27 ms·

Web3 is expensive P2P

501 points by mritzmann 4y ago

adrianthedev 4y ago
Good way of putting things!
andsoitis 4y ago
> P2P never made it to the mainstream; instead, centralized systems still (or, again? even more?) dominate the landscape. So, because it failed, should we try Web3? I doubt it, as it is more likely to fail, due to higher complexity and more dependencies. One major reason decentralized has a hard time is because standards, public protocols cannot be innovated on rapidly. Or at least, new iterations cannot be deployed universally very quickly. So centralized / proprietary channels rise to the top because new ideas can find expression in them more rapidly.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Those "open standards" are often dictated by the whims of giants like Google. That's fine when the interests of buisnesses align with their clients, but a recent one that comes to mind is FLoC Edit: I think this is why we have seen the emergence of standards like WebRTC, WebGL, etc. that enable "web apps", for better or for worse.
- moolcool 4y ago
  I don't think that's right. Using decentralized protocols doesn't necessarily imply decentralized authority or use of those protocols. Skype used to be P2P, and the mothership would still push updates to end users to ensure everyone was using the correct protocol. Decentralized protocols do create some technical challenges, but they also alleviate others (scaling, for example). Even when that's not the case, like with bittorrent, there's tons of innovation. DHT Protocol, for example, was a game changer.
  - aardvarkr 4y ago
    You’re missing the forest for the trees… Skype is a corporate product run and owned by a single entity that is free to change their tech however they please. Something like email, a federated and distributed communication protocol, is incredibly slow to change because the stakeholders are numerous and the protocol is entrenched. You point to DHT as a game changer, and yet that protocol was invented in 2005 and took over a decade to hit mainstream success and hasn’t changed much in the past decade. New protocols can be invented at any time but getting them adopted is a Herculean task with little monetary profit and updating said protocol in any innovative way is nigh impossible.
    - moolcool 4y ago
      > You’re missing the forest for the trees No, I'm saying that trees do not exist exclusively in forests. A protocol does not have to be federated in order to be decentralized.
- dangerlibrary 4y ago
  Yes. For more thoughts on this, I'd recommend reading Moxie's expansion on these ideas here. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
- VGltZUNvbnN1 4y ago
  I still believe the P2P version of Skype was better. Centralized Skype may have more features, but the P2P version of Skype was better at the core functionality of video and audio calling. It was also more private and secure, since your calls were not routed through a central server.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    The change to centralized servers was done because more and more Skype users (P2P nodes) were/are running on bandwidth and processor constrained mobile devices. It also just so happened to align with the acquisition by Microsoft and resulting support for “lawful intercept”.
- cnity 4y ago
  It is my (largely uninformed) opinion that the greatest barrier to an open web is the difficulty in securing a static address for a device that remains consistent regardless of the currently connected gateway address. So much of what third party web services actually do is simply offering a static address for routing traffic.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    If IPv6 adoption goes at this pace, crypto adoption for addressing will probably pass it anyway.
  - blep_ 4y ago
    ... huh. I had not thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right. Not even a DNS thing. The entire concept of third party messaging platforms is because we can't just send data directly at another internet user unless they've done all the requisite setup to reliably receive it.
    - cnity 4y ago
      Yes exactly! My yardstick for the "spiritual" health of the internet is how easily I can have two devices across the internet communicate without a service in the middle. It shouldn't be difficult in theory. I _can_ send a file from my phone to another friend's phone via ftp for example, but only if both are on WiFi, have port forwarding turned on on the router, and either just have the most up-to-date dynamic IP stored, or are using dynamic DNS, or have a static IP allocated from their ISP, which is less common at least here in the UK. If you're using a cell tower, forget it.
- mdale 4y ago
  It depends what decentralization layer your talking about. Technically all these centralized / proprietary channels rose from the underlining net neutral decentralized Web. I think higher layer "decentralized" protocols may allow a lot of people / organizations to compete but a similar winner takes all network effect will likely take hold relative to the fundamentals of network centric bell curve. The marginally better content / service wins out exponentially as it gains value as more people in the network consume or interact with it. It's why small percent of YouTubers, twitch streamers and blogger, app store apps take home hugely disperportional percent of revenue on these services. The same would be true for "decentralized" platforms. Maybe more so as there would be no organization to build, invest and support the farm league.
- Asooka 4y ago
  I wouldn't say that P2P never became mainstream. BitTorrent is still huge and a great way to share media with each other. The reason it's not mainstream is because without centralisation, you can't enforce copyright and DRM. If sharing movies with friends was legal, P2P platforms would sprout like mushrooms after rain. I personally think, perhaps foolishly, that if we decriminalise nonprofit filesharing and at the same time make supporting creators easy and not tied to buying the media, we would have a better system in place. I would love to see some of the smaller creators on Patreon experiment with giving every Patron a transferrable license to reproduce their work, as long as attribution is given. I base my assumption on the fact that piracy has been a constant presence for the last 20 years and the entertainment industry doesn't seem to have suffered one bit. In fact every time they try to kill piracy all they end up getting is negative PR.
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    Most bittorrent traffic is bootstrapped by centralized trackers.
    - dharma1 4y ago
      Doesn’t have to be centralised https://boredcaveman.xyz/post/0x2_static-torrent-website-p2p-queries.html https://boredcaveman.xyz/post/0x2_static-torrent-website-p2p...
    - xyzsparetimexyz 4y ago
      Bootstrapping doesn't make them not P2P though. It's an unfortunately necessary piece of infrastructure for peer discovery.
- topranks 4y ago
  Crypto is funny in this regard. It has decentralised nodes but the protocol and software development is often very centralised to a small team. Bitcoin’s been upgraded many times. There’s no meaningful attempt at an open, IETF style approach to reaching consensus on changes to the protocol. Forks are more common.
api 4y ago
No because it's mostly not P2P. A lot of it is centralized. There are central servers behind things like MetaMask or hosting most NFT content.
- web4 4y ago
  you can point MetaMask to a different RPC endpoint or your own local node. it is like suggesting BitTorrent is centralized tech because many users download torrents on a centralized website. most NFTs (of value) are using IPFS or Arweave not a URL.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    IPFS only enables decentralization, it doesn't guarantee it. I'd be willing to bet most NFT content is only pinned by the exchange.
    - web4 4y ago
      maybe but this is still better than a centralized server URL for something that is designed to be owned by the commons. if the marketplace goes down users can just re-pin the asset. even if the asset has been completely garbage collected, if it is truly valuable (like Punks) probably at least one computer in the world will have the asset on-disk, and can just re-pin it to revive the IPFS url.
    - kkielhofner 4y ago
      Most NFT content is hosted with HTTP(s). Many NFTs that reference an IPFS url point to a specific IPFS gateway run by the creator as opposed to a “standard” IPFS url with ipfs:// I know this because I have a product that indexes various blockchains and the referenced content.
      - Karunamon 4y ago
        Wow, the situation is even more dire than I thought. So by and large, the decentralization benefit is completely off the table for most NFTs. Would you be willing to share some numbers on what you're seeing? This is valuable information.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
What is the value proposition of web3 to the user? JS web apps offloaded the compute and memory onto the browser/client, web3 to offload storage costs onto the user. You will up pay for every click. web3 and metaverse feels so dystopian. but the young generations that were raised by tiktok will probably accept it.
- lalaland1125 4y ago
  > What is the value proposition of web3 to the user? The same value as most other P2P software: illegal activity. Web3 in particular is very useful for running online casinos and ponzi schemes. Note that there is huge potential there for a ton of profit. Casinos make a ton of money.
  - przeor 4y ago
    - Xorlev 4y ago
      I don't think your parent comment mentioned social security. Kind of off-topic, don't you think?
    - LordKeren 4y ago
      yeah, if you cut out and overlook all the key defining aspects of a Ponzi scheme like the fraud, sure. Once the government privatizes social security (and similar mandatory retirement programs in other countries), converts it to a for-profit system, encourages speculative “investing”, makes deceptive claims on returns— you’ll be exactly right, they would be the same.
    - Double_a_92 4y ago
      What about it? Everybody knows it's a Ponzi and at some point people agreed to it. It's not lying to you saying it will magically create money for you if you invest. You take the money from younger contributors, to give it to older contributors by design. And that kinda makes sense because the people at the top eventually die and it's everybodys turn at some point.
somezero 4y ago
Sure! It’s P2P, but doesn’t need centralized certificate authorities (= Has some Sybil resistance)
- littlestymaar 4y ago
  > doesn’t need centralized certificate authorities (= Has some Sybil resistance) What link do you make between Sybil attacks and centralized authorities? And btw the only decentralized sybil resistance component to blockchain things was proof of work, which is being deprecated by most people who believe Web3 is a thing (which afaik Bitcoiners don't).
  - somezero 4y ago
    The only way to provably prevent Sybil attacks are CAs (https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/sybil.pdf https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/sybil.pdf) This is why almost all P2P and DHT papers assumed existence of a CA in their system model eg. Castro’s secure routing etc. P.S. PoS protocols are also Sybil resistance mechanisms. Look into Tendermint and compare it with, say, PBFT.
    - ItsMonkk 4y ago
      Not true. > This paper shows that the situation with BFT CRDTs is very different from BFT consensus: it is possible to guarantee the standard CRDT consistency properties even in systems in which arbitrarily many nodes are Byzantine, e.g. where the Byzantine nodes outnumber the correct nodes. This makes the algorithms immune to Sybil attacks, allowing them to be deployed in open P2P systems that anybody can join, without requiring proof-of-work or proof of any other resource. [0]: https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/bft-crdt-papoc22.pdf https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/bft-crdt-papoc22.pdf
      - somezero 4y ago
        I’m not saying his paper is wrong or not up to the workshop quality. But he’s saying something against an easy-to-prove impossibility theorem in a seriously sloppy/hand-wavy way. I trust Doceur and the entire early 2000s literature more than his paper. But who knows, I might be wrong. P.S. Also commented about the paper here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561786
lekevicius 4y ago
P2P is a big component of blockchains. The "expensive" part is competition for the limited capacity in global consensus (block space), which is necessary if you want to interact with global systems that deal with high value objects. Blockchains can't exist without P2P, but P2P is not sufficient. There are plenty of use cases that require global consensus, and that part is expensive.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Sure, but you would think that P2P is mostly sufficient for a social media replacement (e.g. PeerTube, Mastodon, etc.). Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin)
  - lekevicius 4y ago
    For sure! Until we can figure out how to make global consensus ridiculously scalable, I don't see "web3 social" being successful at all. It's using a very expensive resource for a frivolous need.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      "web3 social" will never be successful because censorship is a desirable feature of a social-media platform. If there is no way to censor a group of people, there is no way to censor spammers either. You will be able to filter at the client level of course, or set up maintained filter-lists (which will be trivial to game with a "sybil" approach), but this is going to be "running an email server" times a million in terms of how abusable that "censorship-resistance" is going to end up being. You will need "spam assassin for social media" immediately and it will be a continuous battle. Spammers are perfectly happy to pay-per-impression if that's what it takes to get ads (or botnet droppers, etc) in front of victims. They are more willing to pay than an actual user is, really.
      - exdsq 4y ago
        Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake. Or maybe it's just paid out on a long delay. Now spamming costs quite a bit. Add to that a blacklist feature and a shared consensus on spamming addresses and it starts to work a little better.
_glass 4y ago
site is down for me. would have been better hosted on ipfs :)
- can16358p 4y ago
  And anyone hosting it, verifiable implicitly by the content hash, could be paid a small amount of some token. But oh wait, crypto is only for illegal things sorry. /s
- LanternLight83 4y ago
  Some aggregators include archive links automatically; maybe an aggregator should mirror/pin content on an IPFS node, and users can help host front page content?
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > maybe an aggregator should mirror/pin content on an IPFS node, and users can help host front page content? I could do that... for money!
WaxedChewbacca 4y ago
alexnewman 4y ago
His hypthesis that p2p never paid off is not justified. P2P plays an important role in media, aka bittorent. The issue with p2p and open source in general not taking off more in the consumer space has to do with the lack of profit motives. In b2b oss is winning cause businesses care a lot about costs and control. in b2c, this isn’t a concern and thus we need to figure out how to pay the p2p workers and developers for work. aka web3
diego_moita 4y ago
Moxie Marlinspike on Web3 [1]: * "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will" * "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform" [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
- mlok 4y ago
  When Matrix will be p2p, people will be running their own server without even thinking about it. I think this is the way to go. But it is not there yet : https://arewep2pyet.com/ https://arewep2pyet.com/
- the_other 4y ago
  I admit, I've not read Moxie's post. IMO "people" would run many of their own servers if it were easy. At the moment, it's not easy because it's not easy to safely open up to the public a server running on your computer/phone, or home network. ISPs benefit from making this hard, and (as best I understand it) the IP4 address space isn't wide enough anyway. If "people" could run servers on their phones, safely, with minimal effort, they would. They would, because it would be so minimal effort that no-one needed to think "I'm running a server". They should only need to think "I'm available now" and that be it.
  - notriddle 4y ago
    Read it. It’s not long. It’s not just that running servers is hard. It’s that decentralized control can cause ossification. A bunch of functionality that people want became implemented in OpenSea because they couldn’t roll it into Ethereum itself.
  - dharma1 4y ago
    I agree with this. This is what projects like Matrix are trying to do - your own federated server running on your phone. https://arewep2pyet.com/ https://arewep2pyet.com/ There are issues however - mobile operating systems (especially iOS) kill background processes aggressively - and the user has very little control over this. Until that changes, you can have federated servers running on phones which will go offline frequently and will have to sync when they get back online. This is fine for some applications but perhaps not fine for others. The server also needs to be lightweight because of memory/bandwidth/battery constraints on mobile devices.
douglaswlance 4y ago
The internet didn't replace centralized services. It was a new platform that extended the capabilities. Web3 is the same thing. It offers new platforms for extending capabilities using blockchain tech. The platform is decentralized. Centralized services are built using the platform. Services themselves do not need to decentralized. But they can benefit from it. You can also build decentralized services. In some sense, decentralized services become the platform.
can16358p 4y ago
Ironically I can't access the site, that probably defends against web3 (checking out the title and the comments), which is on a centralized web host, is probably hugged to death because of HN exposure and I can't access it. I can't stop thinking how things could be different if we embraced web3 and used a decentralized storage/hosting that incentivizes sharing by some form of token, solving the scaling problem while also awarding the content creators/hosters. I know this is not the only solution, but given the particular context, I can't stop thinking this.
- exyi 4y ago
  This use case would be better served by old-school P2P, something like bittorrent or ipfs
web4 4y ago
this article is lazy, and has no real substance. > The Web3 community approaches this from the opposite side: Instead of a lightweight communistic take, they follow a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized. the web is already monetized - we pay for games and game skins, software and apps, access to news, media streaming. current web2 payment and ownership model favors payment processors like VISA, and the distributors like Spotify, not the creators and consumers of this media. > So, unless the setup and maintenance trouble of the initial setup can be reduced (and there are community efforts out there), the best way to go is the centralized model: You pay someone specific to do this. Maybe set up a not-for-profit association to provide the necessary money. this already happens in web3. OpenSea charges 2.5% on trades for the UX and network effects they provide. other marketplaces offer 0% on trades but do not have the same reach and UX. despite this, users do have a choice to go with any service they desire, since the asset is not locked into any single walled garden.
bogwog 4y ago
> The Web3 community approaches this from the opposite side: Instead of a lightweight communistic take, they follow a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized. This is how you get people to stop reading your article, and to instantly agree or disagree with you (regardless of what you're saying) based only on the political language you used. I'm not a politician, and I make an active effort to avoid politics on the internet. However, even I know that this is tone deaf. If this article was written only for people with above average reading comprehension skills (which is not this site's demographic), then that's fine. But if this was written for the masses, i.e. the typical victims of crypto scams, then it's just completely tone deaf and ineffective. "Communist" and "libertarian" are trigger words for a significant portion of Americans. For example, I know that if my father was reading through this article, he wouldn't understand any of the technical stuff, but he'd associate the word "communist" with "things that aren't Web3", and then enthusiastically start going down Tiktok/Youtube/Facebook Web3 rabbit holes, just to stick it to those damned commies.
- evan_ 4y ago
  If your father will knee jerk turn against something just because some random article called it communist- that’s not really a problem with the article.
- pshc 4y ago
  What I find amusing in the Twitter bubble I inhabit, people tend to talk about Ethereum blockspace and layers as a public good, a collectivized shared resource, y'know, left wing commie stuff. (Cynically, as a cover for profiteering?) Whereas the Bitcoin's vibe seems more about scarcity and tribalism, "bitcoin is all you need" maximalism, and so on.
pie_flavor 4y ago
I disagree with the article strongly, but still find the comparison very thought-provoking and useful. There are odd parallels there, right down to the early adopters of the former being the regulars of the latter. What the author identifies as the weaknesses of web3, though, are actually just the weaknesses of Ethereum. They're very good reasons why Ethereum will not be the future of the internet - but chains that are being developed to replace it[0] solve all of those problems and then some. [0]: https://smartcontracts.org https://smartcontracts.org
xwowsersx 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/wY5JW https://archive.ph/wY5JW
boredumb 4y ago
Sort of agree. My initial understanding was that web3 was essentially a P2P solution with IPFS, Federated social graphs, decentralized p2p messaging and RTC stuff, and awaiting decentralized DNS. My current understanding or impression is that it's a coin wallet in my ~browser and I have to mine shit coins via storing and computing stuff on what will certainly be FAANGs behalf.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ARandumGuy 4y ago
  Web3 has always been an attempt to rebrand blockchain stuff, and make it appear like the next step in internet technology. Some other technologies (like IPFS) have been added to the Web3 umbrella, but blockchain an cryptocurrency has always been the core of "Web3".
  - dwaite 4y ago
    IPFS was added because blockchain data storage is astronomically expensive. The problem is IPFS is a layer of abstraction to hide the problem away like some shell game. People treat it like it provides storage, while what it actually does is find parties who are hosting the data - if any are left. So while your data might be independent of any single service provider in concept, it might actually be provided by a single vendor's servers, even potentially pinning it with no data backups.
    - dharma1 4y ago
      Blockchains were never intended for data storage of large files, media, binaries etc. They provide global consensus, which is useful for things like a shared ledger - but it’s expensive. IPFS (and similar systems like Arweave) are very much like BitTorrent (except nodes seed/pin full files instead of fragments). If no one pins/seeds the file, it won’t be available to others. If you want some data to stay up for sure, you need to pin it - or pay for someone to do it for you. It’s not a magic free storage solution.
shoulderfake 4y ago
ychompinator 4y ago
intrasight 4y ago
What Web3 should be is a) identity, and b) digital payment. I am of the opinion that the state should provide digital identity service. Estonia is a good example, from what I've heard, of a state that is doing this effectively. As for digital payment, Brazil seems to be in the lead now with Pix. I see no valid role for private companies nor blockchains in providing digital ID and currency services.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  > I am of the opinion that the state should provide digital identity service No thanks. Privacy is a human right.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    I agree, and I would go further: Identity is a human right, and it is not to be seen as a privilege granted by governments, nor should we ever give governments the power to revoke people's identities, or require people to "earn" them.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    If the options are a) government or b) private company, then I will choose government. I guess the issue is does one trust one's government.
agentultra 4y ago
I'll just leave this here [0] I don't disagree that the concentration of web architecture into the hands of a small number of big corps is a bad thing. I just don't see the solution being a purely technical one. There are market forces and reasons for that consolidation: efficiency in terms of power; production, acquisition, and deployment of expensive equipment; high-availability of services, operations and staff, etc. I don't like that a third of the Internet goes down with aws-east-1 like anyone else but the factors that enabled this situation are no conspiracy. We need economic incentives to enable smaller players to build on widely deployed infrastructure, fair competition laws, etc. We could use more edge-computing power with low-power equipment. Make it easy to deploy small-time data-centres on low-power, off-the-shelf hardware. Incentives that align with the economic value they bring so that they're not fighting on the margins left by large monopolies. Instead we're supposed to switch over to a "P2P" system built on funny machines evaluating user code. As many chains have tried to formally verify their smart contracts it's becoming increasing clear that the proofs, when they can be achieved, are so complex that the underlying system probably has more errors in it than we can count. Probably great for departing folks from their money but the folks running this stuff often don't even understand programming let alone proofs and verification. And then the stuff that actually gets built with it... slow, terrible UX, that it is... is just garbage anyways. Axie? I don't think anyone in web3 actually plays the game. It looks boring as all hell. And it's incredibly expensive to get started in it. They literally pay people to play it for them and they just watch spreadsheets for number to go up. And none of this "distributed web" works without the Internet as it exists today anyway. I'm not interested in promises of potential. We don't drive on potential bridges. Maybe some part of the community is built by idealists but their dreams are poisoned. The world we live in right now is already pretty terrible in some parts. We could be fixing those instead of building another dystopia. [0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
- bodge5000 4y ago
  I hadn't seen Axie before, but I have seen a few other blockchain games. They seem to suffer the same pitfalls as the whole gamification trend that went around a few years ago, in that the game part feels tacked on, which of course completely misses the point. I have no doubt a good game could be built around the blockchain, as are my thoughts on gamification for fitness or whatever else, but the game has to come first.
px43 4y ago
Of course, it's P2P with cryptographic incentives for running nodes. That's the entire point.
nont 4y ago
I think the main issue I have is with the name. 3 is implied to be better and replacing 2. I'm not sure if the future we are heading to is actually that way but the name kinda led people to believe it is.
- prohobo 4y ago
  It's essentially supposed to mean the full maturation of P2P solutions that can rival the centralized web. A modern decentralized web, with finance included. There are plenty of things still missing which make it not mature enough to do so, which are too numerous and esoteric to name. But one example would be "account abstraction" (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337) which I believe would enable communities to trustlessly share a single wallet (pooled funds/coins/gas) for various operations related to the service they're using. Doesn't sound like much, but would open up the possibility of some wacky services. From my perspective, the end goal is to make digital networked vending machines that can't be tampered with. That's pretty cool, and there are already some interesting ones out there like PoolTogether (https://pooltogether.com/ https://pooltogether.com/). What would normally be considered an obvious scam can actually be built legitimately with web3 tech. Eventually some very very interesting EIPs will be deployed, and that will drastically change what's possible with "web3" - making it possibly live up to the name.
hammon 4y ago
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it's simply overkill. Skype started out as a p2p thing. But ultimately, video calls became a commodity where orchestrating them centrally proved to be good enough. I can make video calls with meets, facebook, whatsapp, signal, slack, etc. Not a big deal. I even still have Skype somewhere and it still works even though they ripped out the p2p bits ages ago. I'm not sure what web3 is other than a label that people started slapping on the collective efforts of people vaguely doing anything with or depending on some kind of block chain thingy. IMHO it has very little to do with the web and little or no relevance to end users. From a technical point of view, I don't see anything wrong with having a distributed store of ownership of stuff. There are all sorts of useful and valid uses for that. The problem is all the hyena's with dollar signs in their eyes floating around any companies active in this space. It's hard to see the forest for the trees because of this. Doing anything with a blockchain almost automatically buckets you with the fraudsters, utopians, and other people plaguing this space. Most of the companies in this space are a combination of naive, fraudulent, or misguided. With a few notable exceptions where you might squint and see some potential of some actual economic value. But most of them are obvious duds. I actually briefly used Stellar for some actual applications. Great tech. Mostly works as advertised. Not that expensive to use. Etc.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > Nothing wrong with p2p. The article doesn't imply (let alone say) that there's anything wrong with p2p? To the extent that it says anything positive about p2p, it's rather positive. Unless you're one of those americans for whom "communist" reflexively aliases to "bad" I guess?
  - remram 4y ago
    >> Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it's simply overkill. > you're one of those americans for whom "communist" ... The GP is making some comment about the technical merits of P2P which segues naturally from the article. You can agree, you can disagree, but I really don't know what just did.
    - deleted 4y ago
3qz 4y ago
The only legitimate use for web3 that I’ve seen is a way to establish trust with strangers before you run arbitrary software on their computers. It’s like a really expensive replacement for AWS. Are there any other cases similar to this and do you think it could ever be cost effective?
treyhuffine 4y ago
P2P isn't bad thing though right? Or many would argue it's a great thing. Web3 is systematized, open, and properly incentivized P2P. That sounds like a great value prop. This has allowed an ecosystem to be built to push it into the mainstream which is his primary challenge with P2P
empathy_m 4y ago
OK, so granted the boxes-and-arrows descriptions of these software systems are identical if you squint to things we built decades ago. But the social way that human reason about these systems -- that is different this time. Gentle readers, last night I dreamed I was seated in the nave of a tall cathedral, watching four bishops conduct a service at an altar. There were readings with the call-and-response ("The word of the Lord" - "Thanks be to God"). There was the sitting and the standing. And then, I swear to you I am not making this up, each of the parishioners gave some bitcoin to each of the four bishops, and the cryptocurrency was transubstantiated as it passed through each officeholder into the central coffers. In my dream that church service cleared some 30,000 units (BTC or USD, I do not know). I woke up abruptly with a profound sense of "what just happened?". How did I "see" people giving bitcoin to bishops? Did I have a dream about a metaverse church service?!? What is going on here?!? I think I have been reading too much Matt Levine. I would like off Mr. Bones's wild ride. But, friends, I would NEVER have had a dream like this about Beenz or Flooz. Something is very different about this one.
- uoaei 4y ago
  Having a vision in a dream about Bitcoin last night really doesn't give it any more authority today than it had yesterday.
k__ 4y ago
"the P2P community established something like a tiny, lightweight communist bubble" Yes, and that's the core of the problem. Things are pretty limited when the premise is "donating spare hardware and bandwidth." "[Web3 follows] a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized." I don't know what these people think. Only traditional companies should be allowed to make money, and the rest of the world should donate their resources? The conclusion of this piece sounds a bit arbitrary too. P2P failed in the past because of the lack of monetization. Web3 tries to solve this by adding monetization at the protocol level. Adding something to a system to solve an issue that wasn't solved before can add complexity. The author doesn't like complexity, so it's a failed attempt. What?
doubtfuluser 4y ago
As an EU citizen, I’m wondering how things like the “right to be forgotten” would work on this? How can we remove personal information in web3? I’m still new to the topic so I guess there are some easy solutions already…
- hawksprite 4y ago
  My guess is that the "processing" of the data is still controlled by a centralized authority (source code is owned by the company) and that it would have to be compliant to the law, in that it's underlying infrastructure needs to cary out the delete action no matter the design.
danamit 4y ago
p2p cannot save a state that the whole network agree upon, that's the point of Web3, that's what it is solving. What a waste of articles? You CANNOT have distributed apps with old p2p file sharing.
anonymousDan 4y ago
It's a bit of a strawman argument. I don't see it as being either/or. Sure for many/most use cases the existing web is likely to remain the better option. The real question is what new interesting use cases are facilitated.
aaroninsf 4y ago
As a vocal critic of "web3" and in particular NFTs and other crypto grifting, I will speak up in defense of its point of origin (as next-generation P2P), the concept of the "decentralized internet," which prior to and if stripped of its monetization schemes back to its original precepts, is as current and urgent as it ever was; even more so in light of its potential complex interactions with the concepts of free speech and the like, much in the news. An interesting critique offered ITT his that P2P "externalizes" the cost of e.g. storage to the user... ...my counter-critique to this is that TANSTAAFL, we are all already paying for storage (most of it for surveillance analytics and its products), c.f. industry chatter about revenue per user e.g. at Twitter. One of the interesting precepts of building a decentralized web is how it changes the premises of "teh algorithm" and the avenues for weaponized (amplified, precisely-targeted, bad faith) speech. Those with the money to game the system to pervert it to their ends (selling you things being the most benevolent end of a spectrum that goes very far into worse uses) will of course always have the most elaborate and pervasive tooling; but its efficacy and that of defenses against it in a decentralized concept are much more murky. Which is what we want; indeed it's kind of the point. Many things benefit from the efficiencies of centralization. Democracy and its constituent discourse do not seem to be among them.
Animats 4y ago
Where is Web3 P2P? Decentraland is centralized. The Sandbox is centralized. OpenSea is centralized. Metamask is centralized. Bitcoin and Etherium mining depend on big server farms that are more centralized than Akamai.
- leifg 4y ago
  All of that is true. But even if web3 was 100% decentralized it still would be an expensive inefficient P2P.
- dropnerd 4y ago
  transacting nfts can happen on multiple platforms, and do. looksrare, dxdy, nfttrader, etc. now try that with your steam game.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Also the whole blockchain seems to be model of distributed centralized. Okay so same thing runs in multiple places. But it is still same centralized thing. Everyone has copy and some lucky get to do next part... That just seem stupidly wasteful approach. I have nothing against actually p2p where everyone controls and runs the parts useful for them, even if there is some duplication. Think of Bittorrent. You don't download entire bittorrent network, but parts that you want...
deleted 4y ago
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status200 4y ago
So many people miss the point of blockchains that they forget that there is an actual utility for immutable ledgers, that is, to make sure funds (e.g. taxes) go to the places that they are claimed to be going to. Right now we pay our taxes and that's that - we don't even have a way to confirm that it is going to the extremely bloated military-industrial complex in the way the budget is written. Will the government ever allow something like that? Most likely not, but it doesn't mean that having complete traceability for funds is a bad idea at its core.
- Bajeezus 4y ago
  "Will the government ever allow something like that?" It's not that they won't allow it, its that its largely useless. The dollar is fungible. Who cares if a dollar spent on a new M1 Abrams was "your dollar", its identical to everyone else's dollar, so everyone else's dollar could have substituted yours. What benefit would knowing that possibly provide?
  - jyturley 4y ago
    OP is not talking about fungibility, but accountability. Web3 technology can provide transparency to see and verify that money is allocated in all the ways the entity said it would.
    - warkdarrior 4y ago
      Transparency of the blockchain is only a temporary flaw. Better solutions exist (Monero, Zcash) or are being actively developed (Zk Rollups).
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      that transparency at best tells you what wallet received what funds, whoever owns or trades that wallet or what happens with resources in the real world using those funds is outside of the scope of web3 technology or for that matter any technology safe for surveillance.
ericxtang 4y ago
The underlying technology of Web3 (distributed consensus building) is quite different from that of p2p (networking and information sharing). While some of the criticisms of web3 are true, most of them are situations caused by the early phase we are in. Moxie's post surfaces the need for better decentralized infrastructure. The hyper financialization (everything is monetized) is caused by lack of identity solution and limited blockspace in L1 chains. These things are being built now, and will come online in the next few years. Transaction fees will become cheaper, applications will be more decentralized. The core innovation is digital scarcity and crypto-enabled data ownership. For the first time in history, we can represent value without a middle-man. This completely changes the power dynamic of platforms vs. users, and makes value creation digital-native. Web3 has an opportunity to address some of the biggest problems with today's internet services like surveillance capitalism and censorship.
low_tech_love 4y ago
I live in a Nordic country which I semi-jokingly call a “anthropophobic” country. People simply don’t want to deal with each other. Whenever you need to do anything that is predicted by the system and happens by the book, it is an extremely pleasant and comfortable experience. The moment you “fall in the cracks” and needs to somehow have a custom solution to something, it becomes hell. And all that simply because you will actually need to talk to someone to solve your problem, and people simply don’t want to talk to you, period. When you call someone, you have to actually get them to answer the phone in the first place (in the 30 min per week that they have allocated for phone calls, if you get through the 20+ queue before the 30 min are up). Then, after a cold greeting, you explain your problem and immediately feel like you are (a) stupid because you had to ask a question and couldn’t solve your problem silently by yourself, and/or (b) a nuisance because you have to bother another human being and put them through the extremely unpleasant experience of having to talk to another human. Then, they will forward you to someone else, you go through the whole ordeal again (because the next person doesn’t know your problem and nobody explained it to them), they will forward you again, until after the 3rd or 4th jump you are back to the first attendant. The whole system is designed to wear you out in the hopes that you’ll give up, which most people do (nordic people are averse to conflicts), but if you are resilient enough you’ll eventually find someone to actually help you. And don’t even think about getting angry; in the nordic countries getting angry and making a scene is extremely looked down, and if you do, you are immediately wrong and they won. No problem solving for you. The reason I told the anecdote is that I think the main point of the article was the last one: a bit of trust can go a long way. It seems to me that people advocating for stuff like DAOs and “code is law” believe so strongly that the human is the broken link in the system (which it probably is) that they want to take the human out of the loop completely. They are “anthropophobes”: they want to find a way to make deals and business without having to deal with the fellow humans. Obviously, it fails miserably. You always need to deal with humans; if it’s not the person/company administrating a service, it’s the hacker who is asking for ransom or the judge who will decide about your case when you sue the DAO or whoever else. We should invest more in people and their communication instead of trying to replace them with blockchains and algorithmic contracts, IMHO.
Uptrenda 4y ago
Another clickbait article based on strawman's by an author with no clue what the blockchain is for. Yawn, nothing to see here.
bernardlunn 4y ago
No, the OP is wrong. Exchanging value (not just content) online without having to trust a third party is a game-changer and that is why Web 3 is a big deal. You have to be P2P aka decentralized to do that. Yes, lots of fluffy marketing hype obfuscating that reality.
eternityforest 4y ago
Traditional P2P has a lot of potential. It just has almost no attention these days, everything has a blockchain built in. BitTorrent was mainstream, and had near-centralized performance in ideal conditions. I think that a cross-platform P2P solution that doesn't make any compromises to add incentive layers or data structures to support them, could really work. No crazy CRDTs, no append only ledgers, just fully mutable multi-writer torrents. GUN seems to be closet.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Nothing is done well unless it burns enormous amounts of power doing useless work. That’s why I only use XML and blockchains.

501 points by mritzmann 4y ago

Good way of putting things!

> P2P never made it to the mainstream; instead, centralized systems still (or, again? even more?) dominate the landscape. So, because it failed, should we try Web3? I doubt it, as it is more likely to fail, due to higher complexity and more dependencies. One major reason decentralized has a hard time is because standards, public protocols cannot be innovated on rapidly. Or at least, new iterations cannot be deployed universally very quickly. So centralized / proprietary channels rise to the top because new ideas can find expression in them more rapidly.

cowtools 4y ago
Those "open standards" are often dictated by the whims of giants like Google. That's fine when the interests of buisnesses align with their clients, but a recent one that comes to mind is FLoC Edit: I think this is why we have seen the emergence of standards like WebRTC, WebGL, etc. that enable "web apps", for better or for worse.
moolcool 4y ago
I don't think that's right. Using decentralized protocols doesn't necessarily imply decentralized authority or use of those protocols. Skype used to be P2P, and the mothership would still push updates to end users to ensure everyone was using the correct protocol. Decentralized protocols do create some technical challenges, but they also alleviate others (scaling, for example). Even when that's not the case, like with bittorrent, there's tons of innovation. DHT Protocol, for example, was a game changer.
- aardvarkr 4y ago
  You’re missing the forest for the trees… Skype is a corporate product run and owned by a single entity that is free to change their tech however they please. Something like email, a federated and distributed communication protocol, is incredibly slow to change because the stakeholders are numerous and the protocol is entrenched. You point to DHT as a game changer, and yet that protocol was invented in 2005 and took over a decade to hit mainstream success and hasn’t changed much in the past decade. New protocols can be invented at any time but getting them adopted is a Herculean task with little monetary profit and updating said protocol in any innovative way is nigh impossible.
  - moolcool 4y ago
    > You’re missing the forest for the trees No, I'm saying that trees do not exist exclusively in forests. A protocol does not have to be federated in order to be decentralized.
dangerlibrary 4y ago
Yes. For more thoughts on this, I'd recommend reading Moxie's expansion on these ideas here. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
VGltZUNvbnN1 4y ago
I still believe the P2P version of Skype was better. Centralized Skype may have more features, but the P2P version of Skype was better at the core functionality of video and audio calling. It was also more private and secure, since your calls were not routed through a central server.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  The change to centralized servers was done because more and more Skype users (P2P nodes) were/are running on bandwidth and processor constrained mobile devices. It also just so happened to align with the acquisition by Microsoft and resulting support for “lawful intercept”.
cnity 4y ago
It is my (largely uninformed) opinion that the greatest barrier to an open web is the difficulty in securing a static address for a device that remains consistent regardless of the currently connected gateway address. So much of what third party web services actually do is simply offering a static address for routing traffic.
- can16358p 4y ago
  If IPv6 adoption goes at this pace, crypto adoption for addressing will probably pass it anyway.
- blep_ 4y ago
  ... huh. I had not thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right. Not even a DNS thing. The entire concept of third party messaging platforms is because we can't just send data directly at another internet user unless they've done all the requisite setup to reliably receive it.
  - cnity 4y ago
    Yes exactly! My yardstick for the "spiritual" health of the internet is how easily I can have two devices across the internet communicate without a service in the middle. It shouldn't be difficult in theory. I _can_ send a file from my phone to another friend's phone via ftp for example, but only if both are on WiFi, have port forwarding turned on on the router, and either just have the most up-to-date dynamic IP stored, or are using dynamic DNS, or have a static IP allocated from their ISP, which is less common at least here in the UK. If you're using a cell tower, forget it.
mdale 4y ago
It depends what decentralization layer your talking about. Technically all these centralized / proprietary channels rose from the underlining net neutral decentralized Web. I think higher layer "decentralized" protocols may allow a lot of people / organizations to compete but a similar winner takes all network effect will likely take hold relative to the fundamentals of network centric bell curve. The marginally better content / service wins out exponentially as it gains value as more people in the network consume or interact with it. It's why small percent of YouTubers, twitch streamers and blogger, app store apps take home hugely disperportional percent of revenue on these services. The same would be true for "decentralized" platforms. Maybe more so as there would be no organization to build, invest and support the farm league.
Asooka 4y ago
I wouldn't say that P2P never became mainstream. BitTorrent is still huge and a great way to share media with each other. The reason it's not mainstream is because without centralisation, you can't enforce copyright and DRM. If sharing movies with friends was legal, P2P platforms would sprout like mushrooms after rain. I personally think, perhaps foolishly, that if we decriminalise nonprofit filesharing and at the same time make supporting creators easy and not tied to buying the media, we would have a better system in place. I would love to see some of the smaller creators on Patreon experiment with giving every Patron a transferrable license to reproduce their work, as long as attribution is given. I base my assumption on the fact that piracy has been a constant presence for the last 20 years and the entertainment industry doesn't seem to have suffered one bit. In fact every time they try to kill piracy all they end up getting is negative PR.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  Most bittorrent traffic is bootstrapped by centralized trackers.
  - dharma1 4y ago
    Doesn’t have to be centralised https://boredcaveman.xyz/post/0x2_static-torrent-website-p2p-queries.html https://boredcaveman.xyz/post/0x2_static-torrent-website-p2p...
  - xyzsparetimexyz 4y ago
    Bootstrapping doesn't make them not P2P though. It's an unfortunately necessary piece of infrastructure for peer discovery.
topranks 4y ago
Crypto is funny in this regard. It has decentralised nodes but the protocol and software development is often very centralised to a small team. Bitcoin’s been upgraded many times. There’s no meaningful attempt at an open, IETF style approach to reaching consensus on changes to the protocol. Forks are more common.

api 4y ago

No because it's mostly not P2P. A lot of it is centralized. There are central servers behind things like MetaMask or hosting most NFT content.

web4 4y ago
you can point MetaMask to a different RPC endpoint or your own local node. it is like suggesting BitTorrent is centralized tech because many users download torrents on a centralized website. most NFTs (of value) are using IPFS or Arweave not a URL.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  IPFS only enables decentralization, it doesn't guarantee it. I'd be willing to bet most NFT content is only pinned by the exchange.
  - web4 4y ago
    maybe but this is still better than a centralized server URL for something that is designed to be owned by the commons. if the marketplace goes down users can just re-pin the asset. even if the asset has been completely garbage collected, if it is truly valuable (like Punks) probably at least one computer in the world will have the asset on-disk, and can just re-pin it to revive the IPFS url.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    Most NFT content is hosted with HTTP(s). Many NFTs that reference an IPFS url point to a specific IPFS gateway run by the creator as opposed to a “standard” IPFS url with ipfs:// I know this because I have a product that indexes various blockchains and the referenced content.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      Wow, the situation is even more dire than I thought. So by and large, the decentralization benefit is completely off the table for most NFTs. Would you be willing to share some numbers on what you're seeing? This is valuable information.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

What is the value proposition of web3 to the user? JS web apps offloaded the compute and memory onto the browser/client, web3 to offload storage costs onto the user. You will up pay for every click. web3 and metaverse feels so dystopian. but the young generations that were raised by tiktok will probably accept it.

lalaland1125 4y ago
> What is the value proposition of web3 to the user? The same value as most other P2P software: illegal activity. Web3 in particular is very useful for running online casinos and ponzi schemes. Note that there is huge potential there for a ton of profit. Casinos make a ton of money.
- przeor 4y ago
  - Xorlev 4y ago
    I don't think your parent comment mentioned social security. Kind of off-topic, don't you think?
  - LordKeren 4y ago
    yeah, if you cut out and overlook all the key defining aspects of a Ponzi scheme like the fraud, sure. Once the government privatizes social security (and similar mandatory retirement programs in other countries), converts it to a for-profit system, encourages speculative “investing”, makes deceptive claims on returns— you’ll be exactly right, they would be the same.
  - Double_a_92 4y ago
    What about it? Everybody knows it's a Ponzi and at some point people agreed to it. It's not lying to you saying it will magically create money for you if you invest. You take the money from younger contributors, to give it to older contributors by design. And that kinda makes sense because the people at the top eventually die and it's everybodys turn at some point.

somezero 4y ago

Sure! It’s P2P, but doesn’t need centralized certificate authorities (= Has some Sybil resistance)

littlestymaar 4y ago
> doesn’t need centralized certificate authorities (= Has some Sybil resistance) What link do you make between Sybil attacks and centralized authorities? And btw the only decentralized sybil resistance component to blockchain things was proof of work, which is being deprecated by most people who believe Web3 is a thing (which afaik Bitcoiners don't).
- somezero 4y ago
  The only way to provably prevent Sybil attacks are CAs (https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/sybil.pdf https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/sybil.pdf) This is why almost all P2P and DHT papers assumed existence of a CA in their system model eg. Castro’s secure routing etc. P.S. PoS protocols are also Sybil resistance mechanisms. Look into Tendermint and compare it with, say, PBFT.
  - ItsMonkk 4y ago
    Not true. > This paper shows that the situation with BFT CRDTs is very different from BFT consensus: it is possible to guarantee the standard CRDT consistency properties even in systems in which arbitrarily many nodes are Byzantine, e.g. where the Byzantine nodes outnumber the correct nodes. This makes the algorithms immune to Sybil attacks, allowing them to be deployed in open P2P systems that anybody can join, without requiring proof-of-work or proof of any other resource. [0]: https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/bft-crdt-papoc22.pdf https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/bft-crdt-papoc22.pdf
    - somezero 4y ago
      I’m not saying his paper is wrong or not up to the workshop quality. But he’s saying something against an easy-to-prove impossibility theorem in a seriously sloppy/hand-wavy way. I trust Doceur and the entire early 2000s literature more than his paper. But who knows, I might be wrong. P.S. Also commented about the paper here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561786

lekevicius 4y ago

P2P is a big component of blockchains. The "expensive" part is competition for the limited capacity in global consensus (block space), which is necessary if you want to interact with global systems that deal with high value objects. Blockchains can't exist without P2P, but P2P is not sufficient. There are plenty of use cases that require global consensus, and that part is expensive.

cowtools 4y ago
Sure, but you would think that P2P is mostly sufficient for a social media replacement (e.g. PeerTube, Mastodon, etc.). Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin)
- lekevicius 4y ago
  For sure! Until we can figure out how to make global consensus ridiculously scalable, I don't see "web3 social" being successful at all. It's using a very expensive resource for a frivolous need.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    "web3 social" will never be successful because censorship is a desirable feature of a social-media platform. If there is no way to censor a group of people, there is no way to censor spammers either. You will be able to filter at the client level of course, or set up maintained filter-lists (which will be trivial to game with a "sybil" approach), but this is going to be "running an email server" times a million in terms of how abusable that "censorship-resistance" is going to end up being. You will need "spam assassin for social media" immediately and it will be a continuous battle. Spammers are perfectly happy to pay-per-impression if that's what it takes to get ads (or botnet droppers, etc) in front of victims. They are more willing to pay than an actual user is, really.
    - exdsq 4y ago
      Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake. Or maybe it's just paid out on a long delay. Now spamming costs quite a bit. Add to that a blacklist feature and a shared consensus on spamming addresses and it starts to work a little better.

_glass 4y ago

site is down for me. would have been better hosted on ipfs :)

can16358p 4y ago
And anyone hosting it, verifiable implicitly by the content hash, could be paid a small amount of some token. But oh wait, crypto is only for illegal things sorry. /s
LanternLight83 4y ago
Some aggregators include archive links automatically; maybe an aggregator should mirror/pin content on an IPFS node, and users can help host front page content?
- paulmd 4y ago
  > maybe an aggregator should mirror/pin content on an IPFS node, and users can help host front page content? I could do that... for money!

WaxedChewbacca 4y ago

alexnewman 4y ago

His hypthesis that p2p never paid off is not justified. P2P plays an important role in media, aka bittorent. The issue with p2p and open source in general not taking off more in the consumer space has to do with the lack of profit motives. In b2b oss is winning cause businesses care a lot about costs and control. in b2c, this isn’t a concern and thus we need to figure out how to pay the p2p workers and developers for work. aka web3

diego_moita 4y ago

Moxie Marlinspike on Web3 [1]: * "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will" * "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform" [1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

mlok 4y ago
When Matrix will be p2p, people will be running their own server without even thinking about it. I think this is the way to go. But it is not there yet : https://arewep2pyet.com/ https://arewep2pyet.com/
the_other 4y ago
I admit, I've not read Moxie's post. IMO "people" would run many of their own servers if it were easy. At the moment, it's not easy because it's not easy to safely open up to the public a server running on your computer/phone, or home network. ISPs benefit from making this hard, and (as best I understand it) the IP4 address space isn't wide enough anyway. If "people" could run servers on their phones, safely, with minimal effort, they would. They would, because it would be so minimal effort that no-one needed to think "I'm running a server". They should only need to think "I'm available now" and that be it.
- notriddle 4y ago
  Read it. It’s not long. It’s not just that running servers is hard. It’s that decentralized control can cause ossification. A bunch of functionality that people want became implemented in OpenSea because they couldn’t roll it into Ethereum itself.
- dharma1 4y ago
  I agree with this. This is what projects like Matrix are trying to do - your own federated server running on your phone. https://arewep2pyet.com/ https://arewep2pyet.com/ There are issues however - mobile operating systems (especially iOS) kill background processes aggressively - and the user has very little control over this. Until that changes, you can have federated servers running on phones which will go offline frequently and will have to sync when they get back online. This is fine for some applications but perhaps not fine for others. The server also needs to be lightweight because of memory/bandwidth/battery constraints on mobile devices.

douglaswlance 4y ago

The internet didn't replace centralized services. It was a new platform that extended the capabilities. Web3 is the same thing. It offers new platforms for extending capabilities using blockchain tech. The platform is decentralized. Centralized services are built using the platform. Services themselves do not need to decentralized. But they can benefit from it. You can also build decentralized services. In some sense, decentralized services become the platform.

can16358p 4y ago

Ironically I can't access the site, that probably defends against web3 (checking out the title and the comments), which is on a centralized web host, is probably hugged to death because of HN exposure and I can't access it. I can't stop thinking how things could be different if we embraced web3 and used a decentralized storage/hosting that incentivizes sharing by some form of token, solving the scaling problem while also awarding the content creators/hosters. I know this is not the only solution, but given the particular context, I can't stop thinking this.

exyi 4y ago
This use case would be better served by old-school P2P, something like bittorrent or ipfs

web4 4y ago

this article is lazy, and has no real substance. > The Web3 community approaches this from the opposite side: Instead of a lightweight communistic take, they follow a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized. the web is already monetized - we pay for games and game skins, software and apps, access to news, media streaming. current web2 payment and ownership model favors payment processors like VISA, and the distributors like Spotify, not the creators and consumers of this media. > So, unless the setup and maintenance trouble of the initial setup can be reduced (and there are community efforts out there), the best way to go is the centralized model: You pay someone specific to do this. Maybe set up a not-for-profit association to provide the necessary money. this already happens in web3. OpenSea charges 2.5% on trades for the UX and network effects they provide. other marketplaces offer 0% on trades but do not have the same reach and UX. despite this, users do have a choice to go with any service they desire, since the asset is not locked into any single walled garden.

bogwog 4y ago

> The Web3 community approaches this from the opposite side: Instead of a lightweight communistic take, they follow a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized. This is how you get people to stop reading your article, and to instantly agree or disagree with you (regardless of what you're saying) based only on the political language you used. I'm not a politician, and I make an active effort to avoid politics on the internet. However, even I know that this is tone deaf. If this article was written only for people with above average reading comprehension skills (which is not this site's demographic), then that's fine. But if this was written for the masses, i.e. the typical victims of crypto scams, then it's just completely tone deaf and ineffective. "Communist" and "libertarian" are trigger words for a significant portion of Americans. For example, I know that if my father was reading through this article, he wouldn't understand any of the technical stuff, but he'd associate the word "communist" with "things that aren't Web3", and then enthusiastically start going down Tiktok/Youtube/Facebook Web3 rabbit holes, just to stick it to those damned commies.

evan_ 4y ago
If your father will knee jerk turn against something just because some random article called it communist- that’s not really a problem with the article.
pshc 4y ago
What I find amusing in the Twitter bubble I inhabit, people tend to talk about Ethereum blockspace and layers as a public good, a collectivized shared resource, y'know, left wing commie stuff. (Cynically, as a cover for profiteering?) Whereas the Bitcoin's vibe seems more about scarcity and tribalism, "bitcoin is all you need" maximalism, and so on.

pie_flavor 4y ago

I disagree with the article strongly, but still find the comparison very thought-provoking and useful. There are odd parallels there, right down to the early adopters of the former being the regulars of the latter. What the author identifies as the weaknesses of web3, though, are actually just the weaknesses of Ethereum. They're very good reasons why Ethereum will not be the future of the internet - but chains that are being developed to replace it[0] solve all of those problems and then some. [0]: https://smartcontracts.org https://smartcontracts.org

xwowsersx 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/wY5JW https://archive.ph/wY5JW

boredumb 4y ago

Sort of agree. My initial understanding was that web3 was essentially a P2P solution with IPFS, Federated social graphs, decentralized p2p messaging and RTC stuff, and awaiting decentralized DNS. My current understanding or impression is that it's a coin wallet in my ~browser and I have to mine shit coins via storing and computing stuff on what will certainly be FAANGs behalf.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ARandumGuy 4y ago
Web3 has always been an attempt to rebrand blockchain stuff, and make it appear like the next step in internet technology. Some other technologies (like IPFS) have been added to the Web3 umbrella, but blockchain an cryptocurrency has always been the core of "Web3".
- dwaite 4y ago
  IPFS was added because blockchain data storage is astronomically expensive. The problem is IPFS is a layer of abstraction to hide the problem away like some shell game. People treat it like it provides storage, while what it actually does is find parties who are hosting the data - if any are left. So while your data might be independent of any single service provider in concept, it might actually be provided by a single vendor's servers, even potentially pinning it with no data backups.
  - dharma1 4y ago
    Blockchains were never intended for data storage of large files, media, binaries etc. They provide global consensus, which is useful for things like a shared ledger - but it’s expensive. IPFS (and similar systems like Arweave) are very much like BitTorrent (except nodes seed/pin full files instead of fragments). If no one pins/seeds the file, it won’t be available to others. If you want some data to stay up for sure, you need to pin it - or pay for someone to do it for you. It’s not a magic free storage solution.

shoulderfake 4y ago

ychompinator 4y ago

intrasight 4y ago

What Web3 should be is a) identity, and b) digital payment. I am of the opinion that the state should provide digital identity service. Estonia is a good example, from what I've heard, of a state that is doing this effectively. As for digital payment, Brazil seems to be in the lead now with Pix. I see no valid role for private companies nor blockchains in providing digital ID and currency services.

chrisco255 4y ago
> I am of the opinion that the state should provide digital identity service No thanks. Privacy is a human right.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  I agree, and I would go further: Identity is a human right, and it is not to be seen as a privilege granted by governments, nor should we ever give governments the power to revoke people's identities, or require people to "earn" them.
- intrasight 4y ago
  If the options are a) government or b) private company, then I will choose government. I guess the issue is does one trust one's government.

agentultra 4y ago

I'll just leave this here [0] I don't disagree that the concentration of web architecture into the hands of a small number of big corps is a bad thing. I just don't see the solution being a purely technical one. There are market forces and reasons for that consolidation: efficiency in terms of power; production, acquisition, and deployment of expensive equipment; high-availability of services, operations and staff, etc. I don't like that a third of the Internet goes down with aws-east-1 like anyone else but the factors that enabled this situation are no conspiracy. We need economic incentives to enable smaller players to build on widely deployed infrastructure, fair competition laws, etc. We could use more edge-computing power with low-power equipment. Make it easy to deploy small-time data-centres on low-power, off-the-shelf hardware. Incentives that align with the economic value they bring so that they're not fighting on the margins left by large monopolies. Instead we're supposed to switch over to a "P2P" system built on funny machines evaluating user code. As many chains have tried to formally verify their smart contracts it's becoming increasing clear that the proofs, when they can be achieved, are so complex that the underlying system probably has more errors in it than we can count. Probably great for departing folks from their money but the folks running this stuff often don't even understand programming let alone proofs and verification. And then the stuff that actually gets built with it... slow, terrible UX, that it is... is just garbage anyways. Axie? I don't think anyone in web3 actually plays the game. It looks boring as all hell. And it's incredibly expensive to get started in it. They literally pay people to play it for them and they just watch spreadsheets for number to go up. And none of this "distributed web" works without the Internet as it exists today anyway. I'm not interested in promises of potential. We don't drive on potential bridges. Maybe some part of the community is built by idealists but their dreams are poisoned. The world we live in right now is already pretty terrible in some parts. We could be fixing those instead of building another dystopia. [0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

bodge5000 4y ago
I hadn't seen Axie before, but I have seen a few other blockchain games. They seem to suffer the same pitfalls as the whole gamification trend that went around a few years ago, in that the game part feels tacked on, which of course completely misses the point. I have no doubt a good game could be built around the blockchain, as are my thoughts on gamification for fitness or whatever else, but the game has to come first.

px43 4y ago

Of course, it's P2P with cryptographic incentives for running nodes. That's the entire point.

nont 4y ago

I think the main issue I have is with the name. 3 is implied to be better and replacing 2. I'm not sure if the future we are heading to is actually that way but the name kinda led people to believe it is.

prohobo 4y ago
It's essentially supposed to mean the full maturation of P2P solutions that can rival the centralized web. A modern decentralized web, with finance included. There are plenty of things still missing which make it not mature enough to do so, which are too numerous and esoteric to name. But one example would be "account abstraction" (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337) which I believe would enable communities to trustlessly share a single wallet (pooled funds/coins/gas) for various operations related to the service they're using. Doesn't sound like much, but would open up the possibility of some wacky services. From my perspective, the end goal is to make digital networked vending machines that can't be tampered with. That's pretty cool, and there are already some interesting ones out there like PoolTogether (https://pooltogether.com/ https://pooltogether.com/). What would normally be considered an obvious scam can actually be built legitimately with web3 tech. Eventually some very very interesting EIPs will be deployed, and that will drastically change what's possible with "web3" - making it possibly live up to the name.

hammon 4y ago

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it's simply overkill. Skype started out as a p2p thing. But ultimately, video calls became a commodity where orchestrating them centrally proved to be good enough. I can make video calls with meets, facebook, whatsapp, signal, slack, etc. Not a big deal. I even still have Skype somewhere and it still works even though they ripped out the p2p bits ages ago. I'm not sure what web3 is other than a label that people started slapping on the collective efforts of people vaguely doing anything with or depending on some kind of block chain thingy. IMHO it has very little to do with the web and little or no relevance to end users. From a technical point of view, I don't see anything wrong with having a distributed store of ownership of stuff. There are all sorts of useful and valid uses for that. The problem is all the hyena's with dollar signs in their eyes floating around any companies active in this space. It's hard to see the forest for the trees because of this. Doing anything with a blockchain almost automatically buckets you with the fraudsters, utopians, and other people plaguing this space. Most of the companies in this space are a combination of naive, fraudulent, or misguided. With a few notable exceptions where you might squint and see some potential of some actual economic value. But most of them are obvious duds. I actually briefly used Stellar for some actual applications. Great tech. Mostly works as advertised. Not that expensive to use. Etc.

masklinn 4y ago
> Nothing wrong with p2p. The article doesn't imply (let alone say) that there's anything wrong with p2p? To the extent that it says anything positive about p2p, it's rather positive. Unless you're one of those americans for whom "communist" reflexively aliases to "bad" I guess?
- remram 4y ago
  >> Nothing wrong with p2p. But often it's simply overkill. > you're one of those americans for whom "communist" ... The GP is making some comment about the technical merits of P2P which segues naturally from the article. You can agree, you can disagree, but I really don't know what just did.
  - deleted 4y ago

3qz 4y ago

The only legitimate use for web3 that I’ve seen is a way to establish trust with strangers before you run arbitrary software on their computers. It’s like a really expensive replacement for AWS. Are there any other cases similar to this and do you think it could ever be cost effective?

treyhuffine 4y ago

P2P isn't bad thing though right? Or many would argue it's a great thing. Web3 is systematized, open, and properly incentivized P2P. That sounds like a great value prop. This has allowed an ecosystem to be built to push it into the mainstream which is his primary challenge with P2P

empathy_m 4y ago

OK, so granted the boxes-and-arrows descriptions of these software systems are identical if you squint to things we built decades ago. But the social way that human reason about these systems -- that is different this time. Gentle readers, last night I dreamed I was seated in the nave of a tall cathedral, watching four bishops conduct a service at an altar. There were readings with the call-and-response ("The word of the Lord" - "Thanks be to God"). There was the sitting and the standing. And then, I swear to you I am not making this up, each of the parishioners gave some bitcoin to each of the four bishops, and the cryptocurrency was transubstantiated as it passed through each officeholder into the central coffers. In my dream that church service cleared some 30,000 units (BTC or USD, I do not know). I woke up abruptly with a profound sense of "what just happened?". How did I "see" people giving bitcoin to bishops? Did I have a dream about a metaverse church service?!? What is going on here?!? I think I have been reading too much Matt Levine. I would like off Mr. Bones's wild ride. But, friends, I would NEVER have had a dream like this about Beenz or Flooz. Something is very different about this one.

uoaei 4y ago
Having a vision in a dream about Bitcoin last night really doesn't give it any more authority today than it had yesterday.

k__ 4y ago

"the P2P community established something like a tiny, lightweight communist bubble" Yes, and that's the core of the problem. Things are pretty limited when the premise is "donating spare hardware and bandwidth." "[Web3 follows] a heavyweight libertarian path: Everything should be monetized." I don't know what these people think. Only traditional companies should be allowed to make money, and the rest of the world should donate their resources? The conclusion of this piece sounds a bit arbitrary too. P2P failed in the past because of the lack of monetization. Web3 tries to solve this by adding monetization at the protocol level. Adding something to a system to solve an issue that wasn't solved before can add complexity. The author doesn't like complexity, so it's a failed attempt. What?

doubtfuluser 4y ago

As an EU citizen, I’m wondering how things like the “right to be forgotten” would work on this? How can we remove personal information in web3? I’m still new to the topic so I guess there are some easy solutions already…

hawksprite 4y ago
My guess is that the "processing" of the data is still controlled by a centralized authority (source code is owned by the company) and that it would have to be compliant to the law, in that it's underlying infrastructure needs to cary out the delete action no matter the design.

danamit 4y ago

p2p cannot save a state that the whole network agree upon, that's the point of Web3, that's what it is solving. What a waste of articles? You CANNOT have distributed apps with old p2p file sharing.

anonymousDan 4y ago

It's a bit of a strawman argument. I don't see it as being either/or. Sure for many/most use cases the existing web is likely to remain the better option. The real question is what new interesting use cases are facilitated.

aaroninsf 4y ago

As a vocal critic of "web3" and in particular NFTs and other crypto grifting, I will speak up in defense of its point of origin (as next-generation P2P), the concept of the "decentralized internet," which prior to and if stripped of its monetization schemes back to its original precepts, is as current and urgent as it ever was; even more so in light of its potential complex interactions with the concepts of free speech and the like, much in the news. An interesting critique offered ITT his that P2P "externalizes" the cost of e.g. storage to the user... ...my counter-critique to this is that TANSTAAFL, we are all already paying for storage (most of it for surveillance analytics and its products), c.f. industry chatter about revenue per user e.g. at Twitter. One of the interesting precepts of building a decentralized web is how it changes the premises of "teh algorithm" and the avenues for weaponized (amplified, precisely-targeted, bad faith) speech. Those with the money to game the system to pervert it to their ends (selling you things being the most benevolent end of a spectrum that goes very far into worse uses) will of course always have the most elaborate and pervasive tooling; but its efficacy and that of defenses against it in a decentralized concept are much more murky. Which is what we want; indeed it's kind of the point. Many things benefit from the efficiencies of centralization. Democracy and its constituent discourse do not seem to be among them.

Animats 4y ago

Where is Web3 P2P? Decentraland is centralized. The Sandbox is centralized. OpenSea is centralized. Metamask is centralized. Bitcoin and Etherium mining depend on big server farms that are more centralized than Akamai.

leifg 4y ago
All of that is true. But even if web3 was 100% decentralized it still would be an expensive inefficient P2P.
dropnerd 4y ago
transacting nfts can happen on multiple platforms, and do. looksrare, dxdy, nfttrader, etc. now try that with your steam game.
Ekaros 4y ago
Also the whole blockchain seems to be model of distributed centralized. Okay so same thing runs in multiple places. But it is still same centralized thing. Everyone has copy and some lucky get to do next part... That just seem stupidly wasteful approach. I have nothing against actually p2p where everyone controls and runs the parts useful for them, even if there is some duplication. Think of Bittorrent. You don't download entire bittorrent network, but parts that you want...

deleted 4y ago

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status200 4y ago

So many people miss the point of blockchains that they forget that there is an actual utility for immutable ledgers, that is, to make sure funds (e.g. taxes) go to the places that they are claimed to be going to. Right now we pay our taxes and that's that - we don't even have a way to confirm that it is going to the extremely bloated military-industrial complex in the way the budget is written. Will the government ever allow something like that? Most likely not, but it doesn't mean that having complete traceability for funds is a bad idea at its core.

Bajeezus 4y ago
"Will the government ever allow something like that?" It's not that they won't allow it, its that its largely useless. The dollar is fungible. Who cares if a dollar spent on a new M1 Abrams was "your dollar", its identical to everyone else's dollar, so everyone else's dollar could have substituted yours. What benefit would knowing that possibly provide?
- jyturley 4y ago
  OP is not talking about fungibility, but accountability. Web3 technology can provide transparency to see and verify that money is allocated in all the ways the entity said it would.
  - warkdarrior 4y ago
    Transparency of the blockchain is only a temporary flaw. Better solutions exist (Monero, Zcash) or are being actively developed (Zk Rollups).
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    that transparency at best tells you what wallet received what funds, whoever owns or trades that wallet or what happens with resources in the real world using those funds is outside of the scope of web3 technology or for that matter any technology safe for surveillance.

ericxtang 4y ago

The underlying technology of Web3 (distributed consensus building) is quite different from that of p2p (networking and information sharing). While some of the criticisms of web3 are true, most of them are situations caused by the early phase we are in. Moxie's post surfaces the need for better decentralized infrastructure. The hyper financialization (everything is monetized) is caused by lack of identity solution and limited blockspace in L1 chains. These things are being built now, and will come online in the next few years. Transaction fees will become cheaper, applications will be more decentralized. The core innovation is digital scarcity and crypto-enabled data ownership. For the first time in history, we can represent value without a middle-man. This completely changes the power dynamic of platforms vs. users, and makes value creation digital-native. Web3 has an opportunity to address some of the biggest problems with today's internet services like surveillance capitalism and censorship.

low_tech_love 4y ago

I live in a Nordic country which I semi-jokingly call a “anthropophobic” country. People simply don’t want to deal with each other. Whenever you need to do anything that is predicted by the system and happens by the book, it is an extremely pleasant and comfortable experience. The moment you “fall in the cracks” and needs to somehow have a custom solution to something, it becomes hell. And all that simply because you will actually need to talk to someone to solve your problem, and people simply don’t want to talk to you, period. When you call someone, you have to actually get them to answer the phone in the first place (in the 30 min per week that they have allocated for phone calls, if you get through the 20+ queue before the 30 min are up). Then, after a cold greeting, you explain your problem and immediately feel like you are (a) stupid because you had to ask a question and couldn’t solve your problem silently by yourself, and/or (b) a nuisance because you have to bother another human being and put them through the extremely unpleasant experience of having to talk to another human. Then, they will forward you to someone else, you go through the whole ordeal again (because the next person doesn’t know your problem and nobody explained it to them), they will forward you again, until after the 3rd or 4th jump you are back to the first attendant. The whole system is designed to wear you out in the hopes that you’ll give up, which most people do (nordic people are averse to conflicts), but if you are resilient enough you’ll eventually find someone to actually help you. And don’t even think about getting angry; in the nordic countries getting angry and making a scene is extremely looked down, and if you do, you are immediately wrong and they won. No problem solving for you. The reason I told the anecdote is that I think the main point of the article was the last one: a bit of trust can go a long way. It seems to me that people advocating for stuff like DAOs and “code is law” believe so strongly that the human is the broken link in the system (which it probably is) that they want to take the human out of the loop completely. They are “anthropophobes”: they want to find a way to make deals and business without having to deal with the fellow humans. Obviously, it fails miserably. You always need to deal with humans; if it’s not the person/company administrating a service, it’s the hacker who is asking for ransom or the judge who will decide about your case when you sue the DAO or whoever else. We should invest more in people and their communication instead of trying to replace them with blockchains and algorithmic contracts, IMHO.

Uptrenda 4y ago

Another clickbait article based on strawman's by an author with no clue what the blockchain is for. Yawn, nothing to see here.

bernardlunn 4y ago

No, the OP is wrong. Exchanging value (not just content) online without having to trust a third party is a game-changer and that is why Web 3 is a big deal. You have to be P2P aka decentralized to do that. Yes, lots of fluffy marketing hype obfuscating that reality.

eternityforest 4y ago

Traditional P2P has a lot of potential. It just has almost no attention these days, everything has a blockchain built in. BitTorrent was mainstream, and had near-centralized performance in ideal conditions. I think that a cross-platform P2P solution that doesn't make any compromises to add incentive layers or data structures to support them, could really work. No crazy CRDTs, no append only ledgers, just fully mutable multi-writer torrents. GUN seems to be closet.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Nothing is done well unless it burns enormous amounts of power doing useless work. That’s why I only use XML and blockchains.