Making Sense of Web3
lifeitself.us
lifeitself.us
1. Identity
Wallets are required to interact with chain. This means every user has one which is great because you can use wallets to sign message and authenticate people.
People's transaction history are public so you can fetch that and do authenticate on a micro level. Say, you want to authenticate people who have a particular nft or spent money somewhere specific.
2. Tokenomics
Encourage contribution and investing by providing financial motivation in the form of tokens through technical means.
Take example of torrent protocol. A big problem with torrent is there are not enough seeders because there is no incentive to seed which means many useful torrents go down.
3. Public ledger
This one doesn't need much explanation. Use cases like DNS or voting fits the area where every record needs to be publicly available and verified.
4. Financial & payments
Prediction markets, Programmable finance, cross bridges, AMMs, lending, yield farming, etc. Some are cool, some are almost scam but there are some novel ideas tested in practice here. AMMs are one successful example.
5. Collectibles and scarcity
This one is controversial. If you know the traditional gacha and pay to play industry is huge, then you understand the applications where trading and uniqueness is built in. The items can be made unique and be used outside the game which increases their value.
Especially for the first two points, how do you not see the absolute dystopian downsides?
Sorry, I'm not commenting on the good or bad. I wanted to provide a dense technical overview of what web3 is being used for since it's HN.
If you want a concise definition of web3 the website provides this as well: https://web3.lifeitself.us/concepts/web3
The first thought that came after the feeling of horror subsided, is that you can simply create a new wallet for each transaction, or maybe a new one once a day. I felt better after that.
If wallets are disposable (i.e. you throw them away after a while to avoid tracking etc) then by definition you are throwing away ownership of your content too. They'll be locked away forever like all of satoshi's BTC.
As soon as you try to move content between wallets, you've immediately and irreversibly "linked" those wallets so you may as well have not bothered and just accept that every tiny iota of your online life is publicly open for anyone to track and monitor from your first ever website you viewed as a child right through to signing the contract on your funeral plans before dying of old age - linking wallets and identities will be cryptographically/mathematically bullet-proof (not to mention trivial) and so they'll be able to easily tie together your entire life via your wallets (unless you totally separate you wallets and so have multiple totally separate identities with zero overlap ... won't be easy for "real life" stuff like work or banking etc).
Have fun.
They can't be used outside the game [1]
The only thing that "increases their value" is speculation (and scams).
[1] One person's game engine isn't another person's game engine. One game's items are not other game's items. Even displaying and interacting with items in the game that has the mechanisms to display and interact with those items cannot be translated to the world outside the game.
There are companies using it to show ads in decentralized way in the metaverse right now.
I don't understand it like you but I can reason about it looking at similar patterns in gacha and game skins. They are a digit in a database but sold for huge money and have a big secondary market.
The value of it comes from the association and possibility than immediate practical use.
Or just offer an image upload feature in their own app and/or website?
The value comes from the association. A baseball hat worn by a famous person is worth more than if it is worn by a normal person even if the hat is the same physically.
If you directly use nft from the chain in some big project, the value of that particular receipt will go up because the association can be made. This cannot be done if it was simply a digital image copied over.
You can't "use nft". Nft is a crappy recipt that tells you that you spent some money. That is it.
In the absolute vast majority of cases the actual asset is some blob of data stored on a company's server somewhere.
Since we're in a subthread about using game items outside the game for which these items were specifically designed, good luck using your "nft" in "some big project".
For example, you can store game state on the chain and generate a svg based on that state which is returned to an external application if they fetch the nft.
There are few examples of it I can dig up if you are interested.
They can't. Again. Context: game assets/game items.
Good luck storing any game asset/item on (any) blockchain.
Battlefield is EA.
What you're proposing is about as likely as Apple adding Windows and Android support for Airdrop and Universal Control.
Yes, it is. What do cryptocurrencies or web3 or other random crap has to do with them?
1. Not for free
2. This doesn't even begin to answer my question.
> I could buy a gun in CoD for a party hat in RuneScape or whatever.
No, you couldn't. Explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30708290
Yes. Let's say that. Please walk us through how this would work on a technical level, since you are "not a total novice here".
Why would CoD and Battlefield want to introduce NFTs in lootboxes? By having a resale/collectors market on-top it'll drive sales.
Why would Amazon Prime invest in having these sorts of promotional items? They already do in Apex Legends with skins.
Why would Activision and EA want to have cross-game NFTs? Item longevity would inflate the price of the asset again increasing sales of lootboxes for collectables.
The perk of Web3/NFT for these things over say the CS:GO store is you get a lot of that for free within the ecosystem - for example storefronts. Also you don't have to handle payments yourself! And there's a whole world of additional meta one can include to NFTs that you can't get with game assets. For example, and yes I know this is stupid, if my solution above was implemented I could also add a derivative CFD of a Gamestop share in it as a 'Charged NFT'. Why? Fuck knows lol. But maybe someone will come up with some cool features in the future. It's just something that's unique to NFTs and shows additional functionality. (https://www.charged.fi)
> Go and work on it then.
I try work on important things and I don't think video games are that important, albeit they're fun.
> So far you've shown exactly zero understanding of the problem. You clearly don't even understand what NFTs are.
> since you are "not a total novice here"
I don't appreciate your sarcastic tone to be honest, I am not sure if it's intentional or not but you comes across as a jerk with your confrontational attitude.
That's not what I asked.
Walk through the technical steps to implement this: "CoD and Battlefield teams both implement the MP5 and include them as a legendary drop in Lootboxes".
> I don't appreciate your sarcastic tone to be honest, I am not sure if it's intentional or not but you comes across as a jerk with your confrontational attitude.
No, I just don't suffer fools gladly. So far for every question and comment showing your complete lack of understanding how anyting in games works.
At great expense, yes.
Back in 2017, it cost approximately $76,000 per gigabyte to store data directly on Ethereum: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/896/17413 Now it's multiples of that (i.e. millions of USD per gigabyte).
Of course, that's fine, because Ethereum is not meant to be a data-store, that's where IPFS and FileCoin come in (with their own "proof-of-storage" scheme to sister Bitcoin's world-destroying Proof-of-Work). IPFS should cost less than 1USD per gigabyte while reads are "free" - though I'm unsure how well this will scale over-time. Also, AFAIK, IPFS isn't immutable/append-only storage.
Ah yes. We went from "items in the game used outside the game" to "basic sprites and characters".
Define "character", by the way.
> There are companies using it to show ads in decentralized way in the metaverse right now.
And this has anything to do with the original statement?
> I don't understand it
This is the key sentence, and you should have started with it.
> looking at similar patterns in gaccha and
Gaccha: Gaccha, alternatively spelled as Gachchha, is a monastic order, along with lay followers, of the image worshipping Murtipujaka Svetambara sect of Jainism.
Wat?
> game skins
What game skins?
> They are a digit in a database but sold for huge money and have a big secondary market.
Yes, and this has literaly nothing to do with their usefulness outside the game they were built for.
Example: Fortnite skins are built specifically for the Fortnite game engine, using textures available for that engine, applicable to skeletons and meshes designed specifically for that game engine.
How exactly are you going to use it outside of Fortnite's game engine?
> The value of it comes from the association and possibility
Translation: speculation, scams, and tricking people out of their money.
Edit: I mean, there was a huge public outcry because of EA's lootboxes. No cryptobros want these loot boxes everywhere and pretend it's a good thing.
(I haven't yet seen web3 proposed as the solution for JavaScript framework proliferation, but I'm sure it's just around the corner...)
What does it add to Halo Infinite if Deadpool is a playable character in it? Especially if the developers and publishers do not make money selling you a skin that you bought some place else.
What standard? A skin in a game is not a shitty ape jpeg that you can right-click to download. It's a 3D model designed for a specific game. Other games will not have the same models (and nor should they).
> It's not some impossible unsolvable problem unless you don't want it to work
Go and work on it then. So far you've shown exactly zero understanding of the problem. You clearly don't even understand what NFTs are.
People can work it out at great expense to developers and at the risk of destroying whatever a game is stylistically.
Again, each game will have its own ways of presenting, combining and displaying objects. A game with highly detailed human-like motion will be radically different from a cartoonish game. A game designed with large textures in mind will not work well with small textures. A game with complex physics will be completely different from a simpler game in how it represents, handles and combines objects. And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum.
Brushing this aside betrays how little you understand of this.
By way if example: websites are completely open systems. You can go in and see all the "assets and objects and items". Websites are also manny, many orders of magnitude less complex than a computer game.
Go ahead, copy a website's CSS and paste it into another. Or copy a chunk of a website's HTML and paste into another. Doesn't work, does it? You can reflect on why that is.
On top of all of that, why would, say, developers of Elden Ring want to allow you to bring in assets from Horizon Zero Dawn or Binding of Isaac? Those are completely different games with completely different stylistic choices.
> I understand why AAA games are so boring nowadays outside of a couple studios.
Ah yes, they are boring because you can't use skins from Fortnite in Shadow of Mordor. That's the reason.
I definitely agree with your assessment that most crypto/web3 stuff these days are terrible ideas.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
Games that are not available don't count, neither do games that say you'll be able to do it "soon". Pointing a game to an ugly monkey jpeg you "own" doesn't count either. Getting a character, weapon, costume piece, companion, etc, in one game, and transferring it to a completely unrelated game does count.
Someone in the crypto ecosystem working on a framework to make it easy for a game developer to allow import/export of game items as NFTs in a standardized way halfway counts.
I guess its one of those cases where time will show what sticks and what people find acceptable. To me they are all controversial.
It is like a persistent super cookie that exists online and off, that anyone can access, and that can never be deleted.
People think it is bad now with Google and Facebook - web3 is going to be way worse, with every shady operation under the sun doing all sorts of questionable targeting, combining, profiling, mining, and selling of your publicly accessible data openly stored on the block chain (forever) for everyone to see and use for whatever unsavoury things they can conjure up.
At the same time, I think this is a poor wording choice, rather than an actual issue.
Christopher Allen has been publishing research on the topic for many years before “web3” was used at all, let alone the recent hype cycle. A good thread with links to various articles:
The (shameless plug) /r/Web3skepticism subreddit[0] is an open place for critical web3 thought. Feel free to drop by and say hi.
I’m not sure how a productive discussion can happen when both sides pre-judge each other. Skepticism itself is a charged term. /r/ReligionSkepticism and /r/AtheismSkepticism already self-select for audiences - one segment is clearly defending, and another is attacking. A more neutral phrasing would be /r/ReligionChangeMyView. I initially wrote this without opening up the GP's link, but I encourage you to check it out to see if this tracks.
To your point about religion, I’m atheist but have a few very religious friends. Them being religious didn’t sour me on them when we first met, though I’ll likely always disagree with them on that point.
This is something that is desperately needed. More often than not I try to assess bold claims like "Blockchains will solve X". I try to follow the thought process of these claims and arrive at the solution: "Blockchains will most likely NOT solve X". The first comment to that is usually: "It was never supposed to solve X it is rather about Y which is loosely related to X".
There is no way to have a proper debate if one side if flip flopping about claims.
Any discussion on the basis of "X will solve Y" or "X will most likely NOT solve Y" predictably spirals on and on because the parties chose hypothetical claims that can't be falsified so it's easier to play with semantics and pretend the other doesn't get it yet.
Blockchain is cold fusion for tech bros.
> Blockchain is cold fusion for tech bros.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...
If I were working at a dot-com company at the turn of century, it would have been extraordinary to me that there were people that didn't believe in the internet and still used white/yellow pages.
Soon after, with the crash, I would have been very wrong. And a few years after that, I would have been very right again.
As soon as any discussion becomes the 'other side' needing to prove something, it's likely already terminal.
One of the earliest articles that already made sense is 5 years old this year:
- Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain, https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
- And the follow up, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future, https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
We've yet to see a single "making sense" cryptobro engage with any of the points in the article. I'm not even talking about the more recent ones like Moxie Marlinspike's My first impressions of web3, https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html, or Molly White's collection of posts on blockchains and web3, https://blog.mollywhite.net/
There are more, of course. But they are all dismissed by crypto people because they don't care as long as crypto is useful for getting rich quick schemes. It's not here to save the world, or help the disadvantaged, or whatever other bullshit they sling your way.
Heck I even initially hated crypto (and still hate some NFTs), but even I recognise that 'critics' like Stephen Diehl, Molly White, Nicholas Weaver, etc have all deliberately been ignoring the eco-friendly cryptocurrencies and technologies for years. As soon as one is mentioned on Twitter, there are no counter responses or refutations. They are immediately silent.
It seems that even Stripe [2] has recognised that change as well as Moxie, who is also pushing MobileCoin [3], a private and encrypted cryptocurrency into Signal (which he rarely talks about) and pissed off one of his critics. [4]
I think they are finding it very difficult to ignore it. For them, it is only going to get harder.
[0] https://twitter.com/saurik
[1] https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green
All three Molly White, Stephen Diel and Nicolas Weaver have made arguments beyond "cryptocurrencies use a lot of energy".
You cite a couple of sources in your statements but I would like to see these twitter threads where they "have all deliberately been ignoring the eco-friendly cryptocurrencies and technologies for years". I'm not saying it didn't happen but in these cases it depends on the details because I wouldn't engage in a debate with a laser eyes account whose only talking point it "you forgot about 'eco-friendly" cryptocurrency X".
Even beyond those criticisms, anyone else's counter-examples, arguments are never replied to or several of their tweets are deleted without explanation.
> You cite a couple of sources in your statements but I would like to see these twitter threads where they "have all deliberately been ignoring the eco-friendly cryptocurrencies and technologies for years".
Well I don't seem to find any tweets or sources of direct criticisms by them towards the state-of-the-art cryptocurrency technologies or even their impact on the environment. Perhaps they cannot critique the eco-friendly ones at all or perhaps it is just difficult for them to do so. So it is easier for them to be ignorant and dedicate to only attacking PoW cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
> I'm not saying it didn't happen but in these cases it depends on the details because I wouldn't engage in a debate with a laser eyes account whose only talking point it "you forgot about 'eco-friendly" cryptocurrency X".
Well it is only so when one invites themselves to fight an uphill battle against everything as they generalize all cryptocurrencies having the same characteristics Bitcoin, which not only that is not true, but that is a very dangerous assumption to make. [0]
What we're trying to do here is set out the claims clearly (and atomically) and evaluate them in as transparent and honest a manner as possible. So far I've not seen this a lot on the internet despite the huge amount of material on this topic.
Protip: if you work in tech it doesn't mean you automatically know shit about [p2p networking, decentralized incentive structures, consensus algorithms, decentralized property registers, smart contracts, economics, cryptography, economic-security, 'dapps' / web3, valid use-cases thereof, and so on]
Worse still: if you are only an 'expert' in one of the topics above it also doesn't mean you understand the totality of how it fits in to 'Defi' / 'ledger tech startups.' But I guess it's fun pretending to be an expert by only pointing only the historical bad things and posting retarded strawmans about dapps. Go ahead, with no understanding at all: you too can be a 'blockchain expert.'
If you want to know more about motivation and approach there is quite a bit of detail on https://web3.lifeitself.us/about