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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

by 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.)
  - Swizec 5y ago
    > “why not just keep using <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”? The question, for me, is actually "how is this any different than <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”? Because I still remember high school and how every single one of these monopolistic centralized platforms sold itself to me as "Come to us, we represent a new free and open society unencumbered by stodgy authorities!". You know, the exact same rhetoric these new web3/crypto companies are selling. Sounds like Animal Farm all over again to my skeptic ears. Remember when Twitter was the future of decentralized discourse free of government tyranny where you can organize political protests free of oversight and manipulation from your local govt? Hell it's a big part of why arab spring worked!
    - pshc 5y ago
      I hear you! And I remember. Every startup that goes big eventually becomes the thing they were supposed to obsolete, because all the incentives point that way. Moats! I hope that this time is different, because we can now deploy code that is ownerless and immutable. Kind of a cool property if it catches on.
    - codehalo 5y ago
      >> The question, for me, is actually "how is this any different than <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”? You can send a transaction from A -> B using Bitcoin (or another cryptocurrency) without it being censored by any government. Can they see your transaction? Yes. In that case, use Monero (or the upcoming Railgun). Comparing crypto to any of the above is quite a stretch. Twitter may have failed in it's promise, but right now, crypto/blockchains/web is a massive improvement. They may not be perfect, but they are trending in the correct direction. Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the 180 that HN has done in this regard.
      - cwalv 5y ago
        > Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the 180 that HN has done in this regard. Is it all of HN that's changed, or just this thread? There are probably a lot of ppl commenting on this article that don't bother to comment (or maybe even read) many other web3 related articles.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Control of distribution is a problem, but control of data makes it much harder for users to switch away from them and use a different distributor. >>For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights It has licensing agreements with numerous record labels.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    Agree, owning data makes it harder to switch. A counter example here might be Twitter and Facebook. You can export all your data just fine, but it’s useless anywhere else. Because the reason you’re on Twitter/Facebook is that everyone else is there. They own the distribution of your connections making the data itself useless without them.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      True, you can export your Twitter data, but a competitor to Twitter cannot access the entire set of user data that Twitter has access to. The real differentiator is that with Web3, the data is open, so providing an alternative is as simple as providing an alternative front-end. What threatens the promise of Web3 are the issues that this article brings up, with decentralized projects not being able to iterate as quickly as centralized ones, leading to proprietary elements becoming the standard for some aspects of widely used Web3 technologies (like NFTs) and establishing a moat for the centralized platform that owns that element.
      - uncomputation 5y ago
        How does this handle data schemas? Perhaps I’m thinking too much of an RDBMS schema but for Twitter for example. If decentra-Twitter stores my data in some schema (say a hard-coded “pinned tweet” column that only supports one) then is everyone else stuck with that forever? Or could they extend that to include, say, multiple pinned tweets?
        CryptoPunk 5y ago
        I don't have the experience with smart contract development to have an informed opinion on this. My guess would be that others could extend the protocol, but the challenge would be to get the extension widely adopted. For example, ERC20 is the primary token transfer protocol on Ethereum, and there are various new token transfer protocols that are supersets of ERC20, and add useful new functionality, but they have not yet gained the widespread adoption to become useful the way vanilla ERC20 is.
- derangedHorse 5y ago
  The web3 providers mentioned are the most popular, but they do not control distribution. That's the whole point. Anyone can distribute the data on the blockchain with no clear legal repercussions unlike with music where you will get sued for distributing music without permission.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
While in theory you could change your RPC URL, in practice what difference would it make? At least IPFS offers some form of integrity checking through its generated hash. But there's no way to say, for example, that I karrot_kream at time T fetched a URL pointed to by NFT N with contents C. As demonstrated by Moxie's changing NFT and eventual deletion by OpenSea, who _knows_ what will happen to it? It's possible to at least build cryptographic attestations of fetching a particular NFT (and even maybe placing this attestation on-chain, to have some NFT "provenance" going on) but there's really not that much work going into it right now. That's the critique.
- pshc 5y ago
  Changing your RPC url will make no difference because you’ll get the same result either way. Any service that lies about the state of the chain will quickly be jettisoned like so much carbon dioxide. The bare minimum for a reputable NFT is to publish the contract source code and use immutable storage. That’s the first step of due diligence in the space. All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized because it’s still super early and everyone’s trying to figure out how it ought to work.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized because it’s still super early and everyone’s trying to figure out how it ought to work. I understand this and I'm certainly sympathetic to it. Folks are also trying to figure out how to actually stuff art on-chain which I'm a fan of. I'm very familiar with the NFT standards because I was involved in some of the discussions with it. The amount of money this space is seeing though given how fluid representation in the space though, leads to Moxie's other critique, that this is being fed with a gold rush trying to find liquidity for hoarded crypto. I know that builders can't control what these speculators do but it certainly adds pressure for builders to either take the money or operate at a disadvantage to builders who do.
    - Loudness 5y ago
      In regards to keeping the art on-chain, the immutability is a real problem. What happens when someone stuffs illegal data/images on the blockchain? Once a bad actor sneaks trade secrets, doxxing material, or CP onto the chain, it's there forever. By design, deleting data from the blockchain isn't possible.
betterunix2 5y ago
Github relies on a distributed storage architecture (local git repositories on developers' machines) and in theory anyone can take a project from github and duplicate it on gitlab etc. In reality nobody bothers and a project hosted on github will remain exclusively hosted on github and nowhere else, and likewise with other git hosting services. For the most part nobody cares if the data is hosted on a distributed system or a centralized one, because the overwhelming majority of users will rely on the front end. Changing RPC urls is not as easy as you might think, especially for systems that are widely deployed and have heterogenous clients (which in theory would be the case if Web3 ever took off, which I personally doubt).
- sfblah 5y ago
  And, as the article suggests, if there is some new feature that Github can enable (integration of git commits with an issue tracker or CI/CD integration come to mind), that will happen in a vendor-specific way on Github, not in the Git protocol. So, then you immediately move back to the world of platforms.
- pshc 5y ago
  Few people bother because every git commit is cryptographically signed and every git repo is inherently replicated. It doesn’t matter if you use a centralized service or not as long as you can rely on SHA1 (and sha256 is coming…) Git is almost the ur-blockchain in this respect, hardly an argument for centralization. Also, fuck Microsoft.
- anderspitman 5y ago
  I keep my projects on GitHub for discoverability and the reputation provided by stars, whatever that's worth. So essentially network effects. The reality is if I'm looking for a library to solve a problem, I'm much more likely to use one from GH with 1000 stars than a random self-hosted GitLab with 50. I would like to not feel that way, but I suspect many others do as well. It would be nice if we at least had a decentralized reaction/reputation system. Is there an analog to this with the services Moxie talked about? Sincere question, I'm not familiar with the ecosystem at all.
uncomputation 5y ago
You’re still relying on one central server though because of the fundamental problem OP laid out: the blockchain is designed for servers, not clients. There is no API inherent to any chain and thus one must be grafted over it by a web server. Things will tend toward one or two companies because those will be the ones who can afford to run such services and then they will have funding to create more features and better documentation and do dev evangelism and you know the rest. Just look what happened already once OpenSea removed his NFT.
lolinder 5y ago
The web3 frontends appear to be in the same place that Chrome is: yes, technically you can always switch to another browser, but if Chrome decides to boycott a new feature, it will never exist as a practical matter. If Chrome blocks a website, it will be as though it doesn't exist for most people. That in theory it still does doesn't change anything. What makes OpenSea different than Chrome in this respect?
dfee 5y ago
Actually, this was his point exactly. OpenSea must start on a decentralized block chain (due to market forces) and must move to a more centralized (faster moving) protocol in order to remain relevant. And the byproduct is lock-in.

by pshc 5y ago

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.)
- Swizec 5y ago
  > “why not just keep using <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”? The question, for me, is actually "how is this any different than <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”? Because I still remember high school and how every single one of these monopolistic centralized platforms sold itself to me as "Come to us, we represent a new free and open society unencumbered by stodgy authorities!". You know, the exact same rhetoric these new web3/crypto companies are selling. Sounds like Animal Farm all over again to my skeptic ears. Remember when Twitter was the future of decentralized discourse free of government tyranny where you can organize political protests free of oversight and manipulation from your local govt? Hell it's a big part of why arab spring worked!
  - pshc 5y ago
    I hear you! And I remember. Every startup that goes big eventually becomes the thing they were supposed to obsolete, because all the incentives point that way. Moats! I hope that this time is different, because we can now deploy code that is ownerless and immutable. Kind of a cool property if it catches on.
  - codehalo 5y ago
    >> The question, for me, is actually "how is this any different than <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”? You can send a transaction from A -> B using Bitcoin (or another cryptocurrency) without it being censored by any government. Can they see your transaction? Yes. In that case, use Monero (or the upcoming Railgun). Comparing crypto to any of the above is quite a stretch. Twitter may have failed in it's promise, but right now, crypto/blockchains/web is a massive improvement. They may not be perfect, but they are trending in the correct direction. Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the 180 that HN has done in this regard.
    - cwalv 5y ago
      > Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the 180 that HN has done in this regard. Is it all of HN that's changed, or just this thread? There are probably a lot of ppl commenting on this article that don't bother to comment (or maybe even read) many other web3 related articles.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
Control of distribution is a problem, but control of data makes it much harder for users to switch away from them and use a different distributor. >>For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights It has licensing agreements with numerous record labels.
- Swizec 5y ago
  Agree, owning data makes it harder to switch. A counter example here might be Twitter and Facebook. You can export all your data just fine, but it’s useless anywhere else. Because the reason you’re on Twitter/Facebook is that everyone else is there. They own the distribution of your connections making the data itself useless without them.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    True, you can export your Twitter data, but a competitor to Twitter cannot access the entire set of user data that Twitter has access to. The real differentiator is that with Web3, the data is open, so providing an alternative is as simple as providing an alternative front-end. What threatens the promise of Web3 are the issues that this article brings up, with decentralized projects not being able to iterate as quickly as centralized ones, leading to proprietary elements becoming the standard for some aspects of widely used Web3 technologies (like NFTs) and establishing a moat for the centralized platform that owns that element.
    - uncomputation 5y ago
      How does this handle data schemas? Perhaps I’m thinking too much of an RDBMS schema but for Twitter for example. If decentra-Twitter stores my data in some schema (say a hard-coded “pinned tweet” column that only supports one) then is everyone else stuck with that forever? Or could they extend that to include, say, multiple pinned tweets?
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        I don't have the experience with smart contract development to have an informed opinion on this. My guess would be that others could extend the protocol, but the challenge would be to get the extension widely adopted. For example, ERC20 is the primary token transfer protocol on Ethereum, and there are various new token transfer protocols that are supersets of ERC20, and add useful new functionality, but they have not yet gained the widespread adoption to become useful the way vanilla ERC20 is.
derangedHorse 5y ago
The web3 providers mentioned are the most popular, but they do not control distribution. That's the whole point. Anyone can distribute the data on the blockchain with no clear legal repercussions unlike with music where you will get sued for distributing music without permission.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

While in theory you could change your RPC URL, in practice what difference would it make? At least IPFS offers some form of integrity checking through its generated hash. But there's no way to say, for example, that I karrot_kream at time T fetched a URL pointed to by NFT N with contents C. As demonstrated by Moxie's changing NFT and eventual deletion by OpenSea, who _knows_ what will happen to it? It's possible to at least build cryptographic attestations of fetching a particular NFT (and even maybe placing this attestation on-chain, to have some NFT "provenance" going on) but there's really not that much work going into it right now. That's the critique.

pshc 5y ago
Changing your RPC url will make no difference because you’ll get the same result either way. Any service that lies about the state of the chain will quickly be jettisoned like so much carbon dioxide. The bare minimum for a reputable NFT is to publish the contract source code and use immutable storage. That’s the first step of due diligence in the space. All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized because it’s still super early and everyone’s trying to figure out how it ought to work.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized because it’s still super early and everyone’s trying to figure out how it ought to work. I understand this and I'm certainly sympathetic to it. Folks are also trying to figure out how to actually stuff art on-chain which I'm a fan of. I'm very familiar with the NFT standards because I was involved in some of the discussions with it. The amount of money this space is seeing though given how fluid representation in the space though, leads to Moxie's other critique, that this is being fed with a gold rush trying to find liquidity for hoarded crypto. I know that builders can't control what these speculators do but it certainly adds pressure for builders to either take the money or operate at a disadvantage to builders who do.
  - Loudness 5y ago
    In regards to keeping the art on-chain, the immutability is a real problem. What happens when someone stuffs illegal data/images on the blockchain? Once a bad actor sneaks trade secrets, doxxing material, or CP onto the chain, it's there forever. By design, deleting data from the blockchain isn't possible.

betterunix2 5y ago

Github relies on a distributed storage architecture (local git repositories on developers' machines) and in theory anyone can take a project from github and duplicate it on gitlab etc. In reality nobody bothers and a project hosted on github will remain exclusively hosted on github and nowhere else, and likewise with other git hosting services. For the most part nobody cares if the data is hosted on a distributed system or a centralized one, because the overwhelming majority of users will rely on the front end. Changing RPC urls is not as easy as you might think, especially for systems that are widely deployed and have heterogenous clients (which in theory would be the case if Web3 ever took off, which I personally doubt).

sfblah 5y ago
And, as the article suggests, if there is some new feature that Github can enable (integration of git commits with an issue tracker or CI/CD integration come to mind), that will happen in a vendor-specific way on Github, not in the Git protocol. So, then you immediately move back to the world of platforms.
pshc 5y ago
Few people bother because every git commit is cryptographically signed and every git repo is inherently replicated. It doesn’t matter if you use a centralized service or not as long as you can rely on SHA1 (and sha256 is coming…) Git is almost the ur-blockchain in this respect, hardly an argument for centralization. Also, fuck Microsoft.
anderspitman 5y ago
I keep my projects on GitHub for discoverability and the reputation provided by stars, whatever that's worth. So essentially network effects. The reality is if I'm looking for a library to solve a problem, I'm much more likely to use one from GH with 1000 stars than a random self-hosted GitLab with 50. I would like to not feel that way, but I suspect many others do as well. It would be nice if we at least had a decentralized reaction/reputation system. Is there an analog to this with the services Moxie talked about? Sincere question, I'm not familiar with the ecosystem at all.

uncomputation 5y ago

You’re still relying on one central server though because of the fundamental problem OP laid out: the blockchain is designed for servers, not clients. There is no API inherent to any chain and thus one must be grafted over it by a web server. Things will tend toward one or two companies because those will be the ones who can afford to run such services and then they will have funding to create more features and better documentation and do dev evangelism and you know the rest. Just look what happened already once OpenSea removed his NFT.

lolinder 5y ago

The web3 frontends appear to be in the same place that Chrome is: yes, technically you can always switch to another browser, but if Chrome decides to boycott a new feature, it will never exist as a practical matter. If Chrome blocks a website, it will be as though it doesn't exist for most people. That in theory it still does doesn't change anything. What makes OpenSea different than Chrome in this respect?

dfee 5y ago

Actually, this was his point exactly. OpenSea must start on a decentralized block chain (due to market forces) and must move to a more centralized (faster moving) protocol in order to remain relevant. And the byproduct is lock-in.