20 ms·

In Response to My first impressions of Web3

219 points by bbno4 5y ago

nedstarkin 5y ago
Holy Moly ---"A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever."---is this true.
- dylkil 5y ago
  Yes, and a lot of people hand their money to lazy scammers who use imgur as the file host
jeroenhd 5y ago
> Illegal images being sent to your wallet, forcing you to go to prison in some places. My god, I hadn't even considered that, but they're right, there's currently n established blockchain the requires permission to send anything. That's fine with money, but with NFTs that actually represent something that could be a serious risk.
- neuroma 5y ago
  I forget the name but there was an NFT set that was dropped straight to wallets. It was various pixilated dicks. Kinda funny and cute I suppose. They had rarity traits etc.
- Joeri 5y ago
  Someone can send you illegal material through the regular snail mail and call the cops as soon as the mail is delivered. Is this really that different?
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    I don't have to pay ethereum gas to hand the proof over to the police or to burn it if they don't care. The mail system also doesn't keep a public, permanent record of all things mailed to me that any political opponents might use to imply things. There are also countries where you don't want to let the police know you own crypto because of laws against alternative currencies. Real world comparisons don't really work well with public blockchains.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      Well, if you don't have a wallet then you can't receive it, and if you have a wallet, you're suspect anyway ?
  - berkut 5y ago
    I personally wouldn't want to put possible key disclosure laws to the test in this situation. With post mail I'd imagine that scenario is somewhat timing-critical, whereas I'm not sure how feasible it is to delete things if they are in the blockchain (consensus for deletion? How does that work?) and the police seize all the computers in your house.
  - samatman 5y ago
    That's the point of this sort of (hypothetical?) attack: poor Bob now has a poison envelope on his private key, he has something which roughly constitutes 'ownership' of illegal bits. Does our legal structure support immediately transferring it to a null wallet as a disclaimer of ownership? Bob doesn't want to be the one to make that case law. Nor does he want to hand over his private key, or clean his wallet out of everything but the evil image and then hand over his private key. Basically there are no good options, although burning the offending data by sending it to /dev/null should emerge as a valid defense. Will it?
    - jakear 5y ago
      "I swear officer, the only proof I have of ever being sent those images is this folder filled with infinitely detailed top-down photographs of each one of them lying face-up in my trash can""
      - samatman 5y ago
        A tidy summary of the issue, that. But hey, if it was a Bored Cryptokitty, then Bob can't sell it and no one can buy it anymore, so clearly, he doesn't own it. The same principle should apply to evil bits, the real kicker being that the whole rigamarole is now written to a shared database whose, er, immutability is part of the product on offer. Man, the Twenties are gonna be lit.
        jakear 5y ago
        The NFT principle only applies when content consumers value maintaining a chain of ownership to content authors. In cases where a clear chain of provenance is more of a liability than an asset, it's probably more desirable to forge a new copy for resale and shred the original. I suspect this is perhaps a part of why OpenSea maintains a lens over all wallet content requests... the impact of a mass mailing of evil bits to wallets would be devastating to the platform, perhaps to the entire crypto ecosystem. Any corporation who wants to be seen as legitimate must have the capability to keep evil bits out of users eyes.
- srqwe 5y ago
  Where do you live that you can be arrested for someone sending you illegal material you didn't request?!
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    Possession if child porn is illegal in many countries. If digital wallets convey any kind of ownership (which anyone using cryptocurrency or NFTs would argue in favour of) then that implies receiving child porn makes you be in possession of illegal material. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure not reporting such content to the police immediately would be a crime, and even if you do the right thing the police might still suspect you if you're unlucky. Someone malicious could definitely send a collection of child porn through the mail and report you the second it arrives. If they can time it right, you could definitely be in trouble and the police would likely take all of your digital storage and search for more. It's a lot harder to do such things anonymously in the real world, where security cameras and physical mail boxes are a thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone would actually pull off something awful like this. Of course, the police probably won't arrest you if you immediately report the illegal contents and hand over the evidence (or destroy the evidence without involving the police), but that's not as easy with the blockchain. Transferring the NFT out of your account would likely involve paying some kind of transfer fee (ethereum gas is quite expensive) and the police aren't going to pay that for you. You won't be finding or suing the sender of the child porn either, because this stuff isn't hard to do anonymously. Even if you do manage to transfer the illegal content out of your wallet, the blockchain will forever keep a public record of the content you once owned, so even if you do everything right the accusation of paedophilia will forever be easy to make.
- meltedcapacitor 5y ago
  Is it fine with money? A ransomware operator could send the loot from an operation, channelled through a well publicized address, to someone they don't like which makes their account undistinguishable from that of a fence as seen by blockchain analytics firms maintaining the blacklists of addresses legit players do not task to. Or they could blackmail someone by threatening to burn their account by sending tainted funds. Politicians could be sent unwanted donations to dirty their reputation by making it looked they're supported by the wrong people. ...
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    You can already do that though the regular old banking system, no difference there. Banks monitor and take action when they detect money laundering systems in their transfers, and they use graph analysis that's not dissimilar from the analysis law enforcement uses for tracking anonymous wallets. The mixers in the cryptocurrency world exist as school kids acting as fencers in the real world. A crime ring could definitely "taint" a politician's bank account if they wish to do so, but the manual oversight of the banking system probably wouldn't flag them. It's not that this isn't a problem with cryptocurrencies, it's just that it's a problem that already exists in the real world.
    - meltedcapacitor 5y ago
      Sure. The difference is it's harder to manage in crypto (by design).
- kamranjon 5y ago
  I realize that it is said to be prohibitively expensive to store an image on-chain - but if an actual illegal image was stored on-chain would that be irreversible? Basically I’m wondering if making the entire ledger illegal to posses is as simple as ponying up the cost? Could that bring down an entire crypto currency? Sorry if this sounds naive, I am just not sure what is currently possible.
  - pclmulqdq 5y ago
    It has already happened, and nobody cared. Very early on, the bitcoin blockchain ended up playing host to some illegal images, but nobody took down bitcoin or bitcoin nodes for storing them.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    It would be practically impossible, the only way you can remove something from the blockchain is to ask all nodes to revert to an earlier version and purge the offending blocks and any blocks related to them. This is also why using public blockchains for storing personal information is such a stupid idea, illegal even if the GDPR is involved in any way. Blockchains are designed so no information can be altered or redacted, and that's often an overlooked problem.
bambax 5y ago
> The sooner Opensea dies, the better. From my understanding of the space and the original article, it seems OpenSea will not die and this is pure wishful thinking.
- tobessebot 5y ago
  This is the dilemma in a nutshell. There are lots of incredibly smart people working in the web3 space who are aware of its limitations, but for every one of those, there are 1000 people just trying to make as much money as possible.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  OpenSea could very easily die. They have momentum, but not a lot of moat. They also don't have a lot of community good will. A well funded competitor could take them down quickly. Might not happen, but as of now it definitely could.
  - paulgb 5y ago
    According to a Twitter employee, Twitter will piggyback on OpenSea verification for verified profile pictures. If it ships, that will be a big moat. https://twitter.com/thesmarmybum/status/1478505321433735169?s=21 https://twitter.com/thesmarmybum/status/1478505321433735169?...
    - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      Not particularly. What verification means there is verifying that a certain Bored Ape is really on the "official" Bored Ape contract. It's verifying the contract address and nothing else. The NFTs themselves can be traded anywhere, there's no lockin for OpenSea there. It's trivial for Twitter to add another contract address verification source.
      - paulgb 5y ago
        Will OpenSea verify an NFT minted on a non-OpenSea platform? I had assumed the answer is “no” but I’m not 100% sure. > It's trivial for Twitter to add another contract address verification source. It’s technically trivial, but then they are putting themselves in a position to verify the verifiers. It seems like they are outsourcing verification because they want to avoid the overhead of deciding what a verified NFT is, which is something they would have to do if they invited in more sources.
bambax 5y ago
This response is technical and appears a little naive to me. The reason why NFTs are currently hot is because there's a gold rush and people fear missing out. I don't think anyone who buys an NFT wants that NFT; they just hope to flip it for more money than they spent, or maybe diversify their portfolio (use it as a store of value). I could be wrong of course, but I seriously doubt it. Which means, the technical solutions to the questions raised in the original article this responds to, will probably not have time to be implemented before the rush is over. Also, one of the main points of the first article, if not the main one (and certainly the first one) is that centralization is a feature, not a bug. People want a central authority and not bother themselves with running their own server/infrastructure. So the only way for OpenSea to "die" is if it's replaced by a different, but similar, central authority.
- squabble 5y ago
  A central authority can be advantageous, until it becomes dysfunctional or prioritizes its own interests over the interests of those it serves.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Yeah, but real life doesn't really work efficiently with backup plans, that's the problem. For efficiency what we do is we centralize and wherever possible we add safeguards and controls to the central authority, as auditors call them, mitigations.
- eqmvii 5y ago
  Hey, I’m sure plenty of people are buying NFTs with their own money, too. Nice trick to take $X and turn it into 0.98$X and an asset “worth” 0.98$X.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    The thing goes deeper: this gives you a big opportunity to launder money. It's the same with art, but at least in the art world there are some regulations.
lordnacho 5y ago
Reasonable rebuttal to reasonable article. I wouldn't accuse MM of lying, though, I think it's very easy to miss something like whether a thing is normally held on a simple apache VPS. As for dipping your toes, I'd say it's maybe the hardest area of coding to do that in. Generally I find the documentation is lacking, everything is moving really quickly, there's a huge amount of jargon, and there's a huge number of protocols and standards to read about, with very little authority on what is worth spending time on. I have a collection of comments in my side projects where I've discovered various surprising things about how blockchain stuff works. Others I know have similar pages of notes on how particular things in the space are arranged. Moxie captures why this is so: there's a gold rush, and appearances seem to matter more than substance.
dmitriid 5y ago
> Every user will have to pay for everything. Ahahaha. No. More seriously: if "everyone" pays it means there will be a few who are going to reap all the profits. Glorious future, indeed
- dylkil 5y ago
  those who reap the profits will be network validators, which as of today is ~300k validators[1] [1]https://beaconscan.com/ https://beaconscan.com/
  - meltedcapacitor 5y ago
    How is ownership distributed? Out of this 300k are 298k aliases of Alice and 2k aliases of Bob? Is there a third dude maybe?
- floatboth 5y ago
  Buttcoiners' "future" is all about financializing everything. They have ZERO claim to "good old web 1.0 decentralization" because the original web was all about information wanting to be free!
- timeon 5y ago
  Well their answer for freedom is chain. No thanks. Don't chain on me.
knorker 5y ago
Standard blockchain apologist. Always jam tomorrow, never jam today. It's always "early" for some definition of the word "it". Any decade now we'll have PoS, or an actual use case for smart contracts, or NFTs etc. But no, every year just seems to bring a new "invention" that is "still early" while implying that this, unlike every single other use of distributed blockchain, somehow is the first of all of them to not be pointless (outside of a way to find the bigger fool). Blockchains are just scam generators. Well, they are of great utility to ransomware, so i guess they have found one use case in over a decade. Edit: and of course this rebuttal found like one possible mistake in statistics and calls it a "lie". That should tell you all you need to know about the author's intellectual honesty.
- eqmvii 5y ago
  Hey now, ransomeware /and/ drugs!
  - floatboth 5y ago
    And both are now eclipsed by the wild speculation. The vast majority of buttcoins' "usage" is all about "number go up".
    - srqwe 5y ago
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      How financial markets should be.
      - sobkas 5y ago
        > How financial markets should be. Until the bubble pops, then better not be one holding the bucket.
        BeFlatXIII 5y ago
ra-mos 5y ago
“proposed solutions solve this” ~ every cryptocurrency/blockchain/web3 article ever written
- wepple 5y ago
  This is the TL;DR for me. Perhaps a lot of this will evolve and we’ll end up with some fantastic technologies that are truly revolutionary. But, a lot of us are pretty jaded by “blockchain is a game changer” with no tangible evidence beyond BTC as a highly unstable store of value and claims of some great future state.
  - fivea 5y ago
    > (...) beyond BTC as a highly unstable store of value and claims of some great future state. Bitcoin is not a store of value, and never was. A highly volatile asset, specially one whose market price halves overnight without much surprise, does not serve the purpose of a store of value. I mean, this week alone Bitcoin dropped around 10%, and around 25% during the past month. This is not value being stored. If an asset manager lost 25% of it's wallet in a month they'd be out of a job.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Either it will solve something and you can get on later, or if you have to get on now “before it goes up” it’s just a scam (or”investment”) of sorts.
- dylkil 5y ago
  slowly but surely things improve, and then people find something else to complain about
- vitaflo 5y ago
  Yeah it’s starting to sound a lot like “this is the year of Linux on the desktop” to me. We’re always one year away.
emptybottle 5y ago
I wish they would expand on their objection to using tezos. https://hicetnunc.art https://hicetnunc.art is an active alternative to opensea, and the gas fees on tezos are far smaller (pennies) Whats the downside?
- jsheard 5y ago
  Isn't it the case that these alternative blockchains are only cheap because practically nobody uses them? There's a recent example from the Polygon blockchain, which was also sold on having gas fees on the order of a penny, until the recent launch of a Polygon blockchain game which drove enough transactions to push the gas fees up to half a dollar. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/polygon-under-accidental-attack-from-swarm-of-sunflower-farmers/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/polygon-under-accid... They don't seem to really be solving the scalability issues, but rather just kicking them down the road, at which point yet another blockchain will pop up to "solve" the issue.
boffinism 5y ago
Moxie says 'Ys are often X'. This says that's a 'lie' because 'Most Ys are not X'. Hands up if you see the flaw here.
- yunohn 5y ago
  This article also claim that “Z solves the problems mentioned” but Z is actually 100 different potential proposals.
kristofferR 5y ago
This is a okay response, although the language ain't great. Half of Moxie's post were using the evil YC company OpenSea as an argument against decentralization, which seemed strange. It's like arguing against decentralized email because so many use Gmail. The arguments against Infura etc. especially fell flat, as they are just proxies to the decentalized blockchain, the only value they provide is providing exactly the same decentralized blockchain data as your own node would. It's not as decentralized as running your own node would be, but to call it centralization is still wrong.
- rvense 5y ago
  > It's like arguing against decentralized email because so many use Gmail. Which Moxie does often do, including in the web3 article. I respect Moxie's opinion on (de)centralization, but I just have different priorities to him. I am personally more concerned about one company (Facebook or Signal, although I do use the latter) owning and controlling access to a platform than I am about perfect end-to-end encryption and forward secrecy.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  The point is that when the proxy is a monopoly, it basically becomes the new, centralized source of truth rather than the actual decentralized source of truth. If 90% of wallets utilize the OpenSea API what the blockchain says doesn't really matter anymore. OpenSea is effectively the new source of truth.
yunohn 5y ago
> Both of the proposed solutions solve this. Moxie spoke about how web3 currently works. Not about the hundreds of proposed solutions. And no, proposals don’t “solve” anything, until they’re actually implemented and tested.
- jack_pp 5y ago
  And adopted
- rainsford 5y ago
  I think it's even worse than that, because a significant part of Moxie's argument is that the current centralized web3 approaches have structural advantages (especially speed of innovation) that will leave the "proposed solutions" constantly trying to catch up. And the incredible popularity of the centralized approaches seems to suggest users in the web3 space value those advantages more than they value adhering to the distributed principles supposedly at the heart of web3. To their credit, the author of the rebuttal acknowledges that the Opensea type approaches are problematic, but misses the greater argument around why they're popular and why trying to replace them with something "better" will be difficult.
yunohn 5y ago
> “Axie Infinity and how it’s bringing entire nations out of poverty” https://www.notboring.co/p/infinity-revenue-infinity-possibilities https://www.notboring.co/p/infinity-revenue-infinity-possibi... No way I can take someone seriously if they think Axie Infinity is saving the Philippines/Vietnam from poverty. Edit: Crypto maximalists don’t understand history, economics, or globalism. All while claiming that crypto will solve for globalised economies and save people from poverty. Do they know why these countries are poor? Do they understand colonialism and modern slave labor? Or that colonising countries dictate the global economy and devalue developing world currencies? And that these countries are poor by design, and their weakened economic status is a result of colonial history? How does a “Play 2 Earn” game that is provably negative sum by making money from fees - where the poor ”scholars” have to rent tokens from the rich “lords” and share 30% of their income with, help the poor come out of poverty? This is crypto colonialism for crying out loud!
- deleted 5y ago
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- Mandelmus 5y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900 re:Axie Infinity and the “ saving the Philippines/Vietnam from poverty” bs
- cfup 5y ago
  I completely agree with you. Crypto bros for some reasons think they are saving the world. The original claim is just pure ignorance. To get start with Axie or other so-called GameFI, players need to have money first. For people with small capitals, they need to participate in 'Guild' and borrow the money from the rich (be it in digital or physical world). So, it is just capitalism all over again. Spending all your time maximizing some games won't save a nation from poverty.
- TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
  Had the same reaction. Seemed like such a silly thing to say. Does he know what the scale of Axie is and what the scale of national GDPs are? Seems so ridiculous. But I also don't agree with your characterization of developing nation economies. You have your own blinders on. The degrees of freedom a developing country has are constrained ... but not mainly by outside market forces ... more their own internal institutional structures. India was isolated from all Western banking for the main part for a long time. Also insulated from competition from Western companies. That was not a good time for India. Turns out your own institutions can fuck up pretty well on their own. Openness and liberalization of an economy also come with complications but these are not "slave labor" and "colonization". I feel you have been exposed to some ideologies but have not actually tried to manufacture something in a developing country and seen the friction that prevents local economies from leveling up ... its not the EU or America stopping Indian manufacturing from leveling up ... its India's own internal complexities. If it was possible to do what you suggest, Taiwan, South Korea, and now Chinese advanced manufacturing would not exist. Countries just need to get their act together.
sovietmudkipz 5y ago
The thing I think that sucks that hasn’t been covered is how you have to have a wallet specific to each blockchain I want to interact with. I have to know what blockchain the web3 property uses. Why can’t I have a like universal wallet? I don’t want my NFTs divided among 4-5 wallets, especially as new chains are created as time goes on. Kinda a sucky user experience. That’s my nit
chrisco255 5y ago
> This is true, wallets suck so much it’s funny. I was sent a £2k NFT the other day which I can’t sell because Opensea has glitched and my wallet won’t show me the NFT, which means I can’t send it or sell it! This is not true. An NFT that follows the ERC721 contract standard has a `safeTransferFrom()` function that a token holder can call to initiate a transfer. You do not have to depend on OpenSea: https://etherscan.io/address/0x5754f44bC96F9F0Fe1a568253452a3F40F5e9F59#writeContract https://etherscan.io/address/0x5754f44bC96F9F0Fe1a568253452a... You can also use an alternative NFT swapping protocol, such as the ZeroX-backed Trader.xyz: https://trader.xyz/ https://trader.xyz/ (fully open source) to initiate a swap.
- yunohn 5y ago
  Yes, quite ironic that the author denounces OpenSea while simultaneously ignoring that they could actually sell their NFT elsewhere if they wanted to. This demonstrates the value of marketplace centralisation.
  - detaro 5y ago
    The problem that the wallet system (which especially the web3-folks push as "you login with your wallet, so easy!" etc), which is very much supposed to be the user agent is hiding it from him, instead of allowing him to interact with it is another failure, even if "moving to less-broken wallet software" is a solution.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      The real problem is that showing a user what NFTs they own requires an indexing service. Each NFT collection is represented by its own smart contract. So the only way to show a user what NFTs they have is to either iterate over all of the ERC721 contracts on the blockchain and iterate over all of the tokenIds calling `ownerOf()` for each one (millions upon millions of tokenIds to iterate through) or to maintain an indexing service that listens for transfer and mint events and updates state continuously for every wallet address. Another issue is that someone can send an NFT to an address with or without being requested, just like an email can be sent with or without being requested. On cheaper networks, spam NFTs are a real problem. So OpenSea will hide NFTs unless they're from a reputable collection. In my opinion, OpenSea's key strength is their indexing service. Beating OpenSea in a decentralized manner will require a decentralized indexer. Protocols like The Graph (https://thegraph.com/en/ https://thegraph.com/en/) are an example of how to do that in a decentralized way.
JofArnold 5y ago
> This is a lie. Most NFTs which sell for millions use IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin or others for decentralised storage of data Nope - do your research better before you use the word "lie". BAYC did it until very very recently for instance. Definitely as of 27th September they were using cloud functions as you can clearly see in my gist here: https://gist.github.com/JofArnold/bf2c4a094fcdd4aee2f52983c7714de8#gistcomment-3906906 https://gist.github.com/JofArnold/bf2c4a094fcdd4aee2f52983c7... I know there is/was plenty of others too because I looked deeply into this around the time.
- dylkil 5y ago
  Ok but currently they are using IPFS so does it matter if they once used the cloud? Go here[1] and scroll down to tokenURI and input 1 and you will get an IPFS hash back. [1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d#readContract https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118...
  - JofArnold 5y ago
    I'm aware which is why I said "very very recently"* (I just so happen to have checked when Tweeting this the other day so it was fresh in my mind https://twitter.com/JofArnold/status/1478071171597975554 https://twitter.com/JofArnold/status/1478071171597975554). I don't think the fact they are now using IPFS makes it any more credible either; IPFS is not a new thing and the valuations were huge already by September. They should have done it from the start. Furthermore that they can mess around with the base URL is not cool. * Although thanks for posting that as without that fact I admit my story was incomplete.
- deleted 5y ago
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CPLX 5y ago
I feel like someone should take the phrase “This is true at the moment, but there is work being done on…” and set it to a catchy melody, since it’s clearly the national anthem of the crypto community. For the verses of the song I would suggest lines such as: “The proposed solutions solve this” “But this is not always true, you can” “We are actively building alternatives!”
- chias 5y ago
  "Toss a coin to your witcher, o valley of plenty..."
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chrisco255 5y ago
> Illegal images being sent to your wallet, forcing you to go to prison in some places. Images are not stored in a wallet. NFTs and ERC20s do not actually live in a Ethereum wallet. They live in a smart contract. And that smart contract has a ledger of account for who has the right to transfer that particular asset. The images themselves, unless they are SVGs, are typically stored on Filecoin or Arweave or a centralized server and marked by an IPFS hash. Content moderation is handled by the data storers in those networks: https://www.arweave.org/technology#content-moderation https://www.arweave.org/technology#content-moderation Spam NFTs are just like spam email. The receipt of something illicit or illegal does not mean automatic imprisonment anywhere that I'm aware of. If you live in such a jurisdiction, I suggest you flee immediately.
rutierut 5y ago
This is such a bad take, almost everything here is wrong in some way, e.g. see the other comments.
arunoda 5y ago
> Just to clarify, this is what the author wanted to do. You can create distributed apps easily using Fleek or by manually uploading to IPFS, Arweave or Filecoin. Seems like the author has never build an app before. There nothing easy even with the current tech. It's much harder with the tech they mentioned. Even with that, there's a centralized system anywhere. Liek Arweave's DNS system etc.
chrisco255 5y ago
One point about NFT metadata and the debate about whether it's centralized or not. NFTs don't all have to be maximally decentralized. It should be perfectly okay that some NFTs are not on-chain, purely immutable artwork. Besides the extreme constraints that places on the art (given that data storage on a blockchain not purpose-built for storage is expensive), there are some advantages to having mutable NFTs. You can create evolving NFTs by making them mutable. Users can upgrade their skins (such as adding a Santa hat during Christmas). The NFTs could respond to real-world events (maybe the weather or the outcome of a sporting event influences the artwork). You can use them as game characters that level up in response to playtime, presumably the artwork for the character would change as the character levels up, etc. It's very difficult to do the above in an immutable, pure fashion, without thinking of all the possibilities beforehand. It's okay that just the mere ownership transfer mechanic is decentralized. Yes, a project could theoretically rug its users and change the art to a poop emoji, but in practice projects develop a reputation over time and those that foster goodwill stand to gain more from community loyalty than they'd gain from pulling B.S. Even in the case that a project were to rug its community, however, it's entirely possible for the community to create a new smart contract that "wraps" the NFT as a new NFT (you deposit an NFT from a particular collection, and get back a new NFT and the old NFT is burned). And if enough members of a community rallied around the wrapped version, then it could be treated as a consensus fork. Escape hatches are one of the features that distinguish Web3 from Web2.
md_ 5y ago
The author seems to miss that one of Moxie's central criticisms is that, all else being equal, distributed solutions tend to lag centralized ones. The reason for OpenSea et al. providing centralized services isn't accidental--it's not that it's "early days"--but that whenever there's an opportunity to innovate, those innovations will first appear for centralized services. If we hope for distributed solutions to be on par with centralized, we are in effect hoping for an inefficient market, or one without innovation (giving distributed services time to catch up). This criticism, in a way, has little to do with "Web3" at all. Instead, it's justification for the alternative solution Moxie has been working toward: one where crypto(graphy, not currency) allows the cost and feature advantages of centralization while preserving (or in fact exceeding) the user privacy of distributed solutions. (I have some criticisms of Moxie's vision, but the author seems not to engage with the argument's real substance.)
- tasha0663 5y ago
  I have a feeling it's more broadly true that centralization is an emergent property of networks. Webs 3 -> n are no exception.
- groovecoder 5y ago
  This was the part I latched onto in Moxie's piece too: "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face." In the Firefox OS days here at Mozilla, I was a huge believer and advocate for our desire to push web protocols & standards into mobile. But as it turns out, proprietary walled-garden mobile platforms move faster than web standards - who knew?! But, I like the phrase you used - "hoping for an inefficient market". At this point in my tech career and looking around at what the tech market is doing in the world, I think slowing down and getting less efficient might be good for us?
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  >but that whenever there's an opportunity to innovate, those innovations will first appear for centralized services. This isn't really true, though. Even in the example he gave, NFT royalties, they appeared first in individual NFT contracts before they were on OpenSea.
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soheil 5y ago
> This is a lie. Most NFTs which sell for millions use IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin or others for decentralised storage of data. A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever. This is such a he said she said. Can we get some stats on this? Are NFTs primarily stored on the chain or linked to a URL? I'd like to see the breakdown by platform, Opensea, etc.
svilen_dobrev 5y ago
Take the money out of equation, and i'm all for it. Which is what Moxie is suggesting, more or less.. Sadly it's all about money re/distribution, even if all try to dress it in all kind of masks on top.. With a wallet substituting my Identity (or trust, or whatever else that is not money).. it's no different to any other substitution - email, belonging to a club (FAANG+oauth), whatever. Except more involving..
butz 5y ago
So in theory, it might be possible to build a "pirate bay" on blockchain (presuming that it has capability to store huge amounts of data) and resist DMCA takedowns?
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
> NFTs are only 3 years old No they're not. I co-founded Fabrica.land in 2017, and in mid 2018 we used an NFT to perform a real estate transaction. That's already 3.5 years, and NFTs were already around. The first transaction was a bit "rough", but perfectly valid. Lot of progress since then. From [0]: The ERC-20 (Ethereum Request for Comments 20), proposed by Fabian Vogelsteller in November 2015, is a Token Standard that implements an API for tokens within Smart Contracts. Note: yes, ERC-20 has a few flaws [1], and subsequent ERC have improved on it. [0]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-20/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc... [1]: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/20 https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/20
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  ERC-20 is for fungible tokens, not NFTs, as I'm sure you know. If you want to trace that idea back, you can go to Vitalik's colored coins idea for bitcoin that predates Ethereum all together. But yes, it's true that NFTs are older than 3 years old. I thought that was an odd statement.
  - 70rd 5y ago
    An ERC-20 token with supply of 1 is non-fungible.
  - simonebrunozzi 5y ago
    Before ERC-721, the first non fungibles used ERC-20. Useful recent discussion here [0]. [0]: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/which-one-to-choose-erc-20-vs-erc-721-vs-erc-1155-ethereum-token-smart-contract-red-pill-9bb827148671 https://levelup.gitconnected.com/which-one-to-choose-erc-20-...
esrauch 5y ago
> A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever. However, I can promise you that one of the first things people do when making sure they are not rugged (crypto-term for scammed) is to make sure it’s not possible for the author to suddenly delete or change the image. I'm curious about this point; if the only thing stored on the chain is a URL (including Drive/Imgur) then there's no possible way to actually preclude the content from changing right? It actually does seem very weird that people aren't at least putting a #sha1= in the NFT URL to be able to verifiably know if the underlying content did change.
- le-mark 5y ago
  > to be able to verifiably know if the underlying content did change. Indeed that would seem to be the point of the entire exercise!
- hakcermani 5y ago
  seems simple enough right .. to add a ?h=HASH_OF_IMAGE in the URL .. maybe the real issue is that fact that the server pr the actual image itself can disappear ?
- vmception 5y ago
  I’ve seen all of the above. I’ve inspected NFT contracts and saw they were designed wrong with a direct link to a website that could go down And I still minted or bought them because the community or game was interesting I’ve also seen extremely clever completely onchain nfts. I like those.
- superfad 5y ago
  > I'm curious about this point; if the only thing stored on the chain is a URL (including Drive/Imgur) then there's no possible way to actually preclude the content from changing right? When you use something like IPFS the url is created from a hash of the file contents, so it is not possible to change the file without creating a new url.
  - esrauch 5y ago
    Sure if it's IPFS. The article seemed to suggest that there were NFTs that were just Imgur urls and that a savvy purchaser of that NFT would somehow ensure the Imgur image couldn't be deleted or changed, which I don't believe is possible.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aaomidi 5y ago
syntheweave 5y ago
I should note that while I don't know of a "illegal image lives on-chain" solution, a solution to "illegal image is sent to your wallet" is found in Grin's Slatepacks: transactions have a synchronous component, so the receiver has to accept them.
jollybean 5y ago
In neither of the articles did someone even mention even a use case for something even remotely value creating. I suppose for some, enhanced control and privacy of full decentralization has value, but it's a very niche scenario. Web 1 brought us the internet. It's already decentralized, and it changed everything. Web 3 enabled us to interact a lot more with user-generated content. FB, YouTube. Nice, but it has some downsides. Web 3 ... so far mostly Crypto and NFTs have some possibly interesting characteristics but are mostly giant pyramid/MLM style scams. Web 3, so far, is a lot of hot air and a mostly hollow effort, it's like Tech Buzfeed. We should be doing better than this.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
So far I've read barely one article that mentions web3 and manages to describe the fundamental concepts and problems. Instead, most people writing about this seem to assume that the "problems" web3 is supposed to fix are completely self-evident, and then everyone who is in favor of the current "vision" of web3 simply assume that blockchain is the correct technological answer. It doesn't seem that hard to state relatively quickly and simply: Current ways of handling data online generally result in large centralized databases under the control of relatively or extremely large corporations, which gives these corporations too much control over (a) what data is accessible (b) what can be done with the data (c) the lifetime of the data. Sensible folks generally acknowledge that this either is a problem, or is likely to become one. So the central issue is: how do we have data available online without it under the control of corporations that run centralized databases? ---- In response to this, cryptocurrency advocates point to blockchain technology and say, in essence, "look! there's an example of a technology that does exactly that" However, for this to be the best solution to the problem requires a few things to be true that are either untrue or not known (yet) to be true. * was blockchain designed to handle arbitrary data blobs, or was it designed to handle transaction records? * does pretending that any arbitrary data blob can be treated as a transaction record help or hinder solutions? * are there other ways to distribute data storage and access that don't depend on the fundamental technologies/concepts inherent in blockchains? ---- Why anyone feels they can be certain that the answers all indicate that blockchain is the obviously correct technology to use for distributed trusted data storage and access totally escapes me.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Fully agree that these articles often fail to put things in a broader context. But I'll take it a step further than 'Blockchain is not the answer' and indicate that Web3 itself probably isn't an answer to that much in the first place. "this either is a problem, or is likely to become one." Web 1/2 approaches have tremendous advantages. As the original article stated - people don't want to run servers. People don't want to manage confusing things. We want everything mostly SaaS. Some of those push a bit too far, like Apple locking you out of your Mac - but this is probably best dealt with with legislation. The privacy and control benefits of self hosting are limited to mostly niche use cases, and of course, blockchains have problems, as you mention. Web 2 is just a few bits of legislation, a few rational consumer choices, and a few fewer crappy companies away from being fairly ideal. Don't use iCloud, avoid Google for anything other than search, don't 'depend' on Facebook or Twitter and already you're doing well. Dialogue and experiments are great, but NFT/Crypto so far is just a lot of MLM noise.
StrLght 5y ago
>Some countries have unstable currencies and to use USD you need to pay a hefty fee. And the solution to this is using unstable internet money which are being accepted by a handful of stores? Sounds about right.
fgnfngfdfgd 5y ago
[dead]

219 points by bbno4 5y ago

nedstarkin 5y ago

Holy Moly ---"A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever."---is this true.

dylkil 5y ago
Yes, and a lot of people hand their money to lazy scammers who use imgur as the file host

jeroenhd 5y ago

> Illegal images being sent to your wallet, forcing you to go to prison in some places. My god, I hadn't even considered that, but they're right, there's currently n established blockchain the requires permission to send anything. That's fine with money, but with NFTs that actually represent something that could be a serious risk.

neuroma 5y ago
I forget the name but there was an NFT set that was dropped straight to wallets. It was various pixilated dicks. Kinda funny and cute I suppose. They had rarity traits etc.
Joeri 5y ago
Someone can send you illegal material through the regular snail mail and call the cops as soon as the mail is delivered. Is this really that different?
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  I don't have to pay ethereum gas to hand the proof over to the police or to burn it if they don't care. The mail system also doesn't keep a public, permanent record of all things mailed to me that any political opponents might use to imply things. There are also countries where you don't want to let the police know you own crypto because of laws against alternative currencies. Real world comparisons don't really work well with public blockchains.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Well, if you don't have a wallet then you can't receive it, and if you have a wallet, you're suspect anyway ?
- berkut 5y ago
  I personally wouldn't want to put possible key disclosure laws to the test in this situation. With post mail I'd imagine that scenario is somewhat timing-critical, whereas I'm not sure how feasible it is to delete things if they are in the blockchain (consensus for deletion? How does that work?) and the police seize all the computers in your house.
- samatman 5y ago
  That's the point of this sort of (hypothetical?) attack: poor Bob now has a poison envelope on his private key, he has something which roughly constitutes 'ownership' of illegal bits. Does our legal structure support immediately transferring it to a null wallet as a disclaimer of ownership? Bob doesn't want to be the one to make that case law. Nor does he want to hand over his private key, or clean his wallet out of everything but the evil image and then hand over his private key. Basically there are no good options, although burning the offending data by sending it to /dev/null should emerge as a valid defense. Will it?
  - jakear 5y ago
    "I swear officer, the only proof I have of ever being sent those images is this folder filled with infinitely detailed top-down photographs of each one of them lying face-up in my trash can""
    - samatman 5y ago
      A tidy summary of the issue, that. But hey, if it was a Bored Cryptokitty, then Bob can't sell it and no one can buy it anymore, so clearly, he doesn't own it. The same principle should apply to evil bits, the real kicker being that the whole rigamarole is now written to a shared database whose, er, immutability is part of the product on offer. Man, the Twenties are gonna be lit.
      - jakear 5y ago
        The NFT principle only applies when content consumers value maintaining a chain of ownership to content authors. In cases where a clear chain of provenance is more of a liability than an asset, it's probably more desirable to forge a new copy for resale and shred the original. I suspect this is perhaps a part of why OpenSea maintains a lens over all wallet content requests... the impact of a mass mailing of evil bits to wallets would be devastating to the platform, perhaps to the entire crypto ecosystem. Any corporation who wants to be seen as legitimate must have the capability to keep evil bits out of users eyes.
srqwe 5y ago
Where do you live that you can be arrested for someone sending you illegal material you didn't request?!
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Possession if child porn is illegal in many countries. If digital wallets convey any kind of ownership (which anyone using cryptocurrency or NFTs would argue in favour of) then that implies receiving child porn makes you be in possession of illegal material. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure not reporting such content to the police immediately would be a crime, and even if you do the right thing the police might still suspect you if you're unlucky. Someone malicious could definitely send a collection of child porn through the mail and report you the second it arrives. If they can time it right, you could definitely be in trouble and the police would likely take all of your digital storage and search for more. It's a lot harder to do such things anonymously in the real world, where security cameras and physical mail boxes are a thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone would actually pull off something awful like this. Of course, the police probably won't arrest you if you immediately report the illegal contents and hand over the evidence (or destroy the evidence without involving the police), but that's not as easy with the blockchain. Transferring the NFT out of your account would likely involve paying some kind of transfer fee (ethereum gas is quite expensive) and the police aren't going to pay that for you. You won't be finding or suing the sender of the child porn either, because this stuff isn't hard to do anonymously. Even if you do manage to transfer the illegal content out of your wallet, the blockchain will forever keep a public record of the content you once owned, so even if you do everything right the accusation of paedophilia will forever be easy to make.
meltedcapacitor 5y ago
Is it fine with money? A ransomware operator could send the loot from an operation, channelled through a well publicized address, to someone they don't like which makes their account undistinguishable from that of a fence as seen by blockchain analytics firms maintaining the blacklists of addresses legit players do not task to. Or they could blackmail someone by threatening to burn their account by sending tainted funds. Politicians could be sent unwanted donations to dirty their reputation by making it looked they're supported by the wrong people. ...
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  You can already do that though the regular old banking system, no difference there. Banks monitor and take action when they detect money laundering systems in their transfers, and they use graph analysis that's not dissimilar from the analysis law enforcement uses for tracking anonymous wallets. The mixers in the cryptocurrency world exist as school kids acting as fencers in the real world. A crime ring could definitely "taint" a politician's bank account if they wish to do so, but the manual oversight of the banking system probably wouldn't flag them. It's not that this isn't a problem with cryptocurrencies, it's just that it's a problem that already exists in the real world.
  - meltedcapacitor 5y ago
    Sure. The difference is it's harder to manage in crypto (by design).
kamranjon 5y ago
I realize that it is said to be prohibitively expensive to store an image on-chain - but if an actual illegal image was stored on-chain would that be irreversible? Basically I’m wondering if making the entire ledger illegal to posses is as simple as ponying up the cost? Could that bring down an entire crypto currency? Sorry if this sounds naive, I am just not sure what is currently possible.
- pclmulqdq 5y ago
  It has already happened, and nobody cared. Very early on, the bitcoin blockchain ended up playing host to some illegal images, but nobody took down bitcoin or bitcoin nodes for storing them.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  It would be practically impossible, the only way you can remove something from the blockchain is to ask all nodes to revert to an earlier version and purge the offending blocks and any blocks related to them. This is also why using public blockchains for storing personal information is such a stupid idea, illegal even if the GDPR is involved in any way. Blockchains are designed so no information can be altered or redacted, and that's often an overlooked problem.

bambax 5y ago

> The sooner Opensea dies, the better. From my understanding of the space and the original article, it seems OpenSea will not die and this is pure wishful thinking.

tobessebot 5y ago
This is the dilemma in a nutshell. There are lots of incredibly smart people working in the web3 space who are aware of its limitations, but for every one of those, there are 1000 people just trying to make as much money as possible.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
OpenSea could very easily die. They have momentum, but not a lot of moat. They also don't have a lot of community good will. A well funded competitor could take them down quickly. Might not happen, but as of now it definitely could.
- paulgb 5y ago
  According to a Twitter employee, Twitter will piggyback on OpenSea verification for verified profile pictures. If it ships, that will be a big moat. https://twitter.com/thesmarmybum/status/1478505321433735169?s=21 https://twitter.com/thesmarmybum/status/1478505321433735169?...
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    Not particularly. What verification means there is verifying that a certain Bored Ape is really on the "official" Bored Ape contract. It's verifying the contract address and nothing else. The NFTs themselves can be traded anywhere, there's no lockin for OpenSea there. It's trivial for Twitter to add another contract address verification source.
    - paulgb 5y ago
      Will OpenSea verify an NFT minted on a non-OpenSea platform? I had assumed the answer is “no” but I’m not 100% sure. > It's trivial for Twitter to add another contract address verification source. It’s technically trivial, but then they are putting themselves in a position to verify the verifiers. It seems like they are outsourcing verification because they want to avoid the overhead of deciding what a verified NFT is, which is something they would have to do if they invited in more sources.

bambax 5y ago

This response is technical and appears a little naive to me. The reason why NFTs are currently hot is because there's a gold rush and people fear missing out. I don't think anyone who buys an NFT wants that NFT; they just hope to flip it for more money than they spent, or maybe diversify their portfolio (use it as a store of value). I could be wrong of course, but I seriously doubt it. Which means, the technical solutions to the questions raised in the original article this responds to, will probably not have time to be implemented before the rush is over. Also, one of the main points of the first article, if not the main one (and certainly the first one) is that centralization is a feature, not a bug. People want a central authority and not bother themselves with running their own server/infrastructure. So the only way for OpenSea to "die" is if it's replaced by a different, but similar, central authority.

squabble 5y ago
A central authority can be advantageous, until it becomes dysfunctional or prioritizes its own interests over the interests of those it serves.
- oblio 5y ago
  Yeah, but real life doesn't really work efficiently with backup plans, that's the problem. For efficiency what we do is we centralize and wherever possible we add safeguards and controls to the central authority, as auditors call them, mitigations.
eqmvii 5y ago
Hey, I’m sure plenty of people are buying NFTs with their own money, too. Nice trick to take $X and turn it into 0.98$X and an asset “worth” 0.98$X.
- riffraff 5y ago
  The thing goes deeper: this gives you a big opportunity to launder money. It's the same with art, but at least in the art world there are some regulations.

lordnacho 5y ago

Reasonable rebuttal to reasonable article. I wouldn't accuse MM of lying, though, I think it's very easy to miss something like whether a thing is normally held on a simple apache VPS. As for dipping your toes, I'd say it's maybe the hardest area of coding to do that in. Generally I find the documentation is lacking, everything is moving really quickly, there's a huge amount of jargon, and there's a huge number of protocols and standards to read about, with very little authority on what is worth spending time on. I have a collection of comments in my side projects where I've discovered various surprising things about how blockchain stuff works. Others I know have similar pages of notes on how particular things in the space are arranged. Moxie captures why this is so: there's a gold rush, and appearances seem to matter more than substance.

dmitriid 5y ago

> Every user will have to pay for everything. Ahahaha. No. More seriously: if "everyone" pays it means there will be a few who are going to reap all the profits. Glorious future, indeed

dylkil 5y ago
those who reap the profits will be network validators, which as of today is ~300k validators[1] [1]https://beaconscan.com/ https://beaconscan.com/
- meltedcapacitor 5y ago
  How is ownership distributed? Out of this 300k are 298k aliases of Alice and 2k aliases of Bob? Is there a third dude maybe?
floatboth 5y ago
Buttcoiners' "future" is all about financializing everything. They have ZERO claim to "good old web 1.0 decentralization" because the original web was all about information wanting to be free!
timeon 5y ago
Well their answer for freedom is chain. No thanks. Don't chain on me.

knorker 5y ago

Standard blockchain apologist. Always jam tomorrow, never jam today. It's always "early" for some definition of the word "it". Any decade now we'll have PoS, or an actual use case for smart contracts, or NFTs etc. But no, every year just seems to bring a new "invention" that is "still early" while implying that this, unlike every single other use of distributed blockchain, somehow is the first of all of them to not be pointless (outside of a way to find the bigger fool). Blockchains are just scam generators. Well, they are of great utility to ransomware, so i guess they have found one use case in over a decade. Edit: and of course this rebuttal found like one possible mistake in statistics and calls it a "lie". That should tell you all you need to know about the author's intellectual honesty.

eqmvii 5y ago
Hey now, ransomeware /and/ drugs!
- floatboth 5y ago
  And both are now eclipsed by the wild speculation. The vast majority of buttcoins' "usage" is all about "number go up".
  - srqwe 5y ago
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    How financial markets should be.
    - sobkas 5y ago
      > How financial markets should be. Until the bubble pops, then better not be one holding the bucket.
      - BeFlatXIII 5y ago

ra-mos 5y ago

“proposed solutions solve this” ~ every cryptocurrency/blockchain/web3 article ever written

wepple 5y ago
This is the TL;DR for me. Perhaps a lot of this will evolve and we’ll end up with some fantastic technologies that are truly revolutionary. But, a lot of us are pretty jaded by “blockchain is a game changer” with no tangible evidence beyond BTC as a highly unstable store of value and claims of some great future state.
- fivea 5y ago
  > (...) beyond BTC as a highly unstable store of value and claims of some great future state. Bitcoin is not a store of value, and never was. A highly volatile asset, specially one whose market price halves overnight without much surprise, does not serve the purpose of a store of value. I mean, this week alone Bitcoin dropped around 10%, and around 25% during the past month. This is not value being stored. If an asset manager lost 25% of it's wallet in a month they'd be out of a job.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Either it will solve something and you can get on later, or if you have to get on now “before it goes up” it’s just a scam (or”investment”) of sorts.
dylkil 5y ago
slowly but surely things improve, and then people find something else to complain about
vitaflo 5y ago
Yeah it’s starting to sound a lot like “this is the year of Linux on the desktop” to me. We’re always one year away.

emptybottle 5y ago

I wish they would expand on their objection to using tezos. https://hicetnunc.art https://hicetnunc.art is an active alternative to opensea, and the gas fees on tezos are far smaller (pennies) Whats the downside?

jsheard 5y ago
Isn't it the case that these alternative blockchains are only cheap because practically nobody uses them? There's a recent example from the Polygon blockchain, which was also sold on having gas fees on the order of a penny, until the recent launch of a Polygon blockchain game which drove enough transactions to push the gas fees up to half a dollar. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/polygon-under-accidental-attack-from-swarm-of-sunflower-farmers/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/polygon-under-accid... They don't seem to really be solving the scalability issues, but rather just kicking them down the road, at which point yet another blockchain will pop up to "solve" the issue.

boffinism 5y ago

Moxie says 'Ys are often X'. This says that's a 'lie' because 'Most Ys are not X'. Hands up if you see the flaw here.

yunohn 5y ago
This article also claim that “Z solves the problems mentioned” but Z is actually 100 different potential proposals.

kristofferR 5y ago

This is a okay response, although the language ain't great. Half of Moxie's post were using the evil YC company OpenSea as an argument against decentralization, which seemed strange. It's like arguing against decentralized email because so many use Gmail. The arguments against Infura etc. especially fell flat, as they are just proxies to the decentalized blockchain, the only value they provide is providing exactly the same decentralized blockchain data as your own node would. It's not as decentralized as running your own node would be, but to call it centralization is still wrong.

rvense 5y ago
> It's like arguing against decentralized email because so many use Gmail. Which Moxie does often do, including in the web3 article. I respect Moxie's opinion on (de)centralization, but I just have different priorities to him. I am personally more concerned about one company (Facebook or Signal, although I do use the latter) owning and controlling access to a platform than I am about perfect end-to-end encryption and forward secrecy.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
The point is that when the proxy is a monopoly, it basically becomes the new, centralized source of truth rather than the actual decentralized source of truth. If 90% of wallets utilize the OpenSea API what the blockchain says doesn't really matter anymore. OpenSea is effectively the new source of truth.

yunohn 5y ago

> Both of the proposed solutions solve this. Moxie spoke about how web3 currently works. Not about the hundreds of proposed solutions. And no, proposals don’t “solve” anything, until they’re actually implemented and tested.

jack_pp 5y ago
And adopted
rainsford 5y ago
I think it's even worse than that, because a significant part of Moxie's argument is that the current centralized web3 approaches have structural advantages (especially speed of innovation) that will leave the "proposed solutions" constantly trying to catch up. And the incredible popularity of the centralized approaches seems to suggest users in the web3 space value those advantages more than they value adhering to the distributed principles supposedly at the heart of web3. To their credit, the author of the rebuttal acknowledges that the Opensea type approaches are problematic, but misses the greater argument around why they're popular and why trying to replace them with something "better" will be difficult.

yunohn 5y ago

> “Axie Infinity and how it’s bringing entire nations out of poverty” https://www.notboring.co/p/infinity-revenue-infinity-possibilities https://www.notboring.co/p/infinity-revenue-infinity-possibi... No way I can take someone seriously if they think Axie Infinity is saving the Philippines/Vietnam from poverty. Edit: Crypto maximalists don’t understand history, economics, or globalism. All while claiming that crypto will solve for globalised economies and save people from poverty. Do they know why these countries are poor? Do they understand colonialism and modern slave labor? Or that colonising countries dictate the global economy and devalue developing world currencies? And that these countries are poor by design, and their weakened economic status is a result of colonial history? How does a “Play 2 Earn” game that is provably negative sum by making money from fees - where the poor ”scholars” have to rent tokens from the rich “lords” and share 30% of their income with, help the poor come out of poverty? This is crypto colonialism for crying out loud!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Mandelmus 5y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900 re:Axie Infinity and the “ saving the Philippines/Vietnam from poverty” bs
cfup 5y ago
I completely agree with you. Crypto bros for some reasons think they are saving the world. The original claim is just pure ignorance. To get start with Axie or other so-called GameFI, players need to have money first. For people with small capitals, they need to participate in 'Guild' and borrow the money from the rich (be it in digital or physical world). So, it is just capitalism all over again. Spending all your time maximizing some games won't save a nation from poverty.
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
Had the same reaction. Seemed like such a silly thing to say. Does he know what the scale of Axie is and what the scale of national GDPs are? Seems so ridiculous. But I also don't agree with your characterization of developing nation economies. You have your own blinders on. The degrees of freedom a developing country has are constrained ... but not mainly by outside market forces ... more their own internal institutional structures. India was isolated from all Western banking for the main part for a long time. Also insulated from competition from Western companies. That was not a good time for India. Turns out your own institutions can fuck up pretty well on their own. Openness and liberalization of an economy also come with complications but these are not "slave labor" and "colonization". I feel you have been exposed to some ideologies but have not actually tried to manufacture something in a developing country and seen the friction that prevents local economies from leveling up ... its not the EU or America stopping Indian manufacturing from leveling up ... its India's own internal complexities. If it was possible to do what you suggest, Taiwan, South Korea, and now Chinese advanced manufacturing would not exist. Countries just need to get their act together.

sovietmudkipz 5y ago

The thing I think that sucks that hasn’t been covered is how you have to have a wallet specific to each blockchain I want to interact with. I have to know what blockchain the web3 property uses. Why can’t I have a like universal wallet? I don’t want my NFTs divided among 4-5 wallets, especially as new chains are created as time goes on. Kinda a sucky user experience. That’s my nit

chrisco255 5y ago

> This is true, wallets suck so much it’s funny. I was sent a £2k NFT the other day which I can’t sell because Opensea has glitched and my wallet won’t show me the NFT, which means I can’t send it or sell it! This is not true. An NFT that follows the ERC721 contract standard has a `safeTransferFrom()` function that a token holder can call to initiate a transfer. You do not have to depend on OpenSea: https://etherscan.io/address/0x5754f44bC96F9F0Fe1a568253452a3F40F5e9F59#writeContract https://etherscan.io/address/0x5754f44bC96F9F0Fe1a568253452a... You can also use an alternative NFT swapping protocol, such as the ZeroX-backed Trader.xyz: https://trader.xyz/ https://trader.xyz/ (fully open source) to initiate a swap.

yunohn 5y ago
Yes, quite ironic that the author denounces OpenSea while simultaneously ignoring that they could actually sell their NFT elsewhere if they wanted to. This demonstrates the value of marketplace centralisation.
- detaro 5y ago
  The problem that the wallet system (which especially the web3-folks push as "you login with your wallet, so easy!" etc), which is very much supposed to be the user agent is hiding it from him, instead of allowing him to interact with it is another failure, even if "moving to less-broken wallet software" is a solution.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    The real problem is that showing a user what NFTs they own requires an indexing service. Each NFT collection is represented by its own smart contract. So the only way to show a user what NFTs they have is to either iterate over all of the ERC721 contracts on the blockchain and iterate over all of the tokenIds calling `ownerOf()` for each one (millions upon millions of tokenIds to iterate through) or to maintain an indexing service that listens for transfer and mint events and updates state continuously for every wallet address. Another issue is that someone can send an NFT to an address with or without being requested, just like an email can be sent with or without being requested. On cheaper networks, spam NFTs are a real problem. So OpenSea will hide NFTs unless they're from a reputable collection. In my opinion, OpenSea's key strength is their indexing service. Beating OpenSea in a decentralized manner will require a decentralized indexer. Protocols like The Graph (https://thegraph.com/en/ https://thegraph.com/en/) are an example of how to do that in a decentralized way.

JofArnold 5y ago

> This is a lie. Most NFTs which sell for millions use IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin or others for decentralised storage of data Nope - do your research better before you use the word "lie". BAYC did it until very very recently for instance. Definitely as of 27th September they were using cloud functions as you can clearly see in my gist here: https://gist.github.com/JofArnold/bf2c4a094fcdd4aee2f52983c7714de8#gistcomment-3906906 https://gist.github.com/JofArnold/bf2c4a094fcdd4aee2f52983c7... I know there is/was plenty of others too because I looked deeply into this around the time.

dylkil 5y ago
Ok but currently they are using IPFS so does it matter if they once used the cloud? Go here[1] and scroll down to tokenURI and input 1 and you will get an IPFS hash back. [1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d#readContract https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118...
- JofArnold 5y ago
  I'm aware which is why I said "very very recently"* (I just so happen to have checked when Tweeting this the other day so it was fresh in my mind https://twitter.com/JofArnold/status/1478071171597975554 https://twitter.com/JofArnold/status/1478071171597975554). I don't think the fact they are now using IPFS makes it any more credible either; IPFS is not a new thing and the valuations were huge already by September. They should have done it from the start. Furthermore that they can mess around with the base URL is not cool. * Although thanks for posting that as without that fact I admit my story was incomplete.
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CPLX 5y ago

I feel like someone should take the phrase “This is true at the moment, but there is work being done on…” and set it to a catchy melody, since it’s clearly the national anthem of the crypto community. For the verses of the song I would suggest lines such as: “The proposed solutions solve this” “But this is not always true, you can” “We are actively building alternatives!”

chias 5y ago
"Toss a coin to your witcher, o valley of plenty..."

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chrisco255 5y ago

> Illegal images being sent to your wallet, forcing you to go to prison in some places. Images are not stored in a wallet. NFTs and ERC20s do not actually live in a Ethereum wallet. They live in a smart contract. And that smart contract has a ledger of account for who has the right to transfer that particular asset. The images themselves, unless they are SVGs, are typically stored on Filecoin or Arweave or a centralized server and marked by an IPFS hash. Content moderation is handled by the data storers in those networks: https://www.arweave.org/technology#content-moderation https://www.arweave.org/technology#content-moderation Spam NFTs are just like spam email. The receipt of something illicit or illegal does not mean automatic imprisonment anywhere that I'm aware of. If you live in such a jurisdiction, I suggest you flee immediately.

rutierut 5y ago

This is such a bad take, almost everything here is wrong in some way, e.g. see the other comments.

arunoda 5y ago

> Just to clarify, this is what the author wanted to do. You can create distributed apps easily using Fleek or by manually uploading to IPFS, Arweave or Filecoin. Seems like the author has never build an app before. There nothing easy even with the current tech. It's much harder with the tech they mentioned. Even with that, there's a centralized system anywhere. Liek Arweave's DNS system etc.

chrisco255 5y ago

One point about NFT metadata and the debate about whether it's centralized or not. NFTs don't all have to be maximally decentralized. It should be perfectly okay that some NFTs are not on-chain, purely immutable artwork. Besides the extreme constraints that places on the art (given that data storage on a blockchain not purpose-built for storage is expensive), there are some advantages to having mutable NFTs. You can create evolving NFTs by making them mutable. Users can upgrade their skins (such as adding a Santa hat during Christmas). The NFTs could respond to real-world events (maybe the weather or the outcome of a sporting event influences the artwork). You can use them as game characters that level up in response to playtime, presumably the artwork for the character would change as the character levels up, etc. It's very difficult to do the above in an immutable, pure fashion, without thinking of all the possibilities beforehand. It's okay that just the mere ownership transfer mechanic is decentralized. Yes, a project could theoretically rug its users and change the art to a poop emoji, but in practice projects develop a reputation over time and those that foster goodwill stand to gain more from community loyalty than they'd gain from pulling B.S. Even in the case that a project were to rug its community, however, it's entirely possible for the community to create a new smart contract that "wraps" the NFT as a new NFT (you deposit an NFT from a particular collection, and get back a new NFT and the old NFT is burned). And if enough members of a community rallied around the wrapped version, then it could be treated as a consensus fork. Escape hatches are one of the features that distinguish Web3 from Web2.

md_ 5y ago

The author seems to miss that one of Moxie's central criticisms is that, all else being equal, distributed solutions tend to lag centralized ones. The reason for OpenSea et al. providing centralized services isn't accidental--it's not that it's "early days"--but that whenever there's an opportunity to innovate, those innovations will first appear for centralized services. If we hope for distributed solutions to be on par with centralized, we are in effect hoping for an inefficient market, or one without innovation (giving distributed services time to catch up). This criticism, in a way, has little to do with "Web3" at all. Instead, it's justification for the alternative solution Moxie has been working toward: one where crypto(graphy, not currency) allows the cost and feature advantages of centralization while preserving (or in fact exceeding) the user privacy of distributed solutions. (I have some criticisms of Moxie's vision, but the author seems not to engage with the argument's real substance.)

tasha0663 5y ago
I have a feeling it's more broadly true that centralization is an emergent property of networks. Webs 3 -> n are no exception.
groovecoder 5y ago
This was the part I latched onto in Moxie's piece too: "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face." In the Firefox OS days here at Mozilla, I was a huge believer and advocate for our desire to push web protocols & standards into mobile. But as it turns out, proprietary walled-garden mobile platforms move faster than web standards - who knew?! But, I like the phrase you used - "hoping for an inefficient market". At this point in my tech career and looking around at what the tech market is doing in the world, I think slowing down and getting less efficient might be good for us?
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
>but that whenever there's an opportunity to innovate, those innovations will first appear for centralized services. This isn't really true, though. Even in the example he gave, NFT royalties, they appeared first in individual NFT contracts before they were on OpenSea.

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soheil 5y ago

> This is a lie. Most NFTs which sell for millions use IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin or others for decentralised storage of data. A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever. This is such a he said she said. Can we get some stats on this? Are NFTs primarily stored on the chain or linked to a URL? I'd like to see the breakdown by platform, Opensea, etc.

svilen_dobrev 5y ago

Take the money out of equation, and i'm all for it. Which is what Moxie is suggesting, more or less.. Sadly it's all about money re/distribution, even if all try to dress it in all kind of masks on top.. With a wallet substituting my Identity (or trust, or whatever else that is not money).. it's no different to any other substitution - email, belonging to a club (FAANG+oauth), whatever. Except more involving..

butz 5y ago

So in theory, it might be possible to build a "pirate bay" on blockchain (presuming that it has capability to store huge amounts of data) and resist DMCA takedowns?

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

> NFTs are only 3 years old No they're not. I co-founded Fabrica.land in 2017, and in mid 2018 we used an NFT to perform a real estate transaction. That's already 3.5 years, and NFTs were already around. The first transaction was a bit "rough", but perfectly valid. Lot of progress since then. From [0]: The ERC-20 (Ethereum Request for Comments 20), proposed by Fabian Vogelsteller in November 2015, is a Token Standard that implements an API for tokens within Smart Contracts. Note: yes, ERC-20 has a few flaws [1], and subsequent ERC have improved on it. [0]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-20/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc... [1]: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/20 https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/20

TigeriusKirk 5y ago
ERC-20 is for fungible tokens, not NFTs, as I'm sure you know. If you want to trace that idea back, you can go to Vitalik's colored coins idea for bitcoin that predates Ethereum all together. But yes, it's true that NFTs are older than 3 years old. I thought that was an odd statement.
- 70rd 5y ago
  An ERC-20 token with supply of 1 is non-fungible.
- simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  Before ERC-721, the first non fungibles used ERC-20. Useful recent discussion here [0]. [0]: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/which-one-to-choose-erc-20-vs-erc-721-vs-erc-1155-ethereum-token-smart-contract-red-pill-9bb827148671 https://levelup.gitconnected.com/which-one-to-choose-erc-20-...

esrauch 5y ago

> A lot of NFTs do use Google Drive or Imgur or whatever. However, I can promise you that one of the first things people do when making sure they are not rugged (crypto-term for scammed) is to make sure it’s not possible for the author to suddenly delete or change the image. I'm curious about this point; if the only thing stored on the chain is a URL (including Drive/Imgur) then there's no possible way to actually preclude the content from changing right? It actually does seem very weird that people aren't at least putting a #sha1= in the NFT URL to be able to verifiably know if the underlying content did change.

le-mark 5y ago
> to be able to verifiably know if the underlying content did change. Indeed that would seem to be the point of the entire exercise!
hakcermani 5y ago
seems simple enough right .. to add a ?h=HASH_OF_IMAGE in the URL .. maybe the real issue is that fact that the server pr the actual image itself can disappear ?
vmception 5y ago
I’ve seen all of the above. I’ve inspected NFT contracts and saw they were designed wrong with a direct link to a website that could go down And I still minted or bought them because the community or game was interesting I’ve also seen extremely clever completely onchain nfts. I like those.
superfad 5y ago
> I'm curious about this point; if the only thing stored on the chain is a URL (including Drive/Imgur) then there's no possible way to actually preclude the content from changing right? When you use something like IPFS the url is created from a hash of the file contents, so it is not possible to change the file without creating a new url.
- esrauch 5y ago
  Sure if it's IPFS. The article seemed to suggest that there were NFTs that were just Imgur urls and that a savvy purchaser of that NFT would somehow ensure the Imgur image couldn't be deleted or changed, which I don't believe is possible.

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aaomidi 5y ago

syntheweave 5y ago

I should note that while I don't know of a "illegal image lives on-chain" solution, a solution to "illegal image is sent to your wallet" is found in Grin's Slatepacks: transactions have a synchronous component, so the receiver has to accept them.

jollybean 5y ago

In neither of the articles did someone even mention even a use case for something even remotely value creating. I suppose for some, enhanced control and privacy of full decentralization has value, but it's a very niche scenario. Web 1 brought us the internet. It's already decentralized, and it changed everything. Web 3 enabled us to interact a lot more with user-generated content. FB, YouTube. Nice, but it has some downsides. Web 3 ... so far mostly Crypto and NFTs have some possibly interesting characteristics but are mostly giant pyramid/MLM style scams. Web 3, so far, is a lot of hot air and a mostly hollow effort, it's like Tech Buzfeed. We should be doing better than this.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

So far I've read barely one article that mentions web3 and manages to describe the fundamental concepts and problems. Instead, most people writing about this seem to assume that the "problems" web3 is supposed to fix are completely self-evident, and then everyone who is in favor of the current "vision" of web3 simply assume that blockchain is the correct technological answer. It doesn't seem that hard to state relatively quickly and simply: Current ways of handling data online generally result in large centralized databases under the control of relatively or extremely large corporations, which gives these corporations too much control over (a) what data is accessible (b) what can be done with the data (c) the lifetime of the data. Sensible folks generally acknowledge that this either is a problem, or is likely to become one. So the central issue is: how do we have data available online without it under the control of corporations that run centralized databases? ---- In response to this, cryptocurrency advocates point to blockchain technology and say, in essence, "look! there's an example of a technology that does exactly that" However, for this to be the best solution to the problem requires a few things to be true that are either untrue or not known (yet) to be true. * was blockchain designed to handle arbitrary data blobs, or was it designed to handle transaction records? * does pretending that any arbitrary data blob can be treated as a transaction record help or hinder solutions? * are there other ways to distribute data storage and access that don't depend on the fundamental technologies/concepts inherent in blockchains? ---- Why anyone feels they can be certain that the answers all indicate that blockchain is the obviously correct technology to use for distributed trusted data storage and access totally escapes me.

jollybean 5y ago
Fully agree that these articles often fail to put things in a broader context. But I'll take it a step further than 'Blockchain is not the answer' and indicate that Web3 itself probably isn't an answer to that much in the first place. "this either is a problem, or is likely to become one." Web 1/2 approaches have tremendous advantages. As the original article stated - people don't want to run servers. People don't want to manage confusing things. We want everything mostly SaaS. Some of those push a bit too far, like Apple locking you out of your Mac - but this is probably best dealt with with legislation. The privacy and control benefits of self hosting are limited to mostly niche use cases, and of course, blockchains have problems, as you mention. Web 2 is just a few bits of legislation, a few rational consumer choices, and a few fewer crappy companies away from being fairly ideal. Don't use iCloud, avoid Google for anything other than search, don't 'depend' on Facebook or Twitter and already you're doing well. Dialogue and experiments are great, but NFT/Crypto so far is just a lot of MLM noise.

StrLght 5y ago

>Some countries have unstable currencies and to use USD you need to pay a hefty fee. And the solution to this is using unstable internet money which are being accepted by a handful of stores? Sounds about right.

fgnfngfdfgd 5y ago

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