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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

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.
kristofferR 5y ago
> The moment you need to rely on third parties, you lose any unique properties a blockchain might have. Not really, since the blockchain data providers obviously need to provide the exact same data, from the decentralized blockchain. That's not the case with centralized providers.
- 8organicbits 5y ago
  > blockchain data providers obviously need to provide the exact same data That's not obvious to me. I'd expect that companies could be asked to censor certain parts of the blockchain, and would then hide those parts in their API. I would also expect that transacting with certain addresses could be blocked, and companies could enforce that in their APIs.
deleted 5y ago
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codehalo 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. Absolutely correct. Extremely flawed reasoning regarding blockchains and web3 on Moxie's part. He actually created more confusion than enlightenment.
- Biganon 5y ago
  What's flawed in his reasoning?
  - codehalo 5y ago
    He's creating confusion by treating front ends or clients like (Metamask, Opensea, and Infura) as servers when they are actually clients. So dapp -> infura -> blockchain is really client -> client -> blockchain. When multichain interoperability becomes widely available (See polkadot, cosmos, etc) blockchains will also become clients as well. Clients at any level won't be bounded like they currently exist in centralized networks.
hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago
magicjosh 5y ago
This article also helps me appreciate how important the "small node" approach is. Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes can run on $200 of hardware (a basic Raspberry Pi + 1 TB drive). And even that investment is inaccessible to most.

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.

kristofferR 5y ago

> The moment you need to rely on third parties, you lose any unique properties a blockchain might have. Not really, since the blockchain data providers obviously need to provide the exact same data, from the decentralized blockchain. That's not the case with centralized providers.

8organicbits 5y ago
> blockchain data providers obviously need to provide the exact same data That's not obvious to me. I'd expect that companies could be asked to censor certain parts of the blockchain, and would then hide those parts in their API. I would also expect that transacting with certain addresses could be blocked, and companies could enforce that in their APIs.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

codehalo 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. Absolutely correct. Extremely flawed reasoning regarding blockchains and web3 on Moxie's part. He actually created more confusion than enlightenment.

Biganon 5y ago
What's flawed in his reasoning?
- codehalo 5y ago
  He's creating confusion by treating front ends or clients like (Metamask, Opensea, and Infura) as servers when they are actually clients. So dapp -> infura -> blockchain is really client -> client -> blockchain. When multichain interoperability becomes widely available (See polkadot, cosmos, etc) blockchains will also become clients as well. Clients at any level won't be bounded like they currently exist in centralized networks.

hrhrhrhrhr 5y ago

magicjosh 5y ago

This article also helps me appreciate how important the "small node" approach is. Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes can run on $200 of hardware (a basic Raspberry Pi + 1 TB drive). And even that investment is inaccessible to most.