would be not a high bandwidth pinner, but a pinner of last resort. Universities were very important to the original internet, and should also host public data sets, software artifact, and hopefully if Sci Hub prevails the journal articles themselves. None of that is a pinning service, but if it catches on the big cloud companies might feel compelled to get into the pinning service game, if only so they can get those university and government contracts! The current cloud computing business as a racket, but them offering support for a protocol that reduces switching costs might make for some real competition. Basically "web2" problems are Captialism problems, and the stuff needs to become a low-margin business or state-run not-for profit to be better. There is no secret magic short cut, it is a political problem. SV is of course completely uninterested in low-margin businesses. The regular web3 will have a hard time being anything but a Ponzi scheme per its design, but IPFS itself at least doesn't have those characteristics baked in, and so these alternative futures are possible.