It's interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the other big crypto / NFT marketplaces. Feels like the "distributed web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.
It has, but only a small portion of people with the engineering skills to recognize knew it. Those profiting off it hyped it, and those not either called it a scam or stayed out of the fray.
Put another way, even IPFS nodes that for all intents and purposes are "clients" can still speak the same protocal to talk to the pinning service.
The single-ish central chain idea was always terrible. "Trustless" or not, that much synchronization is a misfeature! The real world really is partial-order time/causality, that is a feature not a bug.
I understand that is still not satisfactory.
I think the real goal is to find institutional users who are not interested in a profit. For example I am involved with https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/. Software Heritage would be not a high bandwidth pinner, but a pinner of last resort. Universities were very important to the original internet, and should also host public data sets, software artifact, and hopefully if Sci Hub prevails the journal articles themselves.
None of that is a pinning service, but if it catches on the big cloud companies might feel compelled to get into the pinning service game, if only so they can get those university and government contracts! The current cloud computing business as a racket, but them offering support for a protocol that reduces switching costs might make for some real competition.
Basically "web2" problems are Captialism problems, and the stuff needs to become a low-margin business or state-run not-for profit to be better. There is no secret magic short cut, it is a political problem. SV is of course completely uninterested in low-margin businesses. The regular web3 will have a hard time being anything but a Ponzi scheme per its design, but IPFS itself at least doesn't have those characteristics baked in, and so these alternative futures are possible.
I saw this back in the 90's when a lot of people thought the internet was "Internet Explorer".
The nice thing is that you can depend on Infura for now, but if they ever attempt to be dishonest, you can easily switch to hosting your own node or light client. The cost of moving away from these centralized services is pretty low.
Will the ethereum light client run in metamask with no configuration? I’m afraid anything short of that is too heavy.
Extending the mail server analogy, updating the MX record does not exec a mail server.
Ideally, as Moxie suggested, MetaMask itself integrates a light client into its wallet, so that it becomes the default configuration.
So for metamask they would replace the calls to infura with a light client instead. Easy. They’re probably a year away from adoption, this year will accelerate development as it’s something lots of us want.
For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights, yet they own 32% of the music streaming market. The second best is Apple at 16% ... which also doesn't own any of the music.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-s...
It's still a severe issue but it's a much simpler solution to simply build competitors for a tool accessing an open platform than it is to build a new platform entirely.
aside; sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because for the last decade or so on HN we’ve been talking about how Big Tech has monopoly control over everything, how they’ve destroyed privacy and monetized eyeballs and engagement to the fullest. And now that a potential decentralized competitor is emerging, the kneejerk reaction is “why not just keep using <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”?
(I understand why, cryptocurrency is the whipping boy of the week, and it’s full of scammers, I get it! But I’m not going to pretend I’m happy with the existing crop of centralized services.)
The question, for me, is actually "how is this any different than <monopolistic centralized surveillance ad platform>”?
Because I still remember high school and how every single one of these monopolistic centralized platforms sold itself to me as "Come to us, we represent a new free and open society unencumbered by stodgy authorities!".
You know, the exact same rhetoric these new web3/crypto companies are selling. Sounds like Animal Farm all over again to my skeptic ears.
Remember when Twitter was the future of decentralized discourse free of government tyranny where you can organize political protests free of oversight and manipulation from your local govt? Hell it's a big part of why arab spring worked!
Every startup that goes big eventually becomes the thing they were supposed to obsolete, because all the incentives point that way. Moats!
I hope that this time is different, because we can now deploy code that is ownerless and immutable. Kind of a cool property if it catches on.
You can send a transaction from A -> B using Bitcoin (or another cryptocurrency) without it being censored by any government. Can they see your transaction? Yes. In that case, use Monero (or the upcoming Railgun). Comparing crypto to any of the above is quite a stretch.
Twitter may have failed in it's promise, but right now, crypto/blockchains/web is a massive improvement. They may not be perfect, but they are trending in the correct direction. Like the parent post, it's shocking to me the 180 that HN has done in this regard.
Is it all of HN that's changed, or just this thread? There are probably a lot of ppl commenting on this article that don't bother to comment (or maybe even read) many other web3 related articles.
I don't pay a lot of attention to the complaints, so I could be wrong, but it seems like when ppl complain about Twitter they're just as likely to complain about them being too unencumbered as they are about them restricting too much.
Consider how many people post something on Facebook in a single day, and now consider what it would take if each post had to be replicated across tens of thousands of independently operated systems. Big tech companies scale in large part because of their centralization, which allows them to coordinate large numbers of physical machines to efficiently provide service to their users. You may not like the ads-centric business model but on a purely technical level it is pretty clear that the big tech companies have a big advantage in terms of operating their infrastructure, and overcoming that advantage is not going to be easy for any distributed system.
I personally prefer to focus on mitigating/preventing abuses by a central authority/component of a system, which almost always results in a far more efficient and reliable solution that trying to eliminating all centralization.
Right now? Absolutely not, web3 is pure jank right now. I’m just trying to see where the puck is headed.
> I personally prefer to focus on mitigating/preventing abuses by a central authority/component of a system, which almost always results in a far more efficient and reliable solution that trying to eliminating all centralization.
How do you do this? How do you take Facebook to task? The only entity that comes anywhere close is France maybe and those fines are just a slap on the wrist.
End consumers don't care and that will always dictate adoption.
Also because people are complaining - doesn't mean that this specific implementation of decentralisation is the right one and that's why it gets so much pushback. A mere difference of opinion, but mostly because parties who claim to work in the name of decentralisation are there to grab the cash and push the narrative that it is actually to relief the society of evil organisations - so far its rather about wealth re-distribution as usual...
>>For example: Spotify doesn't own any music copyrights
It has licensing agreements with numerous record labels.
A counter example here might be Twitter and Facebook. You can export all your data just fine, but it’s useless anywhere else. Because the reason you’re on Twitter/Facebook is that everyone else is there. They own the distribution of your connections making the data itself useless without them.
The real differentiator is that with Web3, the data is open, so providing an alternative is as simple as providing an alternative front-end.
What threatens the promise of Web3 are the issues that this article brings up, with decentralized projects not being able to iterate as quickly as centralized ones, leading to proprietary elements becoming the standard for some aspects of widely used Web3 technologies (like NFTs) and establishing a moat for the centralized platform that owns that element.
My guess would be that others could extend the protocol, but the challenge would be to get the extension widely adopted.
For example, ERC20 is the primary token transfer protocol on Ethereum, and there are various new token transfer protocols that are supersets of ERC20, and add useful new functionality, but they have not yet gained the widespread adoption to become useful the way vanilla ERC20 is.
True, but they could make it very easy for users to transfer all their data, which makes it possible if they could convince everyone to do it mass. So the real problem is that it's not realistic to convince everyone to move; the network effect is too strong.
AFAICT, OpenSea et al have the same first mover/network advantage. The record on the chain of a url "belonging" to someone has approximately zero utility without the edifice they've built on top
The bare minimum for a reputable NFT is to publish the contract source code and use immutable storage. That’s the first step of due diligence in the space.
All of this stuff is super fluid and non-standardized because it’s still super early and everyone’s trying to figure out how it ought to work.
I understand this and I'm certainly sympathetic to it. Folks are also trying to figure out how to actually stuff art on-chain which I'm a fan of. I'm very familiar with the NFT standards because I was involved in some of the discussions with it. The amount of money this space is seeing though given how fluid representation in the space though, leads to Moxie's other critique, that this is being fed with a gold rush trying to find liquidity for hoarded crypto. I know that builders can't control what these speculators do but it certainly adds pressure for builders to either take the money or operate at a disadvantage to builders who do.
If OpeanSea can blackhole / cancel / hide a NFT on a whim, what does that say about the viability of hosting other services that access the blockchain through similar gateways?
Additionally, if such services can preform those actions, what does that suggest about the viability of financial instruments and company governance accessed through those or similar services?
Yes, this is FUD. I believe it is quite reasonable FUD.
I agree that OpenSea should not have final say in this regard, as clearly that is not decentralized. I would be interested to hear if anyone is trying solve this at scale.
Also, fuck Microsoft.
The reality is if I'm looking for a library to solve a problem, I'm much more likely to use one from GH with 1000 stars than a random self-hosted GitLab with 50. I would like to not feel that way, but I suspect many others do as well. It would be nice if we at least had a decentralized reaction/reputation system.
Is there an analog to this with the services Moxie talked about? Sincere question, I'm not familiar with the ecosystem at all.
It’s the same problem across all decentralised protocols, if it’s cheap to say something you get spam(see email) but introducing costs can just skew it to those who can afford to spam instead (essentially those with an advertising budget).
So there’s been a lot of research on proof of personhood (BrightID/ideas/proofofhumanity) to add Sybil resistance mechanisms so we can do 1p1v across the network. They’re working ok, but the next big step is adding zkproofs so we can anonymise the voting (which is needed to prevent collusion) which clrfund and sismo are working on.
Kleros have an interesting curated register protocol, which seems to work on small scales. Some groups are using it to token rank guy issues to prioritise work and get feedback.
The status blog has some interesting writing around these ideas over the past few years https://status.im/research/
More broadly speaking, it's important that you can migrate, even if you don't actually do it, because users who can easily churn give the developers an incentive to keep the UX solid. If you can just leave GitHub at any time, then they're less likely to add gigantic banner ads to every page, or bundle "third party offers" into installers - they know what happened to SourceForge, after all.
The barrier to hosting your own email is that you'll spend a day configuring everything, and a year later, the big providers will slightly change a spam detection algorithm, your mail won't be delivered, you won't know, and there will be bad consequences for you.
The barrier to changing your git origin is spending five minutes setting up an account and repo somewhere else. Everything will work absolutely fine, you'll still have all your git history, you'll just be slightly less discoverable and some potential contributors might not want to create an account.
And the byproduct is lock-in.
He does point out some real problems. Yes, all this has been discussed in the Ethereum community already and many in the community have voiced the same criticisms as well. But a lot of the issues are still unsolved for regular mainstream users, who rely on a lot of centralized services and are often herded into solutions that may bring more convenience but are also less secure. It's good we're having discussions about this, and the more people that point out flaws the better. After all the entire point of a blockchain is to be public and robust. If this is our future money or notary service, the more probing the better.
You can't really lump both of those into the same bucket of "front-end". Metamask is a front-end, a user interface. OpenSea is more like middlewear that connects various front-end clients like Metamask to the backend database, and provides some additional functionality that's in any of the database's stored procedures or views. OpenSea also has its own front-end UI to its own service, but its core service is its API to the Ethereum database.
In India even to this day for a vast majority YouTube/FB/WA is all the internet is. It's not at all unusual for people to walk up to a mom-and-pop store to top-up their data plan asking them to "recharge my WhatsApp balance". Even carriers have specialised data packs that are tied to a specific product/service.
And to be fair this is just how it'll be with any product/tech. As an example, in India Xerox literally stands for photocopy https://imgur.com/a/66TnCog
I wonder what type of cultural memes exist for other cultures, similar to these examples.
Twitter is frustrating in that the good content is buried and if you follow the wrong people they just spam your feed.
Its a constant battle to keep the signal to noise ratio of your feed high and the right people to follow constantly changes.
@das_connor is an awesome follow. He works for Avalanche (which I believe will be a massive player in enterprise blockchain adoption).
- @VitalikButerin
- @Hasufl
- @ePolynya
- @gakonst
Can see who they're following as a launchpad into the more interesting ecosystem
Ethereum is fundamentally flawed in this sense - it only pays for mining (and in the future, staking). The work of routing and storing data is done by the most prolific miners and businesses reliant on Ethereum to keep it from collapsing; there is no sustainable model where a decentralized cohort of nodes can run Ethereum without fundamentally changing how Ethereum pays for infrastructure.