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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

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.
- agentultra 4y ago
  I don't share your optimism. Just as most smart contract/web3/crypto developers fail to understand political science, economics, physics, and software engineering; fewer seem to understand game development -- yet are happy to blithely repeat the same myth that game assets will somehow live on the block chain and be use-able in different games! Imagine owning Mario! There are a ton of great games being made today without any of this "ownership" stuff and users are not complaining about it. It's not a pain point for anyone who plays games. However it does present an opportunity for someone, somewhere to keep growing the herd of people at the bottom of the pyramid...
  - bodge5000 4y ago
    > There are a ton of great games being made today without any of this "ownership" stuff... I didn't say anything about ownership, I said the blockchain. Surely you're not saying its impossible to make a good game that makes use of the blockchain? Maybe that will never happen, but it seems odd to discount it entirely. I get HN's negativity when it comes to the blockchain and crypto and all of that, I share it a lot of the time, but it feels like people here are just a little too jumpy when it comes to its very mention.
    - agentultra 4y ago
      If by blockchain you mean a hashed linked list or a Merkle Tree; that’s like saying someone could make a great game using a Red-Black Tree or a priority queue. While technically true it’s not what most people mean when they say that we could build good games on the blockchain. In this context they generally mean using some form of cryptocurrency and smart contract. I’d say sure, you could potentially figure out a way to make the most amazing AAA game experience to make your mother cry with pride. But if it’s on a smart contract blockchain you already have a problem: nobody is going to play it. If Axie was on the normal web, no blockchain at all, it would be a lot more popular. People still play Neopets-clones and Pokémon rip-offs online all the time. What’s holding Axie back, besides being an unimaginative and boring design, is the exorbitant costs of playing. Imagine teaching your non-technical friend how to set up a wallet, store it on a hardware fob, all the opsec necessary to prevent them from losing all of their tokens and coins… and then they have to spend hundreds of dollars to buy their game assets, gas fees for all of the transactions, etc. Terrible UX. And the more people that play it the slower it gets. Potentially crashing indefinitely under the weight of trying to keep up with the typical load a popular AAA would draw on an actually popular platform like Steam. But we probably won’t have to worry about that because the pool of crypto users is nothing compared to the size of the Steam/Switch/XBox/PlayStation audience. A killer app seems highly unlikely.
wmf 4y ago
We need economic incentives... That's the whole point of Web3. Unfortunately the incentives as currently designed are relatively simplistic and seem to go wrong more often than they go right, but the idea is there.
- agentultra 4y ago
  Given the track record of the web3 community in regulating itself, preventing fraud and corruption, and even building a tech stack that can be trusted... I don't think we should place a single bit of faith in their ability to align incentives with the kinds I'm talking about. The kinds of economic incentives I'm talking about come from industry experts working with democratically elected officials with a system of government that is concerned with the rights and freedoms of a society to have access to technology and infrastructure for the benefit of everyone. The kind of Keynesian approach to economics rather than the Austrian school (which has shown itself to implode and fail and enrich the few at the cost of the freedoms of the many, less fortunate).
  - nsjsuabNdi 4y ago
    “industry experts” - capitalist sponsored charlatans “democratically elected officials” - corrupted by corporate greed “Government that is concerned with the rights and freedoms of a society to have access to technology and infrastructure for the benefit of everyone” - which planet do you live on?
  - CryptoPunk 4y ago

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.

agentultra 4y ago
I don't share your optimism. Just as most smart contract/web3/crypto developers fail to understand political science, economics, physics, and software engineering; fewer seem to understand game development -- yet are happy to blithely repeat the same myth that game assets will somehow live on the block chain and be use-able in different games! Imagine owning Mario! There are a ton of great games being made today without any of this "ownership" stuff and users are not complaining about it. It's not a pain point for anyone who plays games. However it does present an opportunity for someone, somewhere to keep growing the herd of people at the bottom of the pyramid...
- bodge5000 4y ago
  > There are a ton of great games being made today without any of this "ownership" stuff... I didn't say anything about ownership, I said the blockchain. Surely you're not saying its impossible to make a good game that makes use of the blockchain? Maybe that will never happen, but it seems odd to discount it entirely. I get HN's negativity when it comes to the blockchain and crypto and all of that, I share it a lot of the time, but it feels like people here are just a little too jumpy when it comes to its very mention.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    If by blockchain you mean a hashed linked list or a Merkle Tree; that’s like saying someone could make a great game using a Red-Black Tree or a priority queue. While technically true it’s not what most people mean when they say that we could build good games on the blockchain. In this context they generally mean using some form of cryptocurrency and smart contract. I’d say sure, you could potentially figure out a way to make the most amazing AAA game experience to make your mother cry with pride. But if it’s on a smart contract blockchain you already have a problem: nobody is going to play it. If Axie was on the normal web, no blockchain at all, it would be a lot more popular. People still play Neopets-clones and Pokémon rip-offs online all the time. What’s holding Axie back, besides being an unimaginative and boring design, is the exorbitant costs of playing. Imagine teaching your non-technical friend how to set up a wallet, store it on a hardware fob, all the opsec necessary to prevent them from losing all of their tokens and coins… and then they have to spend hundreds of dollars to buy their game assets, gas fees for all of the transactions, etc. Terrible UX. And the more people that play it the slower it gets. Potentially crashing indefinitely under the weight of trying to keep up with the typical load a popular AAA would draw on an actually popular platform like Steam. But we probably won’t have to worry about that because the pool of crypto users is nothing compared to the size of the Steam/Switch/XBox/PlayStation audience. A killer app seems highly unlikely.

wmf 4y ago

We need economic incentives... That's the whole point of Web3. Unfortunately the incentives as currently designed are relatively simplistic and seem to go wrong more often than they go right, but the idea is there.

agentultra 4y ago
Given the track record of the web3 community in regulating itself, preventing fraud and corruption, and even building a tech stack that can be trusted... I don't think we should place a single bit of faith in their ability to align incentives with the kinds I'm talking about. The kinds of economic incentives I'm talking about come from industry experts working with democratically elected officials with a system of government that is concerned with the rights and freedoms of a society to have access to technology and infrastructure for the benefit of everyone. The kind of Keynesian approach to economics rather than the Austrian school (which has shown itself to implode and fail and enrich the few at the cost of the freedoms of the many, less fortunate).
- nsjsuabNdi 4y ago
  “industry experts” - capitalist sponsored charlatans “democratically elected officials” - corrupted by corporate greed “Government that is concerned with the rights and freedoms of a society to have access to technology and infrastructure for the benefit of everyone” - which planet do you live on?
- CryptoPunk 4y ago