Web3 is expensive P2P
netfuture.ch
netfuture.ch
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.
P2P may have a comeback, because home connections are becoming more symmetrical. DSL usually had relatively low uplink rates, and COMCAST cable was worse. But fiber is usually symmetrical, and 5G wireless typically has an uplink bandwidth of half the downlink rate. This makes P2P more feasible.
Automatically exposing ports is very flaky and doing so manually is way beyond the understanding of almost anyone.
I mean how could it happen that such a basic utility as the router was developed with such fundamental design flaws that hosting a webserver at home is above the skills of 99% of people?
There’s a router in every home anywhere now, so this is a fact we’ll have to deal with for decades.
I’m pretty young so i was not around at the time. How did it come about?
But largely no one cares because you wouldn’t want to host any real website at home anyway. It’s extremely cheap and reliable to just rent a VPS.
Another underrated benefit of P2P (if implemented in good faith) is that the users will have peace of mind with regards to the ownership of their data.
Famous last words! Not sure how users will establish the trustworthiness of P2P protocols (and there will be many competing versions), when now they cannot determine the trustworthiness of one service.
And with the popularity of the cloud it has made it available across data centres and even regions.
So it is debatable whether P2P is more reliable than centralised.
But upload speeds have risen a lot, despite many of them still being lower than downlink.
Like, there are all kinds of products which use p2p architectures internally to solve some technical problem - bit torrent is sometimes used inside updaters, elasticsearch organizes its nodes as a p2p network for greater robustness and scalability, WebRTC let's you make direct connections between browsers to save roundtrips, etc etc. But those are just technical details - the products themselves are still controlled and administered by a central entity.
In contrast, crypto, file sharing and federated systems use p2p as a technical means but they are also administered in a decentralised fashion, where no person or entity has ultimate control (or should have at least).
I think Skype was falling squarely in the first category here: They were experimenting with decentralised network protocols, but the nodes were all pretty clearly belonging to a singular and centrally controlled product. That's why p2p really just was an implementation detail that could be replaced by a different technical architecture by a simple update.
(Weird thought as an aside: I think most companies or organisations follow a sort of similar pattern: They are communist with respect to coworkers of equal status ("everyone should chip in for Carol's birthday present"), authoritarian with respect to management and owners - and libertarian/anarchist with respect to the outside world ("freedom! ...from annoying rules and regulations..."). But that doesn't mean leadership necessarily follows communist, authoritarian or anarchist principles when deciding strategy)
There’s still nothing that comes close to the call quality Skype provided for long distance calls, especially when the network may not be as good on 1 end.
It's my understanding that "phone" without the ability to tap is illegal in the US.
IIRC, the "must be able to let the govt listen" requirement occurred at the same time as Skpye switched models and the requirement was given as the reason for said switch.
This is not true. Else you couldn't have whatsapp or signal calls (e2e encrypted). In 2009, Skype made the argument with the ACLU that they are not a telecoms carrier, and are therefore exempt from CALEA and similar regulations. Additionally, Skype's original CSEO refused to promise that they did not support wiretaps in the original architecture. We know from Edward Snowden that "old Skype" was included in NSA data sources.
Skype changed architecture because routing calls through neighboring, always-on nodes is not practical in a mobile world where 50%+ of users pay for their data by the MB, and have spotty connections with high latency. For several years before the rearchitecture, Microsoft propped up the network by running all the supernodes itself.
Skype is not Common Carrier. It's an Internet Service which ISP's have been deadset on avoiding getting classified as covered under Common Carrier obligations because it would entail, according to them, enormous harm to the profitability of the sector due to the cost of increased regulatory compliance".
Telco's/Telephony must provide pen register/tap capability. Internet services as of yet need not. Until you become big enough for Federal LE to start harassing.
The relevant regulation in question is CALEA.
So I'm not sure that's accurate that there were any such legal limits on Skype, I'd like to see a citation to more info.
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?
> 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.
it's usually people who had actually lived under communism who have that reaction
Yeah, I have lived under communist rule. That's not the reason I can easily spot such nonsense but it certainly helps a bit.
Has zero to do with tech, however.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
All I'm saying is, I think theres the possibility that the blockchain could be used in interesting ways within game dev. Maybe it'd take the form of cryptocurrency or smart contracts, thats not what I was thinking of but again, used in new and clever ways Im sure theres gold in there.
Perhaps it'd be entirely on the backend, the player wouldnt even know its on the blockchain. I'm not sure, but as with any new technology its interesting to think about at least.
Either way, it comes back to what I was saying before, the game has to come first. No game will be made good by sticking it on the blockchain, and as with the issues you mention it has to be properly factored into its design.
I do get where your coming from though, the blockchain and crypto and all those do have certain associates with them
From a user perspective, it's certainly anything but free.
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.
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.
No-one can tell me anything about Web3 except that it's the future, it's the next wave, everyone is investing in it, everyone is moving into the space, it's going to be huge, you'd be a fool to miss out. But ask for details, or for a single example (just one) of a Web3 application that's unequivocally proved itself or that can't be better served by an existing pre-blockchain technology and... crickets.
Replace "Web3" with simply "blockchain" and I could have written the exact same paragraph five years ago. It's hard to keep the hype train going when you've been saying the same thing for five years and the "future" still hasn't arrived, but rename "blockchain" to "web3" and suddenly it sounds like you having something new and the hype cycle can repeat.
Give it another five years and I expect the cryptoheads will be pumping another trendy new term to mask the lack of innovation. It's the future, you've got to believe me! It's going to blow up! Any day now.
But even if web3 was 100% decentralized it still would be an expensive inefficient P2P.
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...
now try that with your steam game.
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.
Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin)
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.
Oh, so, if I have $1m I can register a bunch of accounts and kick people I don't like off the platform? You said this thing was supposed to be censorship-resistant, right?
Hell people will do it for free if they disagree with someone, you don't need $1m of accounts, you just need to say something that angers 100k people who report you and get you banned... isn't that something that people specifically complain about with regards to "censorship" with current platforms? Like I'm not saying they have to read it, but if others have the ability to stop me from publishing than that's not really censorship-resistant, it's just mob-controlled censorship. Censorship-resistance is something like IPFS - you have no control over what I put on IPFS. You don't have to access it, but you can't stop me either.
Also, if I register enough accounts so that 100k people never complain about any one account do they gradually go back to being healthy accounts? Or if not, then when I spam a bunch of people then I can get them kicked off they will be banned permanently (or have to pay another $10 to restore access), right? How long will this service last when I'm kicking every single user off every single day?
"Consensus" will always take into account the consensus of attackers too... sure you can always have a trusted party who oversees censorship and you can depend on to make unbiased and fair decisions that 100% of individuals will agree with (lol) - but in that case, why do we need crypto at all? Why not just let that guy run the server/why not let him build blocklists for the mastodon server?
it's the SMTP copypasta except the thing you have chosen to ignore is sybil attacks, and the massively complex thing you are handwaving as being trivial is building a reputation system, and that would solve all the problems for the non-crypto space too.
https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
(really, it's the exact same problem, it doesn't matter whether the format is facebook posts or emails. Email is actually an extremely decentralized and censorship-resistant protocol - there is no central authority who can stop me from putting my message into your mail server, or even see what I'm sending you (if we connect directly). We can have completely private conversations that no central authority can stop! And what's what makes it terrible, because it turns into utter white noise with vague "reputational" signals like "dirty IPs" - those are your "blacklisted commenters" on facebook, and spam emails are still a problem. Or at least they were, until a centralized authority (Google) effectively came to take over the market and solved the problem for us... but then there's censorship again. And if you are winding up about "PGP message signing" or anything else, you need to go back to the "spam solutions" copypasta and find the bits that apply to you, because people thought of that 40 years ago before crypto was a gleam in satoshi's eye. Is spam solved? No, because your idea doesn't work.)
Spammers have been willing to "pay per account" forever, and that's the problem, they are more willing to pay than the actual users are. So any model needs to survive in the face of an asymmetric foe that has more resources than you... and almost all of the "asymmetric" strategies will require either a huge amount of cooperation between "honest" participants, or a few "super participants" who have actual power (ie censorship) over the system.
And remember - the original idea behind bitcoin literally came from HashCash - which was an attempt to reduce spamming by requiring a unique proof-of-work for each message.
We already have payment networks that work well. People aren’t going to switch to a less convenient solution to what they already have for <insert political reason about decentralisation/privacy/anti-statism>.
That’s not always good but it’s the reality.
Those are the only credible use-case(s) that the cryptocurrency folks should be looking at. I can see a few projects surviving like Stellar [0], Ripple (XRP) [1], Algorand [2] and Nano [3], ENS [4], Handshake [5] and Skiff [6].
Unlike the other projects that are slapping blockchain, crypto on to anything they can find and are filled with scams being reported, daily on web3isgoinggreat, there are a few that are not silly meme coins / tokens, or vaporware but stuck to their goals / whitepaper(s) and seem to be still useful and have a use-case.
This is what these skeptics won't tell you and will ignore and filter out.
[1] https://xrpl.org
[3] https://nano.org
Bitcoin itself was a genuine attempt at peer to peer cash too.
Problem is the technology sucks and can’t scale. The trade offs are immense. DNS works great and is decentralised in all the meaningful ways. Nano network is currently struggling cos of one script kiddie, and puts everyone’s bank balance out there for the world to see.
Honest intentions and even innovative ideas are all well and good. But replacing the current financial system, or DNS or whatever is a massive technical challenge.
The trade offs in efficiency, scalability, even privacy with blockchain solutions, just to get decentralisation, are far too high.
* "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
.. that line "People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will" kills me. That's exactly the problem with P2P that Web3 is trying to solve. By strapping a financial layer onto a P2P network, you can build cryptographic incentives for people to run nodes and participate constructively in running and maintaining the network. It's certainly not the intention for everyone to run their own node, but anyone CAN, and even if you don't, you can be confident that the people who are running the network are acting in your best interests.
This, of course, does assume that the incentives are well thought out and properly aligned, which is very commonly not the case, but these networks are an amazing sandbox for people to try to build incentive systems that work, and there are many systems that are working quite well, many of which can run without any central authority over the protocol at all.
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.
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.
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.
But with people demanding more quality, richer content and consistent and stable connections p2p makes not much sense. Look at some Netflix blogs and how complex their infrastructure is geographically as well as in terms of hardware and software to deliver content at the cost to the user that they do.
Division of labor has made sense for hundreds of years and it will continue to do so for many more, the economics of p2p when resources matter doesn't check out.
Division of labor with companies hosting servers for online games makes sense until the servers go away and then what? No more Warcraft III ever, I guess, the servers are gone.
When we go in on centralization, we lose availability, privacy, and control. The services are more reliable from a technical sense but less reliable from a social sense.
Most people. And there's still a ton of "non-technical" (minimal programming/operations skills) but technically literate people who will not run their own servers but prefer to pay for applications and services that are built on protocols like RSS, ActivityPub etc.
Also hosting providers make it much more easy today than ever before. It's not "running your own server" but you get definitely quite a bit of control and ownership if you rent a VPS that runs stuff you created and/or installed.
> "A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform"
That's a good thing.
---
However, I think overall these are very good points. Personally I think there is just too much crap that goes under Web3 to the extend that it is repulsive. I'd rather help people to use computers, even if it is someone else's (AKA the cloud).
There is also a lot of work being done on light clients and faster proofs, so we can bundle them into browsers/apps and not rely on third party nodes for messaging/transacting. This would solve quite a few of moxies concerns right away. Alongside this the work being done on rollups shows us ways of facilitating services for others, without them being dependant on it or locked into it.
For comparison, signal is great example of cryptography protecting users, but users being dependant on signal. there is no exit- so in critical situations what happens? Thats the kind of power-dynamic people working in crypto are grappling with. This is a hard problem but it is something worth attempting to solve.
How can we provide services to users but have them be able to leave with all their assets when then need to (not when its convenient to us who run the servers). I hear a lot from non-crypto people about how they agree with these ideas but you dont need blockchains to do them, but it seems most of the work to do with this is being done in the crypto/blockchain community (look at who is funding/doing the research on zk-proofs/snarks/starks, which can have a much wider impact outside of the crypto space too! => https://0xparc.org/blog/zk-mnist )
It’s always “in development”, “around the corner” etc.
Blockchain is hugely inefficient and for the most part has failed to scale meaningfully. Look at popular networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. If it weren’t for the Ponzi scams most people probably would have moved on.
Zksnarks might be great, but absolutely private transactions have downsides too. Most of us would like our daily purchases to remain private. But do we want to enable unlimited money laundering and tax evasion too?
Problems like that are social and political and technology alone can’t give a solution.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/why-this-computer-sci...
But it is not there yet : https://arewep2pyet.com/
At this point, Moxie's fans and minions are not even aware of this involvement of the darker sides of that cryptocurrency project which have even (allegedly) plagiarised some of their privacy features from Monero. [1]
To Downvoters: So this is not true? Care to explain your reasons why as now I have added sources backing up these claims? [0][1][2]
[0] https://amycastor.com/2021/04/07/signal-adopts-mobilecoin-a-...
[1] https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/1379559273504641025
[2] https://twitter.com/sethforprivacy/status/137979120155827814...
The idea of crypto backers getting mad about "plagarizing features" is ridiculous in the extreme. Maybe what you want here is... a statist patent system that gives you a legal monopoly on particular kinds of math? Am I getting that right?
But then, this is a world where crypto people get mad about other people using the JPGs they "own" a link to... which is basically describing the need for copyright, isn't it?
If you believe in crypto I don't see how your position here should be anything other than "let crypto systems compete in the marketplace of ideas". And it is fundamentally ridiculous how crypto bros are slowly re-creating every aspect of a state except slower, more expensive, more energy intensive, less accountable, and worse for users in every way. Truly Libertarians do yearn for a feudal society, but one where they're the one on top...
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.
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.
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.
https://boredcaveman.xyz/post/0x2_static-torrent-website-p2p...
Even when that's not the case, like with bittorrent, there's tons of innovation. DHT Protocol, for example, was a game changer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It also just so happened to align with the acquisition by Microsoft and resulting support for “lawful intercept”.
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.
- Universal login: An alternative to "Sign in with Google/Apple/XYZ" that can't be denied by a corporation. There are countless examples of these companies deactivating accounts for questionable reasons.
- Permissionless composability: I'm not sure how to word this one better. If a developer wants to build on top of blockchain data, they can. No need to apply for API access, rate limits, etc. Not all data should be open/on a blockchain, but in the cases where it's appropriate this is a fantastic benefit.
- Ownership in communities: tokens (fungible or non-fungible) can represent ownership for communities. The next Reddit will reward its community and contributors. This isn't an unusual concept. YouTube and TikTok already reward their creator communities. The difference is that existing platforms don't let you build on those communities outside of their walled garden.
For balance, here are two concepts/terms I see co-mentioned with web3 that I believe are bullshit:
- Metaverse: I don't think this will come to anything. We're already living in the metaverse. We have online identities (yours is mouzogu!). I refuse to spend a significant portion of my life in VR or another 3D game.
- Micropayments: Consumers don't want the mental overhead of figuring out value for money every time they consume content.
You can have universal login with MetaMask, sure, but that functionality isn't reliant on a blockchain. It's decades-old public key cryptography.
> Ownership in communities.... The difference is that existing platforms don't let you build on those communities outside of their walled garden
But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens. What could they possibly have to gain by doing this? Like what would Reddit gain by moving Reddit Gold to the blockchain?
For sure, you can do PGP, but if it's decades old, you have to ask yourself: Why hasn't public key cryptography taken off as a sign in solution in the same way that email or Google or Facebook have been?
Mainly because it's always been a chicken and egg problem for consumers and application developers. If you implement PGP as your sign-in method, it's unlikely that any consumers will adopt it unless they're developers. And you increase the barrier to entry for anyone who does not understand it.
In the case of MetaMask, this has already got significant traction at 21 million monthly active users (more if you count other EVM wallet solutions), because there's no other way to interact with a blockchain. It's also relatively user friendly. And there's an ecosystem now of applications that require it for interaction, so you're starting to see network effects grow for "Sign in With Ethereum/EVM".
> But successful internet communities do everything in their power to remain walled gardens
This will be proven to be false in the long run. This was the same argument against Linux back in the day vs. Windows. The bazaar will win against the cathedral in the end.
For the same reason a Metamask extension to do so won't take off outside of specialized applications.
Since users have not yet authenticated, this is part of a conversation process of potential users to registered, authenticated users. Only options which will increase that will be supported.
People to some very high double-digit percentage understand what a "Sign in with Google" button does, what will happen if they hit it. Because of that, there is high likelyhood if someone hits that button that they will return successfully authenticated.
PGP never had a website-based authentication option. Mutual TLS did, but other than a few certificate authorities I've never seen it out of the enterprise space - the compatibility and user experience were never even close to sufficient to offer as a broader option.
As optimized as the sign in with Google experience is, there are still sites which will not support it because they want to make sure the user does not get 'lost' on another site if there are failures. They simply will not outsource their funnel.
Because people haven't been financially motivated to evangelize it.
I believe that's the core of blockchain/web3 innovations. It's a worse way to do it, but the social hype (driven almost entirely by get rich FOMO) is enough to push it over the edge.
Linux is still sitting at ~2% desktop market share compared to 90% for macOS+Windows. I'd hardly call that a win for the bazaar.
Blockchain doesn’t really solve the whole “who is giving me this key” issue with PGP.
I think you nailed it. It’s a victory for USERS - owning your own assets in a way that does not require you to trust the platform. It’s not so great for centralized platforms.
You'd need everyone to agree to the same standard for stuff. Definitely more likely than game assets, but still incredibly unlikely
What does "owning your own assets" really mean, with regards to services such as Reddit, and where exactly do you see any problem worth fixing?
We have to reimagine everything, I don't think a successful web3 platform will emerge from simply tacking on tokens to existing platforms. Successful internet communities become walled gardens to protect against competition, but they're limiting the growth of their community members and I believe the platforms themselves could capture more value. A creator on TikTok today can't easily give their most loyal followers discounts on their Shopify store, perks for moderating a Discord, early access to YouTube content, etc.
Greenfield projects are easy because they wave away the real complexities of integrating with existing systems. But those existing platforms already provide a lot of tangible value. If you want users, you can't just ignore that.
Patreon makes it pretty easy to give your subscribers early access to stuff, too. No blockchain involved. A lot of it happens over email.
That could easily be done with plain old public key cryptography.
Composability: sounds really bad for privacy. The entire concept of a permanent public record of transactions scares me for this reason
rewarding creator communities: we already have Patreon and advertising deals. Aren’t crypto transactions relatively slow and expensive, or has that changed?
Instead of the Security team at Google, their ddos service and OnCall experts we have whom now?
Some miners?
Perfectly written Blockchain code?
You sound like those things are just free.
Static HTML pages still exist today.
Google isn't the Internet, no matter how badly they want you to believe that.
that was not free either... what I'm trying to get at (and not very eloquently) is that a lot of that work is done by the computers. also, something about how the code is written once and then used by everybody at the same time. sure, writting the code may be expensive at first.
dunno, I doubt better written words will get you to agree with (or see) whatever it is I'm trying to get at.
Undersee cables for example.
Project Zero.
Secure by default.
2FA.
Google even gives you now the option of configuring your ads.
Realistically speaking some entity with a monetary motivation is solving hard problems for us.
Who will solve this issue in web3 and with what motivation?
If it is monetary (as it will be) do I now should start trusting the etherium company instead of Google?
Or should I start trusting 1000 small companies than Google?
I'm quite happy what Google does and I don't know all of those other potential companies.
I'm not aware of any opensource community being happy at doing on call.
Or end customer support.
Or even marketing.
And if we look at successful opensource projects, than we have companies behind them.
So it sounds like it could make tracking of activity much easier and that doesn't sound right.
Permissionless composability: Copyright ensures there will always be the need for permission if you wish to compose in a country that has copyright.
There are some good ideas here but there are also some very critical flaws. The problem is not so much web3 itself but that web3’s most vocal proponents—- particularly investors—- have refused to grapple with things like spam and copyright. It’s probably because they want to be middlemen who collect all the profits and are left without liability when the pyramid collapses.
Permissionless composability means you have no control over which apps use your data, the universal login makes sure that spam is present and unbannable, and Reddit communities benefit heavily from being able to have top mods removed when they turn abusive
permissionless computing is also fine, but I think payments need to be somehow decoupled from this. endless ocean of tokens is stupid. we need some kind of distributed payment gateway built into the internet where you can use any currency on a list of supported currencies, and none should be supported that are "bad" ie planet killing POW.
tokenization I think is a dead end
Every service that might use blockchain based authentication will implement allow lists. As everyone in the history of the Internet has learned trolls and spammers will ruin services. So some sort of unblockable universal login is an impractical fantasy.
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.
Torrents are also an incredible piece of technology, allowing tamper resistant distribution of files from untrusted parties - imagine how much value Linux distros glean from being hosted by third parties who voluntarily do so without needing to "partner up"?
I don't disagree that the _primary_ use case is piracy though (and I've yet to see any genuine use cases for web3 suggested either)
As soon as I opened "yahoo.com", he asked "how am I paying to view Yahoo?". I said you're not paying anybody, you're just paying for the Internet connection. He nodded.
I then showed him Hotmail. He kept asking "ok so now, how did they charge me to view this page?". I kept telling him, "that's the beauty of the internet, you don't pay for each site you visit, you just have access to this enormous body of knowledge".
He was thinking of sites in terms of making long distance calls, since he knew the Internet used the phone line, so to him it was normal to pay for each "site call" (if that makes sense), because that's how phone calls worked.
This interaction stayed with me for a long time, because it was natural for him to think about paying for each website visit, but to me it was all 'free'. As social media and user data became more monetizable in the years after, we found out pretty fast that there was no such thing as free.
At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could support their existence without ads, since each customer would be a paying customer. Ads would still be around, but perhaps people would have demanded a nicer experience once they know they are paying for the visit.
In many ways, that's the lense through which I look at web3. It might be too late to switch to a pay as you go system. It might be too late to educate people about the importance of staying anonymous and preserving their user data. Nothing about this payment system requires a blockchain, but internet-money is a good enough excuse to introduce an alternative pay-per-click approach to the Internet, because, to be honest, I think the Internet ended up being a cesspool of abnoxious ads, paid content, ads disguised as content, dark patterns, etc, like the world's dirtiest third world country bazaar.
Maybe if we paid for each click, the experience of using the Internet could be more like a supermarket.
It would certainly be different.
In that regard, web3 is a solution looking for a problem.
Companies like Medium, Udemy, Spotify, Netflix, LinkedIn, etc already offer users pay-as-you-go services for higher-value content, and none of them required so many buzzword-driven technologies to pull it off.
Heck, even Amazon offers pay-as-you-go access to books.
Exactly what does web3 bring to the table?
> It might be too late to educate people about the importance of staying anonymous and preserving their user data.
Again, exactly what does web3 bring to the table with regards to privacy and "preserving user data"? Those examples seem too vague to have any meaning beyond scaremongering.
No one would bother with the web if they had to pay for every visit to every website, especially if they had to pay before any content got delivered. It's a certainty that as soon as the client is paying per byte or per transaction that pages will do everything they can to nickel and dime clients by bloating even more than they do today. For clients that's fees on top of what their ISP is charging for the privilege to be charged more money.
But crypto is not the answer for micropayments, if that’s the goal we can do it without all the blockchain nonsense.
But people who come after you will pay even more to you to do the same thing that you did for cheap! You are an early adopter who can just do nothing but click early all the way to becoming a millionaire! Basically a shameless ponzi is implicit in the promise.
I think in a perverse way, the pay per click dystopia is a feature and not a bug.
If people pay to use that network and that increases, means alot of people are
I think the original vision might be possible to pull off if redesigned to ward against that sort of thing. Successfully rebranding it would be one of the harder problems I would imagine.
Users shouldn't even pay for gas. Look at orbis.club for an early example of proper web3.
What we saw up until now is not "true" web3, but simply web2 masquerading as such and using web3 as a marketing buzzword.
This sentence is emblematic of the major problem with discussions of "web3" right now. There are dozens of different definitions of web3 that all conflict with each other in one way or another; the only thing people seem to agree on is that web3 involves blockchain somehow. With so many different versions, it's hard to have a conversation because any criticism invariably ends up with people jumping in with "well, that's not really web3!"
Ok but we’ve had this technology for decades and nobody cares. Why is doing this via the blockchain suddenly going to make it work?
React was “just better” than everything else, and flexible. There was hype, for sure. But you’d only discover React by investigating a company’s stack.
Yes, yes it would feel different. Because every action requires the user to pay.
Running "smart" "contracts" which underpin "web3" is not free.
So yeah. If users only consume content, then web3 can be free for those users I guess.
With TikTok, people usually express how much they love the algorithm that finds things that they like.
Google's success with ads is that they were able to trigger them as part of user action. Paid search results are hypothetically helpful to some people. Contextual ads on a site may actually provide value if they are on-topic.
Facebook ads mostly target people. They don't really provide any in-context value, they are pure commercials - spooky commercials that know what is going on in your life, although the ability to utilize this information is often laughably bad.
Twitter often has the same problems. Ads interspersed within conversations just aren't helpful or desired.
Then you will get something like this [0], and folks [1] on the kool-aid with nonsensical claims like 'TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet' at the height of the euphoria.
In reality, it is both the same concepts of the other social networks but much worse and [0] has shown that its algorithm was more dystopian than previously thought.
Therefore, it is the nadir of social media.
[0] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...
There is nothing about TikTok that makes my generation mindless Web3 drones.
Doesn't make their thoughts any less valid.
There are clear differences between the Facebook demo and the Tiktok demo. I am not smart enough to be able to articulate them but they are there.
Networks should function more like domains and email. If you own "mouzugo.com", you can use Gmail for email. If you decide you'd rather switch to Fastmail, you can migrate without a problem. It's all enabled by open standards and interoperability.
This is what web3 is trying to get back to.
No, it's trying to extract money out of clients for every transaction they perform. Moreover it requires all users buy into the cryptocurrency Ponzi to participate in that rent extraction. So you trade real money for Geoffrey dollars in order to pay money to read a fucking tweet.
But I believe the value proposition is for people who have spare bandwidth/compute/storage and want to make money. Currently internet infrastructure (like AWS) is largely owned by a few corps. Web3 has the potential to let anybody join, distributing the infrastructure across individual providers like what Uber did to taxis.
Another big one is web3 social platforms like Odysee and Peertube. These are more censorship resistant because they are decentralized.
Is it bad to pay to click, if you earn more from the ads on the page? Along with micro-payments, you also micro-earn.
No. No you don't.
1. Below you claim that "Only you (or anyone who has access to your private key) can access your data."
So when you sign in somewhere, that "web3" app still has no access to your data
2. Just the fact that you have your data does not mean it's portable.
A proprietary binary blob created by app1 will not be readable or accessible through app2.
Is it that I don't have to re-enter my personal information on each site? Signing in with Google already gets me that. Is it something else?
Is it some kind of JSON blob that every service will know how to ingest properly?
Potential of paying for services and being able to require privacy in return? It is not a choice one can make with many web2 services (e.g. google).
As for "blockchains are transparent and can't offer no privacy" - just a question of time. Tech is already here (zkps, mpc, etc).
Privacy isn't some technology you can add to the stack. Rather than adding ZKP sprinkles on top, every technical choice will ultimately need to be reevaluated if privacy is a goal. Basically, you're talking about web4/5.
Much less dystopian to me to pay rather than indirectly pay by being a data mining product and selling my mental real estate.
Steam and Apple stores have policies that merchants are legally liable for, including refund and availability policies.
Who enforces it when the creator no longer honors your token?
Web3 is a pretty good use case for this, and the transaction costs barely add anything if you compare to the cut the platform takes (Apple takes 30%) so the game publisher could easily swallow this extra cost too (which could be tiny)
Further, you're now talking about having a way to bring your level 28 sword of whacking into a completely different game world. And somehow you think this is just a matter of an in-app purchase.
It's a weird fever dream.
Roblox already does this. Your in-game purchases are yours and you can carry them from one game to another.
Platforms outcompete protocols - this is why web2 became centralized.
Think of all the stories of startups that offer a product that locks their users and then go to be acquired/shut down by some other bigger company. If the services and the data live on the blockchain, it's guaranteed by design that the users are in control of their own data (no lock in) and that if the company just drops out of the market, others can continue using the services however they want.
Oh, yeah, maybe someone else will make another game and do the work to support a digital hat you bought from someone else. Maybe it'll happen in a bid to try to scoop up users of a dead game. Or maybe, they'll just make their own digital hats and sell you a new one.
I guess "Web3" (it pains me to even use that term) would allow another developer to reverse-engineer an application to digest the data as it exists on the blockchain, but... that seems like a pretty negligible improvement over the status quo with many very significant drawbacks. For starters, a Raspberry Pi has orders of magnitude better performance than the "Ethereum World Computer". To make that concession, I'd hope for a much better benefit.
Maybe too much snark, but there’s a real tension there. “Store it on the blockchain” means “store a copy on every single node, forever”. It’s understandable that incurs some costs, and that one has to store only the most essential information. Maybe, there are some paths forward, like sharded chains?
Without the Google, Facebook, and Twitters of the world pouring substantial resources into hosting and powering those platforms a decentralized approach needs to cover costs somehow.
Of course they monetize the users and their content and make a pretty penny while doing so (except for Twitter).
The centralization of these big tech companies also brings efficiency, optimization, and economies of scale to this infrastructure that decentralized blockchains inherently don’t have. There’s also the issue of much of the Web3 infrastructure being hosted on $BIGCLOUD because lots of data and usage at scale is really hard. Piñata just uses S3 and charges a hefty markup on top of it (as one example). S3 is $0.03/GB at the lowest usage. Piñata is always $0.15.
I’m not saying the decentralized promise of Web3 is impossible. It’s just a bigger question of the vast majority of users who have already demonstrated they’re fine with being monetized by the big tech companies as long as their use is free/extremely low cost paying at least 5X of the fundamental underlying costs. That’s not even getting to content creators that have utilizes these free platforms to already generate significant income for themselves.
The HN crowd has a much better understanding and resistance to big tech and what they do to offer free products that monetize the user. The vast majority of the billions of users on these platforms have demonstrated that they do not care.
almost all NFT platforms will extract some % commission from trades as a form of monetization. they could take 0% but then will have to cover their costs some other way; maybe monthly subscription or regular advertising.
but in the end it doesn't matter how the platform decides to offset its costs, if the data and assets are removed from centralized control. good example of this is NFT art marketplaces - one can go offline, and users can just move to another, or build a new one on the public data (blockchain tokens + IPFS media).
1. you purchase digital items with centralized payment processors like VISA
2. the asset is transferred to your centralized iOS/Steam account. you do not "own" it, the company owns it. if you are banned from Steam, you lose all your games and game purchases.
web3 is asking how these two things can be changed to remove the intermediary.
the best frame for this is not "web3 ideals are not worth pursuing" but "how can we make web3 ideals feasibly work"
Now we don’t have to pay for any costs (maaaaybe a smart contract deployment once) and the users can’t help themselves from interacting
Compared to web 2 marketing funnels, this is a one click funnel where every click is a payment. (Every click doesnt have to be a payment, users dont currently care)
Thats a great value proposition
Cheaper to operate, faster to accept payment, better path to getting payment. Pick all three.
Also, you claim a better path to getting payment? What is better about it? As far as I can see either I trust a third party to act as an intermediate to save in gas tax, or I charge multiple dollars to verify payment "immediately" - i.e. anytime in the next few hours if imlucky, depending on the currency. Of course there are coins out there that don't have these problems (yet) but then I need to go find an exchange that supports the coin I have and the coin I want, transfer them (see above) and _then_ pay? I don't see how this as a consumer is easier than having my browser autofill my credit card, or as a developer is easier than implementing a handful of functions to accept currency my users already use.
But in principle I agree. If you have a wallet set up and are used to using it, it's pretty quick and easy, and the money settles faster than ACH in the US which take at least a day if not 3-5? Although in Canada settlement with Interac is almost instant, maybe 3 minutes to an hour.
Setting up Stripe is something you can only do with approval from the authorities, though, so e.g. sex workers can't use it.
Once you've overcome all the hurdles it's quick and easy isn't exactly encouraging. I'm not going to claim that it's easy to open a bank account/get a debit card, but they're pretty close to required in the western world these days so people have already overcome that hrudle.
> and the money settles faster than ACH in the US which take at least a day if not 3-5
This is a US problem that can be solved by regulation, not a technical problem. SEPA transfers clear in seconds in the EU. If you're using a payment network like Visa or Mastercard, you don't need to wait for processing (which can be 5-10 days), you only need authorization which is normally in the order of seconds. There is an element of trust here for sure, but you're trusting your Merchant Provider, and if you don't trust them to pay you you need another Merchant Provider _anyway_.
> Setting up Stripe is something you can only do with approval from the authorities, though, so e.g. sex workers can't use it.
Coinbase requires you to go through a KYC too, meaning it's unlikely that a person who is currently unable to use an existing Merchant provider will be able to use any of the larger exchanges.
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.
most NFTs (of value) are using IPFS or Arweave not a URL.
Running your own blockchain node is nothing like BitTorrent. The required storage, memory, cpu, and IOPS performance is already pushing the limits of readily available standard hardware.
This applies mostly to Ethereum. When you go to higher throughput chains like Solana and Polygon the node requirements jump to hardware that’s unobtainable/impractical for most people - top of the line NVMe drives with storage requirements beyond a single drive (typically need striping for IOPS anyway). Solana all but requires CUDA acceleration. Syncing the Solana devnet constantly uses at least 50% of my RTX 3090…
IPFS is even worse - the CPU, memory, and bandwidth requirements to do anything beyond playing around are ridiculous.
There’s a reason virtually everyone uses various node providers. This is rapidly setting the stage for all real-world uses of blockchain to end up on Web3 AWS (Alchemy, Infura, Piñata, etc).
The entire Arweave network currently hosts about 64 TB of data. In the scope of a worldwide network that’s… Not a lot.
Ethereum does a tiny number of transactions and I'm not sure Moore's law will keep up with any scale (see Solana and Polygon) as it applies to mobile devices. Then you still have the power and cell connectivity issues.
No one is going to want to wait for their local node on mobile to take a half hour (or more) to sync after it's been disconnected/idle/etc for a few hours/days to make a transaction that should take seconds.
the goal of these base systems is not to be faster or easier to use than a centralized Amazon server. the goal is resistance to centralized control.
mod note: my other account “web4” is rate limited after a couple comments?
What I'm really trying to point out is that the vast majority of users do not care about centralized control. Even those that claim to pretty quickly realize that platforms with no ability whatsoever to filter content end up with universally objectionable content (such as CASM) and/or content otherwise illegal and/or regularly denounced (revenge porn, extreme violence/murder content, etc).
With centralized platforms today this has shown to merely create platforms that better align with someone's particular worldview while still exercising just as much (if not more) moderation and control.
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.
Would you be willing to share some numbers on what you're seeing? This is valuable information.
OpenSea engineers should be shamed for their use of HTTPS URLs in contracts, but it is not the norm outside of their minting platform.
In any case across the 70 million or so NFTs I have indexed HTTP is definitely the majority.
if effective storage proofs ever become a thing, then the later half (decentralized storage) will be standard
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.
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?
I’m still new to the topic so I guess there are some easy solutions already…
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.
I could do that... for money!
But oh wait, crypto is only for illegal things sorry. /s
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.
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.
No thanks. Privacy is a human right.
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.
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
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).
P.S. PoS protocols are also Sybil resistance mechanisms. Look into Tendermint and compare it with, say, PBFT.
> 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
P.S. Also commented about the paper here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30561786
The simple intuition is that because his CRDT's are associative and everyone else is not using associative data types, he simplifies the space and the impossible becomes possible.
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.
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) 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/). 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.
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.
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.
Whereas the Bitcoin's vibe seems more about scarcity and tribalism, "bitcoin is all you need" maximalism, and so on.
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.
You CANNOT have distributed apps with old p2p file sharing.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.