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bidder33 | 4 years ago
I kind of agree in some ways but i think he underplays the critical point that you have an option for voice and exit from the forming centralising forces (which do get established because people like convenience/reliability/familiarity) without sacrificing your data or belongings, you can leave without losses. That is a critical difference.
His nft is delisted from a platform and his wallet calls the api of that platform. That sucks, up till now we have "too bad you got delisted from this platform, all your content is gone". But that isn't the case here, his contract is still on chain, and will work with anyone who calls it. He can still get all the data, there are other wallets, you can run them in your terminal if you like, or you can set your metamask to use your own - or someone elses - node (instead of infura). There is a choice. There are things like TheGraph making distributed indexers/search engines and something like that will replace opensea as the main nft api (if they arent building it themselves).
Add to this the more recent developments of light clients, which are coming along great and which allow us to run in-app/in-browser direct connections to the chain for calls/transactions without needing infura or a third party node.
> Personally, I think enough money has been made at this point that there are enough faucets to keep it going, and this won’t just be a blip. If that’s the case, it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency.
Absolutely agree. there are a lot of people in this space who have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives pursuing their interests in it, and they will. It isn't going away and we should engage with making it as good as we can. Will it be a big thing in ten years? who knows, I can say that everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality. What will we see in the next 5?
We can absolutely bring better privacy too. Layers like aztec are working on exactly that, and zero knowledge proofs and other forms of commitments (sismo) are exploring how to do that. I think a lot of people in the space follow the ideal of "privacy for the individual, transparency for the institutions". We will get there.
> 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 sort of agree with this, we can accept that full nodes will be ran be organisations, businesses, and nerdy individuals who also have their own funkwhale instances and homelabs. those commited to the ideals -> same as home email servers or mastodon communities.
but we can also find ways to distribute infrastructure to bring resilience to those who dont think much about these things and just want to use an app. (again with things like light clients replacing api calls to third parties). so that we care for the non-committed users and make sure the points of fragility are lessened as much as we can.
I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer "i'll be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn't helpful either.
I'd be much more interested in his thoughts on Whisper/Waku and messaging protocols, tradeoffs in validity/volition/optimistic rollups, distributed indexers, etc. He is smart enough and involved in similar things to just take that extra step to the dev forums and discussions and maybe give meaningful, helpful critique. I'm not sure what response he is expecting tbh?
The rest on gold rush and money i don't have much to say on, but mass speculation and desperation to make money is, imo, a symptom of the abusive system of work and finance that we are all forced into and everyone wants to escape. That didnt just appear with crypto/nfts. So sure, people are using something because they are making money and might not actually care about the details and the ethics - but we are also building a free(libre) opensource p2p programmable value network, and there are lots of people who also think that is amazing and worth indicating as different from the current stacks with the 'web3' tag.
hinkley|4 years ago
I want this to be wrong.
Broadband providers make it very difficult to run your own server. Server construction is also in a very bad place as well, so this has spread from consumers to companies. There are just too many externalities from all of your vendors that are left to you to solve and that opens up space for a small number of companies who have people who work on those problems as a full time job, amortized out over X vendors and Y customers.
Until or unless that changes, a bunch of things I'd like to have happen won't happen. I should be able to pull files from my home computer when I'm stuck in an airport in Paris. That was the original promise, but we ended up with something else that has a lot of rent-seeking involved.
I think there are a few people working on the servers problem, probably nowhere near enough, but Broadband companies are also largely to blame for this. I'm not sure if Starlink or municipal broadband that is run like power and water, are ways out. But what we have isn't going to work, and consolidation is just going to get worse and worse until someone fixes it.
clippablematt|4 years ago
WA|4 years ago
Well, it is still "content on a platform", which is Ethereum. If another blockchain comes into existence and most people say that this new blockchain is the source of truth for digital ownership, your old NFTs are worthless, because nobody cares about old Ethereum.
The same is true for wallet apps. If 90 % of people use one specific thing (OpenSea) and think that only this thing is the source of truth, it simply doesn’t matter that your NFT is technically on the chain.
The sense of ownership and the value comes purely from where the attention is right now – and this being the internet, everything can change.
Compare this to the physical world. Here, the attention and trust is in your local laws. If this changes, you can lose ownership (government seizing properties).
The solution is actually to acknowledge that there is no ownership without society.
With Ethereum, people want to build another society, again based on trust/attention. That society has not much overlap to the physical world.
It is not much different than any group of people doing a thing together, like say, an open source project, a clan in EVE or whatever with the only difference that web3 enthusiasts think their hobby has some link to the real world.
elliotbnvl|4 years ago
> everyday I interact with protocols, work and vote in daos- 4 years ago those things were in whitepapers as a possible idea, but now they are reality.
This is a pretty important point. He states that it's not really "early days", but if this is the kind of momentum we're talking about it feels like it is early days still. You don't see this kind of innovation in a stale field.
> I think a lot of his criticism is valid, but it also kinda falls flat on what is being built. It is a surface layer "i'll be a web3 dev for a day" overview and response. So it reads like if i followed a tutorial on neural nets in python then complained that my car still cant be driven by ai. Those of us in the space are well aware of all of this and it is all being worked on, but people unfamiliar read it as some kind of smackdown, which isn't helpful either.
This is the money quote for me. Just because there are issues currently doesn't mean that they won't ever get fixed.
My takeaway is that this subject is a lot more nuanced than his article is claiming, and although he's certainly right in a lot of his criticisms, that doesn't mean Web3 as a whole is doomed to failure.
It also does make me reconsider the movement as a whole. Sure, there are bound to be golddiggers, but that doesn't immediately render the whole concept invalid.