[HN Gopher] My First Impressions of Web3
___________________________________________________________________
My First Impressions of Web3
Author : natdempk
Score : 376 points
Date : 2022-01-07 21:41 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (moxie.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (moxie.org)
| mrkramer wrote:
| >A protocol moves much more slowly than a platform. After 30+
| years, email is still unencrypted
|
| Traffic between email clients and servers is encrypted so can be
| emails themselves; PGP can be used for encryption of emails and
| authentication between email senders. But another story is
| majority of people do not use PGP because of its bad UX.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > For example, whether it's running on mobile or the web, a dApp
| like Autonomous Art or First Derivative needs to interact with
| the blockchain somehow - in order to modify or render state (the
| collectively produced work of art, the edit history for it, the
| NFT derivatives, etc). That's not really possible to do from the
| client, though, since the blockchain can't live on your mobile
| device (or in your desktop browser realistically). So the only
| alternative is to interact with the blockchain via a node that's
| running remotely on a server somewhere.
|
| > As it happens, companies have emerged that sell API access to
| an ethereum node they run as a service, along with providing
| analytics, enhanced APIs they've built on top of the default
| ethereum APIs, and access to historical transactions.
|
| > Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to
| interact with the blockchain. In fact, even when you connect a
| wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the
| blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to
| Infura!
|
| > Imagine if every time you interacted with a website in Chrome,
| your request first went to Google before being routed to the
| destination and back. That's the situation with ethereum today.
|
| This is a very common complaint about anything that claims to be
| decentralized. It was also surprising to me years ago when I
| first read about Bitcoin and realized that it's not practical to
| maintain the whole blockchain on most clients. However, how do
| ISPs fit into this analogy with "web 1"? Since we're assuming
| that the original world wide web _was_ worthy of being called
| "decentralized," doesn't this same criticism apply to ISPs? Even
| if you ran your own web server from your own facility, presumably
| the ISP was a third party that you had to (in some sense) trust.
| dthul wrote:
| The views on centralized services such as Infura really resonate
| with me. A few months ago I looked into how Ethereum and smart
| contracts work and got excited that there is basically this
| shared "virtual machine" with persistent, public state that can
| only be altered by interacting with those smart contracts.
|
| But soon after it became clear that it is not really possible for
| me (or any regular "client" as the article calls it) to look at
| the state of the virtual machine and evaluate view functions
| myself. The block chain is so large already that we need to rely
| on big servers which are operated by other people to do this.
| sva_ wrote:
| I think you can use _geth --syncmode snap_ to get a snapshot
| quickly with which you can interact with the Blockchain.
| ssss11 wrote:
| But there are other L1 blockchains already that aren't like
| that (eg. Mina) and who knows in future what will come..
| dthul wrote:
| Good to know! I don't know much about the blockchain space
| and have only looked more closely at Ethereum so far.
| msgilligan wrote:
| He's focused on Ethereum and NFTs, which is certainly the most
| popular/obvious place to research. I think his analysis is
| excellent and the article is worth reading.
|
| But he does say:
|
| > I have only dipped my toe in the waters of web3
|
| Notably he doesn't even mention IPFS (which uses the pre-image of
| an JPG to form the URL. Nor does he mention Bitcoin, which
| provides a shared state layer as well as a currency and makes it
| much easier to run a full node than Ethereum, which by most
| measures makes the network more decentralized.
|
| I prefer to use the term "Decentralized Web" or "Decentralized
| Internet" and I agree with Moxie that it will take a long time.
|
| I think Ethereum is fascinating and an amazing innovation and
| (who knows) maybe eventually the off-chain pieces of its
| ecosystem will become more decentralized.
|
| Keep building, folks!
| spenczar5 wrote:
| This is the first enlightening article I have read about Web3.
| Maybe that says more about how little I have read than about how
| good the article is.
|
| Anyway, Moxie seems very focused on the decentralization aspect -
| that Web3 doesn't decentralize as much as we would like.
|
| An alternative aspect is the "global ledger of ownership and
| transferrence" though. Yes, interacting with blockchains is hard
| so it is some through APIs... but there does still seem to be
| something important about the idea that my ownership of something
| on a blockchain is permanent, and exists outside of any corporate
| notion of ownership, in a deep mathematical way. That's
| fundamentally appealing!
|
| But is it appealing enough to overcome market forces? I think
| Moxie is right to spend a lot of time on the "nobody wants to run
| servers" thing because it shows that most users are powerfully
| motivated by convenience; if the mathematically-beautiful
| blockchain ownership records remain inconvenient then they are
| likely to be a niche attraction (like running your own mail
| server).
| golf1052 wrote:
| This is a really interesting breakdown of web3 (or as he calls it
| later on web2x2). I haven't dove into the world of web3 yet but
| it does seem incredibly ironic that there's already seemingly a
| large amount of consolidation around platforms to make web3 more
| accessible to people. This is good for early adopters and artists
| who are generating wealth during the gold rush but I don't think
| it's good for "web3 the idea" as a distributed protocol.
| ssss11 wrote:
| It feels like there's alot of get rich quick types involved (is
| a gold rush as you say) but over time the decentralised
| principles will play out
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Please don't degenerate into flamewar.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| How is that a flamewar? Literally talking about the content
| of the article.
| dang wrote:
| You started from the article and headed straight for a
| highly repetitive flamewar trope. That's just what we're
| trying to avoid.
|
| Would you mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of this site more to heart? You
| unfortunately have a history of violating it, and we're
| trying for at least a slightly better quality of discussion
| here.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| It isn't.
|
| Re Dang: straight from your link, "Please don't post
| shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
| good critical comment teaches us something."
|
| Personally, I found the comment insightful. I don't have
| all the time in the world to sit and pick something apart.
| Make no mistake, the smart tl;dr of HN are what gives HN
| any kind of value. Without that, may as well just use RSS
| and Reddit. I'm already subscribed to Moxie, came to HN to
| see what intelligent people have to say about it given that
| I am no longer a Signal user, and am anti-cryptocurrency in
| its current iteration, but pro-decentralization, which
| makes Moxie quite an interesting choice for me to want to
| actively follow the thoughts of as we feel differently
| about many important topics.
|
| There is no binary black or white to be established with
| abstract, complex topics like these.
|
| If it was any kind of bait, it was bait to discuss further.
| That the whole USP of Web3 is supposedly ownership and
| anti-censorship, and what's happening appears to be
| opposite is definitely something we should be discussing.
|
| What's the point of comments on HN if we can't use them to
| discuss? It's a commentary on somebody's opinion--with
| opinions.
|
| Perhaps if you don't like opinion pieces then you should
| simply ban them via these rules? I think HN's content might
| end up a little thin on the ground in that scenario though.
|
| Worth noting is what "guidelines" actually are, they're not
| rules. If you would like them to be enforced as rules, and
| expect people to treat them as such, start calling them
| rules or ToS. But in that case, expect far less interest in
| HN if you aren't going to permit open discussion.
|
| Have a good weekend, Dang. Hope you and yours are healthy
| and happy.
| verdverm wrote:
| If you read why indeed, it is because metamask calls the
| OpenSea API.
|
| All one has to do is call a different API for the same
| information. It's not like it was actually gone
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will
|
| That's one believably accurate summary. But here's another:
| rather than focus on trying to make it easy, cheap and simple for
| everyone to run their own servers, the tech world spent
| 1996-today instead focused on offering to take care of this for
| everybody else, for a price.
|
| Everybody concluded in the late 90s that the "nobody wants to run
| their own servers" claim was self-evidently true, and so all the
| tech development went into extending server capabilities,
| extending browser capabilities, building hosting services and
| infrastructure, and almost no effort went into making running a
| web server as easy as, oh, I don't know, running Excel.
|
| Imagine a version of things where the server was almost a toy-
| like appliance. Hard to do? Yeah, I know, it's hard. But then
| again, in 1996 browsers with Web USB, Web Workers, Web Assembly
| and the like would have seemed impossibly hard and yet here we
| are.
|
| We don't have it because we chose not to build it.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The personal server space is littered with failed startups.
|
| Not because it's difficult to make turnkey personal servers.
| Embedded Linux hardware is unbelievably cheap.
|
| They fail because they don't bring any benefit against real-
| world threats, but they come with significant downside risks.
|
| If your house floods or your home server is burgled, your data
| is just gone. So your home server ends up backed up to the
| cloud anyway, and now you're maintaining a home server and a
| cloud server when you could have just used the cloud service
| for everything without the headache.
| ericjang wrote:
| I have immense respect for Moxie, who has spent time building
| experiments and tinkering with a new technology, and as a result
| has a take on it that highlights very different issues than what
| most of the predictable web3 flamewar centers around. It makes
| you really think about who is really qualified to discuss said
| technology.
| jwlake wrote:
| Some of his points are out of date (given state of the art is
| old), like royalties and immutable data. See ipfs, eip-2981, etc.
|
| Other parts are very on point, specifically everyone using
| opensea as authoritative for NFTs, which is crazy town. Opensea
| has a dog in the fight, and they are very opinionated about
| what's allowed in the tent and not. Things like etherscan and
| infura are less scary. I can't imagine building a wallet and
| depending on opensea for anything though, because your users are
| not going to appreciate that choice.
| codeptualize wrote:
| Really great article, it's so nice to read a nuanced article on
| such a flame war topic.
| isItpossible8 wrote:
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Thin clients that verify transactions are possible though. For
| something like Bitcoin you have SPV-proofs that prove chains of
| headers. You can prove that a transaction was included in the
| longest chain without having to run a node yourself just by
| checking proof-of-work merkle trees; Even if the vast majority of
| users end up running clients that don't verify the whole chain --
| cryptographic trust would still be ensured by checking headers.
| This requires no centralization.
|
| Satoshi wrote about this architecture early on in scaling the
| blockchain. Ethereum also allows light clients and I think it
| even has checkpoints that make downloading headers faster.
| Cryptographic protocols that verify smart contract results could
| be included in Metamask. I feel like not mentioning this in the
| essay shows a lack of familiarity with the literature even if he
| was extremely opened minded (enough to create dapps himself.)
|
| He did make valid observations about third-party trust: OpenSeas
| and Infura. But in both cases: these protocols can be implemented
| without centralized architecture. A decentralized alternative to
| Infura (that provides reliable results to users and easy-to-check
| attestations) is possible to build. One should also note that in
| blockchain land the lack of incentives to run a full node is a
| problem people are working to address. It's actually a perfect
| illustration of how the blockchain can lead to emergent systems.
| Some ledgers already have rewards for running full nodes. So yes
| -- people do want to run full nodes -- they just want to be paid
| for it.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| I do not look forward to immense backlash against "techies" when
| normal people have been grifted out of what they thought were
| their "savings" in crypto and NFT's.
| milofeynman wrote:
| > The project can't start as a web2 platform because of the
| market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental
| forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.
|
| Great insight.
|
| I didn't realize for maybe 8 months that NFTs were not actually
| storing the art on the Blockchain. I appreciate Moxie pointing
| out the problems with this in an eloquent way.
| intrasight wrote:
| The first article on Web3 that I've read that drills into the
| details and was written by someone who's not only kicked the
| tires but taken the thing for a spin. And the conclusion: It's
| mostly the bad stuff of Web2 combined with the bad stuff of
| Crypto.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I'll be honest I had no idea that access to Ethereum is
| effectively gate-kept by two centralized entities (Infura,
| Alchemy). I knew there were only one or two true Ethereum full-
| nodes, but the impact of that never quite clicked.
|
| [edit] By "full node" I meant "archival node."
| Scott_Sanderson wrote:
| You're not wrong, but it can be a fantastic experience if you
| do have your own self-hosted node. I run the geth node on a
| linux server and can connect to it to send blockchain
| transactions or retrieve information from the chain. Example:
| my tax prep software took my wallet addresses and found all
| my uniswap trades by querying the local node.
| tshaddox wrote:
| In what sense is it "gate-kept"? Isn't the complaint that _in
| practice_ most people probably use those two services? As far
| as I know those two services don 't do anything to try to
| force you to use them, and people just use them out of
| convenience because "People don't want to run their own
| servers, and never will."
|
| The potential for single points of failure (or even
| intentional abuse) does exist because of this de facto
| dominance of two service providers, but as far as I can tell
| there's nothing stopping anyone from running their own node
| and connecting their various cryptocurrency wallets to them
| other than the money and inconvenience of running your own
| server.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > As far as I know those two services don't do anything to
| try to force you to use them, and people just use them out
| of convenience because "People don't want to run their own
| servers, and never will."
|
| Indeed, but one could make the same claim re any Web 2
| juggernauts like Google and Facebook. You don't _need_ to
| use them, sure. You can start your own social network.
| hrhrhrhrhr wrote:
| go_to_moon wrote:
| only one or two true Ethereum full-nodes
|
| source?
| arcticbull wrote:
| I should have said archival nodes, the ones that keep state
| back to the genesis block. I don't know if that number is
| even tracked anywhere. I've read estimates ranging from 2
| to 5. I'm trying to find where I read that, happy to be
| wrong - or right, if anyone has data.
|
| [edit] Here. [1] And here. [2] After
| examining every which way we could think of to add the Trie
| state to our Ethereum state, we asked Vitalik for
| assistance. His first comment to us was "oh you're one of
| the few running one of those big, scary nodes." We asked
| him if he knew of anyone else running a "big, scary node"
| to see if we could possibly sync with them. He knew of no
| one, not even the Ethereum Foundation keeps a full archival
| copy of the Ethereum chain. [2].
|
| [1] https://librehash.org/ethereum-archival-node-review/
|
| [2] https://blog.blockcypher.com/ethereum-woes-d9b2af62da67
| exdsq wrote:
| There's no real reason for this to be honest. The Web3
| projects I've worked on tends to fall for centralized
| services like Infura because of development needs at first
| and then it's just easier to use it for production. I've made
| a decent living for the last two years setting up test
| infrastructure for Web3 projects due to its complex nature.
| This is true across all blockchains, not just Ethereum. It's
| an area ripe for new DX products.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| New products? Would those be more centralized platforms, or
| is it feasible for me to connect to the blockchain, verify
| stuff, and so on if I am running my own server?
|
| It still seems that _my_ users on phones and browsers would
| need to trust _me_ in that case, right?
| exdsq wrote:
| Oh it's totally doable to run your own node on your own
| server! And thanks to the protocols consensus rules your
| users can trust that for a transaction to go through your
| node and be accepted onto main net your node is a good
| actor.
|
| So one example I'd give - every team I've worked on has
| had to build a local development environment with several
| nodes to easily spin up with a clean slate for
| deterministic testing. Teams get sucked into tools like
| Infura to set these up and then it's so easy to do the
| same for deployment they do just that. I think there's
| tons of room for Blockchain-as-a-Service tools to improve
| development and testing processes without forcing
| centralization on main net deployments.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Okay. Why doesn't everyone do that, then? Why use Infura?
|
| As is hopefully obvious, I am totally naive here; my
| questions are genuine. Thanks!
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Bit that it'd be very practical, but the data itself is
| shared so in theory every company could set up their own API
| to render the blockchain into a readable, quick to access
| format. Even the vanished poop emoji NFT would reappear once
| someone else renders their view on the blockchain in the
| right way.
|
| The problem with this is that running servers that store and
| process one or even multiple blockchains in a searchable way
| is terribly costly and inefficient. In theory the public
| ledgers are all safe against locking away data, like Google
| or Microsoft could do with your accounts in the real web, but
| in practice nobody wants to be the guy making a loss on
| serving blockchain views.
|
| If web3 ever gets off the ground, it needs more of these
| access provider companies. Perhaps even a prebuilt system you
| can throw onto your own server to participate, like IPFS and
| other existing decentralised systems provide.
|
| I'm still not clear on the actual benefit of the
| cryptocurrency web other than the concept of "owning things
| without legal protection or oversight" which I (and I believe
| most people) have very little interest in if it comes at the
| premium it comes at today. From a technical standpoint all of
| this blockchain stuff is awesome, but it's an awesome
| solution in search of a problem.
| [deleted]
| joe_the_user wrote:
| A deep dive into this stuff is certainly useful. The question
| is, of the people who were offended by shallowness of people
| saying "this is obviously garbage though I can't be bothered to
| investigate it", how many will say "ah, so here's a thorough,
| technical and soft-spoken explanation why this is all garbage,
| thanks".
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I think you are over-simplifying the conclusions of the
| article. The article presents a much more nuanced view, and
| while it points to certain limitations and deficiencies of Web
| 3.0 (and that on the Eth part of it), it also points to several
| strengths of the growing ecosystems, and mostly comes across as
| humble to not knowing how its all going to turn out.
| serverholic wrote:
| I find these articles to be a lot like criticizing tcp/ip
| because Facebook exists.
| Guest42 wrote:
| Exactly,and it's also intentionally misnamed as web3 as if it's
| an inevitable extension of current internet practices, rather
| than a scifi buzzword fantasy of a small pocket of investors
| (or small to moderate hedge of larger investors).
| NotyoBiz wrote:
| With regard to the last paragraph: Take a look at what Agoric is
| doing. Basically making programming smart contracts less
| difficult with JavaScript. Very interesting, worth a look.
| superfrank wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will
|
| This kind of gets at the reason why I think a lot of tech
| articles/blogs about what the future will be like are just
| terrible. The wants of someone who is driven enough read and
| write about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very
| different from the general population. Like this author says,
| most people don't want to run their own web server, but I'd go
| even farther and say, most people don't really care about
| decentralization or even data privacy. Getting most people to
| care about privacy and decentralization is like getting a kid to
| eat vegetables. They know they should, but the alternative has
| more short term benefits. I think most people care about ease of
| use over almost everything else.
|
| People who write these articles need to be thinking about the
| middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a
| Nintendo". There will always be some users for technologies like
| web3, but until you can clearly demonstrate to that woman that
| this new technology has value and is easier to use than the
| status quo, you're never going to get mass adoption.
|
| Connecting this back to web3, we're clearly not there yet. Almost
| anything being done on web3 is slower, more expensive, and more
| complicated than its web2 alternative. We may or may not get
| there one day, but until we do, I don't see web3 being anything
| more than a niche product.
| jd007 wrote:
| IMO this diagnosis is still one level away from a more
| fundamental truism, which is that people don't want to pay
| anything for digital goods. Running servers can and has been
| massively simplified over the last couple decades, and I don't
| see any inherent technical barrier preventing it from being as
| simple as registering for an account on FB (i.e. anyone can do
| it). The deeper problem is the lack of willingness to pay
| (directly) for anything online.
|
| The reason for this is complex, with lots of unclear cause and
| effect dynamics (e.g. did our unwillingness to pay push the
| ecosystem to gravitate towards ad-based revenue models, or the
| other way around?). The inevitable race to the bottom between
| competitors, under the massive incentive for platforms to
| centralize/consolidate (if you charged any amount for your
| service I can always under-price and out-compete you) is likely
| a major contributor. We do not exhibit such reservations
| against payment for anything physical, probably because of the
| innate sense we have that anything in physical reality should
| have a cost, yet not so in the digital world.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| It's refreshing to read an article that admits this:
|
| > > Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this
| point.
|
| I actually enjoy build and running servers, but only for hobby
| purposes. When it comes down to anything business related or
| critical, I have zero desire to run and maintain it on my own.
| And I especially don't want to have to handle security for
| large amounts of money that could disappear in an instant if I
| make one wrong misstep.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > Like this author says, most people don't want to run their
| own web server...
|
| I know I certainly don't. I want to write my software and I
| want to be able to deploy it somewhere and manage the things I
| may care about for that specific software. As much as possible
| I don't want to have to care about hardware, or routing, or
| server administration, or user permissions, etc. Learning it
| once? Sure. Dealing with it every time I have a new project? No
| thanks.
|
| So, I totally agree. decentralization and privacy _on their
| own_ are difficult to market, as they aren 't nearly as in
| demand as convenience.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > The wants of someone who is driven enough read and write
| about the bleeding edge of technology are very, very different
| from the general population.
|
| This is very insightful. I wonder what else it applies to. I
| bet there are tons of media sectors writing to irrelevant but
| interested audiences.
|
| > People who write these articles need to be thinking about the
| middle aged woman who still calls every video game system "a
| Nintendo". There will always be some users for technologies
| like web3, but until you can clearly demonstrate to that woman
| that this new technology has value and is easier to use than
| the status quo, you're never going to get mass adoption.
|
| I don't get it. I thought this used to be common knowledge. I
| mean it's basically a TV trope, so why and how do industries
| "forget" this?
| nathanyz wrote:
| Concise, well thought out analysis by a cryptographer on Web3. If
| you believe in Web3, then you shouldn't dismiss this out of hand
| as a hater. He truly tried to understand how it works by actually
| building dApps. And the holes seem glaringly obvious.
|
| What you should do if you believe in Web3, is take this as
| constructive criticism and improve so that they holes are no
| longer there.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I wanted to say that I appreciate his approach to stating why he
| isn't sold on Web3: thoughtful, succinct, diplomatic, and based
| on the results of an open-minded experiment. This is so much more
| of an article I'm ready to engage with than the the "crypto is a
| pyramid scheme, don't you get it you morons!?" articles.
| lekevicius wrote:
| While it's refreshing to hear critique from someone who actually
| built something on web3, there are a couple of points where I'd
| dare to disagree, somewhat.
|
| Particularly, regarding "early days". It really is, still, early
| days, because there is a lot of complexity in getting all the
| pieces built. It took years to get overall blockchain going.
| Then, to understand the need of programmability (smart
| contracts). Other pieces too: more efficient consensus mechanisms
| and clever ways to express commitments, decentralized storage,
| etc. And the space is so far from being done.
|
| Particulary, about servers being clients. This is true today, but
| it would be wrong to say that nobody cares about it. Ethereum
| developers spend considerable effort on pushing the idea of light
| clients, going as far as re-architecturing the way whole
| blockchain state is stored, so that browsers could actually
| become fully valid clients, and services such as Infura would
| become a lot less necessary. This requires cryptographic
| innovations (verkle trees), client implementations, consensus
| between participants, etc. It is likely to require 2+ years to
| get there. Early days.
|
| Another moment I would critique is the clever NFT, that displays
| different things. Yes, ERC-721 allows any URL as metadata file,
| so you can put traditional DNS-resolved URL there. But I would
| struggle to find any "respected" NFT collection that actually
| does that. Almost every high quality NFT project (Art Blocks,
| BAYC, so on) has IPFS as metadata URL, and goes as far as to
| freeze metadata, so it couldn't ever be changed.
|
| Lastly, his discussion about value of decentralization is very
| valid. Yes, Ethereum developers spend a lot of effort on light
| clients. Will anyone care to use them? Yes, best NFT collections
| freeze metadata pointed to IPFT... does anyone care? Success of
| OpenSea and Binance Smart Chain shows that for many, idealistic
| goals are irrelevant, as long as money can be made. That's fine.
| But there are some of us who actually care. Majority has
| uninteresting goals (money). There are still amazing gems to be
| found.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| My understanding of IPFS is that there is some DNS-and-HTTP
| translation step that resolves content to IPFS locations. Is
| that correct, and is it immutable? How does that work?
| devadvance wrote:
| This is a really well-thought-out, nuanced take. I really
| appreciate mixture of "but there are still servers", not being
| able to stop a gold rush, and (refreshingly) the technical take
| on the implementation details.
|
| It stands in such stark contrast to other content. For example, a
| web3 chat app announcement I saw yesterday [1]. I even joined the
| Discord to learn more and just found...hype.
|
| I found this parenthetical to be amusing:
|
| > (visualizing this financial structure would resemble something
| similar to a pyramid shape)
|
| Pyramid-shaped financial setups indeed :).
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/MessagePartyApp/status/14791510011813765...
| justinator wrote:
| I was under the impression that crypto currency was thought of
| as nothing but yet another pyramid scheme.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| This article seems like it neatly encapsulates and explains why
| I've subconsciously held off from jumping into the Web3 space.
|
| It might be confirmation bias speaking, but I don't think I've
| seen anyone lampoon Web3 so thoroughly, and it's nice to have
| some well-reasoned explanations for why I feel the way I do.
|
| EDIT: A further thought: this article is the first I've read on
| Web3 that feels like it's actually important and I'm looking
| forward to the discussion. Are there any real counterpoints to be
| made against his reasoning?
| titzer wrote:
| > We'd all have our own web server with our own web site, our own
| mail server for our own email, our own finger sever for our own
| status messages, our own chargen server for our own character
| generation. However - and I don't think this can be emphasized
| enough - that is not what people want. People do not want to run
| their own servers.
|
| I must be stuck in the past.
|
| It's true. No one wants to run an arcane, buggy, insecure, wonky
| POS that needs constant patching. This is really a failure of
| software and shoving all that up a level into the cloud is not
| fixing anything. At least with your own hardware you can nuke it
| and start over from scratch. With your own hardware (and disks),
| you at least know where your data resides.
|
| We live in a time where you can get a 4 TB NAS for essentially
| nothing. You can drop a 8 core, 32GB RAM server on top of that
| for less than $1k. I don't know what other people's scaling needs
| are--who knows, maybe they need to serve 100 PB?--but it's a mind
| blowing amount of computation. Most people can probably serve
| their silly websites off that. If you can't handle your own email
| load on a server like that, I honestly have no idea what you're
| up to.
|
| I kind of _do_ want to run my own ones of those things...but I
| know (with today 's software) I'd hate it. Because even after all
| these years, it kind of terrifies me, the metric shitton of stuff
| I have had no clue how to do, and I know is way over
| complicated...because _everything_ is way overcomplicated.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I run a homelab, and also run a shared server for a few folks.
|
| The hardware is easy. The software can be easy (if you let it).
| The things that are tricky:
|
| 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the users
| perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because most
| software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication!
|
| 2. The gap in average computer skills. Some of my users are
| engineers, most of them are not. My average user needs help
| with password resets, remembering URLs and very basic tasks.
| "Upload a file" is a _difficult_ task for the average user.
|
| 3. Feature requests and keeping maintenance reasonable. A lot
| of my technical users will ask me for feature after feature..
| but not put in any time or effort to set things up or maintain.
| I'm one person and I set a hard cap of how much maintenance
| I'll do in a week, and that is a big limiter of stuff.
|
| I have toyed with just charging my users a bit per month and
| hiring someone as a basic tech, and honestly more of my users
| would rather pay a monthly fee than actually work on the
| servers themselves.
| eatonphil wrote:
| > 1. Getting different software to all play nicely from the
| users perspective. I can't even give my users SSO because
| most software doesn't accept reverse proxy authentication!
|
| It sounds like you're referring to something specific here
| but I'm not understanding. What kind of software doesn't play
| well with SSO? And what is reverse proxy authentication? Do
| you mean give users SSO as in give them an account on an SSO
| system like Google/Okta/LDAP or do you mean use SSO as
| authentication for a web app you're running? Even if in the
| latter case I still don't understand what you mean by reverse
| proxy authentication or what that has to do with SSO. (I've
| set up SSO on my apps before and I've run SSO auth servers.)
| vorpalhex wrote:
| SSO is short for single sign on. It means users have only a
| single login across all the parts of the system. That can
| be something like "Login with Google" or it can be they
| just have a single local user account that works
| everywhere.
|
| A really efficient way to make SSO work is to allow a
| reverse proxy to do all the work. A reverse proxy is a
| webserver (such as nginx or traefik) which receives all
| incoming requests and then hands them off to the correct
| bit of software, such as Plex or Heimdall.
|
| Reverse proxies do lots of things but they help glue
| different pieces of software together. It allows you to
| have "http://plex.example.com" and
| "http://heimdall.example.com" on the same server as a for
| instance.
|
| You can also have the reverse proxy handle authentication.
| Users get redirected to sign in if they don't have the
| right cookie and when the proxy forwards their request it
| includes headers that give the username, email, etc to the
| underlying software.
|
| This way instead of both Plex and Heimdall having to
| support a bunch of different sign in options, user
| management, password resets, etc all that is done by the
| reverse proxy. Your software just has to trust the reverse
| proxy and get it's data from the headers.
| alx__ wrote:
| His point is that a majority of people don't want to bother
| with the cognitive overload of running a server. Just like you
| _could_ build your own car, very few want to. Often they don 't
| even care what kind of car they have. As long as it can get
| them from home to work and back again without killing them.
| titzer wrote:
| I mean, I get that. I have a mailbox on my house. Letters
| come to it. I don't think about it too much. Bits come to my
| house all the time but somehow those trillions of
| computations keep flubbing this basic functionality.
| bobobob420 wrote:
| Are you talking about physical On-prem systems or just buying a
| basic ec2 type server and renting some storage space? Because
| wouldn't the first one require a specific business line to an
| ISP for networking, which would require an office space and
| other associated costs? Or are you referring to renting a
| vanilla server and rolling everything yourself vs using some
| automated deployment and build pack system?
| chasd00 wrote:
| I just did a speed test and got 175mbs up. That is
| ridiculously fast and i don't have an out of the ordinary
| home internet connection. Entire data centers use to run on
| internet connections slower than that.
|
| A mac mini, ups, and that connection is plenty to run any
| kind of server for personal/family use.
| diegocg wrote:
| I don't want to maintain my own mail server, but I definitely
| want to run my own server.
|
| The irony is that modern internet infrastructure makes
| decentralisation _more_ feasible, but software lags behind. Why
| can't I buy some device for 200EUR or so where I store all my
| data and I receive email? (with the cloud being used only for
| optional encrypted backups). One can even imagine a
| decentralised social network running in these devices, with my
| friends getting updates by polling it periodically (or my
| device sending updates to their devices). The device would be
| powered 24h/365d, and if it breaks you just replace it. When
| I'm out of home, my phone apps would just query the device to
| get new mail and updates.
|
| We shouldn't really _need_ the cloud for many things yet we use
| it for everything.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| This smells like the classic "you can build your own Dropbox
| easily" comment. Just because it's technologically feasible
| doesn't mean people want to do so.
| titzer wrote:
| Note, I didn't claim that. I'd love to put a box in my house
| next to the cable modem that did all that stuff in a
| manageable, understandable way, that wasn't some underhanded
| subscription service that is going to try to squeeze me in
| the future or whoops my data amongst its constant, silent
| upgrading itself. But alas, no such box exists, and the
| software components that would go in that box seem to need
| constant babysitting and arcane configuration. Worse, it
| seems like all those overcomplicated things keep having
| critically bad security vulnerabilities and I'm just
| wondering what the actual fuck is wrong with having a damn
| thing on my computer that receives my email and serves a
| webpage.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yes. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy.
|
| I'd love to see appliance-level servers become standard, but
| you'd need Google or Apple to throw their weight behind such
| a thing to make it usable, since decades of server
| software/hardware development has failed to produce things
| that require less-than-professional-level users.
|
| I'd love to buy an off-the-shelf box for my network, have it
| act as a back-end for all my Google cloud-based apps and
| email and serve my blog and my photos and automatically
| encrypt and back it all up to a cloud storage system. But
| none of the big players are interested in that kind of thing,
| and the small players can't create replacements for the
| entire Google or Apple or Microsoft server/client
| architecture.
| ssss11 wrote:
| I think they key is: despite regular people not wanting to RUN
| their own server, they do want to CONTROL their own server.
| Current incumbents treat your data like tier asset, not like
| custody.
|
| This is because you pay nothing. The beginning of regular
| people having empowerment begins by paying some fee to own the
| product.
| dang wrote:
| All: this is quite an interesting article. It deserves much
| better than the tedious flamewar that this topic has routinely
| been converging to, so let's give it a go.
|
| If you're going to comment, please focus on specific, interesting
| things in the article that you're curious about.
|
| Please _don 't_ post generic, shallow, obvious, indignant, and/or
| dismissive comments--those are repetitive and predictable, we've
| had more than enough of them, they're tedious, not what this site
| is for, and we don't need more.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| murat124 wrote:
| I don't like that when an actually good successor to web2 comes
| along it won't be called web3 because of this bullshit that they
| call web3.
| exdsq wrote:
| What a uniquely insightful view, I had not read anything
| similar on HN in the past. I particularly liked the second part
| of your well-reasoned argument on the flaws of these
| technologies.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| If you only read one thing on "crypto", this should be it.
| ineptech wrote:
| > People don't want to run their own servers, and never will.
|
| Not really much related to web3/crypto topics, but I think this
| is an indictment of servers, not people. If managing a server
| were easy and secure, lots of people would do it - for blogs, a
| minecraft server for the kids, to back up their pictures, and
| yes, to store their bitcoins or other digital secrets - they just
| don't want to manage a unix or windows server.
|
| It used to be hard to install a webcam, now it isn't. No reason
| server software can't do the same thing - all we need is for some
| gigantic corporation to sink 100k developer-hours into it (which
| sounds like a joke, until you remember that there are several
| gigantic corporations who have very profitable side-hustles
| hosting servers, and who would be creating a whole new class of
| customer if they did this).
| ericd wrote:
| Yeah, I think the success of Synology's NASes speaks to this -
| they're largely used as little home servers. And it could be
| even easier if someone built a box that functioned as a router
| and a server with dynamic DNS as an easy part of the setup. The
| UI would have to be really, really polished, but I think it
| could be done.
|
| Symmetric home ISP connections would make these more useful,
| too. Sadly, that's not the norm right now, but perhaps that's
| because most people don't demand it.
| pjsg wrote:
| What is the _benefit_ to the average user of running their own
| server? Most people (maybe even on HN) just want things to
| work. We buy connectivity services for our phones and our
| homes. I certainly don 't want to run my own Wireless ISP to
| connect up my neighbourhood even if it was marginally cheaper
| (until I account for my time).
|
| We buy storage services (for lots of reasons) from Amazon,
| Google, <your favorite backup provider>, etc. I don't want to
| run a large NAS and keep it running and backed up.
|
| We buy messaging services (voice, SMS, email, IM etc). I don't
| want to run my own Asterisk VOIP PBX, my own OpenBTS node, my
| own postfix instance, my own IRC server.
|
| I buy power services (electricity and oil). I don't want to run
| my own oil well, refinery, nuclear power plant etc. I do
| actually run some solar panels, but the amount of cognitive
| load that they cost me is very small. It is probably under 3
| hours per year of having to fiddle with them.
|
| In short, the _cost_ in terms of time and energy from me makes
| it far cheaper to outsource all of these services to someone
| else. This doesn 't prevent you from running any/all of these
| services, but I would suggest that you are in a very small
| minority.
|
| Having said all of that, if I lived on an island with no
| services, I might be tempted to run some of them myself.
| smm11 wrote:
| As long as I can stream stuff moving forward, I don't care what
| Web version we're "on."
| dddw wrote:
| I enjoyed reading this article. The closer you look towards
| cryptocurrencies and smart contract projects like nfts, the less
| likely without a significant (state) player supporting these
| experiments I doubt we'll talk let alone use these speculative
| industries in a quarter century. Anyone can make an currency,
| only a strong arm can force you to pay.
| justinator wrote:
| Does it look like I know what an NFT is? All I want is a JPG of a
| gawd dang hot dog.
| jdnordy wrote:
| This is the best article I've found to help me understand what
| Web3 is and how it actually works. Thanks op!
| stavros wrote:
| As much as I hate cryptocurrency as-it-exists, I'm very much into
| its potential. Untraceable (eg Monero) digital cash that settles
| instantly? That has the potential to disrupt societies.
|
| The problem is that most societies don't have a particular need
| of being disrupted, so people are perfectly content paying with
| their credit cards, and why shouldn't they be? The UX is better
| and the banks are fine as long as they don't piss off a too-large
| portion of the population.
|
| Still, I would love it if I could use, say, Nano (as it has very
| limited PoW) to pay for things instantly and securely. I'm hoping
| a miracle happens, but I don't think it will, or it would already
| have happened.
| wstrange wrote:
| Untraceable digital cash facilitates crime, money laundering
| and tax evasion.
|
| None of these things are good for a stable democracy.
| stavros wrote:
| And perfect law enforcement means a stagnating society. Think
| where we would be now if gay people were discovered and
| punished instantly as soon as they kissed a person of the
| same sex, or interracial couples were punished as soon as
| they started dating, etc.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Pretty much any additional freedom facilitates crime.
| clarle wrote:
| As an engineer, I feel like this single post helped me better
| understand Web3 and how it worked under the hood better than any
| of the heavily hyped Discord and Twitter announcements of new
| projects over the past year.
|
| It's interesting how tightly coupled Metamask is to all of the
| other big crypto / NFT marketplaces. Feels like the "distributed
| web" portion of it has just been an over-exaggeration all along.
| jagger27 wrote:
| > [...] NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What
| surprised me about the standards was that there's no hash
| commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of
| the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds,
| or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS
| running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine,
| anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who
| compromises that machine can change the image, title,
| description, etc for the NFT to whatever they'd like at any time
| (regardless of whether or not they "own" the token). There's
| nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image "should"
| be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the
| "correct" image.
|
| How did we go from trapdoor functions being the foundation of
| everything in the space to forgetting to hash a link? Is the
| rational that these links should only ever be IPFS links? That's
| fine I guess, at least those are hashed. Why does the protocol
| allow for this to happen?
| endisneigh wrote:
| If you care about the environment even a little bit (like turning
| off lights in rooms you're not occupying) then you will reject
| Web3. Even the most efficient blockchains use more energy than
| the status quo unnecessarily.
|
| This is also to say nothing of the fact that it's more expensive
| per USD/KB transferred, slower and more complicated.
|
| I think what Web3 should be is a way to use your laptop or any
| commodity computer as infrastructure for your data, and there
| should be APIs for websites such that it uses your computer as
| the source as opposed to their own servers.
|
| For example this comment could be saved on my computer, but
| accessible to everyone viewing even if my computer is off via
| caching, but ultimately I could invalidate and delete.
| verdverm wrote:
| This is not what I expected from Moxie. A writes very good
| account of his experience trying to do some dapp / NFT stuff. He
| eloquently draws attention to the problems that are based in
| human behavior.
|
| Definitely worth the read. Both sides of the debate could elevate
| their arguments if they ponder what Moxie has written.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > Both sides of the debate could elevate their arguments if
| they ponder what Moxie has written.
|
| I appreciate that he fairly tried these different things out
| and reported his experience. But I don't think he has noticed
| anything particularly interesting or novel.
|
| It's common knowledge that the plentitude of blockchains out
| there now make compatibility between them almost impossible.
| This is how Bitcoin "maximalists" came to be in the first
| place. If reputation and trust is the game, it defeats the
| purpose to have a million different blockchains.
| [deleted]
| durakot wrote:
| I've known Moxie to often be right. And I think he happens to be
| right about this.
| verdverm wrote:
| I'm perplexed with him writing this piece and, at the same
| time, adding crypto based payments to Signal...
|
| Has he written anything on Signal and payments?
| durakot wrote:
| I don't think there's necessarily any contradiction. This is
| a critique of the Web3 paradigm (crypto all the things) and
| not cryptocurrency itself for say, payments.
| floren wrote:
| > at the same time, adding crypto based payments to Signal...
|
| Damn, and just when I'd been thinking how much I like Signal.
|
| The goldrush when Keybase added crypto completely ruined what
| had been a pretty good tool.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| I want to run my own servers.
|
| Honestly.
|
| It has always been a somewhat easy task if you pick an OS that is
| secure and stable.
|
| And today with all the Foss/oss there are plenty of reasons why I
| would do it.
|
| More Decentralised Please.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Same. I'd like to make this experience better rather than give
| up and give in to centralization. I know others have different
| priorities, but I don't need them to use my servers. I just
| need them to interoperate minimally.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > rather than give up and give in to centralization
|
| As for why Marlinspike might have abandoned the goal of
| decentralization, I think Upton Sinclair might have some
| insight.
| fabian2k wrote:
| At the risk of displaying my ignorance and lack of knowledge
| about this area, one part I found very familiar in this article
| is that the action interactions in his apps didn't actually
| interact with the blockchain, but essentially with two
| centralized services.
|
| My very limited understanding is that for blockchains essentially
| the way to distribute them is that every node has a full copy.
| This sounds awfully expensive in the long run. My intuition would
| be that once running a node is expensive enough, this would not
| be truly decentralized. If I can't get the fundamental
| information out of a blockchain myself on hardware I can afford,
| the actual properties of the blockchain don't matter anymore as I
| cannot access them myself.
|
| The moment you need to rely on third parties, you lose any unique
| properties a blockchain might have. I don't know how this would
| work if blockchains inherently are inefficient enough that you
| always need a way around querying them directly. I find the idea
| of a distributed trust-less database interesting, but if it is so
| inefficient that I can't actually access it myself that idea
| doesn't seem that interesting anymore.
| simias wrote:
| >When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much "better"
| in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would
| be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use.
|
| That sums up the situation for me. Having a marketplace for
| purely digital goods _might_ be a concept with a future. Having
| standard ways to interoperate between different platforms and
| query and update these goods _might_ make sense (although I still
| think it goes opposite to the general trend of walled gardens vs.
| decentralized web, I don 't see why the IP owners would play ball
| and accept the loss of control).
|
| The thing is that in most case those NFTs wouldn't be trustless.
| I see people putting forward that a use case would be an NFT that
| proves that your Rolex is real, or for Fortnite skins, or for the
| ownership of your house. But in all these situations, there's a
| very clear authority (Rolex, Epic Games and the municipal
| authorities, respectively). These authorities will be allowed to
| mint new NFTs at will (because who else?) and as such have to be
| trusted. That opens up interesting questions btw, like "who is
| Rolex exactly?" which creates a chain of custody of trusted
| authority involving trademark management among other things. But
| I digress.
|
| But then as soon as an authority is identified, why bother with
| the extreme overhead (it terms of resources and costs) of
| blockchain tech? Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all
| valid Rolex serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the
| exact same security and trust profile without having to involve
| any "web3" feature?
|
| Like cryptocurrencies, the subset of problems that can only be
| solved using NFTs is incredibly tiny and speculators rush to make
| up use cases that, if you think about it for five minutes,
| clearly make no sense and could be better solved using good old
| centralized tech.
| pshc wrote:
| > Couldn't Rolex issue a PGP signed CSV of all valid Rolex
| serial numbers once a month on IPFS and you'd get the exact
| same security and trust profile without having to involve any
| "web3" feature?
|
| A serial number can be copied and engraved onto a forged watch,
| so not really.
|
| A more analogous scenario would be if Rolex embedded an NFC
| hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such that
| anyone could wave their phone over their watch and verify that
| the chip's cert was indeed signed by Rolex.
| voldacar wrote:
| > NFC hardware chip with a private key inside the watch, such
| that anyone could wave their phone over their watch and
| verify that the chip's cert was indeed signed by Rolex.
|
| This is an excellent idea and I am now wondering why luxury
| brands haven't started doing this. It would be super hot. One
| would do it and suddenly they would all be doing it. Watches,
| handbags, shoes, whatever
| jfb wrote:
| Could it be that people aren't really interested in undoing the
| mistakes of Web2, but rather just kicking off a new round of
| consolidation, where they could be the gatekeepers/platform
| owners?
| scotty79 wrote:
| People happily run their servers when it's valuable for them. A
| lot of people have torrent program running in the background.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| What he says about NFTs is embarrassing, lmao. I've personally
| never bought them myself but I am enthusiastic about blockchain
| tech. Is there really no commitment saved for an art work? You
| would think this was basic shit. Maybe there is more than one NFT
| protocol?
|
| He also has a good point about centralization in 'blockchain
| oracle' services. In major wallets I've often seen them just make
| calls to blockchain / TX lookup services -- no cryptographic
| proofs there (though in theory easy to add with 'spv proofs'?) I
| also like that he went as far as to make two dapps before
| critiquing it. This is one of the better criticisms of 'web3' out
| there.
|
| I don't think what he says about OpenSea being better as a
| 'centralized' service is valid. Most of his critiques for the
| downside of blockchain-tech seem to be Ethereum-specific. For
| example, Solana transactions are blazingly fast, low-cost, and
| there are nice stable coins on there. OpenSea seems like it would
| be 'better' if it were an actual cryptographic protocol. Maybe
| link it with IPFS + Filecoin.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I like Moxie's work and writings, and this article has some great
| points, but I can't get behind this:
|
| _We should accept the premise that people will not run their own
| servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without
| having to distribute infrastructure._
|
| I'm not ready to give in. I am happy to leave "normal" (tech
| illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my
| decentralization goals.
|
| I think instead of building centralized infrastructure that does
| not require trust, we can make it easier to host decentralized
| infrastructure. Including allowing a "server" to be offline for
| months at a time, come online for a minute or two, then disappear
| again. P2P networking is also an area we can improve on, IMO. Too
| much information is going across the internet instead of point to
| point. Bluetooth is a terrible protocol, but airdrop (and reverse
| engineered implementations) seems to be promising.
| vasco wrote:
| > I am happy to leave "normal" (tech illiterate and politically
| apathetic) people behind to reach my decentralization goals.
|
| You realize this approximates to roughly "everyone that isn't
| you"?
| spenczar5 wrote:
| What does it mean to leave normal people behind? Surely you
| need to interact with them.
|
| For example, you can run your own mail server, but you will
| need to play by Google's rules if you want anyone on Gmail to
| get your emails.
|
| So, it's hard for me to picture what it means to _personally_
| decentralize without caring what the bulk of people do.
| dama0 wrote:
| > I'm not ready to give in. I am happy to leave "normal" (tech
| illiterate and politically apathetic) people behind to reach my
| decentralization goals.
|
| Which should be already possible with with the current
| offerings around selfhosting applications and p2p technologies.
|
| But as the same time you need to accept that the "normal"
| people would probably be happy to, in turn leave you behind to
| reach their goal of being able to use all service available
| without needing to concern themself with running their own
| server.
| somishere wrote:
| Great article. Would love to read an equally solid rebuttle. Can
| I suggest Web2^0?
| boulos wrote:
| Some of this echoes Matt Levine's take on crypto and DeFi
| generally: you will repeatedly see the re-learning the lessons of
| hundreds/thousands of years of traditional finance.
|
| I'm not sure that the "mobile device can't act as a node" is
| fundamental (it's more a quirk of the _current_ systems), but
| "nobody wants to run their own server" => "centralization" is a
| great reminder:
|
| > I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can
| run my own mail server, but it doesn't functionally matter for
| privacy, censorship resistance, or control - because GMail is
| going to be on the other end of every email that I send or
| receive anyway. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a
| platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds:
| centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired
| in time.
| purplesnowflake wrote:
| Moxie is no fan of decentralization. And he made why very clear
| with concise and incisive arguments.
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| At least wrt Signal, I think he prefers the trust be in the
| protocol and not the organization or business model.
| slibhb wrote:
| His argument here is that web3, as it exists today, isn't
| actually decentralized. Also:
|
| > These technologies immediately tended towards centralization
| through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this
| has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the
| ecosystem, and that most participants don't even know or care
| it's happening. This might suggest that decentralization itself
| is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance
| to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of
| decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for
| something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted
| for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer
| to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.
|
| Per the post, he's in favor of decentralization that "uses
| cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust,"
| he's just skeptical that web3 will head in this direction.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| And his arguments in favour of centralization are flawed. Sure,
| regular people do not want to run their own (email, chat, etc)
| servers. But they DO want to be able to chose from a handful of
| available servers the one they like best (or the one they trust
| most), without losing connectivity with their contacts. Tired
| of Google's shenanigans, move from Gmail to Protonmail, tell
| your contacts your new email, set up an autoresponder, all is
| fine. When you move away from a centralized silo like Signal,
| you'll have to move all your chat buddies with you to a new
| platform.
| ianbicking wrote:
| If you read the section "Recreating this world" it addresses
| this pretty directly
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Directly, and not convincingly at all. He presents just one
| use case, which, coincidentally, is the only one that casts
| the service he runs in a really good light. There are other
| use cases, like several email users leaving Gmail
| altogether, escaping from what he calls "the worst of both
| worlds". And his alternative? Using the centralized service
| (preferrably, the one he runs), because, he promises, _this
| one will be totally different_ , aha.
| skybrian wrote:
| Some people say they want this, but in practice, why you
| should trust someone you've never heard of?
|
| Network effects aside, consider the difficulty of deciding
| that the people behind a fork of Chrome or Signal are
| trustworthy. The average person doesn't have the knowledge to
| do due diligence, and many of us who could (in theory) don't
| want to bother.
|
| How do you get to the point where people think your team of
| software developers is legitimate? Decisions like this are
| based on what everyone else is using.
|
| One reason that app stores serving sandboxed apps are popular
| is that you don't have to evaluate each software developer's
| organization just to play their games.
| zaik wrote:
| You might be interested in the refutation of some of those
| arguments by Daniel Gultsch: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
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