Web3 architecture and how it compares to traditional web apps(thenewstack.io)
thenewstack.io
Web3 architecture and how it compares to traditional web apps
https://thenewstack.io/web3-architecture-and-how-it-compares-to-traditional-web-apps/
130 comments
It’s not trying to solve an actual user problem, it’s trying to solve a blockchain investor problem because right now their investments are speculative without any real-world use.
Exactly.
Making money on blockchain requires retrofitting the web to use blockchain to do what the web can mostly do already.
In "Blockchains Are a Bad Idea", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin:
See his presentation here: https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI
1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions.
2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections.
3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.
Making money on blockchain requires retrofitting the web to use blockchain to do what the web can mostly do already.
In "Blockchains Are a Bad Idea", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin:
See his presentation here: https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI
1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions.
2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections.
3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.
I think you are missing the forest for the trees.
1. Zero trust is highly optimal for business. When it is systemically impossible to cheat your vendor/customer, nobody even tries. Happy path only.
2. Good luck suing someone in a foreign jurisdiction with incompatible legal systems. Maybe that sex toy would be embarrassing on ones credit card and tagged to ones identity. Cryptocurrency (especially private cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero) offers an alternative to doxing yourself.
3. You miss the great innovation of SN: Preventing Double Spends. You cannot enforce double spend without a source of truth -- which was traditionally central server/banks.
It was the Proof of Work that made the ledger distributed and censorship resistant, and it is the ledger that prevents double spends. And with Bitcoin, you have a limit of 21 million coins, which addresses SN's concern that central bankers ALWAYS inflate currency. So, no, existing tools did not suffice. That is why we have Bitcoin today.
1. Zero trust is highly optimal for business. When it is systemically impossible to cheat your vendor/customer, nobody even tries. Happy path only.
2. Good luck suing someone in a foreign jurisdiction with incompatible legal systems. Maybe that sex toy would be embarrassing on ones credit card and tagged to ones identity. Cryptocurrency (especially private cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero) offers an alternative to doxing yourself.
3. You miss the great innovation of SN: Preventing Double Spends. You cannot enforce double spend without a source of truth -- which was traditionally central server/banks.
It was the Proof of Work that made the ledger distributed and censorship resistant, and it is the ledger that prevents double spends. And with Bitcoin, you have a limit of 21 million coins, which addresses SN's concern that central bankers ALWAYS inflate currency. So, no, existing tools did not suffice. That is why we have Bitcoin today.
> 1. Zero trust is highly optimal for business. When it is systemically impossible to cheat your vendor/customer, nobody even tries. Happy path only.
I don't understand what point you tried to make, and frankly it sounds incoherent.
Moreover, the weasel word "highly optimal" means nothing. You failed to present any value proposition, specially when discussing a solved problem.
This is perhaps the main problem plaguing web3 proponents: they always fail to present any value proposition at all, and instead resort to all sorts of handwaving to try to distract away from that void
> 2. Good luck suing someone in a foreign jurisdiction with incompatible legal systems.
This statement fails to take into consideration the very notion of a jurisdiction, and somehow presumes that a shop in a country which chose to do trans-national business shouldn't have to deal with the legal implications of operating in another country.
> 3. You miss the great innovation of SN: Preventing Double Spends.
That is not innovation in commerce: it was already a solved problem before the inception of blockchain-based technologies.
I don't understand what point you tried to make, and frankly it sounds incoherent.
Moreover, the weasel word "highly optimal" means nothing. You failed to present any value proposition, specially when discussing a solved problem.
This is perhaps the main problem plaguing web3 proponents: they always fail to present any value proposition at all, and instead resort to all sorts of handwaving to try to distract away from that void
> 2. Good luck suing someone in a foreign jurisdiction with incompatible legal systems.
This statement fails to take into consideration the very notion of a jurisdiction, and somehow presumes that a shop in a country which chose to do trans-national business shouldn't have to deal with the legal implications of operating in another country.
> 3. You miss the great innovation of SN: Preventing Double Spends.
That is not innovation in commerce: it was already a solved problem before the inception of blockchain-based technologies.
It's only decentralised at the web layer - we basically stopped inventing shared protocols after that point in the 90s.
Email interoperates, but messaging doesn't. There's no adopted standard for identity (except centralised Google/Apple), or for payment (except centralised PayPal/Apple, and the bad UX of entering credit cards).
Turning these (and more) into protocols would allow more innovation at a layer above that. This innovation just can't happen right now, as FAANG have to approve of everything you do that works with systems the populuation already use.
web3 doesn't seem good enough yet to help, but it is at least working on it. And it could potentially solve the lack of identity and payment standards.
Email interoperates, but messaging doesn't. There's no adopted standard for identity (except centralised Google/Apple), or for payment (except centralised PayPal/Apple, and the bad UX of entering credit cards).
Turning these (and more) into protocols would allow more innovation at a layer above that. This innovation just can't happen right now, as FAANG have to approve of everything you do that works with systems the populuation already use.
web3 doesn't seem good enough yet to help, but it is at least working on it. And it could potentially solve the lack of identity and payment standards.
> we basically stopped inventing shared protocols after that point in the 90s.
This is incorrect but educationally so: there are many new distributed protocols (RSS/Atom, XMPP, various things around blog interactions like FOAF and ping backs, GraphQL, OpenID, etc.) but the ones which successfully saw adoption were adopted by a few large companies who saw advantages from doing so. Being open or distributed not only wasn’t enough to be competitive with the centralized platforms, it often prevented that since you needed to coordinate improvements across a range of competitors while Google or Facebook could just ship an update.
Consumers didn’t value client decentralization, especially when that meant incompatibility, lower performance, and fewer people they know using a service.
Putting things into a blockchain not only doesn’t help with any of the real problems but makes all of them worse: performance and reliability are completely out of your control, everything costs money (good luck getting users when the competition not only has better features, perform, and social graph but also doesn’t charge them to sign up or send messages!), and since you centralized onto a network run by finance companies the only way to get traction on any of that is to have enough money to be taken seriously.
This is incorrect but educationally so: there are many new distributed protocols (RSS/Atom, XMPP, various things around blog interactions like FOAF and ping backs, GraphQL, OpenID, etc.) but the ones which successfully saw adoption were adopted by a few large companies who saw advantages from doing so. Being open or distributed not only wasn’t enough to be competitive with the centralized platforms, it often prevented that since you needed to coordinate improvements across a range of competitors while Google or Facebook could just ship an update.
Consumers didn’t value client decentralization, especially when that meant incompatibility, lower performance, and fewer people they know using a service.
Putting things into a blockchain not only doesn’t help with any of the real problems but makes all of them worse: performance and reliability are completely out of your control, everything costs money (good luck getting users when the competition not only has better features, perform, and social graph but also doesn’t charge them to sign up or send messages!), and since you centralized onto a network run by finance companies the only way to get traction on any of that is to have enough money to be taken seriously.
Standard for messaging - XMPP
Standard for identity - not sure what you exactly mean by this, but there’s WebAuthn / OpenID Connect / SAML
Standard for payments - W3C web payments
Standard for identity - not sure what you exactly mean by this, but there’s WebAuthn / OpenID Connect / SAML
Standard for payments - W3C web payments
I'm not sure how having a standard for identity would help decentralization. Each website having their own identity managment allows you to have different identities on each website.
Messaging absolutely does. Matrix would like a word.
This!
Web2 = renter
Web3 = owner
Whether it’s Bitcoin, DeFi, DAOs or NFTs Web3 allows you to participate in owning digital property at the protocol layer. Imagine if you could have profited directly from your early adopter curiosity and passion for the early internet by owning a part of the base layer, instead of waiting till the IPO where VCs and early shareholders take most of the profits before dumping their bags on the public.
That’s Web3
Whether it’s Bitcoin, DeFi, DAOs or NFTs Web3 allows you to participate in owning digital property at the protocol layer. Imagine if you could have profited directly from your early adopter curiosity and passion for the early internet by owning a part of the base layer, instead of waiting till the IPO where VCs and early shareholders take most of the profits before dumping their bags on the public.
That’s Web3
What does this even mean?
> domain name system
And it's already there it seems: https://ens.domains/
I wonder how does one integrate ENS into an existing DNS-based system — is there a DNS-compatible resolver that will look up names on ENS (and an IPv4/IPv6 proxy perhaps)?
It's also a missed opportunity to provide hierarchical certificates at the same time, signed by the registry, though in a sense, a smart contract is exactly that, but I am more interested in simple name-resolution and TLS communication for traditional web applications like HTTP and mail (name-to-IP).
And it's already there it seems: https://ens.domains/
I wonder how does one integrate ENS into an existing DNS-based system — is there a DNS-compatible resolver that will look up names on ENS (and an IPv4/IPv6 proxy perhaps)?
It's also a missed opportunity to provide hierarchical certificates at the same time, signed by the registry, though in a sense, a smart contract is exactly that, but I am more interested in simple name-resolution and TLS communication for traditional web applications like HTTP and mail (name-to-IP).
Blockchain-based identity revolves around a user having a private key, which doesn't even need the blockchain to work. We've had TLS client certs (with awful UX, but blockchain doesn't magically fix UX either).
We've decentralised transfers with BitTorrent pretty well, and it's actually reasonably fast and cheap to operate. Opera used to have it built-in, and there are some WebRTC versions.
The web has a decentralised database of domain ownership - Certificate Transparency. The same approach could have been done for NFTs if they were really about owning digital assets, and not gambling on a pump and dump scheme.
Basically there are lots of energy efficient and lower-latency ways to decentralise the web if we wanted to. But the web tends to clump around large services mostly due to economies of scale and user convenience (average user can't be told they've lost their private key and they're totally screwed).
We've decentralised transfers with BitTorrent pretty well, and it's actually reasonably fast and cheap to operate. Opera used to have it built-in, and there are some WebRTC versions.
The web has a decentralised database of domain ownership - Certificate Transparency. The same approach could have been done for NFTs if they were really about owning digital assets, and not gambling on a pump and dump scheme.
Basically there are lots of energy efficient and lower-latency ways to decentralise the web if we wanted to. But the web tends to clump around large services mostly due to economies of scale and user convenience (average user can't be told they've lost their private key and they're totally screwed).
If you run your own web server then that’s still centralized. If you run your own web server that runs code which abides to the protocol rules like miner software then your server is contributing to a decentralized network.
You should take a look at handshake. A lot of GitHub users can claim using their ssh or PGP keys. https://handshake.org/
We've done lots of federations over the years, and the internet was absolutely built with some degree of decentralization/federation in mind.
The radical change here is that now anyone with some pocket change in crypto can deploy a decentralized application. We don't know how that's going to be used yet, it's still so early, but it's certainly exciting.
Web3 is a terrible name (as everyone else has already pointed out), but the magic that shouldn't get lost here is that a new decentralized internet is being born.
The radical change here is that now anyone with some pocket change in crypto can deploy a decentralized application. We don't know how that's going to be used yet, it's still so early, but it's certainly exciting.
Web3 is a terrible name (as everyone else has already pointed out), but the magic that shouldn't get lost here is that a new decentralized internet is being born.
> The radical change here is that now anyone with some pocket change in crypto can deploy a decentralized application.
Oh man it'll be awesome. Decentralized applications running on someone else's hardware with no SLA or even a meaningful relationship between the application author and person(a) executing it. Terabytes of data will just sort of float on the blockchain...sorry, immutable data store. I'm sure it'll be super fast when uploading from people's residential Internet connections.
So exciting!
Oh man it'll be awesome. Decentralized applications running on someone else's hardware with no SLA or even a meaningful relationship between the application author and person(a) executing it. Terabytes of data will just sort of float on the blockchain...sorry, immutable data store. I'm sure it'll be super fast when uploading from people's residential Internet connections.
So exciting!
And lets not forget the high cost of executing these apps not least to the environment.
> The radical change here is that now anyone with some pocket change in crypto can deploy a decentralized application.
Genuine question, how is that different from renting a VPS or buying a Raspberry Pi and running your website on it?
Genuine question, how is that different from renting a VPS or buying a Raspberry Pi and running your website on it?
>> The radical change here is that now anyone with some pocket change in crypto can deploy a decentralized application. We don't know how that's going to be used yet, it's still so early, but it's certainly exciting.
What about decentralized malware?
Web3 seems like a perfect opportunity for malware applications and hosting illicit content.
Have some CSAM you want to host? Put it on Web3! Want to dox someone or leak sensitive info captured in a hack? Put it on Web3!
Edit: This also begs the question: what legal liability might one face for hosting illegal content on Web3?
What about decentralized malware?
Web3 seems like a perfect opportunity for malware applications and hosting illicit content.
Have some CSAM you want to host? Put it on Web3! Want to dox someone or leak sensitive info captured in a hack? Put it on Web3!
Edit: This also begs the question: what legal liability might one face for hosting illegal content on Web3?
I find that most mentions of Web3 and DWeb relate to something with blockchain in it somewhere, which I am not interested in atm. So to me encountering these terms signifies "Probably not worth checking out". But YMMV and blockchain fans should probably be triggered by them.
I guess the first wave of trying to get ignorant CIOs to pay for blockchain stuff is dying down, and "Web3" is the attempt to revive it?
Can someone explain the hype around crypto? Startups and even large consulting companies hyped blockchain. But they never could find an actual use for it. So even places like IBM silently closed their departments.
It is like crypto is a solution looking for a problem. It feels like the whole blockchain hype all over again. More noise than actual substance.
Anyone know of an example for a lay user where crpto has a huge benefit compared to other tech in the space?
It is like crypto is a solution looking for a problem. It feels like the whole blockchain hype all over again. More noise than actual substance.
Anyone know of an example for a lay user where crpto has a huge benefit compared to other tech in the space?
Cryptocurrency is much better understood as a social phenomenon than a technical one. The reason for the hype is very simple, people who have already bought into it greatly benefit financially from creating more hype. They also have a lot to lose from the bubble bursting (savings, jobs, companies, friendships). So from just a few free market extremists who think this is a good idea for ideological reasons, it can sustain itself indefinitely as long as it keeps roping in more people. Hence nfts for artists, web3 for web devs etc.
Disclosure: I own ~$1 in cryptocurrency I forgot the password to years ago
Disclosure: I own ~$1 in cryptocurrency I forgot the password to years ago
The only long-term value I see are DRM-related things like reselling digital assets, artist compensation, etc. Other than that, mostly greater-fool scams and signalling for the tech elite.
The 3 in Web3 is just there to wipe the slate clean in order to resell just about any original vision that previously failed.
The 3 in Web3 is just there to wipe the slate clean in order to resell just about any original vision that previously failed.
I do like the concept that an artist can continue to get a percentage of future sales.
But blockchain itself does not prevent copyright infringement of digital assets. I.e. the artist may sell his photos as NFTs, but I can still use them without permission or resell them through other channels.
But blockchain itself does not prevent copyright infringement of digital assets. I.e. the artist may sell his photos as NFTs, but I can still use them without permission or resell them through other channels.
And any malicious actor can sell those digital assets as "an NFT" without actually holding the copyright.
See, for example, the many NFTs traced directly from artwork by real artists.
See, for example, the many NFTs traced directly from artwork by real artists.
The hype around crypto started with the revelation that bitcoin brought forward: digital scarcity.
A lot of folks hopping on the hype train mentioning they are doing X with blockchain are missing the revelation. blockchain is just a piece of the innovation, imagine if when the car was invented and suddenly inflatable tires got all the hype … that’s pretty much the times we are in. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
All the pieces that made bitcoin were already there. Satoshi was just the first to arrange them in the right order
A lot of folks hopping on the hype train mentioning they are doing X with blockchain are missing the revelation. blockchain is just a piece of the innovation, imagine if when the car was invented and suddenly inflatable tires got all the hype … that’s pretty much the times we are in. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
All the pieces that made bitcoin were already there. Satoshi was just the first to arrange them in the right order
Here is something your programmer brain can get its nureons around.
https://github.com/git-token
https://github.com/git-token
I have this thing called salary that I get for contributing code (it's even better - I also get it for doing other things!).
There is a ton of useless hype and noise in crypto/blockchain/web3, and this is what the average person is probably exposed to.
There are also some new and interesting paradigms however, that enable different systems and possibilities on the web than what we can achieve with our traditional, centralized walled gardens and payment services. See here for an idea:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816818
There are also some new and interesting paradigms however, that enable different systems and possibilities on the web than what we can achieve with our traditional, centralized walled gardens and payment services. See here for an idea:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28816818
That’s just describing things we already have better, cheaper, and more sustainable versions of.
Digital artwork is not magic: someone holds the copyright and needs to pay for hosting. NFTs don’t help the first problem because blockchains are too inefficient; IPFS helps only if you find value in paying for your hosting using that protocol rather than something else — nobody is hosting DRMed content for free so it’s just a question of what storage characteristics fit your budget. Since blockchains are inefficient, more expensive, and require you to maintain a complex operating network coordinated with other people just to use them, that’s unlikely to be a preservation success.
Rights is similar: NFTs are a distraction by people trying to get you to buy their Ethereum. What actually matters is a legal statement transferring ownership – if you have an NFT and the artist says they didn’t sell the rights, you’ll get laughed out of court but the reverse is true if you have any statement from the artist saying they did – we don’t need PKI, even, a witnessed email or note will suffice. That’s important for the discussion about forking: just as nobody is offering truly free hosting, whatever “the community” says is noise — what matters is what a court accepts, and a community which tries to ignore that will get DMCAed off of the internet.
Digital artwork is not magic: someone holds the copyright and needs to pay for hosting. NFTs don’t help the first problem because blockchains are too inefficient; IPFS helps only if you find value in paying for your hosting using that protocol rather than something else — nobody is hosting DRMed content for free so it’s just a question of what storage characteristics fit your budget. Since blockchains are inefficient, more expensive, and require you to maintain a complex operating network coordinated with other people just to use them, that’s unlikely to be a preservation success.
Rights is similar: NFTs are a distraction by people trying to get you to buy their Ethereum. What actually matters is a legal statement transferring ownership – if you have an NFT and the artist says they didn’t sell the rights, you’ll get laughed out of court but the reverse is true if you have any statement from the artist saying they did – we don’t need PKI, even, a witnessed email or note will suffice. That’s important for the discussion about forking: just as nobody is offering truly free hosting, whatever “the community” says is noise — what matters is what a court accepts, and a community which tries to ignore that will get DMCAed off of the internet.
NFT isn’t attempting to solve DRM or copyright. Likewise, when an artist sells you a signed print, they are not giving you any copyright over the art - nor should they.
Not sure what you are arguing about hosting. IPFS is already working well for many NFT projects, because the artist + collectors have an economic incentive to continue to host and maintain the media pointed to by the blockchain tokens.
Not sure what you are arguing about hosting. IPFS is already working well for many NFT projects, because the artist + collectors have an economic incentive to continue to host and maintain the media pointed to by the blockchain tokens.
You described a vision where “the assets still live on the blockchain, and a new platform can easily emerge on top of the same data if there is enough interest” — that requires copyright and hosting to be work. If the assets aren’t on the blockchain and copyright is handled elsewhere as well, we are left with the question of what value the blockchain is providing other than the opportunity to create a market for Ethereum.
Also, you may perhaps be aware that NFTs don’t usually convey ownership but a high percentage of the discussion confuses that. Whether or not that’s an intentional sales tactic there are a lot of people who’ve been confused on that point and left wondering why the price is so high for a link to content owned by someone else hosted somewhere else.
Also, you may perhaps be aware that NFTs don’t usually convey ownership but a high percentage of the discussion confuses that. Whether or not that’s an intentional sales tactic there are a lot of people who’ve been confused on that point and left wondering why the price is so high for a link to content owned by someone else hosted somewhere else.
The vision already exists. Assets on ArtBlocks for example are hosted on the chain itself, and several sites exist to display, facilitate, organize, etc the tokens. Similar things are happening off-chain (see Hicetnunc) with ipfs.
Ownership in the context of NFT is not about ownership of the artistic intellectual property.
Further reading:
https://nathanielstern.com/text/2021/custodianship-copyright...
Ownership in the context of NFT is not about ownership of the artistic intellectual property.
Further reading:
https://nathanielstern.com/text/2021/custodianship-copyright...
> The vision already exists. Assets on ArtBlocks for example are hosted on the chain itself, and several sites exist to display, facilitate, organize, etc the tokens. Similar things are happening off-chain (see Hicetnunc) with ipfs.
How does pricing compare to the existing options? On-chain hosting already limits you to public works, which many people are not going to be comfortable with, but this usually comes down to cost and reliability.
> Ownership in the context of NFT is not about ownership of the artistic intellectual property.
I'm aware but that's not how most of the marketing sounds and it also gets into the question of value. If an NFT doesn't convey real rights and requires paying more for hosting (which is also separate in the case of almost all NFTs currently), the ceiling for long-term value is pretty low.
How does pricing compare to the existing options? On-chain hosting already limits you to public works, which many people are not going to be comfortable with, but this usually comes down to cost and reliability.
> Ownership in the context of NFT is not about ownership of the artistic intellectual property.
I'm aware but that's not how most of the marketing sounds and it also gets into the question of value. If an NFT doesn't convey real rights and requires paying more for hosting (which is also separate in the case of almost all NFTs currently), the ceiling for long-term value is pretty low.
Well, on Ethereum, it's possible to do things that I never anticipated would be possible, despite programming nonstop for 20-whatever years: it is now possible to deploy a smart contract that does something useful and then lock yourself and everyone else out of it, forever. If there are no bugs, then it can be expected to do its job indefinitely without it being possible for anyone to change their mind and use their privileged access to change how the program works. This is called trustlessness, and it's the basis for a new kind of confidence.
This is a lot of words that say absolutely nothing.
If you think so, I don't think you understand what has been achieved. Sorry I couldn't help you with that.
I don't think you gave a very clear explanation, despite your effusiveness.
there are plenty of resources available to read up on smart contracts that can be had, you don't have to help anybody really.
I think a good example would be something like the Land Registry here in the UK. A use case where you need digital ownership and the records are public for all to see.
The decentralised part acts as the security and it would be hard to forge records, could make the process more transparent and therefore less corruption.
As a side note, I'm shocked by the amount of cynicism in this thread. It seems a lot of people have been put off from the negative media surrounding crypto rather than looking at the technology behind it with an open mind. It reminds me of when P2P file sharing was demonised by the media because of pirating.
The decentralised part acts as the security and it would be hard to forge records, could make the process more transparent and therefore less corruption.
As a side note, I'm shocked by the amount of cynicism in this thread. It seems a lot of people have been put off from the negative media surrounding crypto rather than looking at the technology behind it with an open mind. It reminds me of when P2P file sharing was demonised by the media because of pirating.
Is there any known corruption in the UK Land Registry though? Are there frequent reports of land that someone had bought quietly have its ownership transferred?
Why wouldn’t you use traditional PKI for that? Ultimately it comes down to trusting a known authority and tamper-evidence could be provided at orders of magnitude less cost and greater reliability by either using a Merkle tree or notarization from a third-party.
As for the cynicism, note that this is an audience with deep technical knowledge and the ability to reason about systems, years into salespeople making big claims which have not been delivered. Given the conflicts of interest inherent to a system which requires outsiders to put fresh money in before insiders can cash out, skepticism seems warranted.
As for the cynicism, note that this is an audience with deep technical knowledge and the ability to reason about systems, years into salespeople making big claims which have not been delivered. Given the conflicts of interest inherent to a system which requires outsiders to put fresh money in before insiders can cash out, skepticism seems warranted.
I've been playing around with creating a few dapps here and there and I do have to say I really enjoy being able to use wallets as a proof of identity rather than hooking in a dedicated authentication server. I haven't created anything to scale yet but I think simply using wallets instead of relying on oauth for simple applications is really lowering the amount of time I have to put up front into creating proof of concept applications.
Also, I really do think that NFT ownership serving as an access token into a service is a very neat feature that we'll start to see more of as people start getting more creative with NFTs instead of simply being an art asset. There's a lot there and we're barely scratching the surface imo.
Also, I really do think that NFT ownership serving as an access token into a service is a very neat feature that we'll start to see more of as people start getting more creative with NFTs instead of simply being an art asset. There's a lot there and we're barely scratching the surface imo.
The auth thing is great! But from the end user and the developer perspective there’s no difference between an oauth provider and a wallet. You still have to set it up on the machine and “login”, same for the app developer
Yeah, they are comparable, but there is definitely a difference, from both an end user, and developer. The flow is similar - you have to have a wallet, and you have to authenticate it. But really, that's about it.
From an end user perspective, all I need to do is press a button to connect my wallet, and I'm in. The site doesn't even need to reload or hit a callback uri. It's a much simpler flow than any of the oauth authentication flows. Also, as anyone can create a wallet and it is not tied to any other identifying information, it's a breath of fresh air to have some vague sense of anonymity than hooking everything into a centralized email account.
From a developer standpoint, all I need to do is use an API with a callback function that on success takes whatever data I need and update my application state appropriately. It really is smooth, and I don't need to do things like maintain session or handle access token expiration and request refresh tokens. I can sign messages on the frontend & verify signatures on the backend to ensure the user is who they claim to be. It's so simple compared to the stuff I had to implement in the corporate world for OAuth (granted, the projects I've been working on in the space are much less complex).
If you want to try it out yourself as an end user, just download a wallet extension and check out an nft marketplace such as solanart or opensea. You simply have to connect, and that's it. I find it fascinating personally and it's one of the pieces of web3 that I'm most excited for. I believe we're going to continue to see a lot of innovation in the space.
From an end user perspective, all I need to do is press a button to connect my wallet, and I'm in. The site doesn't even need to reload or hit a callback uri. It's a much simpler flow than any of the oauth authentication flows. Also, as anyone can create a wallet and it is not tied to any other identifying information, it's a breath of fresh air to have some vague sense of anonymity than hooking everything into a centralized email account.
From a developer standpoint, all I need to do is use an API with a callback function that on success takes whatever data I need and update my application state appropriately. It really is smooth, and I don't need to do things like maintain session or handle access token expiration and request refresh tokens. I can sign messages on the frontend & verify signatures on the backend to ensure the user is who they claim to be. It's so simple compared to the stuff I had to implement in the corporate world for OAuth (granted, the projects I've been working on in the space are much less complex).
If you want to try it out yourself as an end user, just download a wallet extension and check out an nft marketplace such as solanart or opensea. You simply have to connect, and that's it. I find it fascinating personally and it's one of the pieces of web3 that I'm most excited for. I believe we're going to continue to see a lot of innovation in the space.
With most of the comments here criticizing blockchains, it's hard to get any meaningful discussion on the topic.
Having set up a lot of SSO and other auth mechanisms, I think there is a good opportunity for a combination of NFT-access-token + WebAuthn [1]. The nice thing about that would be a secure login without email/passwords combination that you can access with your biometrics. Imagine the same flow as login with 1Password without having to fill the form.
On the developer side, you don't have to setup the OIDC flow, database, or anything. You just rely on a generic service to provide you with a token. Less opportunity to mess it up, and it can work on localhost too.
Now, would be the question of a similar exercise for authorization.
[1] https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAuthn
Having set up a lot of SSO and other auth mechanisms, I think there is a good opportunity for a combination of NFT-access-token + WebAuthn [1]. The nice thing about that would be a secure login without email/passwords combination that you can access with your biometrics. Imagine the same flow as login with 1Password without having to fill the form.
On the developer side, you don't have to setup the OIDC flow, database, or anything. You just rely on a generic service to provide you with a token. Less opportunity to mess it up, and it can work on localhost too.
Now, would be the question of a similar exercise for authorization.
[1] https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAuthn
I haven't thought of combining access tokens with biometrics, that could actually be pretty slick. I have no real exposure to WebAuthn, but yeah the more I work in the 3.0 space the more I think that NFTs are one the most misrepresented technologies I can imagine.
I'm writing an app that utilizes NFT ownership to authorize access to a service, and it's been really easy to implement, though I'm certain I'll need to continue making improvements to it. But my theory is that I can sign a message with my wallet on the frontend using NaCl, send that message and the signature to my backend and verify it, then verify token ownership using RPC. My PoC implementations have been working pretty well, but I am not sure of any holes that may exist in this approach, so it's still a work in progress.
I'm writing an app that utilizes NFT ownership to authorize access to a service, and it's been really easy to implement, though I'm certain I'll need to continue making improvements to it. But my theory is that I can sign a message with my wallet on the frontend using NaCl, send that message and the signature to my backend and verify it, then verify token ownership using RPC. My PoC implementations have been working pretty well, but I am not sure of any holes that may exist in this approach, so it's still a work in progress.
I’ve used a basic version of OAuth before and found it very simple, so I’m amazed wallet authentication can even be simpler. How does the user prove they have the private key, do they make a verification transaction?
From the user’s perspective I see the (dubious) benefit of being able to use the same key for your money and online accounts, but that’s about it …
From the user’s perspective I see the (dubious) benefit of being able to use the same key for your money and online accounts, but that’s about it …
I've been working on Solana and Ethereum dapps and it does rely on browser extensions at the moment (MetaMask or Phantom wallet for example). But basically they expose an API that lets you connect a wallet. In one app I'm working on right now in Solana, I'm able to connect in a one line api call (granted if I want to support other wallets I'll need to use an adapter npm module). Since you need to have the private key to set up a wallet, connecting is essentially "logging in". So really, I can make a website that lets you use a wallet with no money on it as authentication, if I wanted to, since it proves you are who you say you are unless your wallet's private keys are compromised.
Would love to learn more about the dapps you’re building. Any site or anything I can check out?
edit: Sorry, I think I misread your question. My current ongoing project is not yet public but will be unveiled and live in a few weeks, the others were entries into hackathons for proofs of concept, but I don't have those live. I'll leave the rest of my message (targetted for dev resources in general) below in case you or anyone else finds it helpful.
The only way I can recommend getting started is the way that I did a few months back - I strongly encourage checking out and entering random hackathons! https://gitcoin.co/hackathons
There's a lot going on in the space currently - many projects are trying to attract development talent so they will sponsor / participate in hackathons. imo they're fantastic opportunities to learn something new and potentially win some extra money.
I'd probably recommend ethereum as a first ecosystem to really dive into - the tooling is more mature than other dev-centric blockchains. However, keep in mind that ethereum as a base can be a tricky place to launch your app because of high transactional fees, and you would likely want to integrate a layer 2 like Arbitrum or support alternative coins in a final application. I'll link some pages to a few technologies I used when building some ethereum dapps
https://www.trufflesuite.com/truffle https://www.trufflesuite.com/ganache
for wallet integration, either of these work https://github.com/ChainSafe/web3.js https://github.com/ethers-io/ethers.js
I highly recommend checking out The Graph too - it allows for you to leverage graphQL on your smart contract data by creating a dedicated subgraph. With some careful integration, you can replace a dedicated backend that would normally be required for various APIs with this. It's a very exciting project imo. https://thegraph.com/en/
And of course, the solidity documentation is very helpful. Coming from a scripting heavy background, solidity was very easy for me to pick up and write a simple escrow service. https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.9/
I'd also recommend checking out other chains once you become more comfortable with the system. I'm currently working on Solana and it's a bit more difficult to work with due to the tooling not being as mature, but it is a very interesting chain to work with and I hope that it can scale better than Ethereum has.
The only way I can recommend getting started is the way that I did a few months back - I strongly encourage checking out and entering random hackathons! https://gitcoin.co/hackathons
There's a lot going on in the space currently - many projects are trying to attract development talent so they will sponsor / participate in hackathons. imo they're fantastic opportunities to learn something new and potentially win some extra money.
I'd probably recommend ethereum as a first ecosystem to really dive into - the tooling is more mature than other dev-centric blockchains. However, keep in mind that ethereum as a base can be a tricky place to launch your app because of high transactional fees, and you would likely want to integrate a layer 2 like Arbitrum or support alternative coins in a final application. I'll link some pages to a few technologies I used when building some ethereum dapps
https://www.trufflesuite.com/truffle https://www.trufflesuite.com/ganache
for wallet integration, either of these work https://github.com/ChainSafe/web3.js https://github.com/ethers-io/ethers.js
I highly recommend checking out The Graph too - it allows for you to leverage graphQL on your smart contract data by creating a dedicated subgraph. With some careful integration, you can replace a dedicated backend that would normally be required for various APIs with this. It's a very exciting project imo. https://thegraph.com/en/
And of course, the solidity documentation is very helpful. Coming from a scripting heavy background, solidity was very easy for me to pick up and write a simple escrow service. https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.9/
I'd also recommend checking out other chains once you become more comfortable with the system. I'm currently working on Solana and it's a bit more difficult to work with due to the tooling not being as mature, but it is a very interesting chain to work with and I hope that it can scale better than Ethereum has.
Thank you! Very kind of you to provide the info. Really exciting to enter the space
You don't even need to make a transaction. Cryptocurrency based authentication mechanisms use the ledger as a "trust-less" root of trust. You know anything that's been on the ledger long enough is valid. From their all you need to do is authenticate with the same PKI that corresponds to said wallet.
A simplified example: You own an NFT and want to prove that you own it.
You can produce some chunk of data (not a transaction) that includes a reference to the NFT (be it the UTxO, Tx, or some hash) and sign it with the same key that owns the NFT (or a derivative key depending on the design of the system).
Since it's not a transaction it doesn't cost anything to produce and you can share it with the interested parties however you wish.
In a sense you can think of it like GPG (and GPG based SSH keys) except instead of the web of trust being a federated set of servers and key cross signing, it's a decentralised ledger.
It's not simpler but it can be easier because it largely comes out of the box set up. The PKI is already well established and you don't need to really spin up or configure anything complicated to use it. You just launch a wallet with the supported features and it "just works".
A simplified example: You own an NFT and want to prove that you own it.
You can produce some chunk of data (not a transaction) that includes a reference to the NFT (be it the UTxO, Tx, or some hash) and sign it with the same key that owns the NFT (or a derivative key depending on the design of the system).
Since it's not a transaction it doesn't cost anything to produce and you can share it with the interested parties however you wish.
In a sense you can think of it like GPG (and GPG based SSH keys) except instead of the web of trust being a federated set of servers and key cross signing, it's a decentralised ledger.
It's not simpler but it can be easier because it largely comes out of the box set up. The PKI is already well established and you don't need to really spin up or configure anything complicated to use it. You just launch a wallet with the supported features and it "just works".
This will never get any traction except for startup hype. The economics just don't work and the end user sees nothing changed since frontend stays the same?
How complicated and expensive can you get. Engineering is about solving problems with the right tools and with the least amount of maintenance.
This is inventing a whole lot of stack for what? Your pipedream of "decentralised" internet. They fork Ethereum chain continueslly for their own gain, aka it's managed centrally!
/endrand
How complicated and expensive can you get. Engineering is about solving problems with the right tools and with the least amount of maintenance.
This is inventing a whole lot of stack for what? Your pipedream of "decentralised" internet. They fork Ethereum chain continueslly for their own gain, aka it's managed centrally!
/endrand
You say it will never get any traction, but cryptocurrency’s global market cap is $2.28T right now and growing. This has a lot of vibes similar to when dropbox was first announced. Even if you don’t find it valuable or believe in it, surely you can see why a group of people might.
It’s not similar to Dropbox. For the initial Dropbox idea it was doubt that user convenience mattered (just use rsync!) not that there wasn’t a worthwhile problem.
What is the problem and solution here? If you say illegal activities, gambling, and evading state regulations, I can see it. Great product.
Citing market cap isn’t that convincing. China has a property market with similar value that’s being threatened as we speak. What does a very large number prove except there’s been investment? It certainly doesn’t prove it’s a sound investment or that it has a future beyond a vehicle for the uses I mentioned.
What is the problem and solution here? If you say illegal activities, gambling, and evading state regulations, I can see it. Great product.
Citing market cap isn’t that convincing. China has a property market with similar value that’s being threatened as we speak. What does a very large number prove except there’s been investment? It certainly doesn’t prove it’s a sound investment or that it has a future beyond a vehicle for the uses I mentioned.
The thing driving that market cap is wash trading. The legitimate trade volume is actually quite low. Very few people use cryptocurrencies, and the vast majority that do are gambling.
I can see that people enjoy gambling, but that doesn't mean the actual tech is good.
I can see that people enjoy gambling, but that doesn't mean the actual tech is good.
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In most discussions around the decentralized apps of the future I fail to get any good answers who is actually paying for the compute power and who is maintaining it.
In short: who is paying for the Ramen?
Let's take a multi-user chatting app. The compute power necessary to serve 1000 users is X. Running this costs us $Y. Now we distribute this app, having the same features, I now need to spend X plus the overhead of storing data on-chain plus - likely - extra network hops since my users form a peer2peer network of sorts amounting to $Z.
So now the cost is $Y + $Z: Who is paying for that?
In short: who is paying for the Ramen?
Let's take a multi-user chatting app. The compute power necessary to serve 1000 users is X. Running this costs us $Y. Now we distribute this app, having the same features, I now need to spend X plus the overhead of storing data on-chain plus - likely - extra network hops since my users form a peer2peer network of sorts amounting to $Z.
So now the cost is $Y + $Z: Who is paying for that?
From what I understand it’s the users. Right now if you want to run a smart contract on something like Ethereum you have to pay ‘gas’ which is the cost of execution on the VM and on top of that you have to tip the miner who ends up executing the code. A bigger tip gets you priority. A more complex piece of code that needs to be executed sooner is more expensive.
I’d guess for something like real-time chat you’d want another chain that could resolve transactions much faster and cheaper than Ethereum could and would have to buy their tokens to use it. Then hope that speculators don’t push up the price until using it for the intended purpose is in feasible.
I’d guess for something like real-time chat you’d want another chain that could resolve transactions much faster and cheaper than Ethereum could and would have to buy their tokens to use it. Then hope that speculators don’t push up the price until using it for the intended purpose is in feasible.
> on top of that you have to tip the miner
Ethereum gas is the miner fee, they're not two separate things. More compute-intensive transactions cost more gas, and the price of gas is set in the market by supply and demand.
Ethereum gas is the miner fee, they're not two separate things. More compute-intensive transactions cost more gas, and the price of gas is set in the market by supply and demand.
This is how it used to be from what I understand of it and changed in August after "the London upgrade". A quick google took me here which explains it:
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/
Web3 isn’t about to replace text messaging tech, at least not yet.
A more apt example that exists already is a digital art marketplace[1]. The burden of maintenance for the media lies on the users (those publishing & collecting the assets), and hosting is done in a peer to peer manner through IPFS[2]. The maintenance for the site (servers, indexing) can be funded & incentivized through (for example) a small % cut on all trades as a maintenance fee. In an ideal platform, these fees would be directed to a wallet that is collaboratively controlled by a number of shareholders who have an interest in continuing to support the project.
Most importantly though, and one of the core aspects that tends to be lost in these discussions, is that the assets themselves are typically decentralized. If the platform fails or a fork is desirable (eg: community wants a different direction than the original founders), the assets still live on the blockchain, and a new platform can easily emerge on top of the same data if there is enough interest. This is where you get the idea of “users own their data, and websites must compete to display/facilitate it”—a radically different paradigm than what we have seen in the past.
[1] - https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...
[2] - https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/47f4ea12ea131eed8401bdacf95... (I believe this guide is outdated now as I haven’t been keeping up with their tech stacks, but it gets the point across)
A more apt example that exists already is a digital art marketplace[1]. The burden of maintenance for the media lies on the users (those publishing & collecting the assets), and hosting is done in a peer to peer manner through IPFS[2]. The maintenance for the site (servers, indexing) can be funded & incentivized through (for example) a small % cut on all trades as a maintenance fee. In an ideal platform, these fees would be directed to a wallet that is collaboratively controlled by a number of shareholders who have an interest in continuing to support the project.
Most importantly though, and one of the core aspects that tends to be lost in these discussions, is that the assets themselves are typically decentralized. If the platform fails or a fork is desirable (eg: community wants a different direction than the original founders), the assets still live on the blockchain, and a new platform can easily emerge on top of the same data if there is enough interest. This is where you get the idea of “users own their data, and websites must compete to display/facilitate it”—a radically different paradigm than what we have seen in the past.
[1] - https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...
[2] - https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/47f4ea12ea131eed8401bdacf95... (I believe this guide is outdated now as I haven’t been keeping up with their tech stacks, but it gets the point across)
Don't you see? The blockchain crypto will disrupt the centralized gatekeepers! Then the crypto tokens will fund early adopters. Clearly new AI paradigms will foster the synergy needed for peer to peer decentralized finance. Combined with augmented VR it'll create a self perpetuating network effect.
It's really almost too simple.
It's really almost too simple.
you did not mention metaverse (_)
The idea that there are organised "gatekeepers" holding down humanity is nothing but a thinly veiled layer over "the zionists who control everything".
This is just the tech-version of this evil old conspiracy theory that'll end up, without fail, blaming a race / religious group for all that's allegedly wrong with the world.
I'm pretty sure that's the point. It's a very tongue in cheek/sarcastic "blockchain will liberate us and save all our problems" comment parroting what you hear a lot of less informed & overly zealous individuals claim.
Wait, wasn't Web 3 the whole semantic web thing? This blockchain-y thing should be Web 4, or at least Web 3.1.
I expect it'll be just as successful as Web 3 was.
I expect it'll be just as successful as Web 3 was.
Web 3.0 was indeed the semantic web [1], which Google, Facebook, and Digg/Reddit killed, though perhaps not entirely consciously.
The tooling around FOAF and similar semantic web microformats wasn't very good, and Atom/RSS wasn't needed or widely supported when the web became increasingly siloed. Web 3.0 died when personal websites and blogs stopped being the most common publishing medium.
"New web 3.0" is web + NFTs. The analogy I see thrown around is this :
Web 1.0 : read-only
Web 2.0 : read + write
Web 3.0 : read + write + ownership
Which is stupid, because we already have ownership.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
The tooling around FOAF and similar semantic web microformats wasn't very good, and Atom/RSS wasn't needed or widely supported when the web became increasingly siloed. Web 3.0 died when personal websites and blogs stopped being the most common publishing medium.
"New web 3.0" is web + NFTs. The analogy I see thrown around is this :
Web 1.0 : read-only
Web 2.0 : read + write
Web 3.0 : read + write + ownership
Which is stupid, because we already have ownership.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
You and other commenters have mentioned Google, Facebook, and other silos, and I think your point is well taken. But nobody talks about another giant villain responsible for a pernicious centralization of information and partly responsible for the withering of the decentralized web of individual sites, and the individual responsibility that went with them: Wikipedia.
You mean the website that's run by a non-profit, uses an open content license, provides full history dumps, and is maintained by hundreds of thousands of volunteers?
Wikipedia is hosted centrally, because running infrastructure in a decentralized way is worse in every technical sense. The actual content and maintenance is as decentralized as you can possibly have.
I'm sure you haven't really put much effort into actually looking into this, but you can volunteer to work on the underlying software, and infrastructure as well. The wiki and infra code are open, the infra is documented openly, and the test/dev/staging environments allow volunteers to directly participate. You can have your code end up in production after review.
Wikipedia is hosted centrally, because running infrastructure in a decentralized way is worse in every technical sense. The actual content and maintenance is as decentralized as you can possibly have.
I'm sure you haven't really put much effort into actually looking into this, but you can volunteer to work on the underlying software, and infrastructure as well. The wiki and infra code are open, the infra is documented openly, and the test/dev/staging environments allow volunteers to directly participate. You can have your code end up in production after review.
Actually, Fb is/was one of the largest users of RDF, in the form of OpenGraph meta-tags. And the tooling for RDF/SPARQL isn't bad at all, if stagnant since first introduced in 2002 or so. It's just that there was no business case for it when ads are the primary or only means for monetization. And Atom only served to cannibalize RSS.
> Which is stupid, because we already have ownership.
To be fair, we already had the "write" at the Web 1.0 stage. This is like "what the unwashed masses" can do.
To be fair, we already had the "write" at the Web 1.0 stage. This is like "what the unwashed masses" can do.
I still maintain that aside from limited use cases (usually adding some meta tags), anything semantic web was supposed to do is better handled by an api.
Very few people will ever choose to invest the time necessary to understand how to use cryptocurrencies safely. This means no matter how good or how useful a "Web 3.0" product is it will either remain too niche to make a serious profit in the long term or it will end up as a way to scam people who don't understand how to use crypto safely and eventually sink under a wave of PR disasters.
Web 3.0 is doomed.
Web 3.0 is doomed.
> Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is a big believer that “the next wave of computing innovation will be driven by crypto.” His definition of “Web 3” (a term more commonly styled as “Web3”) revolves around blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies — a market that a16z is heavily invested in.
In other words, a guy heavily invested in speculative technology X, is pushing X.
In other words, a guy heavily invested in speculative technology X, is pushing X.
In other words, a guy thinks X will be extremely successful in the future, so he invests in X early.
If Web3 is the solution, what is the problem?
Web3 seems like the attempt to hype a solution to a largely non-existent problem in order to "keep the music playing". There are many actors with large financial stakes in the crypto ecosystem that will do anything to keep the masses to put money into the system. We've seen that with NFTs earlier this year, where a concerted effort was made to create hype e.g. by auctioning NFTs via Sothesby's for 8-figure amounts (one does wonder why you'd need Sotheby's in the world of decentralized finance), which seems to have worked as people now pay thousands of dollars for worthless GIFs. But in order to keep the price rally going you need to make people pour more and more money into the system every year. Hyping decentralized apps just seems like the next logical step here.
I found it quite hilarious though to see the diagram in the article that explains how a decentralized Web3 app is supposed to replace a traditional centralized system, which ended up being plastered with the logos of companies whose proprietary commercial solutions you need to operate a dApp.
I found it quite hilarious though to see the diagram in the article that explains how a decentralized Web3 app is supposed to replace a traditional centralized system, which ended up being plastered with the logos of companies whose proprietary commercial solutions you need to operate a dApp.
I'm not into crypto, but I think you're missing the picture here: the fact is that a lot of people are into crypto, and new people are coming in (even if they come in waves that crash and exit, some do still stick around), and Web3 seems to be here to serve this people.
You can even call it a niche.
If you can capture part of the value of this market by creating value for those users... what's wrong with that? How is this a non-existent problem?
NFTs are a good example of what you're dealing with. There are so many people with - arguably - apparent "poor taste" exchanging large sums of funny-money because that's part of their vision of an end game, and maybe that "poor taste" it's just because there's nothing else to do with the funny-money.
The problem here is that they want to spend it, exchange it, do things with it, and dApps are here to serve them.
From my understanding of this: the Web3 is not about/for you, or me, it's more for them.
If they are hyping it to be the future, let them be, it's their thing and we "don't get it" - that's ok. We've seen this over and over again, some stuff stuck around, others faded away. But it's ok to not understand some social movements and not be part of them.
You're probably experiencing what some folks experienced when Rock Music came about, it's confusion and it's an odd feeling. I'm not saying crypto will have the same popularity of rock music... I could say another example like EBM music... the point is that we don't understand a lot of things.
You can even call it a niche.
If you can capture part of the value of this market by creating value for those users... what's wrong with that? How is this a non-existent problem?
NFTs are a good example of what you're dealing with. There are so many people with - arguably - apparent "poor taste" exchanging large sums of funny-money because that's part of their vision of an end game, and maybe that "poor taste" it's just because there's nothing else to do with the funny-money.
The problem here is that they want to spend it, exchange it, do things with it, and dApps are here to serve them.
From my understanding of this: the Web3 is not about/for you, or me, it's more for them.
If they are hyping it to be the future, let them be, it's their thing and we "don't get it" - that's ok. We've seen this over and over again, some stuff stuck around, others faded away. But it's ok to not understand some social movements and not be part of them.
You're probably experiencing what some folks experienced when Rock Music came about, it's confusion and it's an odd feeling. I'm not saying crypto will have the same popularity of rock music... I could say another example like EBM music... the point is that we don't understand a lot of things.
Do you think that most/all people buying NFTs are doing it for the art, or are they doing it because they're speculating that the NFT will go up in value and they can resell it?
If you want to appreciate art (of whatever type) what additional benefits of that art does the NFT provide? It's not access to the original image, those are just files, it's only certification of ownership of a particular instance of that image, AFAIK.
The concern I see with NFTs and other similar applications of blockchain tech, is that it's not about the application as much as speculating on them to make money.
That speculation, like all speculation, is susceptible to people overhyping it, leading to lots of losses for late adopters.
If you want to appreciate art (of whatever type) what additional benefits of that art does the NFT provide? It's not access to the original image, those are just files, it's only certification of ownership of a particular instance of that image, AFAIK.
The concern I see with NFTs and other similar applications of blockchain tech, is that it's not about the application as much as speculating on them to make money.
That speculation, like all speculation, is susceptible to people overhyping it, leading to lots of losses for late adopters.
I do think that the main motivation of a big part of those exchanges is indeed fueled by the prospect of the things they buy getting up in value, which if you think about is the same of a social proof-of-stake that you're "cool" - you see the same with real assets with real money, like Supreme merchandising, Pokemon/MTG cards.
Supreme is for the "cool/boasting" factor. Pokemon/MTG is a mix of nostalgia with boasting on social media. Idk what Beanie Babies was about but it had a short run.
Is it an arbitrary choice? Does it require some (little) taste? I don't know, probably A or B, or both A & B.
We all buy stuff with the hopes that people will pay more for it in the future, the difference is that the majority of people exchange broadly accepted symbols like stocks, precious metals, and that renders those symbols as more safe bets - but the motivation is there if you strip off the symbol.
With that said I would never buy a "Bored Ape" NFT. Like I would never buy old Air Jordan shoes for thousands of real money units.
>If you want to appreciate art (of whatever type) what additional benefits of that art does the NFT provide?
Maybe the main value that NFT seems to provide is that is exchanged with crypto. Like I said in my previous comment, it's something people can do with the funny money.
>That speculation, like all speculation, is susceptible to people overhyping it, leading to lots of losses for late adopters.
I do agree with you, yet I need to recognize as well that this thing has momentum and a life of it's own. Even if it is simply because too many people have invested too much on it to go back (time/money), or even if they just believe in that vision...
The truth is that still this is a market that is self serving itself, to the point that they seem to be creating new protocols for that purpose. Itself has it's own problems and there are solutions for those problems, that's how value is created and exchanged. Even if the problem is "we have all this funny money and we want to spend it".
Can it all crumble down? I think it can, like many other cultural movements. But I need admit that I don't understand a big part of it, and I think that a lot of this tech literate user base of HN is on the same boat as me.
Supreme is for the "cool/boasting" factor. Pokemon/MTG is a mix of nostalgia with boasting on social media. Idk what Beanie Babies was about but it had a short run.
Is it an arbitrary choice? Does it require some (little) taste? I don't know, probably A or B, or both A & B.
We all buy stuff with the hopes that people will pay more for it in the future, the difference is that the majority of people exchange broadly accepted symbols like stocks, precious metals, and that renders those symbols as more safe bets - but the motivation is there if you strip off the symbol.
With that said I would never buy a "Bored Ape" NFT. Like I would never buy old Air Jordan shoes for thousands of real money units.
>If you want to appreciate art (of whatever type) what additional benefits of that art does the NFT provide?
Maybe the main value that NFT seems to provide is that is exchanged with crypto. Like I said in my previous comment, it's something people can do with the funny money.
>That speculation, like all speculation, is susceptible to people overhyping it, leading to lots of losses for late adopters.
I do agree with you, yet I need to recognize as well that this thing has momentum and a life of it's own. Even if it is simply because too many people have invested too much on it to go back (time/money), or even if they just believe in that vision...
The truth is that still this is a market that is self serving itself, to the point that they seem to be creating new protocols for that purpose. Itself has it's own problems and there are solutions for those problems, that's how value is created and exchanged. Even if the problem is "we have all this funny money and we want to spend it".
Can it all crumble down? I think it can, like many other cultural movements. But I need admit that I don't understand a big part of it, and I think that a lot of this tech literate user base of HN is on the same boat as me.
"Web3" all too often is just the same old client-server model. The key difference is the API calls are formatted as Ethereum transactions and the server is Infura.
You can tell this is a social movement and not a technology movement by the way it increases the complexity of everything by orders of magnitude without delivering any meaningful improvements to the end user/customer experience.
I kind of thought web3 was supposed to be made of apps that worked without ever taking my personal data off my disk. I'm really bummed that it's somehow instead about cryptocurrencies.
I love the idea of distributed web stuff - Dat and IPFS.
I reject efforts to try to force Blockchain into it.
Can someone explain like I am 5 what the benefit of Blockchain is for something like dat or IPFS? Seems like they work just fine without Blockchain ?
I reject efforts to try to force Blockchain into it.
Can someone explain like I am 5 what the benefit of Blockchain is for something like dat or IPFS? Seems like they work just fine without Blockchain ?
Every time crypto is mentioned on HN it's like the Dropbox Show HN thread over and over again.
Decentralisation, open collaborartion, opportunity for entirely new paradigms of entrepreneurship free from the constraints set by the rulling professional managerial class. Weren't those core hacker values?
The Nakamoto consensus algorithm is the single biggest contribution to CS so far in the 21st century. Choosing ignorance of novel technology is really sad to see on a forum intitled "hacker news"
Decentralisation, open collaborartion, opportunity for entirely new paradigms of entrepreneurship free from the constraints set by the rulling professional managerial class. Weren't those core hacker values?
The Nakamoto consensus algorithm is the single biggest contribution to CS so far in the 21st century. Choosing ignorance of novel technology is really sad to see on a forum intitled "hacker news"
> Decentralisation, open collaborartion, opportunity for entirely new paradigms of entrepreneurship free from the constraints set by the rulling professional managerial class. Weren't those core hacker values?
So the solution is centralizing a currently decentralized network onto a blockchain controlled by a few major players?
Remember: honesty is also a core hacker value. Before saying that “open collaboration” hasn’t been happening for decades, you might want to consider how credible that unsupported claim sounds when your audience knows that you will personally profit every time someone buys into the system you’re pushing. Hacker culture has traditionally found that kind of sales pitch disdainful.
So the solution is centralizing a currently decentralized network onto a blockchain controlled by a few major players?
Remember: honesty is also a core hacker value. Before saying that “open collaboration” hasn’t been happening for decades, you might want to consider how credible that unsupported claim sounds when your audience knows that you will personally profit every time someone buys into the system you’re pushing. Hacker culture has traditionally found that kind of sales pitch disdainful.
I think we are talking about wildly different things here.
>centralizing a currently decentralized network onto a blockchain controlled by a few major players
No, the basic idea is simply decentralization of trust. I do not know what specific blockchain you are refering to.
>someone buys into the system you’re pushing
I'm pushing that we come together to develop novel systems that fundamentally change how governments and human collaboration in general work. Speculative markets do not interest me.
>centralizing a currently decentralized network onto a blockchain controlled by a few major players
No, the basic idea is simply decentralization of trust. I do not know what specific blockchain you are refering to.
>someone buys into the system you’re pushing
I'm pushing that we come together to develop novel systems that fundamentally change how governments and human collaboration in general work. Speculative markets do not interest me.
> > centralizing a currently decentralized network onto a blockchain controlled by a few major players
> No, the basic idea is simply decentralization of trust. I do not know what specific blockchain you are refering to.
All of them? If I host a regular web app, I have a choice of thousands of hosting providers around the world and can self host, with the primary constraints being low-level network issues (e.g. sending spam will get you black-listed). If I use a blockchain I still have the network level concerns but am also ceding control at a higher level to a much smaller, far less experienced community dominated by a few major players. If I adopt someone's distributed app framework on top of that, I'm further reducing my choices and taking on support responsibilities for their decisions when those impact things like performance, security, abuse management, etc.
> I'm pushing that we come together to develop novel systems that fundamentally change how governments and human collaboration in general work. Speculative markets do not interest me.
I'm not opposed to that but the current blockchain hypefest has been a bunch of people pushing technology which cannot work to build those systems. That's why the rhetoric always boils down to the “buy in now or you'll wish you had later” needed by people who have already bought in and are worried about maintaining their ability to cash out. If they were building something novel, you'd know about it because they'd be showing new things which couldn't be done with existing technologies.
> No, the basic idea is simply decentralization of trust. I do not know what specific blockchain you are refering to.
All of them? If I host a regular web app, I have a choice of thousands of hosting providers around the world and can self host, with the primary constraints being low-level network issues (e.g. sending spam will get you black-listed). If I use a blockchain I still have the network level concerns but am also ceding control at a higher level to a much smaller, far less experienced community dominated by a few major players. If I adopt someone's distributed app framework on top of that, I'm further reducing my choices and taking on support responsibilities for their decisions when those impact things like performance, security, abuse management, etc.
> I'm pushing that we come together to develop novel systems that fundamentally change how governments and human collaboration in general work. Speculative markets do not interest me.
I'm not opposed to that but the current blockchain hypefest has been a bunch of people pushing technology which cannot work to build those systems. That's why the rhetoric always boils down to the “buy in now or you'll wish you had later” needed by people who have already bought in and are worried about maintaining their ability to cash out. If they were building something novel, you'd know about it because they'd be showing new things which couldn't be done with existing technologies.
It’s really amazing and sad. I think the majority of users here are now 40+ and are too set in their ways to see anything different.
Partner at Anderson Horowitz or not, this reads like a non-engineer offering architecture kool-aid. That diagram makes little sense.
Unless I'm missing something.
Unless I'm missing something.
All the comments here about not needing the decentralized part of web3 or not needing the payment systems of web3 are missing the forest for the trees.
Yes, both of these things exist in web2.
But, the exciting thing about web3 isn't decentralized payment. It is that you can participate in decentralized markets.
For example, if you go to any website and get an ERC20 token, you can use that token without permission from the site where you got it.
Those tokens can be traded on that site, or another marketplace, or another dapp can use them. The original site can't control that.
If you go to uniswap you can see the prices of all those tokens. It's useful for speculators now but if those tokens have true utility value, it starts getting very interesting and very valuable.
Marketplaces are where things are traded freely. Web3 doesn't make payments any more free. It just makes things more freely tradable.
Yes, both of these things exist in web2.
But, the exciting thing about web3 isn't decentralized payment. It is that you can participate in decentralized markets.
For example, if you go to any website and get an ERC20 token, you can use that token without permission from the site where you got it.
Those tokens can be traded on that site, or another marketplace, or another dapp can use them. The original site can't control that.
If you go to uniswap you can see the prices of all those tokens. It's useful for speculators now but if those tokens have true utility value, it starts getting very interesting and very valuable.
Marketplaces are where things are traded freely. Web3 doesn't make payments any more free. It just makes things more freely tradable.
I can do this with USD right now, and the number of middlemen I need to pay is considerably lower.
Transaction fees are lower too. Also less volatile. Lol?
A lot of folks here seem to believe the web is currently decentralized.
But consider:
- if Google were to stop functioning tomorrow, would you still be able to identify yourself to the web sites you use?
- if dang decided to censor your HN comments, could you or I easily spin up an instance of HN that ignored that censorship?
- if someone were to come up with a better algorithm for generating your Twitter feed, could they implement it and attract users to their site?
The way the web works today, we don't have equal access to the data that powers the applications we use.
I'm not saying which is better, but the type of decentralization envisaged by web3 proponents goes further than what we have today.
But consider:
- if Google were to stop functioning tomorrow, would you still be able to identify yourself to the web sites you use?
- if dang decided to censor your HN comments, could you or I easily spin up an instance of HN that ignored that censorship?
- if someone were to come up with a better algorithm for generating your Twitter feed, could they implement it and attract users to their site?
The way the web works today, we don't have equal access to the data that powers the applications we use.
I'm not saying which is better, but the type of decentralization envisaged by web3 proponents goes further than what we have today.
The main difference is that traditional web apps aren't inherently scams.
Dapps aren't 'inherently scams' either. Some are, some aren't, and the same goes for traditional web apps.
Well, in 2021, they are not. The late 90s and early 00s reeked of scams too.
I hate how crypto proponents try to rewrite recent history to fit their narrative.
“The early Internet was useless too!”
“Everything on the web in the 1990s was a scam too!”
It’s demeaning towards the online pioneers, and it’s depressing if young people actually start to believe this stuff just because some dweeb wants to sell them multi-level casino tokens.
“The early Internet was useless too!”
“Everything on the web in the 1990s was a scam too!”
It’s demeaning towards the online pioneers, and it’s depressing if young people actually start to believe this stuff just because some dweeb wants to sell them multi-level casino tokens.
Not sure if you’re saying I’m a crypto proponent as I am not. To say that early Internet didn’t have its scams is a lie though. Crypto sucks too, don’t get me wrong. The digital scarcity is an archaic concept.
There's still plenty of web apps that are scams.
The most important component of Web3[1] is Infura[2] running on AWS;)
--
1. at least its Ethereum-based implementation, which is the vast majority of web3 stuff.
2. https://infura.io/
--
1. at least its Ethereum-based implementation, which is the vast majority of web3 stuff.
2. https://infura.io/
Ethereum Altair hard fork at the end of this month introduces light clients which will enable the browser to sync with the chain, making infura unnecessary.
Let's say Facebook or someone else builds a popular social network on web3. How is this new incarnation better than the one we have today?
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I have a lot of trouble with Web3. Generally there's mass adoption when we solve some need for users, usually around two areas:
- Price
- Convenience
The problems so far we've solved with crypto seem to be around bypassing nation state regulations and as financial asset to gamble with. In those areas crypto has solved for convenience.
It's plausible that some time in the future users will need / want decentralized platforms with different ownership models for content. Is that time now? I'm not convinced. Being too early isn't great even if you're right eventually.
- Price
- Convenience
The problems so far we've solved with crypto seem to be around bypassing nation state regulations and as financial asset to gamble with. In those areas crypto has solved for convenience.
It's plausible that some time in the future users will need / want decentralized platforms with different ownership models for content. Is that time now? I'm not convinced. Being too early isn't great even if you're right eventually.
bring back compuServe or prodigy before they connected to the internet, then we can talk shop
Before we go to web3 can we get a decently working reasonably priced "serverless" SQL RDBMS?
I think that azure serverless SQL database is extremely cheap ... what is your goal spend and throughput?
Azure SQL-Server is extremely expensive.
It might be cheap unless you actually want to use it for something heavy. Azure is really good at making itself look cheap by assuming that no one ever really needs to use its pricier performance options. It's cheap for CRUD, but once you want to crunch some numbers, like process financial statements for one month, you either wait a week to finish or pay a fortune.
We looked into replacing one (1)local SQL-Server that is able to crunch our monthly statements in a few hours. It would have cost us around USD $15,000 on Azure per pop.
The local machine cost $30,000 to buy + about $1000 in service plans / month, and will be used 2-5 years. And it would run other stuff for the rest of the month, at no extra cost.
It might be cheap unless you actually want to use it for something heavy. Azure is really good at making itself look cheap by assuming that no one ever really needs to use its pricier performance options. It's cheap for CRUD, but once you want to crunch some numbers, like process financial statements for one month, you either wait a week to finish or pay a fortune.
We looked into replacing one (1)local SQL-Server that is able to crunch our monthly statements in a few hours. It would have cost us around USD $15,000 on Azure per pop.
The local machine cost $30,000 to buy + about $1000 in service plans / month, and will be used 2-5 years. And it would run other stuff for the rest of the month, at no extra cost.
The comments here are terribly negative. I'll just paste a post I wrote from /r/ethfinance to explain why I think people who think that blockchain are a fad or just a money grab are wrong. I think blockchain to me personally in very practical sense offers better experience than my bank. And I elaborated this in a thread about a prominent social-recovery wallet (wallet where you rely on your social connections for reinstating you as owner in case of loss) adopting a much needed scaling solution:
Using a social recovery wallet (Argent specifically) has been my top Keanu Reeves "WHOA!" moment in crypto. Years ago when I started coming to these forums and everybody was talking about how this or that chain's TPS is the highest my argument was always that none of it matters to end-user if the UX is not there. I would repeat this ad-nauseum and get downvoted. Feeling like wallets are the key I started a website and twitter account that analyses and compares the UX of different contract wallets. When Argent came around I stopped what I was doing because everything else was pointless. The UX comparing to other wallets was incredible. But even more importantly the user experience was better than my bank.
You see, I fly a lot. And when I fly to different countries my credit cards (no matter how "international" they are) constantly get rejected and locked. When I try to transfer cash from my bank in country X while in country Y I get prompted for PIN numbers which I do not have, because I do not have my phone number. I walk around clutching my credit cards, got forbid they are stolen. And still every couple of years I have to cancel cards cause my credentials are stolen, so its not like the security is so awesome.
When I started using argent (especially when they had daily-limits, which I feel will make a comeback with lower gas fees) I realised that it has none of the problems I had with banks. And also, I can get yields on my assets and stake straight from the wallet. Send money to charity? Easy! Send some ETH to friend so that they can play with it, or cause I owe them? Easy! No seed phrase to worry about! Wallet gets stolen? No problem!
In every way that I can think of I would prefer a social recovery wallet. I barely even have any funds on my Trezor (hardware wallets are awful UX. telling people to use them is a sure way to dissuade them getting into crypto. Even I, a power-user, take out the hardware wallet once every few months cause it sucks. And then there's the seedphrase, gah!). But the obvious elephant in the room is - gas fees. Argent even changed their transact/recover logistics cause a wallet that could be perfect for payment was never used that way, it was only used for long-term safe storage.
Back to Liberosist's write-up and zkSync. There is probably a long way to go in terms of speed and adoption of crypto payments. But if transactions get cheaper I do no see any use from my bank any longer - zero! I am even willing to pay money for L1 recovery. This would be the true unbanking of the banked.
Using a social recovery wallet (Argent specifically) has been my top Keanu Reeves "WHOA!" moment in crypto. Years ago when I started coming to these forums and everybody was talking about how this or that chain's TPS is the highest my argument was always that none of it matters to end-user if the UX is not there. I would repeat this ad-nauseum and get downvoted. Feeling like wallets are the key I started a website and twitter account that analyses and compares the UX of different contract wallets. When Argent came around I stopped what I was doing because everything else was pointless. The UX comparing to other wallets was incredible. But even more importantly the user experience was better than my bank.
You see, I fly a lot. And when I fly to different countries my credit cards (no matter how "international" they are) constantly get rejected and locked. When I try to transfer cash from my bank in country X while in country Y I get prompted for PIN numbers which I do not have, because I do not have my phone number. I walk around clutching my credit cards, got forbid they are stolen. And still every couple of years I have to cancel cards cause my credentials are stolen, so its not like the security is so awesome.
When I started using argent (especially when they had daily-limits, which I feel will make a comeback with lower gas fees) I realised that it has none of the problems I had with banks. And also, I can get yields on my assets and stake straight from the wallet. Send money to charity? Easy! Send some ETH to friend so that they can play with it, or cause I owe them? Easy! No seed phrase to worry about! Wallet gets stolen? No problem!
In every way that I can think of I would prefer a social recovery wallet. I barely even have any funds on my Trezor (hardware wallets are awful UX. telling people to use them is a sure way to dissuade them getting into crypto. Even I, a power-user, take out the hardware wallet once every few months cause it sucks. And then there's the seedphrase, gah!). But the obvious elephant in the room is - gas fees. Argent even changed their transact/recover logistics cause a wallet that could be perfect for payment was never used that way, it was only used for long-term safe storage.
Back to Liberosist's write-up and zkSync. There is probably a long way to go in terms of speed and adoption of crypto payments. But if transactions get cheaper I do no see any use from my bank any longer - zero! I am even willing to pay money for L1 recovery. This would be the true unbanking of the banked.
Internet is already decentralized for the most part. I run my own web server and mail server from my home. There's my "piece of the Internet".
Sure, DNS is centralized (even though it's heavily federated), and TLS certificates are centralized (less federated).
So, what we are looking to replace is simply "who is there?" and "is it the real you?" services with something less... centralized. This can live on the blockchain, sure, but blockchain is a database you sync across in its entirety, right? I am sure you can only get parts of it for some applications, but this, by definition, does not scale to the size of the Internet. (Hum, this is probably a decent dapp proposal: domain name system with certs, but it'd still grow very large if it was to cover entire Internet)
I don't get the connection with Google/Amazon/Facebook either: they are humongous services operating on the decentralized Internet today. Yes, people flock to them, but that's exactly the Internet you can avoid (a recent discussion on search.marginalia.nu gives a pointer as to how).