It also makes me sad to see unnecessary hostility towards crypto. I get it: most NFTs are hyper commercialized trash, and they're in direct opposition to the values outlined in this article. But there's also so much weird, non-commercialized crypto stuff out there that shares a lot of the ethos of early web tinkerers.
Another cool one is minting amulets. You write a poem, and if the hash of that poem has an amulet in it (four or more consecutive 8s), then you can mint it as a token for your collection. But you can't mint the same hashed poem twice https://text.bargains/collection/
I also met someone once who gave me (and everyone he meets) an NFT from an RFID chip implanted in his hand. That was pretty whacky.
What is the function of this?
[0] https://medium.com/ambition-wtf/technical-post-how-we-breach...
[1] https://medium.com/ambition-wtf/the-worm-meets-its-first-cha...
Strangely, the original NFT,[2] linked from another Medium post, now contains the worm again. But the rest of the image also differs from the screenshots in the post, so perhaps they added the worm back after starting the next iteration[3] as an acknowledgement that the original is stuck for good.
Also, I get that it's an art thing, but what is it with the...weird (IMO)...tone? I feel like I also see it elsewhere in NFT-related writing. Reminds me of lesswrong for some reason.
[2] https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xacd3cf818efe8ddce84c585...
[3] https://medium.com/ambition-wtf/the-worm-f-a-q-8f91ea386028#...
So more specifically, I mean: "not for the purpose of creating or transferring monetary value, and not requiring the expenditure of money to create/send the amount of data necessary to host a simple plaintext/html page"
Say I am an amateur content creator and I set up a donations page for my fans. I have the choice between:
- Setting up PayPal/Stripe/etc. who take a percentage cut, sell my data, can freeze my funds at any time or delete my account if they don't like my content
- Putting up the address of a crypto wallet
Which one should I choose?
It's not like cryptocurrencies don't take a cut (in the larger coins, transaction fees are often higher than the amount of money most fans would like to donate) or sell your data (usually not the coin devs themselves, but there are definitely companies/exchanges out there correlating transactions and selling data about them). Stripe and Paypal might not be great, but just because crypto is "not Paypal" does not make crypto automatically trustworthy.
Yeah, so no true non-commercial content creator would use evil crypto. By the snark, I can tell you are as invested in hating crypto as some of us are invested in building it. What is your motivation?
Bullshit. Without miners there's no "crypto" and without payouts there's no miners. So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners. Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content. This is 180° from the "old web". End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection. They didn't have to prop up some asshole's upline to check out the Unofficial X-Files Fan Page.
I can say the same about anything else on the internet. Keeping the servers running costs money
> Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content.
You can actually access most web3 content without spending Geoffrey dollars, or US Dollars. If we're talking about public blockchains like Ethereum, it's all out in the open. By definition, it's a public ledger. IPFS data (which has nothing to do with crypto) is also very public.
> End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection.
I guess some web3 websites require you to connect with a wallet, but downloading a browser extension doesn't seem very prohibitive.
So in the context of the Web Revivalist movement, how do you build stateful applications? It's great when individuals host their own DIY servers, but that doesn't really give you much stability. And in aggregate, it's even more difficult to build rich, stateful ecosystems of applications. How do you handle servers going down and APIs changing? Link rot for stateless websites is a hard enough as it is.
It doesn't, though. That's bullshit. Sharing data between web applications is not some sort of grand challenge that required new technology to solve.
It depends on the level of guarantees you want for that data. If we're communicating, and you're okay with me changing my APIs, or even changing the data itself in ways we didn't previously agree upon, then you 100% don't need a blockchain. And if you don't have a lot of entities that need to coordinate on the data, then there might be an easier solution.
A lot of the blockchain boosterism I see online comes from a place of assuming that the blockchain represents a solution to a problem, and trying to work backwards from there. Avoid that.
So really when I say "applications" I'm referring specifically to other smart contracts.
It's a bunch of rent seeking bullshit on top of what could just be a web API. Storage on a blockchain is stupid expensive so there's oracles everywhere pointing to off-chain resources with zero guarantee of availability.
Blockchains aren't adding any value. They're only extracting rent and adding friction.
This was pretty cool because all the Hic en nunc generated content over their existence is still accessible through Objkt.
Sharing data is of course possible since stone tablets, but doing it without any form of collaboration or approval is probably unique to crypto.
To the extent that crypto doesn’t require collaboration or approval, neither does Wikipedia. Or libraries.
Or, indeed, stone tablets — Pharaoh 𓃹𓈖𓇋𓋴 didn’t give anyone permission to go raid his tomb, and yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unas
People have motivations besides financial incentive.
I've got a website. I'm paying for it. I make no money from it. The web exists.
A miner is just a spare computer in service of a network. Like a closet web server, or a seeder in a public torrent swarm.
A single miner can't do anything on its own so blockchain transactions require the aggregate waste of a whole network of miners to accomplish anything.
For DApps to run the network of miners runs them. They demand payment for doing so. You can run a web server in your closet free of charge, a DApp that doesn't offer incentive to miners will never run. If you foot the bill for some DApp it'll cost you orders of magnitude more than a Raspberry Pi in your closet.
That's one thing that bothered and confused the cranks with burgeoning Wikipedia. Why does the Pokemon article have a longer page than one on the Vietnam War? The priorities are out of wack, they thought, without realizing that the lack of scarcity in a web page (well, technically a scroll) and low friction of revisions ends up changing the process of editing an encyclopedia for length.
It's similar for Bitcoin. Cranks on HN always want to to downplay it's 3-orders-of-magnitude superior transaction speed to Visa/Mastercard by pointing out the much smaller value being transacted. One million microtransactions for a grand total of $1000, they say, without realizing that it's the types of transactions these (often automated) payments support which simply aren't possible using the old payment paradigm.
Without the scale and speed of microtransactions Bitcoin makes possible, you don't just end up with a less effective National Association of Independent Investigative Units. Games in Geocities 2 don't just get a little bit laggy. FOSSmobiles don't just take a little longer to update their FOSStertainment panels. You simply end up with a world where none of that stuff exists.
Oh wait I forgot Bitcoin doesn't work like that. Still, we've got Sci-hub donations and that one ransomware that apparently donates to charities. So not so different, really.
Not that I expect this to land well with the HN crowd, but web3/crypto has the tyrannical effects of capitalism/growth on its side as a force for the “future of the web”. Going up against that with the non-profit model seems… quaint.
There's no such thing as a "unique digital asset". Networked computers are good at sharing copies. Any developments against this nature are manufactured, artificial scarcity, for the gains of the controlling party, at the expense of everyone else; and probably in the name of security.
If you like them so much I can roll a die and tell only you which number I got, but that wouldn't affect the world in any way unless we're gambling, nor make it any less "unique" than crypto - it's just more bits/dice.
The answer is "Yes, but at a cost". One must subsidise the parasitic nature of digital capitalism.
Many of the comments here are about the style or mechanisms of the web, but don't talk much about the values - which are sharing. The object is to give some value to the world, sharing a little of the creation you do.
I've set up websites with HOWTO essays, code examples, mp3 files of sound effects I collected, interesting images etc. In the early days it was popular and well regarded amongst a music coding community, but within 10 years it was inoperable. Bots crawling all over it constantly sucked the life out of the server, and literally tens of thousands of parasitic links from commercial entities, spamdexers and SEO trash attached themselves. My site was like a ship dragged down by barnacles and weeds.
When I shut down the site I got angry emails from entitled assholes who had embedded sound effects in their applications by linking to my site as if it were an infinite free resource.
This story has been told a million times by people who set up websites for fun in the 90s and 00s, and pulled them down after realising the cost (often in time spent reading logs, defending, blocking, banning, rate-limiting etc)
What is to be done? In the digital world capitalism does not create value but extracts or appropriates it from creators. To be a digital creator means paying a constant tax to support those who want to make money from you.
While cryptocurrency type Web3.0 seems to offer a solution it only fights fire with fire, wrapping the web in a framework of mutual extraction and appropriation. Ultimately I think that only plays into the hands of the extractors who will use it to find ever more effective ways to thrive as parasites.